Criticism
In 1983, Diamond was criticized for taking exception to certain "adult"-themed titles and scenes, effectively causing the cancellation of a series called Void Indigo for its excessive violence.
In 1987, Geppi responded to "a graphic childbirth scene in Miracleman #9 ." Geppi wrote to retailers that:
| “ | "Diamond values its retailers too much to take chances on such a dangerous situation... We are not censors. We no more want someone deciding for us than you do. We cannot, however, stand by and watch the marketplace become a dumping ground for every sort of graphic fantasy that someone wants to live out. We have an industry to protect; we have leases to abide by; we have a community image to maintain." | ” |
This call for retailers to refuse to stock Miracleman led to accusations of censorship, charges the company was forced to address when it criticized or refused to carry other titles, including books by Kitchen Sink Press, and Dave Sim in 1988, Jon Lewis in 1994, and Mike Diana in 1996.
Diamond lost customers with this approach, however, "and eventually backed down." Geppi recalls compromising, and accepting "that as a distributor, I owed the retailers the product they wanted." In fact, in an attempt to prove Diamond did not practice censorship, the company joined DC Comics in 1993 to raise money for the industry the First Amendment advocacy group Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.
Because of its industry dominance, Diamond also faced charges it bullied publishers and discriminated against small publishers. These charges first surfaced in 1988 when Diamond rejected Matt Feazell's comic Ant Boy, and in 1989 when it similarly decided not to carry Allen Freeman's Slam Bang anthology.
After the industry consolidation of 1996, Diamond faced similar charges in 1996, 1999, and 2000 (when smaller publishers like Fantagraphics and Drawn and Quarterly lodged complaints).
Their pricing is another point of contention - charging 60-70% off the cover price for their 'service' makes it nigh on impossible for many smaller publishers to make their money back on a given production, leaving 30-40% of the cover price to pay for printing and all stages of production.
Read more about this topic: Diamond Comic Distributors
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“I, with other Americans, have perhaps unduly resented the stream of criticism of American life ... more particularly have I resented the sneers at Main Street. For I have known that in the cottages that lay behind the street rested the strength of our national character.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)