We caught up with Angelo Exarhakos, the CEO of Universal Distribution, which recently acquired Alliance Game Distributors (see "Under New Ownership"), from his vacation in Greece to get the latest on the transaction, what’s been happening since, and his plans for the future.  In Part 2, we talk about Universal’s plans for comic distribution, its approach to that market, handling preorders, Diamond UK, and other categories.  In Part 1, we talked about the acquisition process, the ownership transition, coming changes, and supplier and retailer relationships.

When we last talked in 2022 (see "ICv2 Interview: Angelo Exarhakos"), you talked about your desire to sell comics in the U.S., and you mentioned this again, in this interview.  What are your overall plans for comics in the U.S.?
Angelo Exarhakos:  We intend to try and grow the comic book business.  We hope to bring in new readers to the comic book marketplace. 

I feel like the comic book marketplace has a bit of an aging consumer that has not followed the type of renewed consumer, as the games have.  When you walk into your typical gaming store, you'll notice that the average age of the consumer, but also the average age of the shop owner, is quite a bit younger than your average comic book shop.  I feel that there's a real need to renew that part of the business a little bit, bring in some new people into that genre.

I feel strongly that there's a lot of gaming shops that should be carrying comics that don't, and I think that's a function of Diamond and Alliance being very, very separate. As an example, we have what we expect to be an incredible release of Magic: The Gathering - Spider‑Man coming in September.

I'm willing to bet there's going to be absolutely packed gaming shops holding prerelease events, with all these people playing Magic: The Gathering - Spider‑Man, but there's no trade paperbacks or any type of comic book element for them to buy in those shops.

I think that's a big miss on our end, and that's something I think that is important for us to address, to be able to bring in new people and introduce them to these incredible and wonderful stories.  We need some of that, and we have plans for that.  We have different types of projects that we're going to start, making the availability of these stories much easier for the people who are playing games.

Most people who play games would like to read comics as well; they'll enjoy that genre.  It's just up to us to make sure that it's accessible to them.  That would be the first order of business for us.

You mentioned Marvel. Do you buy from Marvel directly for Canada?
We have a sub‑distribution deal, similar to what Diamond had with PRH.

You buy DC directly, right?
That is correct.

In the States, do you plan to add Marvel as a PRH sub‑distributor?
Well, our plan for the States, on the comic book side, is to make sure we scale up in a way that will allow us to hold a certain type of standard in terms of our services, both for our publishers and the retailers.  We intend to start with DC Comics and add a few publishers as we build up our capacity.

Same thing on the customer side.  We only really intend to start with about 500 customers and build from that as we raise that capacity as we bring in the new technology.  We think we'll be live, probably, at some point in late December.  By then, we certainly plan to bring on as many publishers as we can, including Marvel.  That's a conversation, certainly, for the future.

It sounds like your big expansion of lines is going to be next year.  In the interim, how will you make your offerings to retailers compelling with only a portion of the product lines in the comic space?
Remember, the key for us is not to sell to the people who are already purchasing comic books, whether it's from Lunar or PRH or anybody else.  I think if we're simply doing that, we're not bringing something to the table.

Lunar is a wonderful distributor, so is PRH. What we want to bring to the table is something a little bit different.  Again, we want to certainly have the option if somebody, for some reason, thinks it's better to deal with Universal for their goods that they're currently buying from either PRH or Lunar, that's fine.  But our focus is going to be on expanding the reach of the comic book marketplace into some new customers.  That's going to be our focus.

I think what we can bring to the table to be a little more compelling is the fact that we are a full‑line distributor.  If you're buying comics from us, you will also be able to buy your Magic, your Pokémon, your One Piece, etc., etc., and all of your games at the same time in one place.  That allows us to have our games and our other products reach new customers in the comic shops, and it allows us to have our comics reach new people in the gaming shops.  Really, I think that’s the lowest‑hanging fruit out there for growth.

This has been a strategy that we've used in Canada for years and has been really, really effective.  We're reaching people who are already in one of these categories, already inside a shop.  We're helping to train retailer/owner, on how to build that community in their shops.

You can have a comic book shop owner who doesn't quite know how to run a gaming event. Our reps will hold their hand so they can become a WPN store running Wizards of the Coast organized play.  Same thing for Pokémon, etc., etc.  Sometimes, there's a bit of a hurdle in the learning curve there.  That's what we're there for.  That's where we add value.

We're not just shipping orders to customers and doing nothing else.  Any 3PL company can do that.  We need to be actively building a better experience for a customer inside a shop by helping an owner be able to speak the language of our vendors in creating those communities in their shops.

That's the idea.  There's lots of gaming shops out there who will learn how to talk to a comic book customer, and comic book retailers who can speak to a gaming consumer in their stores.  That's where I believe we'll add value.

If the goal is to find new customers for comics, does that mean you're going to be focused more on the graphic novel format than the periodical?
I don't want to use the term "focused," but there's no question that that is the starting point; that is the easiest thing for us to do.  When I'm looking at a gaming shopper in a Spider‑Man event, well, the easiest thing to do is to set them up with some incredible Spider‑Man trade paperbacks, where a retailer can direct them right to this essential reading.  "This is the type of thing you're interested in?  Here it is.   is what you should start with."

It's certainly easier for a retailer new to comics to be able to understand, "Well, I stock these products; this is what they need; this is who I direct them to."  As they get comfortable with that, then you teach them about the weekly periodicals.  That is the difference.

I was having a conversation with David Gabriel at ComicsPRO, and we were chatting a little bit about the opportunities out there.  I said, "It's crazy that there are going to be so many people packing these shops, playing Magic: The Gathering ‑ Spider‑Man, and we don't have the ability to simply have an assortment of trade paperbacks for these customers."

More than that, if the shop owner sees the success of Magic: The Gathering - Spider‑Man and says, "I want to get into the comic book business, but I don't know where to start," well, if they call Lunar, there's no real number there for them to be able to get assistance, and somebody to say, "This is what you should be carrying.  This is what you should be doing.  This is how to start the process."

Call PRH, it's the same thing, not really equipped for that type of thing, to be able to give that type of advice on how do you build a comic book customer base in your shop.  That's what we do, and that's what we've done in Canada.  We really hold your hand through that process.  This is what you start with; this is how the weeklies work; this is how the trades work; this is how you order; start a subscription service.  You explain it to somebody.

That's really been missing, and that's the whole point of a distributor.  If all we do is simply take orders from customers and ship them their product, that's great, but quite honestly, any publisher should be able to do that on their own.  They don't need us for that.  If that's all we become, then distribution is at its lowest common denominator.  We need to be more than that.  We need to offer more value than that.

If you're going to offer retailers that kind of guidance, does that mean you're going to hire comics expertise for Alliance?
Absolutely.

You mentioned some people from Diamond that you've hired. Does the new comics experties include some folks from Diamond?
It does.  It includes Nance Romer on the sales side, who I've known for 35 years, probably (see "Diamond Promotes Retailer Services Staff").  Very, very well known; most retailers know her.  She's an extremely, extremely beloved person in the marketplace, and somebody I've known for many years and I've dealt with.

Nance was my rep at Diamond, and I can tell you, contributed to a lot of our success because in those early days, gave me the advice that I could take and run with.  I can tell you on a personal level, these are the types of things that I've used and seen the success of.  This is what also we try and do, not just on a daily basis, but that's even the way we build our events.

When we do the open house events, we use those to help retailers pick up some new skills.  If they don't have the knowledge in a certain area of the business, we try to have people that can give them a hand.  That's why we'll have some publishers at the Alliance open house this year, so that if some gaming retailer wants to get into comics, they can speak directly to DC because they'll be there.

We did that last year in Canada. We had DC there, able to present directly to our retailers and talk with them at their booth and off to the side at different times.  It really helps bring people to carry comic books, and vice versa on the games.

We also go a step further.  At our open houses, we also invite some bankers.  Last year, we had American Express opening accounts, business accounts for several of our retailers.  We have insurance companies coming in and talking about ways to ensure your store controls security companies.  These are the type of things that we should be doing as distributors to add value, not simply taking orders.

When you get to the point of selling comic periodicals here: first, how do you handle the pre‑order process in Canada, and then how do you plan to handle it here?  Specifically, do you use a print catalog like Diamond Previews, or is it all online?
It is all going to be online.  The physical catalogs are a thing of the past, not that they're not useful.  I still love holding a book in my hands, but simply it's just not efficient anymore.  It's not cost-effective anymore.  This is something that we're not going to be seeing much more of.

We do it all online.  We try to make that online experience as efficient and effective as possible, but it is going to be an online process.  It is going to be a weekly FOC.  You'll be able to see your orders.  We do it in Canada; we've started the process in the U.S. as well, on the current Alliance system.

That will change when we move them over to a different ERP and a different website, hopefully in December.  You will have tools that are available to you that are not currently available, or have not been currently available at Diamond: efficient ways to track your orders, to tweak your orders, to adjust your orders.  There'll be a lot more tools available there than we've ever had before, more than what would be available using a print catalogue.

You've talked about comics a couple of times as a genre, and certainly there are genres that are strongly associated with comics, primarily superheroes, but horror, things like that.  There are also these other categories, manga and webtoons, which appeal to that younger audience you were talking about, and is very different content.  What's Universal's approach going to be to those categories?
We intend to support them; we absolutely intend to sell them.  They are tremendous genres, incredible stories, and I think they fit side‑by‑side with the superheroes, so I think they go very, very well.  I can tell you, myself, I love reading manga just as much as I love reading Superman or Batman.

I think, in my mind, they may be different sub‑genres.  I consider manga a different genre, maybe, than a superhero comic book.  At the end of the day, they're great stories that we read with pictures, so they are comic books.

One of the things we're concerned about in terms of disruption in supply is the graphic novel publishers that maybe only do 5 or 10 titles a year, but they're really great stuff.  They're primarily New York publishers, but not all.  Are you going to add those lines?  Right now, PRH has their lines and Lunar is doing some, but that kind of material is not necessarily getting access to the marketplace in the way the future looks now.  What are your thoughts on that?
I think that's something that we have to examine on a case by case basis because if they're talking about doing 5 or 10 graphic novels releases a year, this is not something that should take that much in terms of our resources to support.  I'd be absolutely behind something like that.  I think the more variety of content that we can get out there, the better.

It's just that we want to make sure we're dealing with companies that require a reasonable amount of work for what we're selling.  Sometimes (and we've had this experience, unfortunately) some of the smaller publishers, it's simply the work that's involved is not in proportion to what we can sell, and then it becomes a little bit difficult.

We want to make sure that the process remains efficient because it can bring the level of service down when you get bogged down in a lot of things at the same time, so we're very conscious of that.

Are you buying Diamond UK?
No comment.

You haven't bought it yet, obviously.
No, we have not.

In Canada, you handle a couple of major categories that Alliance doesn't, other than comics: trading cards and licensed merch. You mentioned them in connection with the open house.  Are you planning to add those categories to Alliance’s lines here?
Yes, we are.

With the major trading card suppliers, do you have rights to sell in the U.S.?
We do for some, and for those that we don't, at the moment, we intend to have a discussion with them about how we can get that to happen.

Let's look off into the future. Where do you hope to be with Alliance (what will then be Universal) a year from now and five years from now?
Yes, that's right.  I hope we will have contributed to growing the marketplace to whatever degree that we can, humbly, with a partnership of our vendors as well as our retailers.  I hope that we can continue to introduce the genre of both comic books and games to more people.

I think that's been, really, the key element of growth, especially on the gaming side.  The gaming side, right now, is really just kicking on all cylinders.  It is fabulous, and the core of that growth has been coming from new players coming in and discovering this fantastic world.

I think that the comic book business in that space is also primed for that.  I'm always so excited when I tell people (what I call civilians) about what we do and all the different great stories.  I have a little care package that I send people of all the books that I think they should be reading.  Sure enough, they get through a few of those trade paperbacks, graphic novels, and they become fans.  I think there are just such incredible stories out there that more people need to read, and I think they'll become fans very quickly.

Click here to go back to Part 1.