Digital Killed the Catalog Star

Are digital catalogs killing indie comics?

Greetings,

It took me way longer to get this Cosmic Update out than I thought, primarily because I kept changing what I wanted to write about. Recently I was asked to work on a project that required me to know all the comic books that were coming to comic shops this October. Well I accepted the project and suddenly found myself marred down with way too much work … that being said - I did it, but it wasn’t easy.

Since the collapse of comic book distributor Diamond back in January the industry has been super fractured. While Diamond was eventually broken up (with the comic distribution side being purchased by Ad Populum back in May) the ramifications have rocked the industry. It’s hard to assess the damage on a retail level because DC’s recent Absolute line’s success has activated readers to buy more comics … but that does very little for smaller press companies like ours. The Diamond breakup was a hard hit … however I see a larger problem on the horizon and that is the reliance on digital catalogs.

For the most part, an entire generation of comic retailers and readers knew to go to just one source for comics and that was the Previews catalog (published by Diamond). Seeing as Diamond was the only real distributor for comics to shops, their catalog was the alpha and omega of the industry … until COVID. After Diamond failed to ship comics - that gave DC a chance to break their contract and take their business elsewhere, so DC left to go be distributed by Lunar (a spin off of DCBS) and ultimately Marvel moved their business to Penguin Random House. Fast forward to today and now all “major” comic publishers have left Diamond - leaving the Previews catalog a thin skeleton of what it once was. So recently (the new) Diamond moved to a digital only version of their catalog, makes sense and saves money … but it’s not good for retailers and the business. All distributors have turned to the digital catalog model, DC, Marvel and IDW still print physical books … but the rest of the industry requires retailers to go online and download PDFs and some are massive - the most recent Lunar catalog was over 1 GB.

There are three major distributors and one new upstart, each having digital catalogs that need to be sorted through. Lunar is one of the top two distributors and their catalog Next Phase clocks in at 722 pages, Penguin Random House the other leader has their Panels catalog that is about half the size at 309 pages, then there is the streamlined Diamond Previews catalog at a thin 147 pages, finally the new kid on the block PhilBo Distribution and their (unfortunately named) Philviews catalog weighing in at 114 pages. All this means that a retailer is expected to visit FOUR websites and scroll through 1,292 pages of catalogs to decide what books to order … I don’t know many retailers willing to put in that much work on top of what they have to sort through to order gaming and non-comic product for the rest of their store.

Lunar has their site setup so a retailer can just brows DC, Image, and Titan titles without having to scroll through the entire Next Phase catalog … making it easier for retailers to ignore small press or indie publishers all together. Over on the Penguin site they have Marvel, Boom, Dark Horse, Dstlry, and IDW broken out separately as well … heck, until I did this project I didn’t know Penguin even carried other publishers. Diamond and PhilBo just have everything together, with Philviews (sigh) sorted almost alphabetically - some things were out of order.

The point of all of this is that without one source or at least a physical reminder (such as a catalog) in comic shops the fight for small press is even more uphill than before. I’ll be honest I had never heard of about 90% of Dark Horse’s comics shipping in October, because Dark Horse just isn’t in front of me anymore, and I am very plugged-in to the industry. The fracturing caused by the Diamond collapse has caused me to lose track of many smaller publishers, and it’s sad … if I’m not on their email list or following their social media closely - they almost don’t exist anymore.

There is another major issue I see here … Lunar is pushing small press publishers to sign up with Massive (who is also a small press publisher and in essence “the competition”) for their “Massive Indies” program. To some publishers that might seem like a saving grace, but I fear it’s making the waters even more muddy. Assuming a retailer downloads the 1 GB Next Phase catalog … they have to scroll to page 452 to find the “Massive Indies” section (and that’s after the insanely long 36 page Abrams section). The Massive Indie section features 14 different indie publishers (not alphabetized for some reason) that retailers have to scroll through - all with multiple titles covers and preview pages. In all fairness the catalog has hyperlinks to each section - but it still requires a retailer to drill down.

The other concern is the reader’s involvement in this process, I mean readers/subscribers are the retailers core customers - so they are key to this whole process. To make the system work it would require a reader to casually be scrolling through all of these digital catalogs and just happen to discover the book Savager from Panick Entertainment and say - “this looks interesting”. Then that reader has to go to their retailer and say to the person behind the counter “please order me Savager issue one on page 489 in the Lunar Next Phase catalog issue 44”. Honestly how many casual comic book readers are going to do that? Would you?

I’m not saying the “old way” was easy (with the Diamond order codes) but it was more likely. Just looking at Massive Indies all 14 of these small press publishers have to galvanize their fan bases to go into these retailers and preorder their books in a 20 day window of time with a very sketchy amount of knowledge. Oh … good luck if your book is in the PhilBo catalog - not only do you have to convince a retailer to order the book - you need to convince them to try an entirely new distributor. That’s asking a lot from a casual or even fanatic comic book reader.

I don’t have an answer … I’m trying to navigate this myself … but the system for small press publishers is 100% broken. For literal decades I heard small press guys wanting to see Diamond fall because they were “gate keepers” … they finally got what they wanted and to me things look bleak. Not saying we are giving up or that any small press publisher with a true passion for what they do should give up either … just understand what you are up against. The same goes for readers - now more than ever small press publishers need your support.

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I was going to add a few bits of Cosmic Times & PalmCon news to this Cosmic Update … but I think I’ll sit on that as this one went way long. I am curious if you are reading this and you are a small press publisher or just a fan of comics …what are your thoughts. Please let’s start a conversation in the comments.

Stay Cosmic,

Martin