The week’s developments:

• Boom! Studios will move its periodical business to Penguin Random House sooner than planned. Boom was purchased by PRH last year and announced last month that they would be moving both their periodical comics distribution and book distribution to PRH on July 1. Previously Boom was with Diamond for comics shops and Simon & Schuster for bookstores.

In a letter penned by Boom Vice President of Sales, Josh Hayes (formery of Diamond, ironically enough), it was announced the switch to PRH for comics shops would be made much sooner, April 1. 

I’m writing to you today about some very important developments on the distribution landscape and how they impact BOOM! Studios.  While we had previously announced the departure by BOOM! Studios from Diamond Comic Distributors effective July 1st, in light of recent industry developments, we have made the decision to accelerate the timeline for the transition of our Direct Market distribution to Penguin Random House to be effective April 1st, 2025.  This will ensure that we can best support our retail partners and help you weather these market changes.  We appreciate the many years of support from Diamond, and we greatly appreciate all that they’ve done for us over the years.

As with any change, there may be challenges, but we feel this change is necessary and vital, so we urge patience along the way as we work toward this solution.  In order to minimize the disruption, we will continue to offer our products in Diamond Previews, and will be available via Diamond in the same manner other PRH-distributed publishers are.  We are currently working very closely with the PRH Comics team to align our schedules, and will have an update for you very soon about what those changes entail. 

• While most publishers handled by Diamond have made few public facing statements, Massive Publishing announced they would be ending their exclusive deal with Diamond on Facebook:

As most of our fans know, our exclusive distributor recently put out a press statement informing us and others that it had filed chapter 11 bankruptcy in order to restructure its debts and sell assets. We were shocked to see the amount of unpaid debts that were part of the bankruptcy filings, including a significant amount owed to Massive for books shipped in Q4 of 2024.

These books were sold to retailers with Diamond collecting those sales but never paying out Massive its portion of revenue for the product that we paid thousands of dollars to print and ship to Diamond (on consignment) as part of our exclusive partnership.

Yes, we may one day receive money from Diamond once a debt restructuring plan is approved by the courts, but that process can take well over a year and we may only receive a fraction of the debt owed.

With that in mind, and the advice of our legal counsel who have warned us that there is a huge risk in continuing to provide products to Diamond while they continue operating during the chapter 11 process, we have decided to end our exclusive distribution deal with Diamond.

We still intend to solicit our monthly comics through Diamond on a non-exclusive basis, once we’ve established that payments begin again for products shipped after the chapter 11 filing. This will cause a delay in numerous release dates, but we must ensure that our creative teams and partners are fairly paid for their hard work.

New trade paperback titles will no longer be offered through Diamond for the foreseeable future but will be available through our other distribution partners such as Simon & Schuster. Re-order TPB products for existing titles are still available through Diamond.

Retailers, we have appreciated your support since we launched in 2022 and are committed to continue bringing you the best products possible. We will for the first time be making those products available through other distribution partners (announcement coming soon).

This is an exciting opportunity for Massive to expand its reach in the direct market and reach new readers. We wish everyone the best outcome (including Diamond Comic Distributors and its staff!).

Massive Publishing was founded in 2022 by Michael Calero, Trevor Richardson and Kevin Roditeli, and publishes primarily comic books (periodicals) that are then collected into trades – the usual, in short. Their line includes such licensed titles as Popeye, Vampiro and Zorro and originals like Liquid Kill, as well as a partnership with the online auction app WhatNot. Obviously their business model is highly reliant on traditional distribution to comics shops, and their statement is the most candid yet about how Diamond’s could affect publishers who use that system. 

• As we reported yesterday, American Mythology, a small comic book publisher, announced they might not survive the bankruptcy.  

• Just as a reminder, Diamond is currently reorganizing and could come out of bankruptcy (Marvel did), and things could go back to semi-normal at some point. But publishers are facing a lot of challenges in the meantime, as all the above shows.