This Middle-Man, This Monster
January 15, 2025 10:00 AM   Subscribe

Until 2020 Diamond Comic Distributors had a decades-long near-monopoly as supplier of comics & merchandise to the North American direct market. This changed following the arrival of COVID-19 when many of the biggest publishers signed deals with new distributors. Yesterday Diamond announced that it had filed a voluntary petition for relief under Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code.

Over the years Diamond has been criticised by creators, retailers, consumers, and publishers for the power it wielded over the market. However, the exodus of major publishers, led by DC, also sparked concerns from retailers, including San Francisco's Brian Hibbs, about the affect weakened Diamond would have on North America's approximately 2000+ comic retailers.

Supplemental Links
How Do I Comic Shop? Everything anyone would need to know about buying comics by Matt Brady, 2022
ICv2's Comics Direct Market 50th Anniversary, a stonking collection of articles and interviews, 2023
Comic Stores and Diamond Distributors Clash as Industry Reopens, by Graeme McMillan, 2020
Should Comics Keep It Direct? by Brigid Alverson, 2024
3-hour Comic Industry Insiders interview with Brian Hibbs, YouTube/Podbean, recorded just before Diamond's announcement


Supplemental FPPs

The Rise and Fall of the Comic Industry's Direct Market and Other Stories
15-year-old FPP by some handsome guy presenting a history of the direct market by The Comics Journal. Most if not all of the links are dead, but the comments are great.
Archive.org scrapes of the primary links:
Part 1 Fine Young Cannibals:How Phil Seuling and a Generation of Teenage Entrepreneurs Created the Direct Market and Changed the Face of Comics
Part 2 Black and White and Dead All Over
Part 3 Suicide Club: How greed and stupidity disemboweled the American comic-book industry in the 1990s

[Before Carol] People Were Making Change Out of Tackle Boxes
Remembrances of Carol Kalish, whose 1980s tenure as Marvel Comics' Direct Sales Manager made an indelible impact on the industry
posted by Alvy Ampersand (19 comments total) 22 users marked this as a favorite
 
Gold foil cover worthy post title.
posted by Lemkin at 10:11 AM on January 15 [9 favorites]


That is one of the truly great thread titles, Alvy.

From what I can see, literally nobody is upset to see them go, even the retailers that are still dependent on them for some of their merchandise.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 10:12 AM on January 15 [2 favorites]


Yeah, this is like hearing Monsanto has fallen on hard times.
posted by Lemkin at 10:28 AM on January 15 [2 favorites]


Also, the fact that the current largest publisher of Western graphic novels is (and has always been) their own distributor doesn't get mentioned once is telling on its own as well. COVID might have been the the straw that broke Diamond's back, but these problems were building for years prior.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:39 AM on January 15 [2 favorites]


literally nobody is upset to see them go, even the retailers that are still dependent on them for some of their merchandise

What surprised me was the vociferous retailer reaction to DC's parting with Diamond in the "concerns" Bleeding Cool link. Obviously a handful of retailers aren't speaking for everyone - and I'm not trying to gotcha Hibbs, who generally seems pretty fair in his analyses - but it's weird in the "concerns" piece from June 2020 he's very critical of DC's move and worried about the impact on Diamond and the industry, but in the July 2020 "Stores & Distributors Clash" link he basically says he doesn't buy anything from Diamond if he doesn't have to, and then this morning on his Facebook he's furious and predicting dire consequences.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 10:47 AM on January 15 [2 favorites]


I say this with the greatest respect:

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
posted by ivanthenotsoterrible at 10:50 AM on January 15 [3 favorites]


Couldn't have happened to a nicer company.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 10:55 AM on January 15 [1 favorite]


I've been getting weekly emails from my local comic shop about how there's some issue with the comics coming from Diamond and so they won't be available that Wednesday. It doesn't really bother me because I'll go in once a month or so to pick up my comics but for people with the routine of coming in every week, most likely the shop's best customers, it must be frustrating for their books not to have come in when they were supposed to.

Mind you Diamond's pullbox feature is pretty cool. I can just select the comics I want to receive online and they'll show up at the comic shop for me.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 10:57 AM on January 15 [2 favorites]


The bigger problem (and the one that I think all the comic store owners know, but are to various degrees unwilling to acknowledge) is that the physical periodical model is breaking in this era of digital distribution. In the "Should Comic Stores Keep It Direct?" piece, you had one of the store operators say that the $3-6 for a new periodical release is cheap...but $5 covers my monthly Shonen Jump and Viz Manga subscriptions, which gives me access to dozens of both active and archived titles, including major hits like One Piece. Marvel and DC already have their own digital sub services, as do the major Japanese publishers (though in that regard, Shueisha is eating everyone's lunch with their triad (in addition to the above two, they also have their successful international service, MangaPlus.))
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:36 AM on January 15 [1 favorite]


Comics shopping is so broken. The floppy business has been dying for a while now. The top selling American superhero comics don't sell close to what they did a few decades ago or what manga sells now. Digital feels like a rip-off because of the desire for price parity - publishers say their biggest costs are printing and shipping yet charge the exact same for single digital issues. Graphic novels are the way to get into book stores, but comic store and publishers both warn against "trade-waiting" and threaten that if the floppies don't sell well on initial release the books will be cancelled before they get a chance to build an audience.
posted by thecjm at 11:42 AM on January 15 [2 favorites]


Gold foil cover worthy post title.

That is one of the truly great thread titles


Hey! What did The Middleman ever do to you except fight evil so you don't have to?

/s (yes I know about the F4 issue)
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 11:51 AM on January 15 [2 favorites]


If anyone does not understand the title (me!), I tracked it down.
posted by taz at 12:09 PM on January 15 [8 favorites]


In the "Should Comic Stores Keep It Direct?" piece, you had one of the store operators say that the $3-6 for a new periodical release is cheap

Yeah, that's just straight-up delusional. Floppies are stupidly expensive and only getting more-so. They've got to be one of the worst deals in entertainment. I think he's saying they're cheap relative to trades, but even that's wrong because the individual floppy prices are so high. Then they wonder why people wait for the trades.
posted by star gentle uterus at 12:11 PM on January 15 [1 favorite]


Yeah, as much as I kind of want to keep my local comic book store in business because I hate the death of retail, but my pull list is getting kind of thin and I don't think I've actually read anything in my list in 2 years, but my monthly bill is on the order of $20 for maybe 4 issues? Orrrrr I pay Marvel like $6/month and I just wait to buy the digital trades from IDW at a deep discount?

Hrmph.
posted by Kyol at 12:20 PM on January 15


I'm surprised most of these write-ups don't mention when Diamond purchased Capital City waaay back in the 90s, becoming the sole major comics distributor.
posted by gturner at 12:39 PM on January 15 [4 favorites]


As someone distributed by Diamond, I now have to worry about whether my last 6 months of sales will be collectible by my publisher.
posted by jordantwodelta at 1:33 PM on January 15 [4 favorites]


I'm surprised most of these write-ups don't mention when Diamond purchased Capital City waaay back in the 90s, becoming the sole major comics distributor.

Yeah, I sort of lost the thread in composing the post and did a bad job of contextualizing how Diamond got to where it was. One link I ended up cutting were The Rise And Fall Of Capital City Distribution that provides a decent overview of the Distributor Wars of the 1990s.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 1:56 PM on January 15 [3 favorites]


Mike Sterling, a comic book store owner, has this commentary. He notes that Diamond runs Free Comic Book Day, and while they're committed to it this year, future years are an open question. He also notes that he's been moving away from Diamond anyhow (which is probably part of the problem if he's part of a trend), and comments on how the most likely consequence is that very small press books will see fewer orders of convenience (easy to discover them and check them off as part of a larger Diamond order, and he's less likely to seek them out).
posted by Bryant at 2:57 AM on January 16 [3 favorites]


Yeah, one of the big parts of this is that Diamond is about as well liked in the comics industry and community as Blockbuster was with movie watchers back in the day. A lot of people were looking to leave them, and well...

But I also think that the floppies are dying as a format - he brings up Free Comic Book Day, which does drive interest and exposes people to new titles...but the problem is that their competitor has made every day Free Comic Book Day, with day and date releases released gratis (which also does a lot to combat scanlation sites.)
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:34 AM on January 16


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