Yeah, my bad on the Eddington thing. Maka also brought that up, I fixed it.

And yes, Choosing the Players takes place alongside those two series (some scenes are the other side of what was seen in other books). I brought it up as "closest thing I've read lately" because it's based on Spoor's old TTRPG games.

Oops, Adventure Finders did come out this month, but I forgot about it since it came out mid-month instead of near the end.

Ah, another point I'd been unaware of and/or forgot: AT&T bought Time/Warner recently, and there's so much vulture capitalist debt attached to the whole apparatus that they're desperate for revenue.

Think about that for a moment: the same kind of parasitic capitalism that killed Toys R Us could end up killing **AT&T**, and taking Time/Warner with it.

(3/3)

To do all of this in the midst of civil unrest and a global pandemic, and to do it with so little warning, speaks volumes about how much consideration DC Comics has for its retail partners.

When Heroes World happened, it nearly killed a booming comics market. This is a very similar situation, only the market is much less healthy, and there are extremely difficult circumstances already making things difficult for retailers. Hell, in some parts of the country, retailers are still closed and can only do curbside at best.

If you're wondering what you can do to support your local comic shop in all this, I have some ideas. Notably? If you are getting DC Comics in your pull, go to your store, ask to cancel them (ideally after the final issue in June, although DC Comics are all returnable right now, so effective immediately is also good, as long as you don't have a bunch already stacked up) and replace them with a comic from Image, Boom, IDW, Dark Horse, Vault, or the other publishers who are actually supporting retailers in this period. (You'll note Marvel isn't on that list... they aren't moving yet, but they don't do returnability, they have pulled the "digital only" cancellation on some of their books, and are generally not retailers' friends either, but right now, Marvel books are still orderable through Diamond, and are a better replacement than a DC book.)

In addition, they decided, unilaterally, to move the release date of DC Comics from Wednesday to Tuesday, despite the clearest possible feedback from their retail partners that nobody wanted this.

Thankfully, Diamond *did* still carry the comics, albeit a few weeks late. Most retailers didn't mess with Lunar and UCS, and while I've heard from a couple who were happy with them, in general I've heard tales of late shipments, expensive shipping costs, and hassles. Not to mention the downsides of feeding your ordering data to a direct competitor in huge online discounters.

So it seemed that DC's fuckery was a temporary thing. They had earned the ire of a lot of comic retailers, but it was still possible to maintain some sort of normalcy in the midst of these unprecedented times, even if the Tuesday release added headaches now and in the future.

Little did we know negotiations were still going. According to an email sent from Steve Geppi at Diamond today, when DC informed them in April that they were going to begin distribution with Lunar and UCS, they asked Diamond to submit a proposal for a revised agreement with the understanding that Diamond would continue to be one of their distributors, which they did. They then requested an extension to June 30 which they also accommodated. Last week, DC requested an additional extension through July. They responded with questions and DC indicated they would reply today, June 5.

Instead of receiving a response, today they told everyone, including Diamond and all of their retail partners essentially "fuck you, here's what we're doing" and that the comics we put final orders in for last week were the last ones we'd be receiving at Diamond. Those comics ship the last week of June. We were supposed to be putting in final numbers for the first comics in July this weekend.

Instead, they're skipping a ship the first week of July, and in the second week of July, these new, mostly untested distributors will begin servicing thousands of retailers with all DC product. In order to get those comics, we need to set up a new account with these distributors and place our orders by June 15th. In 10 days. Four of which are weekend days, incidentally. In that time, these distributors have to set up thousands of new accounts and get them smoothly running. I am not enamored of their chances.

Pasted from retailer Randy Lander's facebook post https://www.facebook.com/randylander/posts/102238... :

This is going to be long. But I've had requests for context and clarification about just exactly what this "DC leaves Diamond" is all about and what it means. If this post doesn't answer your questions, ask in the comments and I might update.

A little background on the comics industry. In the early 1990s, when I was working at Fusion Comics in Fort Collins, Colorado during college, there were several major distributors. Fusion ordered from Diamond Comics because it was easiest to deal with one distributor, but when I graduated and moved to Austin, I found several shops here in town also ordered from Capital City. I didn't know any shops using Heroes World, but it was the third largest distributor in 1994, when Marvel Comics bought them to use as their exclusive distributor.

The knock-on effects of this move bankrupted Marvel in 1996, crashed the comics market, driving 2/3 of comic book specialty stores and several publishers out of business. And in 1997, Heroes World shut down, Marvel returned to Diamond. A much stronger Diamond because Marvel's move forced other companies, notably DC, to become exclusive, and that crashed Capital City. In effect, Marvel's greed and short-sightedness put a whole bunch of comics companies, comic stores, and comic distributors out of business, not to mention damaging their own company so badly they had to use bankruptcy reorganization.

OK, history lesson over. Y'all may have seen retailers complaining about Diamond's de facto monopoly, with a variety of gripes. They're the only game in town, and that means they get blamed for everything. However, the truth is, and always has been, that Diamond is pretty good at their job, and there are plenty of upsides to having one distributor.

Notably, it saves time on logistics in terms of ordering and receiving, it results in all your volume being ordered from one distributor (thus making your discount higher), and it provides a certain stability.

And then COVID came, and a lot of stores were forced to shut their doors, and Diamond made the decision to shut down distribution for almost two months. Partly because their warehouses were affected by COVID restrictions, partly because stores couldn't receive product for sale. For us, that decision was a lifesaver, because we were spared thousands of dollars in bills at a time when our income was reduced by those thousands of dollars.

While everyone was trying to figure out what re-opening might look like, DC Comics went to two of the largest online discounting retailers, Discount Comic Book Service and Midtown Comics, and set them up as new distributors with new names (Lunar and UCS, respectively). They did not reveal that these new distributors were in fact retailers, although it was quickly discovered and revealed online. They announced that Diamond would cancel all previous orders and that retailers could instead order DC Comics from these new distributors, starting in April. Retailers were given about a week's notice to set up this new system, and many of them were still closed, so the news that comics would be coming in now, and that they might not come from Diamond as previously ordered, wasn't exactly great. It also caused confusion amongst customers as to when exactly comics were coming back out.

(cont)

Having read one more Wearing the Cape and nearly two more of Don't Tell, I've found another point of compare/contrast. In both books, the camera stays fixed on the protagonist. We don't get a shift of POV if something important is happening elsewhere. And in the first two Wearing the Cape books, important things do tend to happen elsewhere. Like, "defeating the main villain" important. It makes Astra feel like a supporting character in her own stories. Meanwhile in the Don't Tell books, when important things happen off-screen, the story-important part is how Penny reacts to finding out. Yeah, Remmy's upgrade happens off-screen, but the important part is what happens when she comes back on camera. The hench brigade's antics off-screen are important, but the story-important part is how they fess up to Penny. And so forth. She's not always present at events, but I never felt like she was left out of her own story the way I did with Astra.

Phil Foglio summed up your Corollary 1(2) neatly in his Angel an the Ape miniseries: "If I hit you with a hammer which then goes away, you've still been hit with a hammer."

They may also have been thinking of the Electors of the Holy Roman Empire, not that this ended well either.

Meep meep morp morp?