Deadline Hollywood: BOOM! Buys Archaia Entertainment

BOOM! announced its purchase of Archaia Entertainment through the entertainment news site Deadline Hollywood earlier today. Although that story is Hollywood-focused, with the companies identified according to their properties in development, that strikes me as pretty interesting, even positive news in terms of their comics efforts as well. Archaia makes nice-looking books that haven't seemed to all the way catch traction in the traditional comics markets; for its part, BOOM! seems pretty production-focused with its system of active and engaged and supported editors driving a wide-ranging group of freelancers.

Step back for a second and it's really sort of remarkable how many smaller comics companies pretty much seem to operate as imprints with an attached apparatus that makes them their own business. What I mean is that it really doesn't take much to imagine a lot of them as an imprint, and certainly something like Archaia might even function more effectively that way. I would also have to imagine there's something to be gained by BOOM! adding to its bottom-line in terms of potential other-media projects, although I have even less of an idea how that kind of thing operates and what advantages might be accrued via scale.

Update: Because I traffic in a kind of full-service ignorance, I also don't know what a major shake-up at Warner Brothers will do to the comics business through DC Entertainment. I think the general model that people use when analyzing that kind of thing is that a management that really gets and celebrates and values superhero franchises will have an impact on comics by sort of aiming their comics in that direction via pushing towards more superhero films and even team superhero movies as Marvel has done. In other words, they build the fun house mirror in which the comics publisher seeks its own identity at the publishing level -- with differences because of the medium involved, of course, but some general, shared aims. I have to imagine it's fun to write those kind of speculative stories, though, because most of those Hollywood people strike me as quite loopy.

Update: An Archaia creator tweeting in my direction mentioned being kept in a loop in a way that suggests the acquisition had been in the works for several months. The tweet was subsequently removed. The tweet delcared that it was off the record, but since it was a tweet as opposed to a direct message. I assumed they meant the conversation between himself and his publisher had been off the record. Apologies if it wasn't.
 
posted 2:00 am PST | Permalink
 

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