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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FitzTheRuke" data-source="post: 9463306" data-attributes="member: 59816">I've never really dealt with Alliance, as they weren't remotely competitive with Canadian Game Distributors. A thing here or there, mostly 20+ years ago.Was it legitimate, though? It seemed to me like standard US-pandemic issues. The shutdowns occurred randomly by state, and the early closure states asked Diamond to NOT send their shipments out, as they wouldn't be there to receive them. Diamond decided that the responsible thing (as well as the fair thing) to do was to warehouse and wait. A few weeks later, Maryland joined the shutdowns anyway.DC took a look at their contract and found that if Diamond ever "failed" to get their books to market, then they could leave, so they did. Sure, they used the excuse that they thought that Diamond was in some kind of financial trouble (which makes no sense, because if THAT were true, there's no way Diamond would have survived losing 2/3 of its business, which it DID.Yup. Diamond never set out to have a "monopoly" - Marvel caused it. And don't get me wrong - I was never a fan of Diamond. There was soooo much room for improvement. Unfortunately, we didn't get much in the way of improvement under the new system.Yeah, but the big difference is, before Marvels' foolish Distributor War, you could order ALL your comics from Capitol City, for example. The pandemic move didn't really "break up the monopoly" so much as create multiple monopolies for various publishers. If you could legit get all your books from one or the other (or the other) Distributor, that would be a broken monopoly with healthy competition, but instead you pretty much need at least three distributors to be a proper comic shop.Yeah, sure. A lot of the artists and writers were literally teenagers themselves.Yeah, they really hated Bill Gaines. Enough to shoot themselves in the foot.I honestly think that they should view comics as a dirt cheap IP farm (which they probably do, but it means something different to them than it does to me): I think that they should work hard to dust off as much IP as possible and get it into as many hands as possible (rather than say, launch another twelve Bat-Books). Get creators to pitch "What makes THIS character cool?" And run them 12-issues. Not continuity-free, in that I don't think you should EVER make stories that step on the toes of other stories (I call it continuity-respectful) BUT also that you should never need to read anything else to enjoy the current story being told.(Within reason - you should never NEED to, but there is room for seeds that would make you WANT to.)Shooter got a bad rap. He was probably just too tall and threw his height around for people's comfort. He was talented, though, and did more for creators than people seem to remember.Yup. See also kids graphic novels, where Raina Telgemeier and Dav Pilkey can outsell the entirety of Marvel or DC combined. And that's not because of the problems with the Direct Market (which are many and varied) but because of a system that created the need for the Direct Market. Also, and this is opening another can of worms, the Direct Market often gets a lot of flack for its drawbacks, but it rarely gets the praise it deserves for what it can accomplish, and for what it does well.</blockquote>

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