Should Fantastic Comics buy Diamond?
We obviously can't, but if we could... should we?
Belated Shoutouts to Wonder Woman
Repping for a series mid-way through its run is never always a great time to promote it, but I wanted to point out this great and clever panel design / solution to the usual wall-of-text that happens when a character needs to explain a crisis to another character / reader in Absolute Wonder Woman #3.
Wonder Woman has been racking up a string of collection-worthy projects, be it the stunning art and myth-retelling of Amazon Historia or the post-apocalyptic romp of Dead Earth.
Now that we’ve paid the bills with those affiliate links…
In the Good News/Bad News department (or Good News/Great News for the Schadenfreudists among us), Fantastic Comics is officially Debt-Free™, and Diamond Comic Distributors has officially declared Chapter 11 Bankruptcy.
It’s a little weird that comic readers would even be aware of who their store’s distributor is (can you think of who distributes to Amoeba Records, or Moe’s Books?)
But such was the monolithic and monopolistic presence of Diamond in the industry, that if a book came in late or damaged, Diamond was the demon whose name we collectively cursed, and store owners often let you know about it! You can get Uel’s lightly profanity-salted take on the fracas direct from the live show a week back.
Good News First
Uel paid off the last of the credit card debts (18% APR is no joke!) encumbering the store with the help of a Faustian bargain — the ransom of a “too beautiful to be believed”-condition (or a conservative 9.2 grading) Giant Size X-Men #1 to the landlord, meaning the store can get it back at any time for $10,000. Sounds like a Pyrrhic victory, right? But, two things:
Comparable condition issues are not really selling anywhere near $10,000 right now. Sounds like the landlord is stuck with a clunker!
In the opposite direction, Uel is convinced this is a $20,000 book, especially if timed to sell with the assured cinematic masterpiece (or at the least, a market speculation frenzy) of an upcoming X-Men movie.
There’s more to this developing story which we’ll let you know about later, but for a limited time, if you are so inclined, you can you can satisfy all parties involved and take home a Giant Size X-Men #1 for $10,000
Metaphor Mixing: Bad News Bears Come Home to Roost
We’ve been a little shy about talking inside baseball with regards to The Distributor Who Shall Not Be Named, but it’s no secret that in years past, we were deep in debt with Diamond, which is not a place you want to be with anyone, especially with a monopoly upon which your store’s entire product line depends, but unlike our other creditors who have finally been paid off, Diamond saw fit to extract nosebleed-high usury-level fees, which would definitely not have been legal (since usury is illegal!) if we were ordinary civilians instead of a business dependent on them for product. But even as bad as credit card companies, who technically also have no maximum interest rate, are, they have their limits. Heck, even actual loan sharks might be shy about charging what Diamond charged us.
Without rehashing too much, we were therefore highly motivated to stretch and starve to pay off the debt to Diamond first and foremost, and we also weaned our purchases off of Diamond the minute their monopoly was broken during the pandemic. In retrospect, you could say that Diamond did us a favor being such an inflexible beast, because it spurred us to be in a much better place, and now that bankruptcy proceedings may force Diamond to more aggressively collect on outstanding accounts, this may very well spell the end for stores that Diamond has decided to be more lenient towards till this point. So thanks to Diamond, I guess?, for the tough love, or more accurately, monstrous indifference to our plight.
But retailers are not the only ones in line to suffer as a result of Diamond’s Chapter 11 status. I reached out to Avi from the always excellent small press/retailer Silver Sprocket in SF:
We are now owed a very large amount of money from Diamond that will be extremely challenging to recover from as they have confirmed that we should not expect to see what they owed us from before the bankruptcy anytime soon.
They say that they have operating money while they go through the bankruptcy process to keep paying invoices on new deliveries of books, and we are evaluating how to proceed.
We know we are a very small publisher and are worried about simply losing any sales that were placed with Diamond that they would not be able to fill.
Who also stands to lose?
For the curious, you can see their top 30 accounts who have not yet been paid. Interestingly, among them are Penguin Random House and Lunar, who are the direct competitors that broke their monopoly. Microsoft is also in the mix at a cool 300K — I guess those Office365 licenses add up?
Most of their creditors seem like they can take the hit, but the last one on the list is one the toy fiends among you might recognize: Super7 (who also has a store in SF) who is left hanging with over 100K. With a $25 Million investment, I’m going to guess that $100,000 is not a back-breaking amount for them either, but it’s at least a back-spraining amount, and the real trouble, as with smaller press like Silver Sprocket, is getting reliably paid on sales going forward with what used to be a significant proportion of your audience.
So, will Diamond be able to use the breathing room offered by Chapter 11 to get back onto an even keel?
Although Image officially jumped from Diamond to Lunar in 2023, they’ve now taken the extra step of pulling their titles from redistribution, effectively a no-confidence vote on that very question.
Die, Die, Diamond, My Darling?
From our experience, Diamond offered us less grace than a faceless bank thousands of times their size. They sent books out damaged and late, increased shipping fees with impunity, and when we asked for more reasonable payback terms on our debt, we were asking with zero leverage, as there was no one else we could get books from. In a real way, we were completely at their mercy, and that form of mercy took the form of, “you can keep buying from us, but you’re gonna pay out your teeth for that privilege.”
The monopoly also made them convenient. We were able to more easily downsize to a one-person shop because ordering itself is not a full-time position of juggling 10 or more distributors, like it might be for a record shop. Free Comic Book Day? Diamond did all the logistics and coordination. A ton of smaller press books can make it to the middle of nowhere thanks to Diamond actively making the choice to carry them.
In their absence, can you depend on the other distributors picking up the slack, and doing a better job? As far as just the meat and bones mechanics of ordering books and getting the books we ordered, we definitely enjoy using thus far more competent competition, but in the long run, without Diamond we might just end up with a Duopoly Devil instead of a Monopoly Monster.
Lunar, for example, was basically birthed out of DCBS and InStockTrades. If you’re wondering why we don’t put more books up online ourselves, one reason is we just couldn’t compete with that kind of pricing, even before they effectively had their fingers on the firehose, so to speak.
Penguin / Random House, as a distributor you likely know from also being one of the biggest publishers in the world, is a beast of an entirely different magnitude, having been recently blocked from acquiring Simon & Schuster because of… you guessed it, monopolistic concerns. Having awesome shipping terms with them is a mercy that they could retract at any time, and we’d frankly be powerless to do anything about it.
For the most part, Lunar and PRH are not catering to the folks who are even smaller than Silver Sprocket, and if Diamond goes, chances are they go, too, or at the very least, they suffer a wind-knocking punch. We actually saw this play out in our backyard when Berkeley’s own Small Press Distribution wound down operations, leaving about 300 independent publishers in the lurch.
If you ever had the dream of making your own physical comic make it to stores across the country and your name was not Dave Sim, Diamond was the institution that made it feasible, and in this increasingly electronic age, being a legacy distribution resource for micropress books and creators is less of a priority.
Avi again:
We are rooting for Diamond to succeed - they have historically been fantastic at soliciting orders and paying us more-or-less on time, but I'm also very happy that they are no longer the monopoly and that publishers and retailers both have options on where they can go to order comics.
We simply don't have the bandwidth to do all of our own retail fulfillment, so it is well worth our while to work with distributors and the cuts that they take.
So what should we do?
Diamond has apparently set an April deadline to find a buyer or they will close up operations. Unfortunately, we don’t have any more Giant Size X-Men’s to hock, so the real answer to “Should Fantastic Comics Buy Diamond?” is we can’t.
But, it’s clear that there’s a gap in distribution that Diamond did provide that likely will not be picked up in the small press arena, a genuine service that provided value and was worth paying for, and we do know a few people who worked in highly-related industry positions that are looking for work. It’s not totally out of the realm of possibility that, even if we don’t have the time and energy ourselves to make a Fantastic Distro — we may be able to connect a few dots.