ICv2

• 1. Introduction

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  ICv2 is an online trade magazine with an unusual origin story hidden in its own name. The "v2" is a clue: the site is literally the second version of something, a digital successor to a print trade publication that circulated through the comic book distribution world decades earlier. That predecessor was called Internal Correspondence, and its history runs straight through one of the more turbulent chapters in American comics retail. Who built this thing, and why does a trade magazine aimed at retailers of geek culture occupy a surprisingly central position in the business of comics, anime, and gaming? The answer starts not in a newsroom but in a distribution warehouse, with a co-founder who refused to let a good name go to waste.

• 2. Internal Correspondence

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  Milton Griepp co-founded Capital City Distribution, a trade distributor that served the direct market for comics and related products. In that role, Griepp published Internal Correspondence, first as a newsletter and then as a full magazine, across the 1980s and into the 1990s. The publication gave retailers the kind of insider sales information and analysis that was hard to find anywhere else. When Diamond Comic Distributors acquired Capital City in 1996, the Internal Correspondence name did not go with the deal: Griepp retained the rights to it. That retention would matter five years later, when he had a new project in mind and a version number to attach to an old title.

• 3. Launch and Early Growth

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  In January 2001, Griepp launched ICv2, positioning it squarely as a resource for retailers and librarians who stocked comics, anime, gaming titles, and entertainment products. The name "Internal Correspondence version 2" signaled continuity with the trade-press tradition he had built at Capital City, now carried into the web era. By 2002, the site had expanded beyond digital publishing: the ICv2 Retailer Guides appeared in hard-copy format, giving retailers a tangible reference they could keep on the shelf. The guides represented an early recognition that some audiences in the specialty retail world still valued print alongside a website.

• 4. The Conference and Community

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  In 2011, ICv2 added a live dimension to its media footprint by launching an annual industry conference held on the eve of the New York Comic Con. The venue was the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City, putting the event inside one of the most prominent gatherings in geek culture. Over time the conference evolved into a standing ritual known as the "White Paper Happy Hour," a name that signals its blend of trade-press substance and social gathering. Griepp oversaw the American Anime Awards balloting in 2015 on behalf of ICv2, an episode that illustrated how the publication had moved from observer to active participant in the industries it covered.

• 5. Recognition and Remote Era

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  ICv2: The Business of Pop Culture, a work edited by Griepp, received a nomination for the "Best Comics-Related Periodical/Journalism" Eisner Award in 2025, one of the most closely watched honors in the comics world. That recognition arrived in the same year the company publicly marked a structural shift: in July 2025, ICv2 announced it had transitioned to a fully remote operation after spending its first twenty-four years in office space in Madison, Wisconsin, where its parent company GCO, LLC is based. The Eisner nomination and the departure from physical offices together captured two different kinds of maturity for a publication that had spent a quarter-century serving the back end of geek culture retail.