The reason why Marvel and DC Comics don't stock in Walmart (not the other way around) is because the direct market with local comic shops operates on non-returnability in exchange for exclusivity. If Marvel and DC sell 500,000 copies of Iceman: Cumsicle to Walmart and nobody buys it, the publishers have to buy it back whereas Dan Shahin has to hustle out whatever trash Marvel squats out through the "back issue" market over the course of 20 years. To get around this would involve making things a large amount of customers would want to buy, and publishers in Western comics simply aren't prepared to do that. Too busy making comics about pozzing, trans diarrhea, being woke and shitty art. This is a problem that Allegiance Arts will potentially have to face (although with online sales and warehousing these days, Walmart may keep stock forever for all I know). It was a deal hammered out in the 1970s between retailers and publishers where the principle brokers have died or are on the verge of death, and the business world of today is unrecognizable from the world of 40-50 years ago. Since DC comics is breaking ties with the direct market, local comic shops could try returning comics to Diamond, but I don't see them having a lot of luck in trying to do so.
2020 was,
according to the NYT, a boom year for print publishers (including Comicsgate in retrospect) thanks to everyone being locked down with nothing to do but read. As a big box chain, Walmart was allowed to remain open while hundreds of smaller comic competitors were shut down. And it's stocked with YA/Children's Graphic novels already; it seems like a small jump for taking comics customers and selling them to a slightly older audience could have been sold, perhaps in a different format, perhaps of a different subject matter. Yet after three years of nationwide distribution, Mitch Breitweiser is still trying to raise capital on Indiegogo and Kickstarter to fund his comics while other repeat creators have enough to get their comic more or less made before campaign launch.
Maybe pissing on whatever fanbase and enthusiasm you had for your product before launching it nationwide was a bad idea?
There is nothing exclusive about direct market comics. Marvel and DC could sell in Walmart if they wanted to. And DC has done multiple initiatives inside and with Walmart in the past few years. But they sell poorly. And because they sell poorly, Walmart gives them bad treatment within the stores. Walmart rewards winners and punishes losers. Comics are losers.
The Allegiance Arts deal is somewhat unique. It was able to be negotiated through the connections in Arkansas that Mitch's wife has and the friends of Mitch's wife have. Its also important to understand that the business plan for Allegiance Arts was to use sales at Walmart to leverage a sale of the Allegiance Arts characters to a media company. Selling intellectual property was always the goal of Mitch's investors. They used crowdfunding as a proof-point to get into Walmart. They intended to use Walmart as a proof-point to sell on the intellectual property. It didn't work. But they could blame their setbacks on COVID for a long while.
As far as comics distribution goes, the short story is that prior to around 1970, comics were produced by magazine distributors as a small part of big publishing empires. The magazine business and the distribution system was both corrupt and often overly criminal. Comic books floated along in the publishing world as part of something much bigger than just selling comics.
But in the late 1960s, it all changed. DC comics was sold to a crooked funeral home and parking lot company in New York. Marvel comics was sold to an erratic New York Attorney who speciaiized in doing mergers (Martin S. Ackerman). Ackerman also bought Marvel's distributor, wrecked it and sold off the pieces. The eventual situation was that the comics companies (Marvel and DC) were operating in the mid-1970s independent of any magazine related company. And the distributors reacted to the situation by robbing them blind. They started selling returned comics illegally to discount stores. They would manipulate the sales numbers to cheat the companies. And it was possible for back issue dealers to make deals with distributors to buy comics in bulk before they ever got to stores. Hence the odd shortages of certain marvel books with large print runs in the 1970s.
This type of behavior had a long history. The original publisher of DC comics (Wheeler-Nelson) had the company stolen out from under him by people manipulating the distribution system he used. American comics with returnable distribution ONLY worked when the comics companies were integrated with the publishers and distributors. Minus being integrated publisher/distributor companies, comics had no chance in the magazine distribution system.
So a system gradually developed where Marvel would sell non-returnable comics to individuals at a substantial discount. That system was however underpinned by a critical assumption: that unsold back issue comics continued to have value. But eventually that assumption broke down. The combination of Marvel/DC publishing back issue collections themselves constantly AND the rise of digital comics (pirate digital and official digital) basically killed the back issue market off entirely. The other thing that happened is that the move into the direct market led to comics being exclusively focused on "superhero" comics with everything that used to appeal to a wider audience in comics gone.
The other problem was that ALL print publishing started going into terminal decline maybe 10-12 years ago. All phyiscal media (books, newspapers, magazines, comics, etc) is in terminal decline. The content wasn't responsible for the decline because even content that had not changed in decades (Archie digests at checkouts) and had been very stable sellers stopped selling.
To survive as comics publishers, Marvel & DC have to change just about everything they are doing. Because no matter what the quality of the content, they would still be in trouble. The format of the floppy is bad. The price-points are bad. The distribution system is bad. Everything has to be re-invented just as things were re-invented in the 1970s with the direct market.
All the old economic assumptions behind selling comics are broken.
The American Comic Book was "invented" as a way to (a) soak up excess printing capacity in metal plate printing and (b) produce an incredibly cheap disposable product at a rock-bottom price point. But everything that created and sustained them is gone & not coming back.
2020 was a "boom" year for print media after over a decade of terminal decline. But that "boom" didn't come anywhere near restoring anything in print to where it used to be even ten years ago. And minus COVID, any gains for print media will likely go into reverse.
