Darkhorse: The Batman/Grendel Hardcover situation

Darkhorse has a pretty poor track record when it comes to consistancy and uniformity in their collected edition libraries. They are getting better, but the company is a private one owned by Mike Richardson, and almost functions as a sort of vanity press that publishes things he likes in the format he thinks will sell the best. There appears to be very little consumer-level market research used in the decision-making process. I'll post more on this in some detail later, but for now let's talk about how this mindset affected the recent limited edition Batman/Grendel book.

Darkhorse had began what looked like a promising reprint initiative of the Grendel back catalog, starting with the very first Comico material. Completists were thrilled, and optimists thought this might be the start of something wonderful. And for 4 volumes it was. But then Darkhorse announced by way of solicitation that Batman/Grendel would be collected and reprinted, but as a softcover. Over on his forums, Matt Wagner indicated that this decision was driven by the desire to achieve a certain price point, att he expense of allowing collectors to obtain a uniform, complete, hardcover library.

Now, I personally don't understand the logic behind this rationalization. Many publishers will solicit and take orders for both hard and softcover editions together. Since the interiors can be produced at the same time (or in the case of at least one Fantagraphics collections - Krazy & Ignatz - , stored on site at the printer for years) it is actually more cost effective to do it this way, since the presses only have to be set up one time for the "guts" or text block. Then you just slap hardcovers on some, and softcovers on the rest. However, for whatever reason, Darkhorse decided not to do this.

Instead, they solicited a limited edition, signed and numbered hardcover for $99.95, with a pre-set production run of only 300 copies.

Diane Schutz, a bigwig at Darkhorse who edited some of the original Grendel material and contributed creativly to the narrative as well, decided to be a stand-up gal and offer a few publisher's and artist's proof copies, via Matt Wagner's message board to those of us who missed out. Which was nice. Especially since I got one. She said orders came in at nearly twice what they had announced the production run to be. So it was heavily allocated.

But was this really necessary?

Why not just announce it as limited to initial orders and leave it at that. Set production numbers based on how many people wanted to buy, and opposed to guestimating how many you think you could sell and being, well, very very wrong.

Later, we'll discuss uniformity within the Grendel Library, since Darkhorse is having trouble with that too...