President Donald Trump has set a deadline of February 1 to implement a 25% tariff on imports from Canada and Mexico as well as a 10% tariff on China. The President has claimed the tariffs are due to fentanyl coming into the US from those countries. Some reports have said the tariffs would be announced this Saturday and go into place March 1 though the White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt has said that the tariffs would take effect immediately.

The final tariff rate is unknown and there may be some exemptions but those would be “few and far between” according to administration officials.

The tariffs would threaten to disrupt trade an imports. The tariffs would be devastating to the comic and tabletop game market forcing an increase in prices. Tariffs are paid by firms importing the goods and those increased costs are then passed along to consumers.

China, Canada, and Mexico are all popular locations for the printing and production of comics and tabletop games. The increase in tariffs would result in an increased production cost as there are few options currently to move that entire production to within the United States where current costs are higher than those available elsewhere. There are some options in Europe. But, even if production was moved to the US, Canada is one of the top countries the US imports paper from. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stated that Canada would respond to the tariffs.

Any disruption would create further ripple effects for the comic industry which has already seen massive disruption this year due to the Chapter 11 filing of its top distributor Diamond Comics. The combination of money owed by Diamond to smaller publishers plus and an increased cost for future production could result in numerous small publishers folding this year.

We’ll have further details when the full tariff announcement has been released.