Comic book shops and a publisher in St. John’s are still grappling with the repercussions more than a year after a major distributor declared bankruptcy.
Diamond Distribution, one of the world’s largest English comic book distribution companies, filed for bankruptcy in the United States in January 2025. For decades, it had been a supplier of comic books, board games, collectives and figures.
“Truly, everything you see in my shop, like, at one point I could have ordered from Diamond,” said Kerri Neil, owner of Downtown Comics in St. John’s.
Neil now orders from eight different distribution companies to stock her shelves. She said there were problems with having just one company dominating the industry, and it was expensive to use with the U.S. exchange rate and shipping from New York to Montreal and finally to St. John’s.
“As soon as we could jump ship … we were out of there,” said Neil.
But having to order from multiple companies can be a headache for small business owners, Neil added.
“They all have different ways to order. Different companies they ship with,” she said.
David Stephens, a sales clerk with Timemasters, said they “easily” work with a dozen companies now, and even if some offer better financial deals it’s “definitely a bigger hassle.”
“Mostly it’s the amount of invoices, right. Because we have to keep track of multiple invoices from, you know, multiple different vendors,” he said.
It hasn’t been easy on local publishers either.
Black Panel Press founder Andrew Benteau said he previously used Diamond as a distributor and was owed thousands of dollars when the company went bankrupt. He has since been able to secure IPG as a distributor.
“We’ve had no revenue from books distributors since … [the] end of 2024 until last week, we got a payment of $600,” Benteau said.
As a result, he’s taken a second job in advertising.
“Book sales have been nothing compared to what they were. We were selling almost 1,000 books in a month at the peak there,” he said. “The Q4 of 2024, and last so far this month, I think I’ve sold about 40 books through our distributor.”
While he’s created connections with local comic book stores Downtown Comics and Timemasters to carry his books, he said it isn’t possible to cut out a distribution company and call up every comic book shop to take his books.
In most cases, stores want books on consignment, meaning Benteau might not get paid for months.
He said the distribution landscape has become fragmented, and he’s now focusing on selling directly to customers through his website.
“It’s going to take a long time to get back to where we were in terms of comic distribution,” he said.
Benjamin Woo, an associate professor of communication and media studies at Carleton University, said Diamond has been a major player in the comics since the 1980s.
“For a while, Diamond had an almost de facto monopoly on comic book distribution, especially in the area of periodical comics,” said Woo.
Diamond would issue a catalog with upcoming titles from a swath of publishers. Now shop owners have to monitor multiple catalogs, said Woo, some of which have overlapping holdings and others exclusive to one distributor.
Woo said comics are a specialty market with clients who want particular things. The distribution companies serve those needs.
“That produces these kinds of uneven results … where a trade bookstore going through a trade book distributor is going to be able to get something perhaps at a different time than a specialty comic store can bring it in,” he said.
Meanwhile, Neil said customers can order comics online and it will arrive in a week.
If a customer breaks a shopping habit, Woo said they might go elsewhere, forgoing the comic book shop to buy it from a digital distribution site.
“Some people will … continue to read comics, but the ways they access it will change. And that has impacts for the economics of the industry,” he said.
Neil said some companies she works with can take four to six weeks to process an order before shipping.
“If someone’s ordering, like, a specific book, I have to say, like, it could be here in two to 12 weeks,” she said. “It’s such a large window of, like, when it’ll get processed and shipped and arrived.”
Stephens said there are some “growing pains” with distributors picking up where Diamond left off. For instance, for a time Timemasters couldn’t bring in Conan The Barbarian, he said.
“It was cost prohibitive for us to order through Lunar and then have it shipped across the border,” said Stephens.
The publisher eventually arranged for a Canadian distributor, but as a result of the gap there were regular Timemasters customers who couldn’t get new issues.
“They’re not happy about it. They’ve had to go online and try to source the issues they’re missing,” Stephens said.
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