Some of you have been rightfully upset to see Heavy Metal #1 appearing in comic stores before it landed in your mailbox. We’ve heard your concerns, and we want to speak openly about the situation with Issue #1 fulfillment. This was never the experience we intended for you. We committed to backers—our most loyal supporters— that they would receive their copies before anyone else. And while we did begin shipping your rewards before the book hit stores, the scale of this campaign, combined with unforeseen delays, meant we were unable to meet that commitment across the board. For that, we sincerely apologize.Most of the ensuing comments so far have been critical, with even the most generous ones expressing disappointment in the lack of advance communication. More frequently, the comments seem to be of the "You bastards planned this from the start and you're just offering empty lip service to us" variety. A couple of examples...
Consumers have been around long enough to know when they're being jerked around because companies accidentally showed who they prioritize when mistakes are made.... and...
It's 2025, stop trying to glaze us with these compliments and execute your job mister chief executing officer. Treat us like adults if you want us to treat you like you're worth our money.
What an absolute C-Suite response.I don't have any special insights on what actually happened here -- I only know what's publicly available -- and I don't have a dog in this fight -- I didn't back the KS and never planned on buying the book. But this isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened. More than a few KS projects over the years have made it into the public's hands before those of the original backers. I've been on both sides of the purchasing equation there, where I've backed projects that didn't arrive until well after they were available to the general public and where I've bought items at the shop before the original backers got them. So I do get the various reactions on the consumer side.
A stupid town hall where everyone’s probably gonna be muted and the CEO just blows smoke up everyone’s ass? Nah, I won’t be joining that. I just read a bunch of vomit - don’t need to hear it too.
You share the frustrations? Please explain how you as the creator share in the frustrations of the backers, when you as the creator caused the problem...
From a production side, I get it. There are a zillion production issues that could get in the way, particularly the past few months with regulations and tariffs changing almost hourly. It is feasible that a delay hampers one venue but not another such that a product gets out to the general public before a select one. But I do agree that this has an air of giving the broader, shallower customer base a priority over the smaller, but more devout "well, they'll buy it regardless of how much we piss them off" customers.
I'll also note that Lees' communication here is... not poor exactly, but not great either. That his communication went out after the fact is a reactionary choice; he would've served folks better by being ahead of the actions. He should have reached out the minute he knew that even some backers would receive their copies after comic shops did, even if that was only a day or two in advance. Ideally, he would've said something as soon as the specific timing might've come up as a question at all; a pre-emptive "we just learned our fulfillment vendors are running a little behind and they might not get every one of your copies in the mail before comic shops receive their copies" would've have gone a long way towards mitigating the current agitation.
Additionally, the specific language he does use is, as that one commenter noted, "an absolute C-suite response." That is, it's a lot of words that ultimately say nothing of substance. Corporate language that's carefully crafted to avoid accepting responsibility. While I think people generally bought into the argument that publishers can justifiably use crowd-funding as a means to guage interest, even though their role as publishers is ostensibly to be able to front production costs themselves, that still comes with a fairly high degree of skepticism. A lone creator can be excused for production management 'failures' like this because their expertise is supposed to be in the storytelling itself. But as a publisher, you've got (or at least should have) production experts on staff to handle precisely these kinds of challenges. Ignorance can't work as an excuse, and therefore responsibility will fall on your shoulders. Trying to corporate-speak your way out of that is going to come across in the worst light possible.
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