AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Batman, Spider-Man, James Bond and Garfield? No, this is not the latest Blockbuster crossover. Those are just a handful of characters involved in a court battle roiling the world of comic books. A 600,000-square-foot warehouse in Mississippi is holding more than 8 million comics, along with other memorabilia. And who actually owns this treasure trove is now being fought over. Jonathan Randles is a journalist from Bloomberg and has been covering the story. He joins us now. Thank you for joining us.
JONATHAN RANDLES: Thanks for having me. I'm excited to talk about the story.
RASCOE: This is a big struggle involving a lot of superheroes. But at its root, what's the background to this case?
RANDLES: Sure. It's about a company called Diamond Comic Distributors that filed for bankruptcy in January 2025, and their main lender is JPMorgan. JPMorgan provided a $41 million Chapter 11 loan, and that was supposed to finance what would have been an $85 million sale of the business. And had that original sale gone through, we might not have been here talking about this.
But what happened, and as we discuss in the story, that deal fell apart. They sold Diamond's business to other companies, but what they ended up selling Diamond's business for wasn't enough to fully repay JPMorgan. They have a $7 million claim. And that really gives rise to this dispute between the bank and really dozens of comic book publishers, game-makers and the like.
RASCOE: Well, can you explain that? Like, what is it about the business of the comic book world that makes this case so complicated?
RANDLES: So the - really, the problem is that all of these publishers were providing Diamond product on consignment, meaning they were providing their comic books to this company that would later sell the product and remit the sale proceeds back to the publishers.
So that's a really good deal, you know, in most circumstances. A lot of retailers do very similar things. If you are one of these publishers, once your comic book sells, you're going to get more money from Diamond. And Diamond, as the distributor, is going to get a ton of product without having to make all these upfront payments. You know, when things are good, that's a really good deal. The problem is, in a situation when a company like Diamond is in financial trouble, they file for bankruptcy. Then the question becomes, who owns the product? And that's a very loaded question, it turns out.
RASCOE: So how have the publishers been affected?
RANDLES: So we spoke to a lawyer who represents a number of these publishers, and it's been a really costly and time-consuming fight to try and get all of their product back. They've been cut off from their product for the better part of a year. In some cases, more than a year. And a lot of these publishers - you know, we're not talking about the biggest publishers here, like Marvel or DC. We're talking about a lot of really small independent publishers that maybe $7 million or even $1 million is a huge deal for some of these publishers, and not having access to this product is a really troublesome thing for them.
RASCOE: Do you have any sense of how this case may be resolved? Like, is there any precedent for how to deal with this?
RANDLES: Yeah. So that was kind of one of the interesting things as I was reporting on this. The case that we included in the story is about the bankruptcy of Sports Authority, the sports apparel retailer. They filed bankruptcy in 2016, and it's kind of a similar situation. The - Sports Authority had lots of vendors who were giving them, you know, sporting goods on consignment, and the vendors in that case were presented in a really similar situation. It took a lot of years to litigate in court, and it was not good for the vendors. A lot of the vendors that challenged this did not win, and other vendors did just come to some sort of settlement.
RASCOE: That's Jonathan Randles, a journalist with Bloomberg News. Thank you so much for talking with me.
RANDLES: Thanks for having me.
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