The big news in comics yesterday was that Alliance Entertainment purchased many of the assets from Diamond Comics including Diamond Comic Distributors, Alliance Game Distributors, Diamond Select Toys & Collectibles, and Collectible Grading Authority. The question I think many people are asking is: what does that mean for the comics industry?
Frankly, I don't think much.
Heidi MacDonald at The Beat has a nice piece trying to look into Alliance as a company since it sounds like pretty much no one in the comics industry is familiar with them. Over at ICv2, Milton Griepp speaks to their existing resources and their potential for changing/updating the distribution channels. But here's the thing: who do they serve any more?
DC Comics switched to Lunar Distribution and UCS Comic Distributors for periodical releases and Penguin Random House for graphic novels in 2020. In 2021, Marvel made a deal with Penguin Random House to distribute their monthly comics and graphic novels to comic shops and Hachette Book Group to handle distribution to the bookstore market. IDW is with PRH for bookstores and comic shops. Archie Comics is going through Lunar for comic shops with PRH to handle their bookstore options. Dark Horse has an exclusive deal with Penguin Random House. Image Comics is exclusive with Lunar. And nearly all of this was set up before Diamond filed for bankruptcy. You could technically still get Marvel, Archie, and IDW through Diamond but only wholesale, which I don't expect many individual comic shops would realistically be able to do as they likely wouldn't be ordering the volumes needed for that.
Now, that's not to say Diamond wasn't distributing anything prior to their bankruptcy, but in terms of volume, the vast majority of comics getting sent to local comic shops across the US were no longer being distributed by Diamond as of the end of 2023 anyway.
If Alliance throws a ton of money at infrastructure upgrades and the like, yes, they absolutely could improve on what Diamond had been doing. But whatever improvements they make only be available to the smaller publishers. The larger orders made from most comic shops -- the titles from Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, etc. -- will come from other distributors that they've been using for the past couple years.
Now, an Alliance-run-Diamond could certainly offer new deals as the various contracts currently with PRH, Lunar, Hachette, and so on are up for renewal. And Alliance could make things look attractive to publishers by cutting special deals where they take a smaller cut of the cover price or adding other perks. But I think they're going to seriously upgrade their services first and foremost, and then prove themselves for several years with whichever smaller publishers are still working with them before a significant number of these publishers sign back on. And I'm certain even then those won't be exclusive deals, meaning that retailers will continue to order through which distributors are being used now.
Now, as Alliance also purchased Diamond Select Toys, they'll likely still have orders coming from comic shops that carry nothing but Marvel and DC. They might be able to use that to "prove" themselves a little faster than if they just relied on the smaller comics publishers' titles. But even so, they'd still have to A) up their game, and B) court the larger publishers back from the existing deals they had now. Recall that those publishers all left Diamond because they were having so many problems years before the bankruptcy; it's going to be a while before that lost trust can be regained. And even then, they're only going to entertain switching distributors again if there's enough benefit from leaving who they're with now; I don't have a direct line of intel on that, but I certainly haven't heard of any of these publishers being unhappy with PRH, Lunar, Hachette, etc. Why would a publisher want to disrupt something that's working?
So whatever Alliance does here, and however much they improve on what Diamond had been doing previously, I don't see Alliance's purchase of Diamond as being especially significant to the comics industry from a practical point of view. At least not for several years, and even then in an ideal (for Alliance) scenario.
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