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This is my bi-weekly “newsletter” delivered straight to your inbox with at least one guaranteed typo I’ll catch after hitting send! If email collectors’ items aren’t your thing, don’t hesitate to switch to the RSS feed or just bookmark loudpoet.com and check in now and then. You do you!

NOTE: I’m in my basement office every day, doing what I can to help make digital comics more accessible and affordable to libraries. At night, I’m either playing games, watching TV with my wife, or reading before bedtime. And I squeeze a few runs and workouts in every week to help clear my head. Every other week I sit down to write this newsletter, mainly for myself, but there’s a small group of people who seem to enjoy it, too. It’s a simple routine that’s keeping me sane while the world burns. This is fine.

_ONE

What Will Alliance Bring to Comics | Sean Kleefeld

If Alliance throws a ton of money at infrastructure upgrades and the like, yes, they absolutely could improve on what Diamond had been doing. But whatever improvements they make only be available to the smaller publishers. The larger orders made from most comic shops — the titles from Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, etc. — will come from other distributors that they’ve been using for the past couple years.

I’ve avoided commenting on Diamond’s bankruptcy, but I was following it closely because the potential ripple effects are of personal and professional interest. I agree with Kleefeld’s overall assessment of things, particularly in the short-term.

Alliance’s short-term impact on comics will be relatively minimal, especially if they don’t make good on the outstanding debts for the smaller publishers that will be their primary partners (in comics), some of which may not be viable businesses by the time the dust settles. Long-term is a different question, and where Alliance is surely more focused.

It’s an interesting and sensible strategic acquisition, although I wonder how stable they actually are, considering it’s been built via acquisitions and debt, mostly around distributing physical media that’s been in steady decline for years. It’s possible their other acquisitions were similar to Diamond, swooping in on poorly managed businesses that can be optimized for profitability, especially if you can avoid the debt that put them on the market at a significant discount to begin with.

I’m pretty sure the gaming side of Diamond’s business was the bigger deal here, at least for short-term impact, with comics thrown in to make the overall numbers work and the bankruptcy proceedings easier to manage. They’re projecting the acquisition will increase their EBITDA by more than 60%, and I don’t see that coming from distributing dozens of second-tier comics publishers to comics shops who won’t see Alliance as a primary distributor anymore thanks to all of the major publishers they care about having moved to PRH and Lunar.

Ultimately, I’m more concerned about the smaller publishers who have unexpectedly found themselves in dire financial straits, hoping they can weather this disruption by relying on other channels, like crowdfunding and DTC sales. A few may become acquisition candidates themselves as the industry is definitely facing more consolidation over the next few years, and PRH and Lunar have both shown they’re not interested in supporting the many smaller publishers Diamond helped keep afloat.

__TWO

Books Are The Perfect Tool for American Propaganda | Kelly Jensen

Yes indeed, the ALA, as well as organizations like the New York Public Library, were engaged in government-encouraged propaganda. For institutions which pride themselves on neutrality today, libraries did not take that stance during other points in history.

Jensen has been doing amazing work covering book bans and censorship at Book Riot for a few years now, but she was always one of my favorite contributors there even before that, so I’m glad that she also has her own newsletter now, Well Sourced, where she can flex a little more.

This overview of the history of propaganda before and during World War II is a fascinating read, particularly for the subjective distinction between “good” and “bad” propaganda, and how easy it can be for institutions to play along — for better and worse. The parallels to current events are obvious in many ways, but her warning is still necessary: “But books have also always the perfect tool of weaponization. Where and how they’ve been deployed as such has depended on who has power; who seeks power; and our social, cultural, and political contexts.”

It reminds me of something loosely related that I wrote for Book Riot several years ago: What’s Good, Publishing?

___THREE

The Substack Dilemma: How Creators Are Inadvertently Fueling America’s Failure | Dave Troy

Srinavasan’s statement makes clear that Substack is seen as part of a networked effort to replace, rather than augment, legacy media. And it is precisely Substack’s strong network effects which are fueling its growth. Substack simplifies the relationship between publisher and reader while also making it easy for creators to amplify and reference other creators on Substack, while simultaneously imposing friction for sources on the open web. Substack’s goal is to win.

Substack has convinced so many people that they’re independent creators who own their newsletters and audiences, but every single reference to them is framed as either “their Substack” or “on Substack.” Even worse, many of them use this framing themselves as they continue doing free PR for yet another platform that is brazenly taking advantage of them.

It’s disappointing to see so many people starting newsletters there in 2025 despite their leadership making it very clear in public statements and consistent actions what they’re really about. Part of the problem is some otherwise reputable journalists and *barf emoji* influencers didn’t leave the platform when they became aware of the problems after Jonathan Katz put them on blast a couple of years ago in The Atlantic, and general media coverage rarely mentions it at all, so plenty of people simply still don’t know what’s happening there.

Troy does a great job of framing the situation, along with links to multiple sources where Substack’s leaders and investors explicitly state their beliefs and goals. Every online platform comes with a range of compromises, but very few are as openly proud of being a Nazi Bar as Substack, and most of them are far more essential than it will ever be.

____FOUR

Substack: home of Nazis, Covid misinformation, anti-vaccine propaganda & transphobia | Maia Kobabe

I know that no internet platform is pure. I know that moving to a new site is a huge hassle. But I am imploring my friends and mutuals not to choose Substack as your new internet home when leaving Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc. And if you already have a Substack, please take some time to look at your alternatives.

Another one for good measure, from someone who’s been the focus of a wide range of attacks from the kind of people Substack happily platforms and profits from. It honestly blows my mind that so many people who should know better still claim to not realize how actively bad Substack is. Seriously, if you’re someone who thinks they should have a newsletter, how are you not doing basic due diligence about where you’re setting up camp?

It’s a chicken and egg situation, where prominent voices many people respect are still on Substack, so how bad can it really be? Of course, many of them are the same people who thought Twitter wouldn’t be tainted by Musk’s ownership, and a lot of them are still there, too. ¯\_ (?)_/¯

YMMV, but for personal context: I unsubscribed from all Substack newsletters a while back, shortly after I bailed on it myself in 2023. That includes RSS feeds. I also don’t read or share links to anything published on Substack, regardless of who the author is. I still miss a few of the people who’ve stayed there, but there are SO MANY other good newsletters and blogs to read that don’t ask you to hang out with Nazis, and I choose to support those people instead.

NOTE: Check out my old school blogroll for my current favorites that I recommend to everyone.

_____FIVE

America is becoming a nation of homebodies | Brian D. Taylor, Eric Morris, Sam Speroni

And if you thought the end of lockdowns and the spread of vaccines led to a revival of partying and playing sports and dining out, you would be mistaken. The pandemic, it turns out, mostly accelerated ongoing trends. All of this has major implications for traffic, public transit, real estate, the workplace, socializing and mental health.

I realize how anti-social I am every Winter, when it gets too cold to run outside, and I’ll go weeks not seeing anyone other than my immediate family and the workers at whatever stores I might have to visit. Once I went full-time WFH in 2019, the thought of commuting into NYC just to hang out became unappealing, and it only got worse after 2020. I’m no longer a fan of being in crowded spaces (partly because I’m not trying to catch COVID again, partly because crowds are just annoying), and I’m becoming a lightweight drinker, so hanging in bars all night isn’t an appealing thing anymore, either.

I can count on two hands how many times I hung out with people I don’t live with last year, and most of those outings were on the right side of the Hudson River. It doesn’t help that most of my closest friends no longer live in the NYC area, and not being in an office for almost six years means I don’t have work colleagues to spontaneously hang out with, either. (RIP SDN!)

Fast-forward to Spring 2025 and it’s finally warming up again, and I’m making my annual belated resolution to get out more, starting with a Mets game next week. That is the absolute worst commute I can think of, so it’ll only get easier after that! I’ll also be attending ALA in June, which always counts as a social outing, too. Beyond that, I have a goal of seeing the handful of good friends I still have in the area at least once before the end of the year.

There’s a middle ground between social butterfly and homebody, and I’m going to find it this year.

______BONUS

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