Diamond Saved(?), The Beat Interviewed, and a Casanova update— The Comic Bookmarks March 30th, 2025
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Let’s just jump into the links this week, starting out with the news about Diamond Comics being acquired out of bankruptcy.
Headlines
So let’s follow this trail.
On Tuesday, it was announced that Alliance Entertainment was set to acquire Diamond Comic Distributors through the bankruptcy auction process. Alliance Entertainment is primarily a pop culture and toy distributor. Alliance posted a news release to their investor site which stated the following:
“This is a transformative opportunity to expand our leadership in the world of gaming and physical collectibles and deepen our reach into thriving fan-driven categories,” said Jeff Walker, CEO of Alliance Entertainment. “With their legacy of exclusive titles, deep retail relationships, and strong presence in comics, tabletop games, and collectible merchandise, these businesses are highly complementary to our existing distribution and fulfillment model. We see powerful cross-selling potential between our product lines and customer bases, expanding the reach of our expanded product portfolio across both mass retail and specialty channels.”
At his site ICv2, Milton Griepp provided a nice into to the new kids on the block. Here’s an interesting nugget from that piece:
In terms of independent stores, Alliance Entertainment currently sells to over 2,500 independent retailers, while Diamond and Alliance together service around 5,000, so with limited overlap, the acquisition can roughly triple the number of independent retailers the company services.
Pure speculation but I wonder if this means that we could see more distribution possibilities instead of less for comics? Trying to be optimistic here.
Brett
And then things started to get really interesting on Wednesday. Image Comics filed an objection to this acquisition for reasons (still owed money by Diamond seeming to be one of the key reasons.)
It’s been fairly quiet since then, at leaset as far as I can see. It‘s still a few weeks until the acquisition is scheduled to be finalized so we’ll see what happens between now and then.
John Freeman
An interesting move by a number of UK publishers. It will be interesting to see what this group can accomplish.
Comic Sites on Comic Sites
I don’t know if I’ve quite wrapped my head around who or what Prana: Direct Market Solutions is but I’ve enjoyed the industry view that Atom! Freeman presents of all aspects of comics, including comics journalism.
In one interview with her, Freeman covers everything that’s great about MacDonald and The Beat and some of my own personal frustrations with The Beat. Now obviously, it operates in a different stratosphere than I do but I always bristle a bit when the conversation about comic journalism slides into being a discussion about comics marketing and the role that journalistic sites play into that. Again, it’s more of a personal thing, a discussion about scale, reach, and aims of what journalism needs to be. And also what journalism needs to do to survive in today’s environment. The Beat is one of the best sites out there and gets held to a high standard.
📢 So excited to announce the amazing recipients of 2025's Comics Criticism Mini Grant Award! A big round of applause to @silenttt.bsky.social Matt Ledger, @hecuba.bsky.social @JSeanHarrison.bsky.social @bjkicks.bluesky.social @lydiaturner97.bsky.social @arpadokay.bsky.social @cacomixpod.bsky.social
— Tiffany Babb @ AWP/Ontario Book Fair/WonderCon (@explodingarrow.bsky.social) March 24, 2025 at 2:01 PM
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Business
Getting back to the news of the week, Alliance‘s chairman Bruce Ogilvie appeared on a retailer YouTube show this week. If you don’t want to watch 2 hour video, Heidi MacDonald reports on the video over at The Beat.
Heidi MacDonald
And my previous optimism died a bit by reading this quote in MacDonald’s piece:
“I haven’t spoken with the [Diamond] team yet because we’re not allowed to but I want to hear what they say and what we can do to fix this business. I just know how it is currently being run is not working. From everything I’ve read and been hearing, there’s just not enough volume for the labor involved. We don’t like to sell $5 cds and dvds. We can’t make any money on it. We want to sell $20 products. That’s the challenge because the labor cost and the freight cost just sucks all the profit out of it. We have a 95 cents rule – if we can’t make 95 cents moving through our warehouse, we have to make a minimum because that’s what it costs to move things through.”
Not that things can’t get better, particularly as Diamond has been a much smaller piece of the Direct Market now than they were even 5 years ago.
The Funny Pages
Interviews
mark1
Over at SKTCHD, David Harper interviewed Matt Fraction on his seeming return to comics even though he never really went anywhere. It’s a good interview even if Fraction sounds kind of tired through the whole thing.
When I saw that Harper had published this interview, I really hoped that there would be something about my favorite Fraction book Casanova in there somewhere. And there was but it made me just a bit more sad.
“But also, I was never not working on Casanova when I was at Marvel, and I would get that thrown at me, like, when are you going to do more Casanova? I'm always doing Casanova. When are people going to buy it?
We've never made money on that book. I love it. We have never made a fucking dime on that book.
I'm sorry, I have kids that need to- and that's the reality of, we were never not doing it. It's just how much can you focus on or whatever, right?”
(transcript from Apple’s Podcast app.)
Jed W. Keith
Interviews with Kieron Gillen are almost as much fun as books written by Kieron Gillen.
Reviews & Features
Tegan O’Neil
O’Neil profiles a comic artist from a different age. I really remember him from Sovereign Seven, the first ongoing series Chris Claremont wrote after his less-than-austere book from the X books.
TUSK! solrad.co
— SOLRAD Magazine (@solrad.bsky.social) March 23, 2025 at 5:12 PM
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I came for the comics but stay for the Buckingham.
— Scott Cederlund (@scottcederlund.bsky.social) March 23, 2025 at 5:41 PM
Support the type of journalism that you want.
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