Dren Productions wants to know if Diamond Comics shipped their comics this week? As Philbo Distribution revealed to be on the prudish side
Comic book publisher Dren Productions, which specialises in fantasy, sci-fi and horror comics, has been featured a number of times on Bleeding Cool. And they have a question to ask comic book retailers and readers.
Feel free to let them know. Because as of now, they will no longer be sending comic books to Diamond Comic Distributors for the now-all-too-familiar reasons.
“We are at a loss at this time. This latest order, mentioned above, was a very large order for us. We had reservations sending it to Diamond in the first place, and as of this moment, we still have not been paid for this order. We have reached out to Diamond several times to ask for the status of this payment, and those emails have been ignored. Our initial emails were simply to ask for acknowledgement of receipt of the invoice we sent, and they didn’t even have the courtesy of responding to those.”
“So, as of right now, we aren’t going to be shipping anything more to Diamond until we are paid. This will include Alien Armageddon #3, AXA #1, and everything else that was solicited in the May Previews. And this really bothers us, because as some of you know, these two books mentioned here were previously solicited and also canceled, much for the same reason we are canceling them now, and we REALLY don’t want to cancel these for a second time.”
“Simply put, these are such large orders for us, if we print and send these, and don’t get paid, it will literally bankrupt us. So, we are awaiting payment of this last order before we determine how best to proceed. Either way, it is pretty much a guarantee at this point that the books in this order will not arrive on time. I don’t want to get into numbers, but between what Diamond currently owes us (since January), and the orders we’ve been forced to cancel, the amount we have lost this year to Diamond is a pretty high number.”
“Unfortunately, anyone who has been following the news, knows that the new owners of Diamond have not been paying anyone, and that all of their biggest clients have been jumping ship. Just this week we’ve seen stories of Dynamite, Fantagraphics, and Titan, all pulling their books because of this same issue.”
“We aren’t going to be an exception to this. We keep hoping that some miracle will happen and that Diamond will get their act together, but we already have contingencies in place in case they don’t. First and foremost, we do have our retailer portal, which we have mentioned in previous posts. You can always order direct from us.”
“But we have also signed on with the new distributor, Philbo Distribution. This catalogue should be going live for orders in the next couple of days (and when it does, we will make a quick update here with a link to that catalogue). Philbo was gracious enough to allow us to relist the books from May and June Previews in here, as well as our July books. So, in case we aren’t able to get these to you from Diamond, we will make sure that they are able to be gotten through Philbo Distribution. The one thing this distributor doesn’t allow though are our naughty covers, which we know many of your customers enjoy. So, if you are going to want those, and Diamond falls through, the only place you will be able to get those is direct from us.”
No naughty covers being distributed through Philbo? I thought Zenescope was going to Philbo as well? Clearly these are changes coming to the market… You can use these Diamond tabs to keep up with the latest on the bankruptcy situation at Bleeding Cool and find out how we got here, below.
