Zanziber vs. Marvel & Diamond

It all began in July when I finally got around to reading X-Men: Phoenix - Endsong. I had purchased this particular trade a few months prior while I was doing some traveling. When I got close to the end, I found that several of the remaining pages were improperly bound into the spine, rendering the conclusion unreadable.

In the past, when I have had issues with other trades, I have been able to contact the publisher (DC & Dark Horse specifically) and they were willing and able to send me a replacement. With my previous experiences to guide me, I contacted Marvel's customer service for assistance. That is where I was put into contact with Jason Strauss (jstruss@marvel.com) who seemingly wanted to help. (Having worked in customer service for many years, I know that it is job 1 to make sure that the customer feels that their issues are being dealt with.)

Jason's response was to either take it back to the comic shop (hardly an option) or contact Diamond Distributors. I asked for assistance in contacting them and he provided me with 2 phone numbers: 1-800-452-6642 and (410) 560-7100. I called and left a message hoping that my problems would be resolved.

A few days later, I received a voice mail from Don (or Dan, I had a hard time distinguishing) asking me for further information. I returned the call and left him a message of my own detailing the problem and methods of contacting me. I did suggest that with my cell phones history of spotty service that it would probably be easier to contact me via email. To this date, I haven't heard back from him, even after leaving several messages.

On August 19th, I received an email from Jason @ Marvel wanting to know if there had been a resolution to my problem. I informed him that there had not and asked for any further assistance. He suggested that he would contact Diamond on my behalf and hopefully that would help the situation.

On September 25th, having still not heard anything from either Jason or Diamond, I emailed Jason to find out what was going on. He informed me that he didn't receive a response either, and that was all he could do to help.

At the time of writing this, I have made another attempt to contact Diamond to get this resolved. Right now, it's not all about me. What if something similar had happened to a customer who purchased a trade from Borders during their going out of business sale? They're not able to return it to Borders, are they?

If anything else happens, I will make sure to post about it. Please pass this along to others who might have a similar situation in the future. Right now, I will NOT be purchasing any Marvel trades, and I suggest the same to others.