Crisis in the Direct Market: A Virtual Roundtable (3 of 5)
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Todd Allen, Shawna Kidman, William Proctor & Phillip Vaughan
Part III
TA
Brian Azzarello had an infamous quote, probably a year or two prior to that about the NY Times List. It was something to the effect that the top DC releases of the week usually made that list, so he didn’t really see what the big deal about being on it was. That might have been when they still broke out the lists into more categories, though.
The Times cancelled the comics bestseller lists for a while and now they only report monthly, which might negate some of the DM material that spikes on its week of release and then slows way down. The current list (https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/graphic-books-and-manga/) has no DM-centric titles on it. Mainstream publisher YA and manga only.
Still, the lack of any DM-centric title shows some potential disconnect with the mass audience, regardless of how popular Raina is.
Speaking of “is it in continuity or not,” there’s always the old Grant Morrison/Mark Waid Hypertime concept that only sporadically got used.
Sometimes the Elseworlds are popular enough to spawn sequels. Dark Knight, Gotham by Gaslight, Superman & Batman: Generations, The Nail, Earth X and the Marvel “Noir” titles fall into that category.
Kingdom Come, that was a little messy how they continued it on and off in various ways. DC really didn’t even promote it heavily when Alex Ross did a follow up (not really a sequel) in Justice Society. Most people only remember the original.
In a similar vein to Henry’s analysis, I used to break out the top creator owned indie DM sales (as opposed to licensed comics) when I analyzed the month Diamond estimates for The Beat. Even in the Direct Market, once you get past DC and Marvel, the licensed material often sells better than the original creations. If you take Image out of the equation, it’s pretty stark.
And the apple cart has been upset. DC has enlisted two “new” distributors to handle East and West Coast distribution. Shipping for April 27th.
Better, folks have been snooping around and it appears that the two “distributors” may really be a rebranded Midtown Comics for the East Coast and Discount Comic Book Service for the West Coast. (And “Lunar” that services the West Coast absolutely has a 260 area code, which suggests the Fort Wayne, Indiana region, so it seems likely.)
So the first question retailer of a certain age will be asking themselves is “how is this not going to turn into a fiasco like Heroes World.” Back in the 1990s, Marvel decided to do a vertical integration so they could be their own distributor. They bought a small-ish East Coast distributor called Heroes World and… it was a mess. Heroes World did not have the infrastructure to handle national distribution for Marvel. At all. Orders were screwed up all over the place. Comics did not get to the right places at the right time to suit anyone.
Plus, having Marvel pulled from their catalogs was the straw the broke the camel’s back for the old system where the Direct Market had multiple, often regional distributors. Capital City and Diamond emerged as the two distributors left standing. Diamond secured an exclusive from DC. Capital City was trying to arrange an exclusive with Image, which sold much better back then. Image opted to go exclusive with Diamond and Capital City shut down. There wasn’t enough volume without DC, Image or Marvel. That’s how Diamond came to rule the distribution space.
So as I’m typing this, the retailers of a certain age are not having a very good reaction.
So the first question becomes whether this is a temporary distribution arrangement? As of right now, Diamond does still appear to be intending to reopen in Mid-May. So perhaps this is only for a few weeks?
Are other publishers who will try to use these “alternate” distributors and do they have have capacity for that before things break?
This is wild!
Now, the rationale here is likely that Midtown and DCBS are both top 10 retailers. Possibly top 5. They’re also some of the largest mail order operations out there (Midtown does subscription fulfillment for Marvel), so there will be some familiarity with high volume shipping. Quite this high a volume? Well, I guess we’re going to find out.
So we’ve now entered the scenario where retailers have to figure out how many shelf copies they can afford to order when they’re not open for walk-in business or not even open at all. The can of worms is opening.
And now just in, because the information rollout wasn’t particularly complete, Batman is being held back until June, per its writer:
Just got the go ahead to let all of you know that we're holding BATMAN #92 back for a June release, so we can make sure to get it to as many of you as possible on its release day. I am very, very excited for you all to read it! #PunchlineIsComing
This could blunt the worst of the potential speculator price gouging, depending on how many retailers are willing and able to receive product in June. Still, it just raises more questions about what title can wait for a month and which can’t.
We’re definitely picking an interesting time to be doing a roundtable.
WP
This just in! From Newsarama
Saturday afternoon DC issued a letter to the Direct Market retail community addressing its initial plans to deal with effects the coronavirus crisis has had distribution in the comic industry.
Here is the full text of the letter:
To Direct Market Retailers:
First, the entire team here at DC hopes that you, your family and your employees are staying safe and healthy during this very tough and precarious time. We know that you have been waiting for DC to comment on the state-of-affairs and to address any measures we will take to help our community lighten the burden of the disruption to our business, and we’ve been working hard on a long-term, solution-focused plan. Here is how we will help:
Periodicals and books with in-store dates between March 18, 2020 and June 24, 2020 will be fully returnable. We’ll even provide credit for your separate return shipping of these items only.
Additionally, because we anticipate that continued disruption to business operations will create regional volatility, DC is exploring a multi-distributor model to provide us with the flexibility needed during this crisis to get new content to our readers on an ongoing basis. In the short-term, we continue to engage in active conversations with Diamond to help us solve the distribution issues that have arisen and hope to get new product to stores that want or need it as soon as possible. We will provide additional information about how we’ll make that happen in the coming days.
Thanks for your patience with us. DC will continue to monitor the situation, continue to speak with you directly, and continue to support you through the days ahead. You are the lifeblood of this industry.
All best,
The DC Team
TA
Wow. DC sends that letter out the next day instead of with the initial announcement? That’s astounding. I suppose they’re in a rush trying to get things set up so that the 4/27 books can come get shipped.
Incidentally, here’s a confirmation that Midtown and DCBS are effectively the distributors: https://www.newsarama.com/49873-inside-dc-s-new-print-distribution-pla-and-the-new-distributors-involved.html
It’s probably best to break this thing down by publisher / retailer / reader perspectives so we can see the dynamics.
This is really more about precisely how DC has implemented a plan than the plan itself.
DC has clearly been eyeing a move like this for some time. We know this because it turns out they’re no longer exclusive with Diamond. I gather that there were a few rumors about this awhile back, but nobody took them seriously because something that big would generally come with a little more fanfare.
In my lead-in piece, I spoke to the problem of comics distribution being a single point of failure, something I’ve been writing about since the early aughts. Someone took that single point of failure seriously and apparently plans were being laid to address it.
Done properly, that could be a good thing for industry as a whole. This appears to be arranged hastily, but the intentions could be better than the retailers are giving them credit for.
What we don’t know is whether Midtown and DCBS were always conceived of as the initial alternate distribution partners or not. The choice of those two businesses is key to how incredibly poorly the retailers have reacted to the announcement.
For the sake of argument, let’s say that DC was still exploring options and wargaming new distribution options when the COVID-19 quarantines dropped. We know that they did not want to stop shipping books (and would need to switch printers to do so). When Diamond shut their warehouses, if DC wanted to continue shipping books, they needed to find that new alternate distributor NOW.
Diamond also suspended vendor payments and then went on a payment plan. If there’s a chance that your (at the moment) sole vendor for your primary product line might not be able to pay you, of course you start looking into alternatives. If Diamond goes under, DC is out a lot of money and as is already obvious, replacing Diamond’s distribution network isn’t easily done in a week.
The rumor mill suggests they may have talked to their bookstore distributor. If they did, not enough came of it and it seems like a potential bad fit. Book distributors would need to be retrained to be gentle enough while packing single issues for those to arrive at stores in mint condition.
While the retailers whose stores have been shut down during quarantine may still be worried about their customers breaking their weekly shopping habit, there’s not always much they can do about it. As a publisher, DC is correct to be concerned about that now. The desire for them to get customers back in the habit before it’s broken is real. The only problem with that desire is whether it causes further chaos in the market, but DC is clearly trying to restore the ability to the reader to maintain the weekly buying habit and make it less likely they’re gone long enough to fall out of the hobby. At some point, everyone needs to be concerned about that contingency.
Whatever the interim steps, they ended up going to two of the largest mail order operations. And as of Friday, we can pretty safely call them the largest mail order operators in comics. Midtown has processed postal subscriptions for Marvel for a few years now. While you have to wonder how they’re going to handle the increase in volume, this is absolutely not new to them. Discount Comic Book Service is a mail order subscription service. Packing and shipping comics is what they do and they’re one of the largest accounts in the distribution chain. We’ll get to the baggage they carry with the retail community in a bit, but if you need comics shipped in a week or two, they are a logical choice.
Jim Lee, the current DC publisher, has been around long enough to remember the Heroes World fiasco and perhaps that’s part of why this is being split to Midtown handling the East Coast and DCBS handling the West Coast. This is going to be a significant increase in volume and its best to spread that around. It also builds in some redundancy. If one distributor can’t handle their load, maybe some of that load can be shifted to the other.
Pragmatically, the load depends on how many retailers consent to order from these new distributors, but if many abstain, that actually helps the logistics and at least two of your largest accounts have their books. At a very cynical level, it’s true that having DCBS and Midtown up and running and taking new material is a consolation prize at the very least, though one hopes that isn’t the primary motive.
They’ve offered returnability and even free shipping on the returns for what they currently expect the quarantine and/or immediate aftermath to be. If they’re determined to be shipping, that’s the most they can offer if we take the “just not shipping” option off the table, which is a different discussion.
They’ve further paused some of the larger titles like Batman and Superman until June, so they’re holding back for when more stores are open for that. That’s still a concession of sorts.
From DC’s perspective, they’re trying to do the right thing. How much you agree with that is another matter entirely, but you can see some effort.
The questions in my mind:
DCBS is in Fort Wayne, Indiana. That’s something like a 5 hour drive EAST of the Mississippi. Weird place to service the West Coast. If I were picking a retailer with a large mail order operation to service the West Coast, I’d have been talking to Mile High Comics in the Denver region. Shorter shipping. Did they approach Mile High? I have no idea. Fort Wayne for the West Coast is just odd, however you slice it.
Is this a long term play or just placeholders for the duration of quarantine? Right now, Diamond is hoping to reopen in mid-May. Is that mid-May day because DC forced their hand with this alternate distribution play? Does DC expect Diamond will be unable to reopen until June or later. It seems like if this isn’t a long term play, they’re risking years of ill will from the retail community for three weeks of shipping what’s mostly the lower sales tier of their lineup.
Are the new “distributor” names new entities that DC has a percentage of ownership in? Which is to say, is this an attempt at building out a vertical integration. You’d want to be very careful about that, since that will bring up bad memories of Heroes World for the retailers even more strongly than this already is.
Diamond already invited questions about their cash flow when they suspended vendor payments. How much cash will this peel away from Diamond, both short term and long term? Is Diamond fragile enough to sustain structural damage from this?
Retailer:
Wow, but the majority of retailers on social media were livid. It’s important to remember that the comic book retailer community is a group of small business owners who are in this line of work because of their love of the medium. They take things personally, both as an assault on their livelihood and as an assault on comics itself. In their situation, they have a lot of valid complaints. Here’s some of the complaints I’ve observed.
● As I was saying earlier, at first blush this arrangement reeks of Marvel buying the Heroes World distributor. Heroes World couldn’t handle the increased volume and far too many shops had their orders absolutely mangled. It was so bad, some shops just stopped ordering Marvel. Those retailers will need to see this working to believe it and, frankly, because of the rest of the baggage they still may not care.
● An awful lot of stores are closed and are having trouble paying their rent. They absolutely do not want to be spending money on books they can’t sell for an unknown amount of time. The stores that are open for “curbside pickup” seem tepid about this, at best. They don’t know how frequently they’re really going to be getting visits from customers during lockdown. Nobody knows how quickly walk-in customers will return and how many won’t. The majority of stores closed for walk-in business absolutely do not want stores in other regions being able to sell new comics while they can’t. That’s an uneven playing field.
● A lot of stores are having trouble with speculators swooping in and buying up hot books, so the regular walk-in customers can’t get them, and then flipping them for outrageous prices on eBay. This is setting up a potential speculator gold rush and we’re prime for a speculator crash. Nobody wins in a crash.
● Retailers do not want to buy books from competitors. They do not want competitors having their business data or ordering data. While this hasn’t been a thing lately, back when there were four times as many comic shops in the Heroes World era of retailing, you’d see unscrupulous retailers pretend to want to buy a rival store, just to get a look at which comics were selling for them, and then open a competing store in the same neighborhood with knowledge of what local tastes were. That really happened. Retailers have long memories. Realistically, this is more of a valid concern for stores in perhaps a 60 mile radius of New York City, where Midtown operates several branches, but it makes people deeply uncomfortable to be buying from competitors.
● DCBS runs a heavily discounted mail order subscription service. They’ll typically let you pre-order new comics at 35%-40% off with some items at 50%. It’s your classic low margin/high volume operation. Remember what I was saying about how much retailers hate it when publishers offer subscriptions at a discount? DCBS is a fellow retailer offering *everything* at a discount. Many stores view them as an existential threat to steal their customer. You see retailers suggest that DCBS should not be allowed to offer those discounts. It is a deep and burning hatred and you’d have to be either totally unfamiliar with the retailer community or blind not to see this coming.
Asking them to use DCBS as a distributor? A significant number of retailers find that worse than just insulting. Plus, if DCBS is the distributor that has the new comics while the local shop is closed, they’re an even bigger threat to steal customers.
It’s fairly common for a retailer to have their order for a random comic “shorted,” or have a smaller number of copies arrived than ordered. When a comic is shorted from DCBS, some of these retailers will be considering the possibility the DCBS shorted them so they could sell copies to their own (DCBS) customers. It may not be the case, but the thought will occur to them.
None of the retailers are happy about Midtown being a distributor. They have similar complaints about Midtown, but at least Midtown has a string of successful brick & mortar locations and that means something in the retail community.
Which is to say, the retailers view this as a very serious conflict of interest that’s piled on top of some pre-existing baggage. A second layer of channel conflict.
Wait until the retailers realize how much extra publicity DCBS is getting out of this...
● The retailers were put off that the roll out didn’t tell them up front what their terms were going to be. This part isn’t really fair. If you email your terms of service, discount schedule and shipping costs to all the retailers, it’ll be on a news site within 15 minutes for all to see. And with retailers this annoyed, I expect we’ll see terms leaked within the week. (Note: I wonder if there’s extra shipping costs with the West Coast hub being in the NE corner of Indiana? If so, that’s a legit beef.)
● Retailers were scoffing at how weak the first week’s offering of new books is. There’s a real question as to who’d make a special trip during quarantine for that lineup.
● They’re being given a whole 4 days’ notice to get an account set up and their orders in.
● Retailers are concerned that this is a direct attack on Diamond. Really, with the limited amount of information we’ve been given, there’s no reason to think it isn’t. Diamond is the primary distributor for the Direct Market. DC is the #2 publisher and there’s a big gap between DC and #3. If Diamond goes under, comic stores can not live on DC alone. Some of them might be able to live without DC, though and the way this was rolled out seems to be making some of the retailers approach it as they’ve been offered a choice. It likely wasn’t intended as such, but one doesn’t always control how the message is interpreted.
● The cynical view that this was just a way to ensure the top mail order companies continued operations has absolutely been taken by some. They aren’t completely wrong, though one hopes that’s an overstated concern.
● Finally, there’s a sentiment of bewilderment that some bare bones distributor website were set up under new names. It took perhaps less than an hour for the retailer community to discover and it came off as a feeble attempt to conceal the participants, which only added to the animosity over channel conflicts.
We’ll have to wait and see how many retailers choose to participate in this. Not rewarding perceived bad behavior on DC’s part has been discussed.
Readers:
The gordian knot of trying to have retail during a national quarantine has obscured the role of the customer in the retail chain.
It is not clear to anyone what percentage of comics readers have lost their jobs and aren’t currently able to purchase comics, even if they’re available. I would further suspect that those numbers are going to be higher in places where the comic stores are in quarantine. That’s fairly intuitive. It isn’t clear how quickly the folks who’ve been laid off due to the virus will be employed again and able to resume their comics purchases or who will fall out entirely. These are some of the major variables.
We also don’t know whether DC’s alternate distribution plan means that digital comics are about to return. As I type this, the single issues slated for the week of April 27th are not scheduled on Comixology, but that’s pretty quickly changed.
These are the likely user cases that jump out at me and this is what DC _and_ the retail community need to be thinking about.
● Can still afford to buy comics and reads them in book form.
Print or digital, these readers can go about their business normally or close to normally. There should be no change in procedure for digital tpb/graphic novel readers. Almost all the book trade material is proceeding normally. Readers of print books might need to switch where they’re buying their books if their local comic shop or bookstore (yes, some of these readers go to bookstores instead of comic shops for this format) is completely closed down, but so far the book trade is moving along slowly. You’re not worried about the reading habit changing nearly as much here. The outliers here will be publishers that have Diamond for bookstore distribution. If they don’t have copies sitting in the Ingram (book distributor) warehouse, they’re going to be shut down for a while.
● Can afford to buy comics and buys new single issues digitally.
If the issues come out, this crowd can continue as though nothing has changed. While there are no (well, perhaps a few from smaller players) new issues coming out, you hope these folks are sampling some of the ubiquitous back issue sales or getting new digital tpbs, because otherwise you’re risking them breaking the habit and needing to *remember* to come back and check for new comics.
● Can afford to buy comics and buys new single issues in print.
OK, this is going to get complicated.
● If there are new comics and there store is open or they’re on a pull-list and their store has curb-side pickup and their store is ordering new issues while they’re closed for walk-in business, then the normal shopping habit should be intact -- as long as they’re comfortable making trips to the store in the current health climate. Let’s not just automatically assume people want to leave the house.
● If there are new comics and their local shop isn’t getting them for whatever reason or if they don’t want to leave the house, this is when choices start up. Does this reader:
○ Wait for their store to open (and the health situation to improve), hope the store will have everything that came out while it was closed and drop a big pile of cash to catch up
○ Look for a mail order option. (Which folks who aren’t comfortable making a lot trips outside the house might automatically gravitate to. This is only going to further upset retailers with DCBS being a distributor.)
○ Wait it out and switch to book format. Now, this is a tricky thing. The retailers anecdotally tell me that once somebody switches to the book format, they don’t usually go back. In the case of DC, they have a delay of a few months before the collected edition comes out, so it’s not a simple matter of “I’ll get the trade paperback of what I missed and then switch back.” You’ll still be behind.
○ Drop out because the speculators have jacked up the prices on single issues with lower print runs during quarantine.
○ Drop out because it’s just too hard to get your comics in print and you fall out of the habit.
● Can’t afford to buy new comics right now and buys comics in a print book format.
As long as the books stay in print, they either start buying again when they can afford to or they drop out of comics. If they come back, there’s a question of whether they’re catching up or just picking up where things are. There’s always a risk, should they be fans of heavy continuity series that they feel they get too far behind to catch up or they might drop out of a couple titles, but let’s face it -- it’s logistically easier tracking down two volumes of a book series than 12 single issues.
● Can’t afford to buy new comics right now and buys comics in a single issue format.
And here’s what I’d postulate is the biggest at risk customer.
○ Let’s say they have an in-store/subscription or pullbox. How long is their local shop going to continue to pull issues for them? Are they racking up credit card debt from their in-store subscription?
○ If they’re no longer on a pull list or were kicked off one for non-payment, how many back issues are they going to need to catch up on? Can they afford all that? Are they going to get priced gouged on back issues because of short print runs and speculator activity during quarantine? Is catching up even affordable after they’ve resumed their job or found a new one?
○ Is it going to be necessary to switch to digital or book format because of back issue availability?
○ Is it too much work to get caught back up and they drop out?
○ Do they drop out simply from being out of the habit too long?
So if we step back and look at the system as a whole, your big risk management bullets are:
● Attempting to keep comics available to the customers who can currently afford them in the format they normally buy them and minimize any changes to their regular buying habit. The retailers really don’t have much control on this and it potentially creates a conflict of interest between the publishers and stores that have to be closed for awhile.
● Retailers are going to be very concerned about unclaimed in-store subscriptions and pull lists. That’s a normal concern, but the circumstances make it goofier here, particularly if they’re trying to buy comics too fill those pull lists without a way for customer to come in and pick them up.
● Everyone needs to be concerned about back issue availability when people can’t walk in and shop. Printing to order when finances of retailers dictate small or no orders is not a good long term strategy.
● The more publishers that start releasing early, the bigger the risks.
And you fellows in the UK are trying to tell me it’s easier to just pick up 2000 A.D. while you’re at the grocer? PSHAW!
But that’s what the DC alternate distribution system looks like to me. Now we wait and see if anyone else bites on one. Marvel does have a relationship with Midtown and very deliberately has used a standalone catalog (separate from the Diamond catalog) for their solicitations…
BP
Phil and I said that British Comics are readily available at retailers as they’re not part of the Direct Market, but in the main, we receive our comics as regularly as ever because we are subscribers, and the US publishers don’t have such a service. The ‘big two’ here are DC Thompson and Rebellion, and they’ve been largely unaffected by the pandemic when it comes to distribution. And for 2000AD, The Beano, The Phoenix, and a whole armada of children’s comics, these are weekly releases, not monthly. Judge Dredd: The Megazine is a monthly anthology comic—still shipping and delivering. The war comic Commando publishes eight issues per month (four bi-weekly)—still shipping and delivering. If these titles were part of the Direct Market, they’d be in the same situation, without a doubt. So is the problem not the Direct Market, and by extension, the naked fact that US comics largely have one outlet, the comics specialty stores? What might have happened if, as Chuck Dixon argued recently, they hadn’t thrown the baby out with the bath-water by circumnavigating the news-stands to a large extent? One of the problems for the US is more than Diamond’s monopoly—it’s that any distribution system that does not include the specialty retailers is doomed, hence the back-pedalling about releasing comics digitally during the pandemic. Such a move would by-pass the specialty stores entirely, signifying that the relationship between production, distribution, and circulation are so tightly knitted that the market is more or less paralyzed. Go digital not only cuts out Diamond, but would have disastrous consequences for retailers, and the publishers understand that without a network of retailers to ship their lines to, then post-pandemic, the landscape would be a wasteland for floppies. So I’d argue that the current model in the US is exacerbating the current problem. If comics are to have any future at all, then some serious remodelling is required both right now, and after the pandemic. For all intents and purposes, It could be a good thing, but in my experience, all parties will want to maintain hold on their power (if we can call it power given the state of the industry overall).
Another aspect is related to quantity. This is not a new insight, but a broader discursive universe that has been criticized since at least the 1980s. Why did Marvel have such a tightly knit continuity in the 1960s and 70? They produced between 12 and 15 books maximum. But in the combat for market-share, both the big two kept pushing their lines higher and higher (and increasing the price count along the way). Between 1962 and 1961, the price of a comic remained constant at 10 cents, but from 1962 to 1981, the price increased by 500 percent (according to Bradford Wright). In today’s market, the prices have mushroomed even further. We have had $2.99 and $3.99 comics for some time, but recently, some issue number ones have been priced at $4.99, $5.99, with some at $7.99 and $9.99. Alan Moore argued in the early 1980s that publishers should focus on 15 books per month, his idea being that sales will improve considerably if managed more cohesively, with a focus on quality. I’ve heard the same from independent retailers. Imagine a line of books created by the very best artists and writers, with an editorial team that could have proper quality control, books that don’t crossover so regularly, don’t push readers to purchase tie-ins that hardly tie-in, don’t require an advanced degree in quantum mechanics to fully understand broader continuity esoterica. One of the reasons I think The Immortal Hulk is a great series is that it largely exists without the need to tie-in, crossover, and eventize. I understand that fans enjoy tracking and charting continuity etc., but there’s no need to frustrate that hobby by trimming the line. How many books sell in the lower ranges in the pre-COVID world? How many books would DC and Marvel sell if the likes of Brian Bendis, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Scott Snyder, Grant Morrison, Gail Simone, G. Willow Wilson, Tom King etc. weren’t buried by an armada of pap? I don’t mean to disrespect all other creators—they all have talent—but imagine a world where there isn’t a heady rush to publish in excess of 50 books a month (maybe more) per company. I’ve heard the quality/ quantity issue raised so many times by fans and retailers that it’s worth thinking about. I’m sure the big two will argue that they need all those books to at least break even, with the top-selling 80K-100K brining in most of the profits (and those books are fewer and further between than ever before), but the point is that readers would perhaps be able to afford to stay in tune with the line if there was less of them, and such a manoeuvre may attract older fans back to the fold if the quality was there. The situation is one of the reasons why I bowed out from the weekly grind, and I’ve heard similar accounts from others in volume.
Todd Allen is the author of Economics of Digital Comics. He covered the comic book industry for over a decade reporting for Publishers Weekly, Chicago Tribune, The Beat and Comic Book Resources. As a contributing editor to The Beat, his work has been nominated for an Eisner and named to TIME’s Top 25 blogs of 2015. He was admitted to the Mystery Writers of America for the Division and Rush webcomic. He taught eBusiness in the Arts, Entertainment & Media Management department of Columbia College Chicago and has consulting on digital topics for organizations like American Medical Association, National PTA, McDonald’s, Sears, TransUnion and Navistar.
Dr Shawna Kidman is an Assistant Professor of Communication at UC San Diego where she teaches courses in media studies. Her research on the media industries has been published in Velvet Light Trap, the International Journal of Learning and Media, and the International Journal of Communication. She is the author of Comic Books Incorporated (UC Press, 2019) a history of the U.S. comic book industry and its seventy year convergence with the film and television business.
Dr William Proctor is Principal Lecturer in Comics, Film & Transmedia at Bournemouth University, UK. He has published on an assortment of topics related to popular culture, and is the co-editor on Transmedia Earth: Global Convergence Cultures (with Dr Matthew Freeman, 2018 for Routledge), and the award-winning Disney’s Star Wars: Forces of Production, Promotion and Reception (with Dr Richard McCulloch, 2019 for University of Iowa Press). William is currently working a history of comic book and film reboots for Palgrave Macmillan titled: Reboot Culture: Comics, Film, Transmedia.
Phillip Vaughan is a Senior Lecturer and Programme Director of the MDes in Comics & Graphic Novels at the University of Dundee. He has worked on productions with the BBC, Sony, DC Comics, Warner Bros, EIDOS, Jim Henson and Bear Grylls. He also has credits on published work such as Braveheart, Farscape, Star Trek, Wallace and Gromit, Teletubbies, Tom & Jerry, Commando and Superman. He is the editor of the UniVerse line of comics publications and also the Art Director of Dundee Comics Creative Space and the Scottish Centre for Comics Studies.
