I apologize if I came off too strident. It's just that I can remember how back when I was a kid (I'm 24 now), trades (collections of the stories in the monthly comic magazines) were something that barely existed. And now I can walk into my local Borders and not only find trades but find enough to fill out their own section of the store. So it bothers me when people talk as if Marvel and DC aren't making humongous inroads in their distribution, because they have and are.
You have to understand that, ten years ago, if someone suggested that a Hellcat trade like the one you linked to would even *exist*, people would have been laughing. The idea that those stories would even be collected at all would have been be preposterous. The fact that I can now walk into Borders and find books starring as relatively obscure a character as Metamorpho the Element Man (to pick a random example) is simply amazing.
(I'm not exactly accusing you of this, or trying to be mean, just noting that it's really, really weird and doesn't exist in any other industry I've ever dealt with.
Er, you made a sweeping pronouncement on the state of modern comics distribution. Given that, was it that much of a leap for me to assume you were thoroughly knowledgeable about the subject?
You don't need to learn little quirks of how, say, Sony Music distributes CDs to buy the disk. You like the music, you buy it. Boom, end of story.
Well, I really don't want to defend Marvel's practice of selling certain books only in the direct market. I don't understand it myself. I just want to put it in perspective: Books like Hellcat are a pinprick in comparison to the many, many that can easily be found online or in bookstores.