105. Collaboration, Not Competition with The Ink Alliance

Well, first of all, everyone, again, welcome and congratulations on the formation of this alliance.

You know, not to insert myself in this conversation, but there's been a lot of sort of groundswell over the last few months about.

representation and and how we can kind of fix the direct market and um you know in that conversation i posted a video about how kind of it's it can be frustrating to be uh black and nerdy in some of these spaces like it just feels like a lot of stuff is dictated towards you a lot of stuff like you kind of have to take scraps at times um and it's just not fun in in some aspects and And one of the solutions that I proposed to this problem was we got to get more black people in the direct market.

We've got to figure out how to get more diversity, not just among the readership, but among store ownership.

Now, I did not know at that time that there were perhaps less than 20.

I've seen the number as high as 20 and as few as 10. black owned direct market shops in the country out of 2000 estimated uh, blur, uh, comic book stores with, you know, lunar or diamond accounts, right? Like that is crazy for the number to be that low.

Um, I was actually talking to my shop owner, uh, Dan from fight or flight comics.

He's Filipino.

And he told me he went to comics pro either two or three years ago.

And he was the only Asian, uh, And there was one black person there who was the only black person.

And they struck up a conversation about how it was just very white.

And I just I had no idea it was that there was that small of representation.

So when a couple of weeks later, I got that email about the Inc.

Alliance forming, I was really excited because I feel like it just.

It's the start of something really, really awesome.

So I want to talk to you guys about one, your independent journeys as retailers and then kind of meeting this moment with coalition by forming this alliance.

So I guess, Michael and Philip, I'll start with you guys since you're the co-founders of this initiative and ask just kind of how did this come together?