I've been waiting with trepidation to see the fallout on Diamond's online information since the bankruptcy was announced. Well, the other shoe has dropped — and it's as bad as I feared.
For those who don't know, the Diamond Previews site was my primary information source for the weekly Comics List for decades. When DC jumped ship, I added Lunar as a source. When other publishers' information became unreliable, I took directly from the publisher websites or, in the case of Dynamite and Titan, individual searches for individual books. Then I'd use whatever DRCs and previews arrived by Friday each week as (hopeful) confirmation. Assembling the list each week became quite an affair. But necessary, since it was from the list that I chose the elements of the Comics Guide.
But now Penguin Random House has cut Diamond off as a sub-distributor. The impact of that hit this week, as Marvel, IDW, Dark Horse, Oni, BOOM and more have disappeared from previewsworld.com. Worse, the "Comics & Graphic Novels" section, which used to carry everything, comprehensively, from the non-featured publishers, is restricted to whatever publishers are still working with Diamond — five or six at most. PRH's website doesn't seem to have a weekly list for consumers; there's FOC and other advance lists for wholesale and retail, but nothing for the current week (that I can find and/or trust). As for Dynamite and Titan, whose relationships with Diamond have become increasingly strained, I already have to do individual searches for individual titles, and what I find can't always be trusted.
Now, I could assemble a list from various secondary sources, but A) it wouldn't be comprehensive, B) it wouldn't be trustworty, C) it would be a lot of time-consuming work on my part and worst of all, D) it probably wouldn't be any better than what you'd get from your LCS on a given week.
The upshot of all this whinging is that I don't see a way to do either list of guide that I can trust as accurate. As an old newspaper man, I regard knowing inaccuracy as a betrayal of the readers. Which means I simply won't do it.
So the list and guide that I did are going on "indefinite hiatus," which is Marvel-speak for "canceled." I hope that's not the case with the List/Guide, as I had fun doing them and I think some of y'all had fun reading them. Maybe they can be resurrected someday. But unless and until one of the new distributors steps up to fill the information vacuum, I'll put that time to other uses.
Thank you all for sticking with me as long as you did. Heroes all!
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And thank you for doing it all these years.
As I posted in the "Thoughts while Filling Out Previews" thread, here is the LINK to the online only July catalog.
My LCS's "New This Week" section of its website is populated directly by Diamond, and this week, for the first time ever, it is BLANK.
That is too bad, but very understandable. Thanks for carrying the torch so often and for so long.
I have to hope that this is a short-term situation that will change soon. There is a genuine demand for such a list; hardly anyone benefits from its absence; and it _should_ be possible to build some functional substitute soon enough once this disorientation period is overcome.
I'm sorry to hear since I've always found the List helpful and the Guide particulary useful in dessriptions of books that otherwise I knew little or nothing about. With Previews becoming less and less complete, I am not surprised at your decision. Seeing the lack of List/Guide last week and this week, I searched for alturnatives and found (so far): https://freshcomics.us/issues/2025-07-02; and https://gocollect.com/blog/comiclist-new-comic-book-releases-list-f... First time I've used either one, so not much of a sample size. Not guides per my brief encounters; but, without Captain Comics imput (sob) may be of some use. YMMV. If either of these sites has some bad history that I should be aware of, let me know. Take care and thanks for all the hard work!