This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
-- T.S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men"
Today, Diamond Comic Distributors shutters its doors.
Lance Woods retires today, and today is President Chuck Parker’s last day as well.
Lance has been a part of my life long before I ever met him — I was a regular PREVIEWS reader fifteen years before I went to work for Diamond — and he was a childhood friend of one of my cousins. (They lost touch, and it was through me they reconnected.)
The closure of the office was inevitable; Chuck requested that Joel Weinshanker, the head of AdPop, continue the lease on the downsized office space (ie., the old Diamond Select Toys offices and the former mailroom) through the end of the year, and even in June, when I moved from my office into that space, I saw no reason to keep it long-term. I barely moved into my space at all, everything felt so transitory.
Ad Populum may be continuing its operations in some fashion, but I truly don’t know what they’re doing business-wise or who’s left to manage it. Apparently, there are “big changes” on the way, though I have no idea what those may entail. It feels too late, now that all the business has fled. I learned people on the Marketing team were being transitioned over to other companies in the AdPop portfolio, which honestly made me a little angry and a lot irritated as I asked if that were an option for me when I was laid off in September and told no.
As the year wound down and I spent several days in Virginia and North Carolina with family for the holidays, I thought about how I stayed too long and gave up too much of my life to the company.
I should have left in 2017, after ten years, when I concluded the company had no future (and would end much as it has) after the one and only time the company sent me to an event (the Retailer Summit in Chicago), for reasons I may someday explain publicly, and I might’ve, had I not been as depressed as I was due to Larry Swanson and Roger Fletcher attempting to kill me. (Someday I’ll tell my #ComicsBrokeMe story, but this is not the time.) But I didn’t, and I stayed, and I put more into Diamond than it gave me back, and that’s the way things go.
That’s not to say there weren’t good times and that I didn’t enjoy myself, because I did, especially the challenge of COVID. I don’t regret staying, even if it broke my health and fueled a severe impostor syndrome. But I knew Diamond was a dying company, even before the collapse of its monopoly. Years of technical debt, failure to invest and innovate, and cost cutting would eventually catch up to it.
And now it’s done. The offices are no more. The dream is over.
Best wishes in your retirement, Lance. Don’t be a stranger.
