When asked by ICv2 about Diamond's proposed change of the comic delivery date from Wednesday to Thursday, Marvel President Bill Jemas replied forthrightly, 'We don't like it.  We think that the Wednesday date works very well.  We have a pretty decent sense of the traffic patterns in comic book shops and we think that it is good that the delivery is on Wednesday and that Wednesday is a fairly active day.  Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday are strong retail days regardless. Wednesday delivery creates an event, an extra strong sell day, and we feel that if the ship day moves to Thursday, it may hurt stores financially at a time when no business in the country needs to be hurt.'

 

In a reply to a follow-up question concerning whether Marvel and the other publishers could release books earlier to Diamond and allow the distributor to avoid having large numbers of employees work over the weekend and still make the Wednesday delivery date Jemas noted: 'We did discuss the idea of doing a one-day reset on the clock, so that books would get to Diamond a day earlier.  That's feasible, but there's a downside there in that we have just recently moved our ordering deadline so that stores get additional time closer to the ship date in order to set their final orders.  We have moved the order cutoff date closer to the ship date.  So if we were to solve the one problem of Diamond's weekend workers, we would create a new problem of store's losing some time on the order cycle, so I don't think that's what's going to happen.  I think that hopefully the industry as a whole will make the right business decision and keep the ship date on Wednesday.'

 

This has been an extremely contentious issue with a lot of discussion by comic retailers, mostly against any change (see 'Retailers Respond To Thursday Release Day' and 'Las Vegas Report -- Thursday Release Controversy').  Now a major comic publisher has come out against the change as well.  Diamond has promised a decision soon.  Stay tuned.