As of now, there is clearly a lot of speculation with I don't think anyone having a complete picture of what's going on with comics distribution. I certainly can't offer any insights about what's to come in 2025. (Not just with comics! I told you last week that my wife and I are speed-running the projects we had planned for 2025 because we don't have any idea of what's going to happen on any front!) Every single option for the future is "Reply hazy, try again" to quote the Magic 8-Ball. But that's not what I want to talk about.
What I want to talk about is why comic distribution has been absolutely bonkers the past few years. The pandemic that started in early 2020, particularly with the initial mish-mash of stay-at-home orders, obviously caused a major disruption to just about every industry. But -- as I pointed out a week before Diamond announced their halting shipments on March 23 -- the problem the entire comics industry was suddenly facing was exasperated by the fact that Diamon had a monopoly on the distribution market. If they experienced any slowdowns or problems, that impacted literally every comic book shop nationwide. "If we had more comic distributors out there, a disruption of one wouldn't grind the entire industry to a halt." And even when others started taking advantage of Diamond's 2020 difficulties, the sudden pseudo-vacuum was filled quickly... and that speed to fill in the gaps led to other indusrty-wide problems as I noted in 2021. Folks were scrambling to get system up and running quickly, and that inevitably leads to stop-gap measures that remain in place far longer than they should.
None of that is Diamond's fault per se. But the root problem here is that Diamond was able to do all this in the first place. One of the key events that put Diamond in a position to run effectively as a monopoly was the "Heroes World Debacle" where Marvel tried to be their own distributor... and failed miserably. And once the dust settled from that, Diamond was THE comic book distributor. (Yes, I know technically, other distributors were still around post-Heroes-World but Diamond had the VAST majority of the market cornered. A judge even later ruled that they did indeed fit the defintion of a monopoly within comics, but he let it slide because he was convinced that comic books were just a subset of magazines.) So while I don't blame Diamond for being put in that position, the fact that they were was and has been a massive problem that was bound to run into some catastrophic failure like we've seen the past few years.
See, the problem with monopolies -- well, one of many problems, but I'm focusing on this one issue -- is that they are a single point of failure. That is, if anything happens to them, that will halt everything both up and down the entire comic book production line. Whatever printer publishers use to make their comics have nowhere to send the printed comics to, and whatever retailers are supposed to receive new comics don't have anyone delivering material to them. With Diamond as a monopoly, there simply was no alterantive.
So what does that have to do with the current situation, particularly since several other outlets were able to get up and running the past few years and Diamond no longer has the stranglehold on the comics industry that they once had? While we did see some new players enter the distribution market since 2020, they had to set up operations quickly and Diamond themselves had to radically adjust their business model quickly now that they had competition. That means, here at the end of 2024, we have an entire arm of the comics industry that was thrown together with duct tape and baling wire. No one has really had the time/resources to adequately plan their entire business. Now, if you had one or two companies doing that, it becomes something of a matter of Darwinism; if they put together a good set of services, they'll survive but if they don't, they go under. But then you've still got several other businesses to pick up the slack and ensure the industry as a whole continues along.
But if everybody is in the same tenuous boat and they all find they're suffering the same headwinds simultaneously -- since they all sprang up at the same time under the same circumstances -- they're all going to experience similar problems at the same time. One catastrophe could be devasting.
You ever look into the banana industry? The bananas you're most likely familiar with are a breed called Cavendish. They're by far the most prolific type commerically. Why? Because the previous type that most widely eaten -- the Gros Michel banana -- was subject to a fungus that spread like wildfire through ALL Gros Michel banana crops worldwide. How did it spread so quickly that it couldn't be eliminated or contained? Because bananas produce asexually, meaning they are clones of each other. Unless you're over 80, the last banana you ate was genetically identical to the first banana you ever ate. Because every banana farmer is growing bananas that come from the exact same situation, the industry has been terrified for years that another fungus could wipe out the entire industry.
While these comic distributors don't have the exact same genetic makeup thanks to coming to the industry from different directions, they did still enter the market at the same time and set themselves under the same circumstances. They all looked at the issues of the industry simultaneously and tried to address the same issues at the same time, meaning they've got similar solutions. All of which means that they're susceptible to the same things. Which means that comic distribution is in a very similar position to banana growers. One seemingly small thing could have a massive impact throughout the industry.
Now on the plus side, all these new distributors do have different lenses that they're seeing things through. While they came in at the same time, they came from different backgrounds and that might be enough to give some places greater flexibility and different options than others. Again, I don't know where things will go in the future. But what we're seeing right now is an industry scrambling to switch from Gros Michels to Cavendishes, and the growing pains are going to continue to ripple throughout the industry for a while.
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