Todd McFarlane was a guest at last weekend’s WonderCon, and I was hoping to get a chance to ask him about the rumors that McFarlane Toys was interested in buying Diamond Comics. By chance, we saw him standing outside our media room and he very graciously stopped by to chat for a few minutes. You can watch the video here.
But for those who like to read, McFarlane confirmed that they had indeed been interested in “some of the side pieces.”.
“My lawyers and accountants and stuff were negotiating with them to go, ‘Hey, how does this all work?’ Can we get the information so that we can make an educated bid?,” McFarlane told me. “The piece that was off to the side was distribution. And, like, man, would that make any kind of sense? Because Steve Geppi built this really magnificent distribution system, but it needed volume. And as Marvel went away, and then DC went away, and then Image went away. You could argue we were like the nail in the coffin. What he had built wasn’t sustainable for the volume.”
McFarlane did put a bid on “a couple of thing” because he thought there would be multiple bidders, but in the end, “one company came in and just said they were going to take one of the big pieces anyway. Like I said, there were components that I was interested in, but my guess is that the bankruptcy court will approve the single buyer for all of it.”
McFarlane didn’t go into specifics but one would assume that the things he was interested in were Diamond Select Toys.
According to court filings, McFarlane Toys was one of Diamond’s biggest creditors – $1.729 million, according to filings. I asked him how that affected his business, but he chose to look at the big picture.
“Not just for me, but I think for obviously, hundreds of others that supply [to Diamond.] That’s the unknown. So it’s the big question, and it’s the unknown. I think on the comic book distributing end between Random House and Lunar like we can sort of say with confidence that comic book distribution is safe and is going good. But the back half of that of the Diamond catalog had all the other stuff, whether it was t-shirts – we call the it the tchotchke business. That’s the the unknown. To what extent will somebody come in and pick that up? And in this case, if it’s the big buyer that potentially might get approved by the court, we will see whether they think that that piece of business is worthy to go there. If I had to take an educated guess, saying that they’re going to want to keep what was already solid there, and then take what they the buyers already do, and integrate it into and try to expand it. If you’re going to buy anything, it has to be additive.
“I’m going to guess there are smart people there, that they’re going to go, how do we use this? You want to keep the accounts open and then go, but they’re not buying some of the stuff that we do as our core business, maybe we can slide some of our stuff into that and expand all of it, right? So that one plus one equals three.”
And with that classic bit of McFarlane Math we leave you to ponder what night have been.
