Heidi MacDonald adds some context over at her Comics Beat site:
IDW "goes dark" on the NYSE, lays off 39% of their staff

Hard to be a successful media company when you're not producing any media:
"IDW Entertainment revenue declined from $4.3 million to nearly NOTHING, due to the absence of Locke & Key, which was streaming on Netflix in 2022."

I was a big fan of Chris Staros's Top Shelf Productions, which was a great indie publisher for over a decade and was then bought by IDW. MacDonald notes their future is unknown.

 

I knew it was only a matter of time before they really started to crash. They basically have been teetering on the edge for the last few years.

 

They also lost the Hasbro titles which was a big one for them.

I don't see some titles staying after the contract is up. I could see Sonic going back to Archie and Usagi Yojimbo going back to Dark Horse.

 

I'm worried IDW is the canary in the coal mine, despite what people have said DC and Marvel have had a lot of failing series and dropping sales also both their parent companies have serious money trouble right now.

 

It's interesting to compare Dark Horse to IDW. Both were major licensing publishers, with their most profitable franchises at the whim of corporate licensing. A lot of folks have proclaimed the end of Dark Horse Comics a few different times. First when they lost Star Wars, and later when they lost the Fox film licenses.

And yet they keep going. Meanwhile IDW is on the verge of collapse.

I'm thinking their big advantage was that Dark Horse has a stable of creator owned comics that have stuck with them, along with a few wholely owned original IP's that just keep trucking. Dark Horse also had their liscensing losses more spread out. IDW appears to have bet big with Hasbro's licensing and didn't have the stable of creator owned or original IP to fall back on.

Meanwhile: Valiant Comics is still chugging along. They're down to one book a month, but they're still publishing stuff. And they've got a nice looking FCBD title available too. Valiant's relaunch has fallen into the same unforced errors at the first go round, but they're hanging in.

 

None of your comparison of DH and IDW is wrong, but it's missing a huge point. Dark Horse is financially sound because they were bought up by a big media company that doesn't need Dark Horse's revenues to stay afloat. IDW is at risk of going bankrupt because they tried to become a media company and couldn't ramp up sustainable production. Dark Horse's owned IP was good enough to get them bought, while IDW's was comparatively shallow, and they were effectively hand-to-mouth from production to production.

For that matter, Valiant's pending demise is best viewed through a similar lens, as their media company owner has similarly struggled in the last few years. Their minimal output doesn't inspire confidence for a rebound, and I don't think they're a good acquisition target in the current media landscape.

From a business perspective, I think it's more useful to see success or failure in terms of these larger corporate concerns than based on the sales figures of individual books. No one is making much money just from comics, and the most successful publishers continue more because of corporate ownership than anything else.

 

Thanks for adding that context. I agree it is important.

As for Valiant, they'll probably fold the comic line, but they do have licensing opportunities last time I checked that they were trying to cash in on. They've got a decent portfolio of original IP, so I'd imagine we'll see a third go of the company if they can't rebound. I just can't see Bloodshot, XO, Harbinger, and Archer and Armstrong disappearing forever.

 

I'm not sure how much value those names have, but I imagine someone will buy the IP. That doesn't necessarily mean that Valiant would continue as a publisher or a brand, though. My perspective is colored because I never read any of their books or the Bloodshot movie, and I'm old enough to have seen other publishers effectively disappear. Marvel has tried to get value out of Crossgen IP several times in the last few decades, but that never goes far.

 

I think part of Valiant's problem is that the original company founded by Jim Shooter in the 90s was based on the Gold Key trio of Magnus Robot Fighter, Solar:Man of the Atom and Turok: Dinosaur Hunter. Shooter even said that Magnus: Robot Fighter that Valiant published was the same character in the same universe that Gold Key/Dell/Whitman published but these 3 were licensed comics so Valiant never owned them and when you base your shared superhero universe on a god like being Solar accidentally blowing up the world and re-creating or being thrown into a new timeline based on his reading old GK comics when he was kid (and also as he said "I played dice with God and lost.") and when VEI bought the rights out of bankruptcy court they didn't have the rights to GK 3 and when they couldn't get the license for them (they went to Dark Horse where Jim Shooter was writing them and the owners were pain to work with and artist delays DH lost the rights then Dynamite got them and did a couple mini-series with their Dr. Solar series feeling like a giant middle finger to VEI) but given that in original Valiant Universe that Solar and Magnus were huge parts of their universe (Turok got there but he always felt more "forced" than the other 2) but without at least 2 of the GK 3 it's like a hole missing plus it makes reprinting a lot of the original Valiant comics (that guest starred in) from the 90s a legal nightmare.

 

The relaunch at Valiant works better than you’d think without the big three Gold Key characters, and eventually Valiant gets their own answer to each of them. Basically the relaunch focuses on one big thread: the hidden history of the world.

The relaunch makes the same mistakes as the last take: it publishes a history of the future that boxes in the plot threads of the books (Rai 0 in the original and Book of Death in the relaunch) and firing the driving force behind the company.

 

"Whose left we can promote?"

 

Image Comics leaves Diamond Distributors for Lunar

Sounds like Diamond's losing a lot of business, which is a big change from the days when it had Market dominance.

 

The first American comic book union is going about as well as expected. (remember also that this is the office staff at Image, no creators, artists or actual talent are in this union ....which consists of about 15 people) Comic Book Workers United is already filing complaints about its employer Image Comics, with the chief complaint being that they're not allowed to pass out union literature during company work hours.  


Yeah this is gonna end badly.