Mergers, Reorganization, Upheavels, Thoughts?

Well, they cleared Paul Levitz out of the way. That man was force-feeding blood into the dying Diamond beast for far too long.

Without any real major supporters (except for Steve Geppi), this is the start of the end. The question is...will the open market take to this?

Isn't the direct sales market still a huge part of the comic industry? Also, it may make sense, if the cost to print singles of new comics and have some of them fail, meaning they don't get collected for trades, is cheaper than printing a run of trades for some new comic and having it fail. Basically the singles are used as a testbed for what to print later for trades.

I don't know, I could be wrong though.

After the failures of a Marvel owned Heroes World and the WB Store chain I doubt either one of them will go into direct retail.
As far as capitalizing on the success of films, location isn't the problem for Marvel and DC. The problem is content.
Stats indicate that the only comics that see a sales bump from adaptations are self contained, creator driven graphic novels- Watchmen, From Hell, Ghost World. Ten years of Wolverines and Batmans in the cinemas hasn't boosted superhero sales one bit because there's no simple BOOK or COMIC for casual fans to buy. When Spider-Man fans try to go back to the source material all they find is a dozen different titles with convoluted storylines. Throwing some X-Men trades into Target or Wal-Mart won't help anybody.
Both Disney and WB recognize that the new audience for their properties is outside of the comicsphere.
I figured Disney would just let Marvel's comics die a natural death. But now that DC has taken "comics" out of it's name and hired an outsider to oversee brand management, I wouldn't be surprise if WB begins actively cutting their comics line just to reduce costs and consolidate resources.
Once Marvel and DC stop making comics, Diamond distributors will go out of business. This will kill all the specialty shops and the periodical market in general. Monthly comics will go the way of the pulps.
Best case scenario out of all this- the remaining publishers will create a niche market for graphic novels in book stores. Dark Horse, Fantagraphics, Top Shelf and some others have been making this conversion for a few years now. Some major book publishers also have their own graphic novel imprint. Digital comics will probably become the playground of superheroes and smaller franchise properties.

CHRISWELL HAS SPOKEN!

Who called the death of monthlies and possibly comic shops months ago?

You and a few thousand others.

Chris Butcher, as always, has interesting things to say. And that was actually from BEFORE the DC shakeup.

Interestingly, I think the thing that might kill the non-major monthlies, if anything, isn't any of this corporate stuff so much as it is the presence of webcomics. Why buy pamphlets when there's a lot of great stuff online, most of it free? Why self-publish a monthly when you can put it up on the web for very little overhead and no fucking around with distributors?

On the other hand, if the Diamond beast dies (GOOD FUCKING RIDDANCE) maybe suddenly the doors will fly open again on self-publishing? Things were puttering along nicely in that arena before Diamond seized the monopoly...could things go back to the way they were after 15 years?

Another thing I'm not sure about is to what degree the majors value monthlies as a "trial run" for the trade collections. That's been mentioned by a few people as the major advantage of floppies from a corporate perspective. Would they be too valuable to give up?

Prankster is like Hal Jordan when he first went rogue.
"No! No! It's not to late! I can rebuild Coast City! I can bring them all back and it will be just like before!"

I didn't say it definitely could be done. I was asking.

Diamond folding would change the game so radically that it's hard to say what would come of it. One thing's for sure: Diamond's been really shitty for self-published comics, and not particularly good for small publishers. Is it really so impossible that the situation might improve without them? Of course there'd be so much chaos that it's possible everyone would suffer too, and as mentioned there's the webcomics factor. It's hard to say. But self-publishing comics is so easy to do that it's hard to imagine it going away forever.

Actually, since Diamond is a monopoly that every comic shop in the country needs to survive, it's pretty easy to guess what would happen.
And self-publishing, by the way, isn't easy. It's fucking hard and expensive and a surefire money loser.
Yeah there will be chaos and people will suffer, but that's what happens when the staus quo collapses. Ultimately it could be the best thing that ever happens to fringe publishers. It will give them the opportunity to create a new, wider market for themselves.

Um, yeah? That was pretty much what I was suggesting might happen. Might.

Self-publishing is easy in the sense that anyone can do it. I didn't mean to suggest that it was a breeze in terms of effort or financial reward, just that motivated people will always have the means to do so. And maybe that will be easier without Diamond standing in the doorway.

Well, Chris Butcher, in my link above, seems to feel that he doesn't need the direct market to survive, and he manages a comic store (and a damn good one, IMHO). There ARE other ways of getting these comics to stores, and Butcher claims that he's not really spending any more money than through Diamond, who seem to be getting pretty flaky and unreliable into the bargain. I'm certainly not going to argue Diamond going under wouldn't wreak havoc for comic book stores, but strictly speaking there ARE other distributors (Cold Cut and Haven, for instance) and DC and Marvel are going to need some way of getting their product out the door. Unless they completely restructure their business model. ...Which is why I say I have no idea what's going to happen. There are too many variables right now.

I really have a hard time seeing the death of Diamond as a terrible thing in the long run, though.