Let's back up a bit... how and why has Wednesday become New Comics Day in the first place? Older fans might well recall going to their local comic shops to buy new comics on Monday. Others might recall that their shop got new comics on Friday. While any given shop might have a regular day that they got new comics, that wasn't necessarily the same day as any other shop. The reason for this is because there were a variety of distribution channels. One thing I try to point out to fans every year is that August 8th is NOT the anniversary of Fantastic Four #1, and this is easily proved by the number of different copies where the retailer physically wrote the date they received them right on the cover, so they would know when they could return unsold copies back to the publisher. I've seen dates ranging from as early as July 30th to as late as August 21st. There was no single, national system in place for distributing comics -- they showed up when they showed up thanks to the collection of regional distribution and subdistribution channels that retailers went through.
Keep in mind, too, that in the mid-20th century, comics were still dismissed as emphemeral garbage. So if a distributor was loading up their delivery truck with Life and Time and whatever else, the comics were considered the absolute least important. Which meant that they might just get left in the warehouse an extra week or two if the truck happened to fill up. That's another reason why the received dates on those Famtastic Four #1s range over almost a full month. As hard as it might be to believe now, back then nobody -- well, no distributors or retailers at any rate -- cared too much whether they got the latest comics issues this week or next week or the week after that.
Now, this started changing in the 1970s. Comics fans were starting to get recognized as a significant (and profitable!) group of consumers, and the industry began trying to standardize and normalize business operations to run more efficiently. You can sometimes find 1970s comics with some random color sprayed across the top; this was actually part of that process of standardizing things, which I wrote about here. (In that same post, I also note how that eventually worked its way back to publishers and that's how/why comics from the 1980s often have a block of color printed at the top of every interior page.)
This standardization process led to comics being delivered in a more regular fashion. Phil Seuling was a big insitigator in this, helping to set up a comics-specific distribution channel that was independent of (and thus wasn't materially impacted by) magazine distribution. There were still regional differences -- and that led to some weird local scarcity issues sometimes; the debut issue of Howard the Duck is a bonkers story because of that -- but that's when you started to see individual shops getting a dedicated New Comics Day.
But the big change happened in 1997 with the collapse of Heroes World. That's a whole story unto itself, but the short version is that Marvel owned its own distributor briefly but that aspect of the business was run really poorly and it entirely collapsed inside a couple years. Marvel had to quickly pivot to Diamond -- who was able to leverage Marvel's now-tenuous position into an exclusive contract -- to gets its comics distributed. Any comic shop that wanted to sell Marvel comics had to go through Diamond. And, as a retailer, if you had to order from Diamond anyway, it was easier to just go ahead and get every other publisher's comics from them as well, whether or not they were exclusive. And that's the super-short, abridged version of how Diamond got to be an effective monopoly.
But now that there was really only one comics distributor for the entire United States, all those regional differences dissipated. Comics got delivered to retailers on Diamond's schedule, and that turned out to be Wednesday. (To be fair, I seem to recall that Wednesdays were arbitrary as far as Diamond was concerned, and it was actually outside input from publishers that led them to Wednesday deliveries. I can't find specifics offhand, but I believe it happened to work well with either Marvel's or DC's production schedule and Diamond didn't really care, so they just rolled with it.)
And that's why we've all known Wednesdays as New Comics Day since the late 1990s.
But if New Comics Day was a thing specifically because of Diamond, what happens when Diamond is no longer a viable player? Well, with comics distribution news being an almost daily thing for the past six months now, there's clearly a lot in flux and we've had so many twists and turns that I don't think anyone can predict where this will all shake out. But if we do get back to a situation where we have multiple reliable distributors, we could see a return to New Comics Day being different for every shop depending on who they order from. Or perhaps a single shop will have multiple New Comics Days every week if they use multiple distributors. Or maybe the major distributors all happen to land on an agreement to all delivery books on the same day because every publisher was already set up for a Wednesday schedule. Or maybe we have different New Comics Days for each publisher. This can go in any number of different directions.
That doesn't necessarily mean the death of New Comics Day or that we'll be forcing fans to shift their Wednesday rituals to a different day of the week. But we're definitely looking at a "things will never again be the same" for comics fans in a way that no company-wide crossover story has ever been able to deliver.
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