Tuesday, Diamond Comic Distributors filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protections.
For almost eighteen years--212 issues, counting the unpublished (though finished) May 2020 COVID issue--I've been the copywriter on Diamond's monthly PREVIEWS catalog, though that only scratches the surface of what I do. I wear many, many hats at Diamond, and I have joked my business cards should really say "Problem Project Person."
I am very limited in what I can say about the bankruptcy. Reports in the media say the company is looking to sell divisions of the company and reorganize the debts in order to continue operations. I won't add to that.
1) I have a job, and I remain hard at work. I began my work on the March 2025 catalog on Wednesday.
2) I won't say I was taken by complete surprise by Tuesday's announcement; Hemingway got it right in The Sun Also Rises about how one goes bankrupt: "Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly." Yet it still came as a shock, and I am still processing the news and what it means.
3) I work (and have worked) with a group of fantastically smart, talented, passionate, and dedicated people. I am proud to call you my colleagues, and whatever happens in the future, I remain inordinately fond of you all.
4) Diamond has been a part of my life since 1991. (A vintage 1991 shipping box is in my closet.) I saw my work on PREVIEWS as a great responsibility--it is the tool of the comics industry--and I always tried to do right by the publishers, the readers, the industry as a whole.
5) I am thinking about the future… which may well be exactly what I'm doing now. But I would be negligent to not investigate other options. Which also means revising my long-neglected LinkedIn profile.
In the summer of 2020, Steve Warble, one of our sales managers, happened to be in the office on a day I was working on PREVIEWS, and he asked me if I was worried about the future--DC Comics had left, much of the company was on furlough. (I was one of two non-managers retained in April 2020.) The odds were against us, the situation that COVID summer looked grim. "All I can do," I said, "is to do the best job I can do today, and I will deal with tomorrow when it comes. If we go down, at least I will know I did everything I could."
I carry on, doing the best job I can do. That attitude carried me through COVID, and it carries me now. Bankruptcy is out of my hands, but my work, that I can control.