Diamond Comics Distributors filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection today. They also announced that they were selling off pieces of their large company - Alliance Games and Diamond UK were two mentioned today with others likely to happen soon.
What does this mean for the comic book business? Hard to tell for sure. Diamond has been losing pieces of the distribution business for the last five years and right now they're a comparatively minor player in the game. However, when it comes to small press comics Diamond is one of the few viable nationwide distribution options.
Remember that a Chapter 11 filing indicates an intent for the business to continue after a reorganization.
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Manga in its modern form goes back to 1902, but it traces its origins to older forms going back to the Eighth Century.
During the Sixties the Marvel double feature books sold well enough as did DC titles like Action, Detective and Adventure. Maybe the key for selling anthologies to US readers was having only two or three stories per issue with those stories featuring on-going characters.
I think two things help sell 2000AD. One: It's weekly. Getting 8 pages of a story a month is a slog. Getting 8 pages a week is more reasonable. Bigger page sizes also make it possible to pack more in to those 8 pages.
The second big thing is: It's one of two places to get new Judge Dredd stories. There's a big appetite for Dredd, and Rebellion handles it well: They produce 2000AD and the monthly Jude Dredd Megazine. If DC put out a weekly anthology headlined by Batman -- and it was pretty much the only way to get Batman -- I suspect that anthology would sell. But when it puts out an anthology with Batman, and it's monthly, and it's one of 15 books featuring Batman in a month...it's going to seem like an afterthought.
Action Comics went weekly in 1988 and it didn't even last a year.
...and yes, I stuck with it the whole way, but I'm something of an outlier, I suspect.
I stuck with it, too. And it did take the Dredd tactic of being the only place for Green Lantern at the time, IIRC. But Green Lantern is no Dredd in terms of draw -- especially in those days.
But yeah, that's DC's closest attempt at giving the 2000AD thing a try. I wish they'd given it more time. Not only from a readership perspective, but from a creator and editorial perspective -- a system designed to produce monthly comics isn't going to be able to turn around and produce a weekly anthology on a dime. There's a learning curve, and a need for a deep inventory, and they pulled the plug before they figured it out.
DC did try Wednesday Comics in 2009
DC also tried a series of 100 page comics sold through Walmart around 2018 or so.
Jack Kirby on the evolution of comic books (18:38-19:28):
"The comic book medium itself is special. It's something that was the result of evolvement. From what I understand, the editorial comic was first. And then they added a few panels to that and you had a comic strip. And they added a few pages to that and you had a comic book. And what we can add to the comic book... we may have to think about that. So I believe that's the interesting part of the entire field, is to say what is it? Where is it going? How it'll evolve. And we experiment with that every day."
The movie snobs lament that the superhero movies (which have saved movie houses) are taking screen time away from “serious” “movies for adults.” Without them, there wouldn’t be enough ticket buyers to keep the doors open.
I hadn’t thought about this before, but that is precisely the same dumb argument that’s been made about superhero comics, going back to at least The Comics Journal, but probably further. That argument being “superhero comics are pushing out everything else, whine, there’d be more highbrow comics if superheroes weren’t pushing everything out, whine whine whine, they need to cancel all those superhero comics and publish more Daniel Clowes whine whine whine”
This argument is specious (and incredibly condescending) because superhero comics didn’t push anything out and aren’t pushing anything else out. The genre came to dominate the market because it’s a failing industry where nothing else was profitable and superheroes were the Last Man Standing. If all that sells in big numbers is superhero comics, by golly, publishers are going to put their chips on superhero comics.
Further, dismissing “superhero comics” (and their readers) as lowbrow and stupid (as The Comics Journal always did) neglects one of Stan Lee’s most important contributions: Superheroes aren’t a genre. They’re a medium. You want to write a soap opera? Go ahead, but put one of the characters in a costume once in a while to jazz things up (Spider-Man). Same with anything else: Westerns, romance, high fantasy, whatever: Just make sure there’s plenty of spectacle, i.e., usually superhero stuff. Then you can tell any story you want to.
Because comics aren’t the place for My Dinner with Andre or Waiting for Godot or Long Day’s Journey into Night. Comics aren’t good at that sort of thing. What the medium is great at, though, is spectacle that would be too expensive anywhere else. (Although CGI is catching up.) What it’s good for is never-ending serial, where the “actors” don’t age. Comics aren’t good a talky stuff like Shakespeare … unless Thor drops into the middle of Hamlet to liven things up!
Publishers DO try to publish things other than superheroes, from Scalped to Sheriff of Babylon to Hate. But they don’t sell, or don’t sell in the numbers necessary to keep a publisher or hundreds of comic shops in business. Those books are riding the success of Spider-Man and Batman, whose sales keep the whole damn poker game afloat.
Which brings me back to movies … where the argument is taking place again. Critics and directors are whining about those darn superhero movies. When it’s the success of those movies that are keeping the theaters open, and keeping the studios in business, and therefore allowing personal projects like The Irishman to get made. What these bluenoses don’t seem to understand is that if you remove the only things that are selling, it’s not going to make room for smaller projects to exist – it’s going to create a void where nothing exists. Directors like Martin Scorsese should be on their knees thanking their gods for superhero movies, without which they’d be out of work.
And criticizing the only thing that sells? That isn’t a criticism of the studios, which the critics seem to think it is. Any more than sneering at superhero comics is a criticism of the publishers. It’s a criticism of the audience. Which is a pretty dumb thing to do if those are the people you’re trying to sell your product to.
You know, the parallel is so strong, that it kinda makes me wonder if the movie industry, like comics in the ‘70s, is a failing business. Where, once again, non-spectacle is failing to sell, leaving superheroes, once again, as the Last Man Standing.
Sorry for the rant.
When did Japan start producing comics/manga?
I've been interested in the answers here. I grew up with the understanding that Western-style comics (i.e. manga, as opposed to whatever came before) and baseball grew popular in Japan during the American occupation. That's probably apocryphal, but I'm sure it contributed in some fashion.
Also, every time a comics reader was portrayed in a movie or TV show, the character was stupid and/or childish.
Gomer and Goober Pyle come to mind. But as Jeff said, if they're really stupid, they wouldn't be reading anything. (And Gomer and Goober probably wouldn't be readers.)
It's one of two places to get new Judge Dredd stories. There's a big appetite for Dredd, and Rebellion handles it well: They produce 2000AD and the monthly Jude Dredd Megazine. If DC put out a weekly anthology headlined by Batman -- and it was pretty much the only way to get Batman -- I suspect that anthology would sell.
This, and other comments on anthologies make sense to me. Especially in this age where titles start over every time there's a new writer. The next time Batman starts over, make Batman #1 an anthology, and include three other Bat-titles in it., also starting over at #1. Ditto with Detective, although maybe extend the range a bit in that title. But again, start three titles over at #1. Do the same with Detective. So instead of all the Bat-titles we have every month, just have two, both anthologies priced at $20.
It's kinda fun to imagine this, and how it would break down.
Batman Comics: The current Batman, Batman and Robin, Batman: Brave and Bold and a Batman Elseworld story (Gotham by Gaslight: The Kryptonian Age, Batman: Off-World, etc.)
Detective Comics: Batman, Catwoman, Supporting Character Comics (The Penguin, Red Hood: The Hill, etc.), Batman/Superman: World's Finest
Green Lantern Comics: Green Lantern, Green Arrow, Green Lantern Corps, Flash
Justice League: Justice League Unlimited, Aquaman, Wonder Woman, rotating five-issue feature (Question: All Along the Watchtower, JLU: Atom Project, Challengers of the Unknown)
Birds of Prey: Birds of Prey, Black Canary, Poison Ivy, Harley Quinn
Maybe Black Canary belongs with Green Arrow. Hmm, this is complicated. Maybe some stuff would have to remain single issue.
If you wanted to go full Judge Dredd, you could break the stories in, say, Batman Comics into 4- or 5-page increments and selling them weekly. But that's probably too drastic a change for the U.S. audience.
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