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I've been working since I was fifteen, flitting from telemarketing (did it until I was 21) to print journalism and promotions to the glories of the dot com boom and its aftermath. I've not kept my head in the sand, staying abreast of current issues and the news. In all my experience, one lesson keeps coming back, more and more powerfully.
It doesn't matter how good you are. It doesn't matter what you do. If you have enough money, you can get away with murder.
My news organ of choice is the San Francisco Chronicle, which I read online at www.sfgate.com. It's zippy, it has a clean load, it's not hard on my eyes (like, say, the LA Times site) and I've been reading it for years, for reasons I no longer remember. Anyway, I was flipping through in early September when I saw this article about how the Bush Administration's Justice Department has a very different view of the findings of fact against Microsoft in their wonderful antitrust dust up.
 I won't slow you down with my zealous depictions of Microsoft as an evil company and the horrors they wreak on the world—As The Apple Turns does that job far better than I, and we're going somewhere with all this. To sum up, Microsoft breaks the antitrust laws, lies and tries to cover it up, is convicted, then appeals, dragging the process along. The hard-on-business Clinton regime leaves office and the soft-on-whoever-sends-cash Bush regime takes over as the appeals are cranking. All of a sudden, punishment doesn't sound that important.
A much lower-profile situation occurred in our industry of interest, comics. Several message board posts and internet apocrypha list Diamond as one of the reasons the industry is in such a state. Diamond, you see, comprises most of the Direct Market (the comic book shops we know and love) and has systematically driven lots of its competition out of the market with exclusive deals (DC was first IIRC, but don't quote me) and incentives to retailers to go virtually "all Diamond."
Consider our dear friends at Marvel (worry not, you're not the victim of the Operative Word this week, just an innocent bystander). The company purchased a smaller distributor (everyone's smaller than Diamond) called Heroes' World and tried to rock that as their exclusive, moving through the direct market. It didn't go so well. Heroes' World went the way of Jenny McCarthy's career and Members Only jackets, and Marvel ended up crawling back to Diamond, where they remain to this day.
 Of course Diamond broke the mandates of the Sherman Antitrust Act with some of their behavior, as well, and the feds got interested, as noted in this Baltimore Business Journal article. Of course, the case ended up going nowhere and Diamond maintains its stranglehold on the comics industry to this day.
Now, I can't prove beyond a reasonable doubt that money changed hands, that greenbacks greased the wheels of justice to help these cases toward their seemingly predictable pro-rich-people conclusions. Luckily, I don't have to. Dammit, Jim, I'm a columnist, not a lawyer. To paraphrase Yelena Rossini in Transmetropolitan #33 (the issue that got me into the title), "Writers ... aren't supposed to make any difference. They're not even relied upon to be right. They're opinion writers." And so I am.
However, if I can plant a small seed of thought in you, if you can, for one glorious moment, turn and see that not only does the emperor have no clothes, but he's starving the kingdom to death with thirty- and forty-year-old business practices and maybe, just maybe, there are other ways to do things...well, that would make me a happy camper indeed.
So our point here, children, is that the rich white men will more than likely use their money to break the law, to abuse the fans, to sully the work and to generally do whatever the hell they want and there's little you can do about it. Note I said "little," not "nothing."
Me, I never pre-order. I often buy reordered books, whose existence Diamond doesn't acknowledge (see Robservations IX: Unhealthy Competition. if you can find it). I go into the shop, I often encourage re-orders with requests I make and I support my local retailer, a guy I appreciate (hey Steve at Comics Ink! Kick Jason in the ass for me!). Diamond would be much happier if I pre-ordered, as many buyers of my volume and regularity do.
Also, I advocate alternate arenas of distribution. If all goes well, Boston-based What's Next Entertainment, at my suggestion, should be putting their books in every Black college bookstore on the eastern half of the country, as well as in Black book stores, and they may even embark on a wacky little tour. Diamond is not the only game in town, even if, like the Matrix, they convince you they are reality.
There are other ways and means. Marc Alessi is dreaming them up down in Florida, I hear, and you'll always hear Scott McCloud telling you about them. I just want you to know that the Empire is not unbeatable and it doesn't take a chosen one to make it happen.
It takes a lot more than that.
Hannibal Tabu is a mad Sith master living in South Los Angeles with his wife and far more Macintosh computers than one duplex should hold. If you'd like to track him to his evil ghetto lair, you'd best start at, http://www.operative.net.
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