Diamond Comic Distributor’s recent bankruptcy filing will fundamentally change the comics landscape. When the news broke, many retailers were still struggling to adjust to the emergence of two new distributors, Lunar Distribution and PRH Comics, after years of ordering from Diamond alone.
“The main thing we’re all dealing with right now is uncertainty,” says Joe Murray, president of the comics retailers association ComicsPRO and owner of Captain Blue Hen Comics in Newark, Del. “The comics industry has been dependent upon Diamond. And whether Diamond’s practices were the best or not, that’s what we had.”
So ComicsPRO is gearing up to help owners of comic shops regain control. “We’re trying to make sure that everybody has their virtual go bag if Diamond goes away,” Murray says. That could include unpaid receipts, records of pending orders, and other documents. “So when things go pear shaped, you’re not in panic mode. You’ve got what you need.”
Comics shops are almost all small, sole-proprietor businesses, and as a national organization, ComicsPRO offers a valuable opportunity for them to work together and share resources. The uncertainty around distribution is only part of a changing landscape. “We’re trying to stay ahead of problems,” says Murray, who notes ComicsPRO meets regularly with distributors and publishers to be proactive. “We’re all in the same boat, and we all want to row in the same direction.”
For example, a ComicsPRO committee spent two years creating a uniform standard for comics metadata—the need for which became glaringly evident once Diamond was no longer the sole distributor. In 2024 it announced the COMET standard, and for the past year publishers and distributors have been working on complying.
But that’s just the first step. “Once we get these tools in place, it leads to conversations about what should be the central repository for data moving forward,” Murray says. Retailers can order from book distributors as well as direct market comics distributors, but the systems aren’t compatible. “We have our comics ecosystem, but the book ecosystem is different. How are we going to get that data into our systems to link it to subscriptions?” The hope is that ComicsPRO’s metadata initiatives will offer the tools to unify processes.
As comics retailers face a year of increased instability, Murray believes the solutions will come from within. “So much of grassroots survival these days is basically crowdsourcing and crowdfunding,” he says, and just as creators may crowdfund a comic, retailers turn to their peers for advice. “You can crowdsource knowledge, and the bigger we make that knowledge pool, the better off everybody is.”
