The PopCulteer
September 19, 2025
Back in May, I first told you about the turmoil surrounding the comic book industry in the wake of the bankruptcy of Diamond Comics Distributors, who had a monopoly on comic book distribution in this country for close to three decades.
During and after the pandemic things changed. DC Comics left Diamond, and is now handled by a new company called Lunar. Several publishers followed suit. Not long after that, Marvel left Diamond and is now handled by Penguin Random House, the long-established book publisher/distributor, who decided to get into comics. Having lost their monopoly, which allowed them to dictate terms to both publishers and retailers that were less than ideal, Diamond’s business model was not sustainable.They entered bankruptcy in January, and a sale was overseen by the Bankruptcy court of the District of Baltimore, Maryland.
I’d like to be able to tell you how it all shook out, but sad to say, while Diamond Comics as we knew it is dead, the corpse is still shaking.
We still don’t know exactly how far the ripple effect will resonate, but there are some key things you might want to know.
Diamond, after the bankruptcy sale, is multiple entities. The original Diamond, now commonly referred to as “Diamond Debtors” is attempting to wrap up the final matters of business before they can cease to exist. They do not seem to be doing this in an thical manner.
The new Diamond Distributors, owned by acompany called Ad Populum, bought the US distribution business, plus Diamond Book Distributors, Diamond Select Toys & Collectibles, Diamond Previews, Collectible Grading Authority, and other assets. Diamond Select Toys was shut down almost immediately, with the entire staff being laid off. CGA was sold off to new owners in June. Free Comic Book Day is rumored to be up for sale, with people wondering why anybody would bother buying it.
Diamond Previews limped along until last month, when the once phone-book-sized catalog went digital-only. Just days ago, The entire staff of Diamond Previews was laid off, including some who had been workinng there since 1991. Many comics fans are mourning this loss. I am not among them. With so many publishers springing up over the last couple of decades, the monthly publication had swollen to several hundred pages…of them technically ads…and it just took up way the hell too much space.
It’s not clear if they even want to be in the business of distributing comics. They may have just wanted a distribution pipeline to get product from their sister companies, NECA, Kidrobot, and WizKids into comic book shops.
Alliance Games, Diamond’s most profitable division, was sold to a Canadian company, Universal distribution. Diamond Comics Distribution UK was sold to its management team.
Universal is expected to attempt to enter the US Comics distiribution business by expanding, putting them in direct competition with the new Diamond Comics, owned by Ad Populum. That competition may be one-sided since almost every publisher has abandoned the new Diamond.
There is also a three-way tug of war between the Diamond Debtors, 130 publishers and the new Diamond over inventory that was consigned to the original Diamond Comics following their bankruptcy filing in January. Millions of dollars of inventory is being claimed by the Diamond Debtors, who want to sell it off at liquidation prices to pay off a line of credit that was extended to them by JP Morgan Chase. The publishers gave that inventory to Diamond to allow them to continue to operate, business as usual, during the bankruptcy process, and their contract clearly states that it was a consignment deal, and that not only would Diamond have to return that inventory to them at Diamon’d expense, when asked, and that it was the property of the publisher until sold to a retailer. Ad Populum, whose deal to buy Diamond apparently excluded the consignment inventory, had been selling it to retailers for months without remitting payment to either the publishers or the the Diamond Debtors.
Clearly, the publishers own the inventory and deserve to be paid. Ad Populum claims to be holding the money in escrow until the courts decide who owns what. The Diamond Debtors lost their first fight over this inventory and are now in the process of suing each individual publisher (all 130 of them) for their inventory, claiming that their clearly-worded contracts are void because of some dubious technicality of Maryland law over a form that wasn’t filed with the court.
What I gave you is just the Cliff’s Notes version. To quote myself from what I wrote in May, “I have not covered this in-depth because it’s a morass of legalese and financial chicanery, but you can find some great reporting about it at Comics Beat and at Bleeding Cool.”
It’s a bigger mess than you might think. JP Morgan Chase loaned Diamond over eight million dollars to cover the cost of doing business, and may not see a penny of it. AENT, a competing bidder for the company, put up almost eight million dollars themselves, before withdrawing their bid after discovering outright lies that inflated the value of the company. They have yet to have their bidding fee returned.
Many of the publishers are facing bankruptcy of their own if they don’t get paid for their product, or at least get it back so they can sell it at full price. If Diamond Debtors is allowed to liquidate their inventory for pennies on the dollar, the affected publishers will find themselves competing with their own product being sold at Ollie’s for a fraction of what they paid to print it.
And some of those publishers have had no money coming in for several months, which is affecting how much they can afford to publish now, and what projects they can take on in the future. Making matters worse, for several months they were simply ghosted by the Diamond Debtors and the new Diamond when they’d ask about either getting paid or getting their inventory back.
I didn’t even mention that, over the years, Diamond had extended lines of credit to hundreds of comic book shops, and now the Diamond Debtors is re-examining the books and is attempting to claw back some of that money, with added onerous interest charges.
DC Comics, Marvel, Image and the larger independents wills survive, easily. Mid-size publishers could take major hits, some of them fatal, if they lose the rights to the inventory that they loaned to Diamond in good faith. They are already losing tens of thousands in legal fees fighting all these dubious court maneuvers. Several of them are turning to Kickstarter and other crowdfunding sources to stay in business, one project at a time.
Many people are wondering about the role of Steve Geppi, the founder and former owner of Diamond in all this. He apparently retained several of what were considered Diamond assets, including Gemstone Publishing (who publish The Overstreet Price Guide), a massive collection of comic book art, Folks who are suspicious that Geppi had been planning Diamond’s bankruptcy for more than six years have speculated that he started moving assets around as early as 2018, but there has been no proof of that. It has been reported that he is personally on the hook for any shortfall between what Diamond Debtors can collect, and what JP Morgan Chase is still owed. Geppi’s personal financial status has been a subject of speculation for almost fifteen years. In 2018 Geppi made a multi-million dollar donation of materials from his now-closed museum to the Library of Congress, so it’s hard to say how much money has been shuffled around since then.
There are still a lot of questions, and with the latest legal complications, this matter could remain unsettled until well into next year.
Meanwhile, comic books are still making their way into stores via a network of better-managed companies, with competition bringing some better deals for retailers and few restrictions on how they do business.
Diamond Previews and Diamond Select Toys are dead. The fate of Free Comic Book Day is up in the air.
And writing about the actions of the Diamond Debtors reminds me…today is talk like a pirate day.
And that is this week’s PopCulteer. Check this blog every day for fresh content and all our regular features.
Tonight for our Sunday Evening Video we are going to repeat a look at the music and video of one of the most popular of the original Radio Free Charleston bands, Go Van Gogh. Running the “Coalfinger” episode of RFC in yesterday’s RFC Flashback put me in the mood to see more of my old buddies.
There’s also some cool stuff hapening at Slack Plaza in Downtown Charleston, as part of City Center Live. Check out the graphic at right.
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