Functional Diamond Impact

At the start of the COVID pandemic, I began regularly using a mail order service for new comics. (MyComicShop.com if you're interested.) I obviously don't have the ability to casusally browse the rack of new comics I might not have seen solicitations for or look for cool/intriguing cover art that hadn't been available to see previously, but I very much prioritized my health. And, while definitely better overall than they used to be, physical comic shops still aren't exactly known as bastions of cleanliness so I've continued ordering comics by mail.

(There are still ~10,000 new cases of COVID formally reported to the WHO every week which results in 50-100 deaths per day. That's just the officially reported numbers; by all accounts, the US has been deliberately under-reporting COVID numbers for several years now. The virus has very much not gone away and is still very dangerous. Wear a mask!)

Typically when I'm going through and making my selections based on a given month's solicitations, I search on a number of creators I like to see if they've got anything new. I then search on a few characters and general genres, and finally I check the full listings for around a dozen publishers who often put work I enjoy. But when they made the newest solicitations available last week, I noticed something different. Namely, that the list of publishers has shrunk pretty radically. I checked the past few months since not every publisher has something new each and every month, but the number of publishers available to purchase from is down by about half of what it was before Diamond declared bankruptcy.

Now, if you've been paying even the slightest bit of attention to comic industry news the past few months, you're no doubt aware that Diamond Comics -- which effectively ran a monopoly on comics distribution in the US since 1997 -- has been dealing with bankruptcy issues and a good many publishers have been scrambling to find alternate distributors. The largest publishers largely all switched a couple years ago when it started to become supremely evident Diamond was having some massive problems when the COVID lockdowns began in 2020. (To be clear, COVID didn't cause Diamond's problems -- it just highlighted many issues that were already in place.) The publishers who have fallen off the list are the ones who are small enough that other distributors don't want to deal with them. If you're Marvel, for example, even the lowest selling monthly titles are typically in the 10-20,000 units ballpark but if you're an independent creator, your sales numbers might be small enough that you don't break into four digit sales. Which is fine, Marvel is a much larger organization and needs higher numbers to pay for salaries of hundreds of people, compared to an operation which consists of one, maybe two people where you don't need to sell as much to remain profitable.

However, since a distributor takes (generally) a smaller cut of those profits and they're a larger operation to be able to handle larger publishers, that means they have minimum threshholds to hit. Let's say, for the sake of easy math, they take 10% of a comic's price tag as their cut. That means they get 50¢ from every $5.00 book that's sold. With federal minimum wage in the US at $7.25, that means that a distributor would need to see a bare minimum of fifteen copies of a title to be sold to make an hour's worth of work profitable. Now you might think, "Well, that's no big deal. How long does it take to sort fifteen comics? A couple minutes tops, right?" Keep in mind, though, that while pretty much every comic shops gets Superman and it's only a matter of counting how many copies go to each shop, a small press book is going to have maybe one or two copies going to a fraction of the available shops. So instead of, "12 copies to Shop A, 10 copies to Shop B, 15 copies to Shop C...", it's more like, "1 copy to Shop... let me see, cross reference this list, ah, here we go! Shop F. OK, next, 1 copy to Shop... G, H, I, J! There it is!" Basically, the amount of time being spent per copy drops waaaaaay down when you're dealing with small numbers. You can sort 1,000 issues of Superman much more quickly than 1,000 copies of any independent book.

This is why smaller press publishers are having more challenges right now. Fabrice Sapolsky of FairSquare Graphics wrote a piece last week speaking directly to this. We've seen several publishers speak to this in varying capacities, some just making basic press releases announcing their new distributor. But it's in looking at the full list of what's available through a comic shop that hammers the point home. You can see these one-off pieces from this or that publisher, but when you see the full list of what's available and it's half the size it used to be, that's when you start to get a sense of the scope of this issue.

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