Diamond Comic Distributors has no plans to adopt Tuesday as the industry-wide standard on-sale date, despite DC resetting their on-sale date to Tuesdays when they restarted distribution with two new distributors Lunar and UCS while Diamond suspended operations earlier this year.
Founder Steve Geppi told Newsarama that while comic book shops that order DC titles through his Diamond can put their DC titles on-sale Tuesdays per the publisher’s guidance, the industry’s dominant distributor will not be promoting the change in release day among their other publishers … and in fact, is skeptical of the need and wisdom of the change given contemporary conditions.
“Diamond’s not going to be pushing a Tuesday on-sale date. If the world suddenly wants Tuesday, we will,” Geppi told Newsarama. “But we see it now as just an anomaly, particularly now during this pandemic. You don’t want to risk going out twice – most people will just wait and go Wednesday, or after.”
DC has explained the reason for the change was to align with the typical Tuesday release schedule in the booktrade and home video markets.
Marvel and other Direct Market-focused publishers have not indicated any plans to switch to a Tuesday release schedule, and Marvel’s recently revealed release scheduled from May 27 through July 8 sticks to traditional Wednesday on-sale dates.
“I don’t think Diamond will change to a Tuesday release date across the board because a handful of stores might have them,” Geppi continued. “I don’t know anyone who’s decided to buy DC comics from those two distributors. A vast majority will buy from us when we get back up and running.”