People have spent a lot of time talking about the health of DC Comics this past year or so especially after they fired a lot of their staff and AT&T threw up the bolus of Time-Warner it was choking on, but Marvel, while ensconced in the big fat arms of Disney, is at much at risk. Recently, comics in their kids lines were published by IDW starting in 2018, but that deal was canceled this year. And we also saw Marvel actually dropping some titles like Fantastic Four that they didn't control the movie rights of. Now, they're again licensing out their characters to completely different publishers, but this time for the adult reader and collector market - and once that starts, I don't think the Mouse will worry too much about publishing their own comics anymore. We've already seen them destroy the Disney line multiple times. Future historians will undoubtedly debate the point, but I'm putting my marker down here. Fortunately, I'm old enough not to care much anymore.
Abrams PR says, "FANTASTIC FOUR: FULL CIRCLE is the first graphic novel that Marvel has licensed to another publisher in more than 40 years. The publication
also will mark the launch of MarvelArts, an exciting new graphic novel collaboration between
Marvel Comics and Abrams ComicArts."
You could read a reworking of that release here -
With Alex Ross 'Fantastic Four' Graphic Novel
by Brigid Alverson on December 13, 2021
That's an interesting take, and one with merit. We've reached a point where the majority of future audiences will be introduced to Spider-Man and others through games and movies before any comics. That makes the comics less important to parent Disney, I think.
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