the vynsane asylum

At Gamestop.

Incredible.

DC is aiming to resume new books on April 28th.
But Diamond isn’t ready to resume until the end of May at the earliest.
So DC is using two smaller distribution companies, despite their exclusive deal with Diamond.

That's pretty cool actually. It won't hurt anyone other than Diamond for there to be some competition.We could conceivably see a drop in cover price....

Breaking Diamond's monopoly could be the best possible thing for the industry.

DC just broke up with Diamond after 25 years...

I feel like DC is trying to get out of the comic book business.

It's certainly not good for Canada. The other shipping entities weren't able to get anything up here in a reasonable time at a reasonable cost from what I understand. Guess I'm not going to wind up with Tom King's Batman/Catwoman floppies after how many years of buying his run? Love it.

What does it mean for ANY comic shop trying to order books?
Is there gonna be a minimum dollar amount to make it feasible to ship to LCSs? And will the stores be able to make that amount? Especially if it’s just DC books?
My guy sometimes only orders 1 or 2 copies of a book. Is that worth the hassle of setting up an account with a whole new distributor? Will some comic shops just be like “fuck em” and stick with Diamond and the other publishers?
Do these two new distributors have the infrastructure in place to cater to shops nationwide? Continent wide? Can they get books to shops undamaged?
They also didn’t give store owners much of a heads up.

It's either going to be really good or really bad for print comics and LCS's. It could go either way, depending on how things play out, but I doubt there's any "in between" here.

Many interesting takes quoted in this article:

https://www.comicsbeat.com/dc-diamond-split/

jjreason wrote:Many interesting takes quoted in this article:

https://www.comicsbeat.com/dc-diamond-split/

Sounds like AT&T/WB/DC just pulled a Jenga Brick out of the stack that’s going to lead to the end of floppies for everyone.

We'll see. Diamond offered shops some fairly good discounts the further up their ordering numbers went, and that included all publishers. Stores won't up their orders by 30% just to hit those discounts I don't think (EDITED: I say 30 percent because DC apparently made up 30 percent of the products and I would assume most stores' orders would be around that much DC, give or take), because the cost to them is sitting on even more new comics that won't sell. I don't think there are any new numbers to show how much Midtown is going to discount the DC books. Stores operate on a high-wire budget anyhow, hurting their discounts & cutting into profits in ANY manner is going to cause some of them to die - especially on the heels of the pandemic down turn.

Another "should read" article. Very interesting.

https://www.comicsbeat.com/the-coronavi ... struction/

It’s already beginning.

Some DC books are already not showing up from Diamond(Young Justice 15 was a no show last week, Flash 754 got skipped entirely and didn’t know until 755 and 756 came out) or coming out of order(Batman/Outsiders 13 showed up last week, issue 12 came out this week). Detective and other books were supposedly released this week, but it wasn’t on Diamond’s list nor in their shipments.
My LCS guy that I’ve been going to for 30 years is the most laid back guy I know and while he was talking about it today, I could tell he’s frustrated as fuck. Because there is zero incentive for Diamond to do any kind of customer service in relation to any DC product. And the ones getting fucked over are the retailers and collectors.
This is to say nothing of whatever clusterfuck awaits when these two new distributor bozos start dropping the ball(and they will).

He also said the order form for Marvel’s upcoming schedule was looking very anemic and he said he wouldn’t be surprised if they were trying to start their own in house distribution again.

We can’t have nice things. Fuck AT&T.

Throwback to the days when my copies of GI Joe used to arrive directly into my mailbox at home in plain brown envelopes, folded in half lengthwise. We have seen the future, and it's 1984 all over again.