“This business will get out of control. It will get out of control, and we’ll be lucky to live through it.”
I’ve been quoting this bit of dialogue from The Hunt for Red October like a mantra recently. No, not in regards to the second Trump administration, which finds new and even more depraved ways to shock the conscience. (Yesterday was Trump’s announcement that Gitmo will be turned into a 30,000 bed concentration camp.) Rather, it’s about Diamond’s bankruptcy.
Last week, BOOM! Studios, which was moving its distribution to Penguin Random House in a few months, accelerated their plans. This week, several publishers have jumped from Diamond to Lunar Distribution or are investigating direct-to-consumer sales.
Meanwhile, I’ve been soldiering on with the text for March’s PREVIEWS, and I was burning the midnight oil the last three nights. People were out, people had technical issues, large sections of several hundred items which I needed last week I didn’t receive until this week, and working on the text takes time. I can work magic, but the magic takes a lot out of me.
And I get it.
The publishers are protecting their business. We are putting together a catalog for products shipping in May and beyond… when Diamond may not exist as a distributor beyond April, depending on how the bankruptcy goes.
The buyers internally, every time I’ve spoken with them in the last week, week-and-a-half talk about how they’re spending all of their time working with their vendors, which leaves little time for getting sections set up in the database for me. And people get sick, people have technical issues. Heck, for some inexplicable reason, my internet goes flaky on windy days. Things happen.
Yet, it all feels like things are getting out control, like we’re careening down a bumpy road in a vehicle with flaky brakes while the wheels are coming off and flying off a cliff into a ravine.
It’s tough to maintain a positive attitude with such uncertainty, with so many unknown unknowns. I feel a certain bleakness and despair, and I don’t know what to do. I feel like I’m reaching for something, and all I find is sand slipping through my fingers. Is Diamond going to make it into March without the wheels flying off completely? Does my work even matter?
I have increasingly felt, when Diamond’s position as the sole distributor of comics crumbled in the aftermath of COVID — DC leaving for Lunar; Marvel, Dark Horse, IDW leaving for Penguin Random House; finally Image leaving for Lunar — the weight of the company’s business crumbling has fallen onto me. Not so much due to DC and Marvel — they did their own catalogs — but the others, Dark Horse and Image and IDW, still wanted to be in the PREVIEWS catalog, but they wanted us to do the layout work they had done before by providing their own pages and designs. As a result, I was working on more text for more publishers than ever before, but with no extra time, and the amount of text I worked on ballooned, from 90 thousand words a month to 120-130 thousand words a month. (Late last year, I reached 140,000 words in one month.)
No wonder I feel tired all the time.
Sigh.
I have low-key been obsessed with the album, Middle-Earth & Chill, the last few weeks:
Howard Shore’s music for the Lord of the Rings trilogy, in a lo-fi trip-hop style. “Concerning Hobbits” is delightful. “Gandalf’s Fall” is gutting. “The Last March of the Ents” and “Forth Eorlingas” are epic.
Recommended.
I attended services at a local Episcopal Church on Sunday.
Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde of the Episcopal Diocense of Washington delivered a sermon at a prayer service for Trump’s inauguration at the National Cathedral where she exhorted the president to show mercy on migrants and the LGBTQ community. I’ve visited the National Cathedral three time — I added bricks to the LEGO cathedral a few months before COVID, and it was so meaningful to me I started to cry — and the cathedral’s calendar hangs on the wall in my office.
In the days that followed, Trump demanded an apology of Bishop Budde, and right-wing media questioned her Christian credentials. A Republican congressman introduced a resolution to condemn Bishop Budde as being political and out of line with Christian teachings. I even saw a screenshot of a Tweet criticizing Bishop Budde that began “Empathy is a sin” and became quite incensed by it.
So, Sunday morning, I attended an Episcopal parish in Lancaster County, which went for Donald Trump by about 20 points in November, to show what support I could for Bishop Budde’s message.
I’m not a believer. I use the word “atheist,” because I feel it’s the right word for me, but “agnostic deism” — I don’t know if there’s a god, there probably isn’t, and if there is it’s so remote and indifferent as not to matter — may be more accurate. In other words, I’m about where Thomas Jefferson was, and he attended Anglican and Episcopal churches all his life.
The rector’s sermon very much leaned in to Budde’s message from last week, springboarding from a reading in First Corinthians about treating the lowest among us with dignity. He talked about the message of Christianity is inherently political but especially so when our leaders are pursuing politics of malice and cruelty. And he said how the message of Christianity cuts across political divides, and whether one is a Republican or a Democrat the message of Jesus remains the message of kindness and mercy and love.
I did not partake of the Eucharist; while baptized (and confirmed in the UMC), I don’t feel worthy, nor do I wish to profane the sacred mystery.
I had no idea about any of the hymns or how the music went. Honestly, I found them a bit tuneless and meandering. The Doxology, at least, was the same tune as the one I knew.
I had to make small talk with the rector when leaving. I asked him how he was, and told him I wanted to show support for the church and its message, especially after seeing some scuzzy stuff online about the Bishop’s sermon at the National Cathedral. He said he appreciated that.
It was a nice little church. Modern, maybe dating to the 1990s. Out in the country, surrounded by farms. There were Amish horses and buggies on the road when I left after the service. I’m sure in the spring the air smells of cow manure. (My elementary school, Linville-Edom, was in the middle of cow farms. The odor of cow manure bothers me not one bit.)
Why Lancaster County, when there are two Episcopal churches in York? Well, I don’t like going into downtown York and will avoid doing so at all costs. Triple the distance, but much more convenient.
And when I got home, I wrote my Congressman and asked him not to support the House resolution condemning Bishop Budde.
Will I attend again? I don’t know. Let’s see how things go in the world. If Trump’s government is building concentration camps, they won’t stop with “migrants.” They will in time come for academics. Critics and dissidents. And liberal atheists like me.