The Baltimore City Paper has a in-depth profile of Diamond owner Steve Geppi and his struggling but amazing museum:

Resentment against Geppi runs deep in some sectors of the comics industry, mostly by small presses whose books’ demand doesn’t meet the $425 minimum order necessary to secure distribution by Diamond, but also by enthusiasts who blame the decline in readership on the prominence of the direct market. When comics largely stopped being sold at newsstands, these critics charge, they stopped being impulse buys for kids and became collectibles for an increasingly closed market of adult readers who wanted the same-old superhero stories, squelching innovation among publishers not willing to risk unfamiliar material on a shrinking audience, which led to further specialization and finally the ghettoization of comics as the pablum of a geeky subculture. Add to that the considerable infusion of cash Geppi has injected into the collectibles market (he’s famously offered $1 million for a near-mint copy, should it materialize, of Action Comics No. 1) and you’ve got the recipe for a serious case of sour grapes among enthusiasts who resent the shift from comics as a living art form to a precious commodity. Seen in that light, a cynic might regard the preserved comics proudly lining the walls of the Geppi’s Entertainment Museum as akin to a big-game hunter’s wall of trophies of a species they’ve successfully hunted out of existence.

1 COMMENT

  1. “When comics largely stopped being sold at newsstands, these critics charge, they stopped being impulse buys for kids and became collectibles for an increasingly closed market of adult readers who wanted the same-old superhero stories, squelching innovation among publishers not willing to risk unfamiliar material on a shrinking audience…”

    If they exist more than rhetorically, these unnamed critics have everything backwards.

    Despite what it has become under the Diamond monopoly, the Direct Market actually gave rise to indie publishing and alternatives to superhero titles. Without it, Marvel and DC would likely be the only comics publishers around, still dishing out supes and little else.

    1. The print-to-preorder and nonreturnable Direct Market system made independent publishing financially possible for those who would otherwise have been relegated to the zine and xerox underground — at best. At worst, they wouldn’t have bothered publishing at all.

    2. Many newsstands did not stop carrying comics, and it’s hard to see how the Direct market could have been a factor with those that did. Marvel, for example, continued to issue separate Direct Market and Newsstand editions before, during, and after the “collectibility crisis” mentioned above.

    More importantly, before the Direct Market, minor publishers never had a chance to even get on a newsstand. You think it’s hard to get carried by Diamond? Try a newsstand distributor. They make Diamond look like a doting grandmother.

    For these reasons, I think all the premises mentioned in Baltimore City Paper article are completely wrong.

  2. HABE has some good points I think. What we need is another “Diamond” to compete with this one and even the playing field. Any really rich people out there want to give it a go?

  3. Good point about competition in Distribution. That’s what is lacking in the marketplace. Plus, how do I get to read my first comic as a kid now? Do I find it at a friend’s house, slabbed in plastic? Do I see it in a long box? At the age of 8 or 9, do I still get to see a few comics on a spinner at the local book chain and decide to buy my $4 comic there?

  4. Ahem… you forgot to mention the annual comics contest in the very same issue. The winner gets a year long contract with City Paper.
    With the internet, does the small press need Diamond? With trade distributors offering competive terms versus Diamond, do we need another comics distributor? Theoretically, a creator, like Phil Foglio, could publish on the web, sell the collection via trade distributors, and avoid Diamond completely.