It’s been a short week. Or has it been the longest week of my life? I don’t even know anymore. I’ll dive right into what you all missed last week in comics. I want to focus on the hullabaloo (what the good folks in the Midwest call it) going on at Oni-Lion Forge. So forgive me for getting a little myopic, or don’t. I’m going to give you all the news about it anyway.
In politics, they would say that the Oni-Lion Forge Publishing Company is “in the barrel.” It’s a term of art that pundits love to use to talk about politicians who can’t get out of a negative media cycle. Politico has like a cottage industry of these stories, but I digress. Point is! It’s not been a great few weeks for Oni-Lion Forge.
You could say things have been going downward since Lion Forge/Polarity acquired Oni back in 2019. The merger kicked off with a round of layoffs mainly affecting women and people of color. The firings and departures have plagued the company ever since.
The Beat broke the story that Publisher James Lucas Jones and VP of Creative and Business Development Charlie Chu were departing the company after over a decade of work. That kicked off the latest round of departures which included, senior VP of Sales and Marketing Alex Segura, sales manager Henry Barajas, Senior Editor Amanda Meadows, and Editor Jasmine Amiri. Then Oni pulled out of SDCC. And the bad news just kept rolling in…
Graeme McMillan, writing for Popverse, interviewed one of the remaining staff members who said the following:
“The only positive thing I can say about the Polarity merger is that it kept Oni open through the pandemic/lockdown,” they said, adding that everything beyond that has been the kind of disastrous decision making that has resulted in the loss of 13 staff members in the last few months and failure in some basic business practices. Specifically mentioned was the tracking and payment of royalties, something that Oni-Lion Forge has been criticized for in recent weeks.”
Oni-Lion Forge has a history of non-payment allegations against the company.
What is fun to know about Polarity is one of the dudes behind the merger, Ed Hamati, has an amusing background. David Steward II, who founded Lion Forge, brought on Hamati. The two, according to Forbes, knew one another from their time in private equity. That firm was The Chi Rho Group, as detailed in Hamati’s bio on the Polarity website. Why should anyone care about private equity?
Oni-Lion Forge is owned by Polarity, owned by a company named “Epsilon Upsilon Alpha LLC,” which is an I don’t know what.
Chris Faerber is a St. Louis-based attorney who has expertise in publishing deals. So that makes sense. The company filed for a Paycheck Protection Loan, according to a search in ProPublica’s federal loan database.
So would this only be for the comics division of the company? I genuinely don’t know. They identify as “periodical publishers” and only report 10 employees, which strikes me as odd. I dunno. Were they only concerned about this particular portion of the company? Was this part of the company that they had and have no money for? I only have more questions now. I’m not begrudging folks for wanting to pay their employees during the pandemic. I’m saying that the way this corporation is set up doesn’t lead me to believe they are very interested in the comics or publishing industry.
What I do begrudge is this. What exactly is you know…all of this? What’s the benefit of a shell corporation anyway? (She asks the wind, knowing no one will answer). One advantage is that you could, hypothetically, hollow out different parts of a company you acquire. You could harvest those assets for whatever value they had in intellectual property. Then, you could sell the rest once you squeeze the value out. You could hypothetically write off losses. You could hypothetically do a leveraged buyout. I mean really the possibilities with private equity are endless.
I don’t know what is going on with Polarity. To be honest, I never have. Either way, it’s either bad business practice or hypothetically shady business practices, either way, it sucks.
