Marvel Retailer Resource Center

Marvel has taken on a pretty cool endeavor to help retailers know what Marvel titles to buy for their store fronts. For years, Marvel (and other publishers) would send out advance issues of their comic lines via UPS to comic shops all over the United States. Costly? You bet, but needed for retailers to gauge which comics they wanted as well as being a way to showcase to customers what comics were coming down the pipe.

Now, instead of getting a hard copy, retailers can access a new site that will allow them to preview the comics marvel produces online. For quite some time, comics have been moving to a digital format, with more and more of the process of creating a comic going electronic an this is just another aspect of that process. I know there will be those that say that reading it online is not the same as holding it in their hands, but it would seem that this is a win win for both retailers and Marvel. Marvel can save a lot of money by not sending out countless hard copies, some of which found their way onto auction sites, retailers can get an advance peek in a rather quick and painless fashion, there is less waste for the environment, I could keep going on.

I'm hoping to get a peek myself at the site, but you need a Diamond Distributors ID to get registered, so I'll just have to imagine it for now. Some publishers would have just cancelled sending previews to store fronts, so it was great to see Marvel take the step to put something else in place that serves not only retailers, but the bottom line as well.