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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wofano Wotanto" data-source="post: 9463278" data-attributes="member: 7044704">Agreed.  Here you go.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />To be fair, Diamond (and through them, Alliance Distribution for games) have been getting worse since the early 2000s, if not the late 90s.  There was legitimate concern that Diamond simply couldn't do the job any more during the Pandemic lockdown, and they don't seem much better four years down the road.  Neither of the Big Two would last a year without distribution, their pockets aren't deep enough, and if there's one thing the 90s debacle with Heroes' World proved it's that it takes time for a small distributor to grow into a big one.  Marvel still hasn't fully recovered from that mess, and it more or less directly led to Diamond's supposed monopoly. True, although Diamond did have too big a role in comic distribution for comfort.  If they'd suddenly vanished in 2020 the other lesser distributors just couldn't have taken up the full load right away - and maybe not in time to save the industry as a whole.  Diamond's position was really pretty unnatural if you look at the history of comics.  They more or less lucked into near-monopoly during the 90s speculator boom when DC went to them for security following Marvel's supposed exclusivity deal when they trying to make Heroes' World a giant overnight, and the end of the boom killed so many comic shops that the smaller distributors faded away and left Diamond as king of the hill with no serious competition.  They took advantage of their favorable position for years, but that's pretty clearly over with and (for better or worse, mostly worse) we've resumed the older patter of multiple competing distributors with more parity in what they can offer both stores and publishers.     I'd say the self-loathing goes even farther back, at least for parts of the industry.  Being a comic artist in the 30s and 40s was not a well-respected profession, and even many of the early creators believed that comics would never be anything but kiddie fare.  Wertham didn't help any, but at the end of the day it was the industry itself that self-regulated and created teh CCA.  That censorial idiocy wasn't imposed from outside, they did it to themselves - at in least in part to kill the competition from Eerie and other more adult comics.When it comes to the Big Two, I don't think any one individual can possibly hope to be good at everything needed to run the business as a whole, no matter what positions they've held rising to the top.  It's just too big and too complex, and these days there's a whole other strata of having much larger media conglomerates able to override "local control" and insist on things that will fuel the real money makers - films and tv shows.  About the best I can envision is someone who understands they don't know enough and is good at picking more specialized advisors, delegating authority, and negotiating with Disney/Warner to keep them from randomly killing the base of the IPs they're milking.Even Jim Shooter (who started in the business in his early teens) didn't come close to being able to do everything one of the Big Two need to succeed, and he wound up being one of the most contentious and widely despised people in the industry for even trying to focus on making profitable books that actually shipped on time. Compare and contrast with the manga industry, which has made enormous inroads into the US market in part by doing things so very differently from our native publishing industry.  I expect that to continue, and if anything the pace is likely to accelerate - especially as we see more manga and animation that play off of familiar superhero tropes without mindlessly imitating them.</blockquote>

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