Marvel/Dabel Brothers Arrangement Concludes; Marvel Retains Rights

This is like a Jim Shooter-era story lurching out of the past in its mustache-twirling implications and odd, related but pertinent facts, but in the end it feels very now. According to a press release, the arrangement between Marvel and the Dabel Brothers studio has ended. This ends speculation caused by an empty Dabel Brothers booth during all of the recent Wizard World Chicago event, which to me falls just short of beheading the studio owners and parading their heads around on sticks in terms of symbolically indicating a split. Empty booths are funny even when unintentional, like that old trick of leaving a chair empty for someone you know won't show up at a debate. And, just to make a number of people do the Little Rascals surprise face quickly followed by the "Of course that's what happened" TV detective face, Marvel will continue to publish all of the titles that DB brought to the table in the original arrangement, such as Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter and Hedge Knight.

The original deal indicated a more devoted expression of Marvel's intermittent favoring of outsourced work, and was seen by some as a capitulation to the wider-genre demands of the bookstore market. My initial reaction is that it now looks like this was sort of a bookstore-focused rights acquisition followed with a service contract, and it's the latter relationship that ended, which is important only in that it puts on display the company's general unwillingness to work with contracts not owned by them. That could all change once I actually gather information and learn stuff, though. My second hunch is that maybe Marvel wants to have an arm like this, but wants a different company fulfilling that role, perhaps one of the groups/lines currently with Image or a bigger stand-alone company. So a follow-up announcement wouldn't be a huge surprise My third is that since this is a bunch of licensing agreements that have seemingly moved from one company to another, and not original creations, Dabel Brothers -- no stranger to jumping from here to there -- should have plenty of opportunity to rebound strongly.
 
posted 3:06 am PST | Permalink
 

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