It's All about the Distribution
There are a lot of ways to make comics, but at the end of the day, if you want to reach a big audience, your delivery system matters. This year has been tricky and painful for comics publishers and comics retailers as we’ve watched the venerable Diamond Comic Distributors slide into bankruptcy, with management companies selling off bits and pieces of this once-sprawling organization to the highest bidders.
You can read about this unfortunate series of events in any number of places, so I won’t try to summarize it here. Let’s just say that by spring of this year, all signs pointed to increasing numbers of retailers pulling away from Diamond and placing their orders elsewhere. The Diamond Previews catalog, which used to run 500+ pages per month, ceased physical publication a couple of months ago, and switched to a PDF only format…and the latest edition ran a scrawny 94 pages, only two-thirds of which was dedicated to publications. The team behind the catalog is gone now. Will there will continue to be a Diamond Previews catalog? It doesn’t look likely. On top of that, word on the street is that Diamond is only able to promise they will ship titles through the October 2025 solicitation cycle, for books with a December on sale date. Beyond that…well, things don’t look good.
My task over the past few months has been to find new distribution opportunities for my client, THE LAB PRESS, publishers of thought-provoking deluxe original graphic novels; the first title from THE LAB, Essentials Vol. 1 Bill Sienkiewicz Premiere Edition, shipped in February, just about the time we were trying to parse what the fallout from the Diamond bankruptcy would be. THE LAB was signed on for distribution with Diamond as well as Simon & Schuster for the bookstore market. (Comic shops can order books from Simon but not many do.)
After numerous conversations, meetings, and emails over the course of several months, I am very pleased to say that titles from THE LAB can now be ordered from Lunar Distribution, Universal Distribution in Canada, and Diamond UK (which is no longer affiliated with Diamond Comic Distributors). For a company that publishes a handful of high-end graphic novels each year, with (as of now) only three titles in the marketplace, it’s about as good an outcome as I could envision.
Right now we’re in the slightly awkward phase of offering titles via our new distributors that were already solicited with Diamond, but we’re moving through them at a fast clip, and soon solicitations for new titles will be synced up across all the distributors.
The first time I dealt with the comic shop distribution process was late 1992, when my employer, Welsh Publishing Group, published the first Simpsons comic book, preceding Bongo Comics by a few months.
This was before the big distribution shakeup of the 1990s, when multiple distributors still serviced different regions. At the time, I had to send art and information for this one comic to Diamond, Capitol City Distributors, Andromeda, Heroes World, Comics Hawaii, and a couple of others. And over my time at DC Comics I worked with Diamond, Hachette, Penguin Random House, Lunar Distribution, and USC, all to varying degrees of involvement.
The current landscape of comics distribution is still in flux, with Diamond’s future looking grim – but at the same time, Universal is testing distribution across all of the English comic book market in North America with comics from DC.
Beyond that…well, we will have to wait and see what’s coming over the horizon, packed in double-walled boxes and loaded onto UPS trucks.