The rumors of the bankruptcy of ECC Ediciones, which until a few months ago was a powerful comic publisher and distributor in Spain, have increased and increased in volume since last Monday the company sent an email to the stores with which it works. , announcing the cessation of shipments. “ECC Ediciones stops sending orders until further notice. As soon as we have new information we will send it to you,” the message says. which was made public on the social network X.
Until last fall, ECC held the exploitation rights to two catalogs as important in the world of comics as Skybound – with notable collections such as walking dead and Invincible– and, above all, the legendary DC Comics – owned by Warner Bros Entertainment –, home to such renowned characters as Superman, Batman, Catwoman, Supergirl, Aquaman and Shazam. Skybound’s operating license ended in November and will be the publishing house Planeta Cómic (Planeta group) who holds the rights. In addition to the licenses, ECC publishes its own work, as is the case of the recent works of one of the leading authors of Spanish comics, Lorenzo Montatore.
The name of the publisher that would be in charge of reproducing and distributing DC titles in Spain remains up in the air, so that the current collections that ECC has in progress could be left without continuity. elDiario.es has tried to contact ECC without receiving a response. However, on their website they continue to announce news for the coming weeks and from some of the stores that the company owns – two in Barcelona, one in Alicante and one in Madrid – they explain that they have no news about a hypothetical closure.
The ECC publishing house was born in August 2011 when the company El Catalogo del Cómic acquired the exploitation rights of DC Comics, which had previously been in the hands of Planeta DeAgostini. Until that moment, El Catalogo del Cómic carried out, on a subcontracted basis, the translation, writing, layout and design of the label’s comics. From that moment on, the new publishing house, whose name ECC comes from the acronym for The Comics Catalog, began to take care of the entire editorial process.
What would happen if ECC loses the rights to superheroes
If ECC were to lose the rights to DC, this could cause “a temporary shortage of comics” from the label. “If ECC loses the rights, as it seems that it will, it will have to remove all the distributed material that has not been sold in stores and burn it,” explains Fernando Garrido, owner of the Madrid store. Alcalá Comics. Garrido explains that this is the procedure established by law.
This would mean that, until the new publisher in possession of the license was known and the publishing machinery was started, the DC superhero titles would disappear from Spanish stores and would be untraceable on the first-hand market. Furthermore, this crisis would coincide with the reboot of a new DC Studios cinematic universe, directed by James Gunn, which will presumably reactivate interest in this team’s comics in 2025.
For Garrido, a very feasible possibility is that this change causes titles started by ECC to remain unfinished. This is what happened at Planeta Cómics with the collections that were left half-finished at other publishers, as its director David Hernando explained in the podcast Special Room which publishes Tomos y Stapas.
The power of licenses
“If it is confirmed that they lose the DC catalog, and having previously lost the Skybound catalogue, it is very difficult for them to survive,” says Garrido, who believes that both losses would explain both the email they have received from the publisher (and that instead of come signed, as usual, by a salesperson, it has been sent by a generic “Comercial Eccediciones”) as the impossibility of contacting any other department of the company. “They have stopped any activity and no one picks up your phone,” he says.
The bookseller says that most of ECC’s business is supported by demand for titles from both licenses. “They had focused a lot on supplying large stores,” explains the bookseller. “To serve large stores you have to be very powerful financially, because they place large orders, but when it comes to collecting payments their conditions are much tougher than those of traditional stores: longer payment periods and very strong discounts,” continues the owner of Alcalá Comics.
“They have not sent us emails intended for large stores by mistake and we have verified that they gave them discounts of up to 50%, something never seen in stores,” Garrido continues. In fact, he highlights that the relationship between Alcalá Cómics and ECC had not been good for a long time. “We placed orders and they sent us only four copies while they made the same title available at their own discretion in their own online store. It’s ugly. It means competing with your own clients,” he concludes. Repeated situations like this, according to Garrido, led him to cut off communication with ECC. They also denounce accounting errors for which they evaded responsibility. “A few months ago they charged all the stores 700 euros more for orders and it cost us God and help to return them,” he illustrates.
Stockouts in stores
The complaints are greater in the case of the Zaragoza store Taj Mahal Comicswhose owner, Daniel Fernández, assures that ECC has sent them invoices in advance. “We have been issued [a las tiendas] fictitious invoices for January and February, which is what we are going to have to fight with them now,” he denounces. Demand that the company “compensate for the returns” they have pending. “I have 4,500 euros in refunds and I am not going to allow them to charge me invoices without compensating for those returns,” he explains.
Fernández’s concern is that, in the event of bankruptcy, claims will be complicated. The bookseller points out that he spoke with a salesperson in the first half of December and denied that “anything happened outside of a specific problem.” But subsequent attempts at communication have been fruitless: “They don’t answer the phones and the emails sent to the salesperson bounce back to us, saying that they are out of the office until that day due to vacation.” The last email from the publisher’s press department received by elDiario.es is from the month of November, announcing news for February 2025: especially the expected Absolute power, where a new universe is started in DC (Absolute) that will mark the future of these superheroes in the coming years and that was announced for February 5. Other manga titles were also advanced, a genre in which ECC is also quite relevant.
Fernández also attributes the hypothetical closure to the loss of the two main catalogs and doubts that ECC can continue without them. In fact, he criticizes that the publisher at the time asked readers to finance the reissue of some old titles through crowdfunding. “It is ugly to be the editor who asks for funds from readers to avoid risking reissues, or the one who creates his own points of sale to skip the stores,” says Fernández.
A similar accounting situation was reported last Tuesday in a statement on his X account the madrilenian Akira Comicswhich in 2012 received the Eisner Award for the best comic book store in the world. “Akira Cómics stopped working on both the new releases and the backlogs of the ECC publishing house last November due to serious accounting disagreements with them that significantly harmed our company and in the face of which the aforementioned publishing house did not agree to solve it in any way. form”, can be read in the aforementioned statement.
They denounced in the text that they were put in a complicated dilemma: “Not receiving more of their products if we did not accept their accounting requests, which were divergent from our own accounting.” They also clarified that their legal office advised them against publishing this same informative note on networks at that time “due to legal issues.” Finally, Akira apologized to its clients for not having been able to “properly report this problem” earlier. They claim that this has been the reason for “the lack of news and reruns” from the aforementioned month of November until today.
At the European level, it is the Italian multinational Panini that is taking over the DC catalog. For this reason, both Garrido and Fernández explain that the rumor has prevailed in the sector that they will take over. Panini, in addition, already exploits the catalog of Marvel, DC’s rival. “It would seem good to me,” says Garrido: “It is a large publisher, of European level, that works seriously and does not cause problems for the stores.”
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