Bad Idea's Full List of 100 Launch Retailers Revealed

Jamie Lovett

03/10/2020 02:00 pm EDT

Bad Idea Comics has revealed its full list of 100 exclusive retailers. The company first announced it would begin its rollout with 20 stores across the United States. The immediate demand following Bad Idea's star-studded ComicsPro presentation convinced the new publisher to expand its initial offering to 100 stores instead, with locations in North America, Europe, and Australia. In order to qualify as a Bad Idea "Destination Store," the retailer must agree to a set of rules and guidelines set down by Bad Idea. This includes in-store placement of Bad Idea releases and promotional displays and a strictly enforced "limit one per customer" rule. Failure to comply could cost the retailer their spot in the program.

The program begins in May with the release of ENIAC #1. ComicBook.com can now exclusively reveal the list of the full list of 100 Bad Idea Destination Stores:

Speaking to ComicBook.com, the Big Idea team discussed some fo the questions they've received from retailers. "One of the things that we're asking retailers to do is to match the orders on an arc to the start of the arc, and that initially led to questions of, 'Hold on, you want me to order like the same number of number four as you do of number one?' The answer is yes but the goal is not what you think," Co-CEO & Co-Chief Creative Officer Dinesh Shamdasani says. "The goal is not to get people to up their numbers on two, three and four. The goal is to reduce the numbers of one. We're a new company we have no known IP. We're going to create kick-ass stories they're going to look better than I think most of the books out there, but we're not going to have the following that a Batman book has or a Walking Dead book has out the gate. The worst thing that can happen to us or the retailers is a bunch of copies on shelves.

"We want to have the books in stores. We want to have them sell out. We want to have people want to come back for them and we want to do reprints of them through new printings, real new printings -- I know there's a new idea of treating printings like variants, but that's not what we're about -- and have people find the books that way. Our models are things like Copra, and Our Love Is Real, and Turtles when it launched, and Bone, and kind of Divinity, we did that at Valiant. That's pretty much in the model of what we're doing here."

Shamdasani goes on to say that Bad Idea is already listening to retailers and trying to incorporate their feedback into their plans. "What a lot of people do to us, they hear the pitch and then they go, 'You know, you're right, there are a lot of things you guys can do that you can't do here at Diamond, but you've missed the biggest one.' And they love to showboat a little bit, which is fantastic because of course then we go, 'What is it?' And they tell us and we're like, 'Oh my God, that's an amazing idea. We didn't think of that,' because it's very hard to get yourself out of the thinking of 'This is the Diamond system' and that the goal is to get as many copies on shelves as possible. That's a very specific type of business and we've all become accustomed to the idea that that's the only way to build comics.

"And I think the benefit that we have as three of the people at Valiant, the only company really in the modern era to successfully navigate the whole life cycle of a publishing company, is we have the ability to look back and say, 'Okay, what would we have done better?' Usually, those companies die, they go away and it's scary and you can't learn lessons. So the next thing we can just learn about how you could have fixed that. We have a unique vantage point. But we're getting a lot of people adding to the process, so we're very much crowdsourcing this idea from people on the ground. And retailers are very cost-conscious. Very smart people."

Bad Idea publisher Hunter Gorinson adds, "The plan is always in process. We're always incorporating new feedback as we go along. But really the central tenants of it have remained the same. And there's a lot of folks behind the scenes, a lot of prominent retailers out there who we've been speaking to over the past six months or so as this really coalesced who gave us a lot of feedback early on. So it's not something that we just went public with and then started collecting feedback on. We've been working on this for more than a year behind the scenes and retailers have been part of that at every step along the way."

Bad Idea's first release, ENIAC #1, arrives in destination stores in May.

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