Justice League: Dream Girls: A DC Pride Event #1 shipped today. The cover shows Nia Nal/Dreamer on horseback on Themyscira, in Wonder Woman’s costume, waving a transgender pride flag. The story places her in the Wonder Woman origin template: a champion chosen to leave the all-female Amazon island and save the world.

Subscribe now

Dreamer is a biologically male transgender character created for the CW’s Supergirl series as the “first transgender superhero on television,” played by a man pretending to be a woman,Nicole Maines, who co-writes this series.

Themyscira’s entire mythological identity is built on the absence of men. The Amazons are warrior women who withdrew from the world of men and built a civilization without male influence. Diana’s origin depends on growing up in that society. DC chose the island whose identity depends on the biological reality of its inhabitants as the backdrop for a story about a biologically male character playing its champion. Maines is co-writing a story that places her own character in the Wonder Woman origin role. The creative casting decision is not subtle.

None of this is generating commercial results. The direct market picture running alongside DC’s activism spending tells the actual story. Absolute Batman has topped the direct market bestseller list for multiple consecutive weeks, outselling its nearest competitor three to one. That book is about a working-class Bruce Wayne with no billion-dollar fortune and no ideological mandate. Everything else in DC’s line exists in its commercial shadow.

The main line DCU is not a market driver. The Absolute Universe carries DC’s numbers on the strength of one book. The Pride Month events, the Galaxy solo series, and the Dreamer showcases are not commercial performers. They are ideological statements dressed as publishing strategy.

The statements are not even satisfying the activists DC is courting. The #DCSoWhite boycott launched this month demanding two to three new Black-led ongoing titles with guaranteed 18-24 month cancellation protection regardless of sales. The audience DC is spending its publishing budget pursuing is simultaneously telling DC it has not done enough.

That is the trap. The audience that buys Absolute Batman needs no Pride events. The audience DC is chasing with Pride events demands more regardless of what DC produces while not buying what DC already published for them. The books built on story sell. The books built on agenda do not, and still generate demands for more agenda.

Placing a biologically male character in Wonder Woman’s costume on the island of women is not a story decision. It is a statement that alienates the audience that built the Wonder Woman fanbase while producing no commercial return that would justify the cost.

What do you think DC’s publishing strategy communicates about who they believe their audience is? Let us know in the comments.

Subscribe now

450 pages of classic superhero storytelling that puts character first. The Flying Sparks Omnibus collects the complete saga of Meta-Girl — the kind of cape comic the mainstream forgot how to make. Sign up to get your copy.

NEXT: Black YouTuber Calls For Boycott Of DC Comics #DCSoWhite

J. Michael Straczynski learned he was not invited to Amazing Spider-Man #1000 the same way everyone else did: by reading the solicitation.

When the announcement came out listing the contributing writers for September’s Amazing Spider-Man #36 (Legacy #1000), Straczynski posted on Bluesky: “It was kind of a surprise, but it’s their call to make.” When someone suggested Marvel might be saving him for Amazing Spider-Man #2000, he replied: “I’m busy that day.”

Subscribe now

The irony is sharpened by the fact that Marvel simultaneously has Straczynski writing Mary Jane: Face It, Tiger, a 60th anniversary one-shot celebrating Mary Jane Watson. He is good enough to write MJ’s anniversary special, but not good enough to write the anniversary issue of the comic he defined for six years.

The lineup Marvel chose for #1000 includes Dan Slott, Brian Michael Bendis, Frank Miller, J.M. DeMatteis, Joe Kelly, and Noah Hawley, a television writer who has never written a comic book in his life. Hawley’s credit on the page lists his television work, Legion and Fargo, as his qualification. Straczynski created Babylon 5. He wrote Peter Parker for six years. He is absent.

J. Michael Straczynski wrote The Amazing Spider-Man from 2001 to 2007. He introduced Ezekiel and Morlun, added a mystical totemic dimension to Spider-Man’s powers, made Aunt May discover Peter’s secret identity, rebuilt the Peter and Mary Jane relationship, and guided the book through Civil War, including Peter Parker’s public unmasking as part of the New Avengers.

He also did two things the Spider-Man fanbase has not forgiven.

The first was Sins Past in 2004, the storyline revealing that Gwen Stacy had a secret affair with Norman Osborn before her death and conceived twin children who aged rapidly due to the Osborn formula. Gwen Stacy was the defining innocent of Spider-Man’s mythos, the character whose death marked the end of the Silver Age. The revelation turned her into Norman Osborn’s mistress and retroactively poisoned every memory of her. Reader backlash was immediate and sustained. The story has never been formally retconned despite decades of requests from the fanbase.

The second was One More Day, the 2007 storyline closing his run in which Aunt May is shot as a consequence of Peter Parker’s public identity reveal, and Peter makes a bargain with the demon Mephisto, sacrificing his marriage to Mary Jane to restore Aunt May’s life and erase the public knowledge of his identity. Straczynski publicly distanced himself from the story’s conclusion, stating that editorial overrode his preferences and that he had asked to have his name removed from the final two issues. The request was denied. His name sits on the issues regardless.

Whatever the internal dispute, One More Day happened on his watch and under his name. Seventeen years later, Marvel has still not restored the Peter and Mary Jane marriage. The most beloved relationship in Spider-Man’s history remains erased because of a story whose own writer tried to disown it.

The pattern of Straczynski’s post-2007 Marvel work confirms that his best years were already behind him. His Thor run beginning in 2007 started strong, reintroducing Thor and Asgard to Broxton, Oklahoma and building a compelling new mythology around the character’s return. Then he walked off mid-story. Thor #600 to #603 had to be finished by other writers when Straczynski departed for DC. His Fantastic Four run with artist Olivier Coipel followed the same trajectory, building toward a story about the Thing and then exiting before it concluded.

At DC he wrote Superman: Grounded, a storyline in which Superman walks across America to reconnect with ordinary people. The concept drew mockery from readers and critics for its plodding pacing. He left that run unfinished as well, with Chris Roberson completing the story. His Wonder Woman run introduced a new costume and a retconned origin that were reversed by the next creative team.

His return to Marvel produced The Twelve, a prestige miniseries about Golden Age Marvel heroes revived in the modern era, which ran from 2008 to 2012 because of delays between issues. Red Circle launched four DC/Red Circle character revamps in 2009, most of which dissolved within a year. His Thor: The Mighty Avenger mini, his Brave and the Bold run, his Before Watchmen: Dr. Manhattan and Nite Owl entries all came and went without lasting impact.

His most recent Marvel work was Captain America: Sentinel of Liberty, a 2022 series with artist Jesus Saiz that was canceled at issue #12 after failing to sustain its early sales. The book’s premise, that Steve Rogers’ entire Captain America identity was built by a secret organization called the Invaders, drew negative reactions from fans who saw it as an attack on the character’s foundational mythology.

Marvel considers him worth a Mary Jane anniversary one-shot. Not worth a slot in the 1000th issue of the title he wrote for six years. The line between those two decisions is the entire story of what JMS did to Spider-Man and what the character has been trying to recover from ever since.

Was leaving JMS off Amazing Spider-Man #1000 the right call? Let us know in the comments.

Subscribe now

450 pages of classic superhero storytelling that puts character first. The Flying Sparks Omnibus collects the complete saga of Meta-Girl — the kind of cape comic the mainstream forgot how to make. Sign up to get your copy.

NEXT: Which Sci-Fi Giant Has The Best Chance Of Survival?

A YouTuber running the #DCSoWhite campaign announced Phase Two this week: DC Blackout, a full boycott of DC Comics including clearing his Absolute pull list, over what he describes as 1,200 days without a Black character-led ongoing series in DC’s main continuity.

Read more

Mike Mayhew spent the last week of May detonating a grenade inside the comics creator community.

Mayhew is a photo-realistic cover artist with over thirty years of credits across Amazing Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, Star Wars, Batman, Justice League, and Vampirella. He runs Mike Mayhew Studio out of Glendale, California, producing exclusive variant covers, signed editions, original art, and CGC-graded comics that he sells direct to collectors without a middleman. He is not at San Diego Comic-Con this year. He will not be at any convention.

Subscribe now

On Wednesday he posted a Summer 2026 Comic Con Manifesto on Instagram explaining why, and told every other creator in the industry to follow him:

“Fellow comic creators!! Stop giving away equity in your future and your brand! You don’t need these half-ass, part-time, tourists who call themselves stores! Half of them can’t handle it and crash into a wall from greed and stupidity and take us with them. Their interests are not in your best interest! You have wings that are being clipped! When you are exhausted after convention season, 60% of your energy will have been wasted on accommodating stores and fans. It’s unnecessary. Think of the art you could have made in the meantime. You are the proven innovator. You have extraordinary talent. Don’t kid yourself into thinking you need others to justify your success! And double your prices godammit! Your talent and your signature isn’t gasoline. You are not a commodity that should be available to everyone. You are special, and all those things ‘They’ll never sell’ will be on eBay tomorrow! Running a business is an art that can ignite your art in ways you never imagined! I will not be at any cons. I will be in the comfort of my own home with my family and traveling with loved ones for pleasure, while designing and scaling a creative brand with total freedom to do whatever I want. Take heed. Time is running out.”

Mark Brooks, another photo-realistic cover artist who runs his own studio with a similar business model, pushed back directly. Brooks is 53, has a teenage son, owns multiple properties, and says he is on track to retire in five years. He reads Mayhew’s position as ego dressed up as strategy:

“My job is singular and solitary which I like. But conventions are how I recharge. I make plenty of money at home doing my thing but the money doesn’t buy camaraderie or the motivation I get when I meet the fans face to face that appreciate my work. A successful sale can fill my wallet for another month but it can’t fill my spirit. The bond with my peers and fans isn’t something I can buy my way into. Likewise, I love my representation and what they do for me. They handle logistics, customer service, and all the stuff that goes along with a successful online sale so I can focus on art. They earn every penny they get paid so I can feel stress free drawing and hanging out with my peers and fans. By doing that I produce more work that I’m paid for. It’s a win-win all the way around. Every artist in this business should do what works best for them so I won’t ever fault you for your decisions. The least you could do is do the same for your peers.”

Mayhew responded with context he had not initially offered, revealing the financial pressure behind the manifesto:

“I have extenuating circumstances in my life which prohibits or make it value proposition of whether I go to cons or whether I pursue this other really important part of my life that is not public. I’m 56 years old I’ve been in this industry for 33 years. I have two teenage children and I’m trying to pay for college, get ready for retirement, etc. Raising capital is a primary concern. I have invested $1 million printing Comics over the last eight years to have a message for my fellow comic artists. That was the nature of my post. I love going to conventions. I love meeting fans. There are decades of stories of me having warm encounters with fans. I love seeing and talking to other creators. I always make a point to tell them how much I appreciate their work. But the reality is that I’m gonna smoke all you guys by orders of magnitude on revenue. I think that’s something to think about. Because the convention experience trade-off is going to cost you an insane amount of money.”

Brooks responded:

“Trust me, I’ve been reading your replies. I get the exhaustion. I am doing things very differently than you, quite the opposite in fact. I’m on track to beat your year last year by loving my fans, getting out to see them, and producing work I love. I’ve also been fiscally minded since the day I began this job. I own multiple properties. I can retire fully in the next 5 years. Quite honestly, I’m exhausted by the cynicism of some of my peers that have grown grizzled and hard by a job that’s supposed to be fun. I’m 53. I’ve been doing this for 25 years. I have a teenage son I’m putting through college. Welcome to life. I too am constantly trying to earn, save, and protect my future. I do better every year, year after year. I think I’ll stick with what I’m doing. You’re welcome to do whatever it is you think you’re doing. Which at this point seems to be pissing off your fans and turning off your peers. You’re a hell of an artist but all of this is really confusing. If you do have a real message I think it’s getting lost in a lot of bad messaging and ego. But you don’t seem in the mindset to see that. Have fun with it I guess.”

Mitch Gerads, the Batman and Mister Miracle artist, kept his answer short: “I love cons. I love meeting new fans. I love seeing longtime fans. I love getting to hang out with my colleagues and friends. It’s a whole vibe and almost nothing fuels me creatively more than it.”

Dan Panosian, a penciller and inker with credits from Marvel, early Image, and creator-owned series including Slots, Canary, and Black Tape, was more open to Mayhew’s argument. He started skeptical:

“I personally love the conventions because it’s a great way to connect with the fans and honestly the whole vibe is inspiring. But you gotta find what works for you. For me, the conventions are a blast.”

Mayhew came back at him with specifics:

“I bet if you stayed home for one out of those six cons and did nothing but sketch covers, producing maybe 30 over 4 or 5 days, and sent those into CGC Signature Series and got the artist rate of $18, you would have made four times more money than going to that con. If you sold 30 9.8 sketch covers at $1k a piece that’s $30k. You can order as many sketch covers as you want through Lunar for $2-3 each. You don’t need a store to arrange all of this for you. You could put whatever you want on them. You could do 30 Absolute Batman sketch covers and they would probably go for $2000 apiece. I’m pretty sure that is game changing. We both live in LA. This shit is expensive. Traditional business would fantasize about an increase in revenue like that. You could promote them all month and then do one Whatnot stream or maybe two a month. It’s the same as having a Zoom meeting. Food for thought my friend.”

Panosian’s response shifted: “I’ve never tried something like that — but I don’t see why you couldn’t do both. I’ll definitely look into it. I still enjoy the conventions and seeing the fans and the other writers and artists. This is a very solitary job and it’s nice to see how the work is resonating with the readers and the other people in the business. But I’ll give the blank covers a go!”

Retailer Dennis Barger had no reservations at all: “You are the new comic book Jesus, go into the temple flip those f’in tables and chase out the middlemen who need creators more than they need them!!! Viva la revolution!”

Mayhew took the conversation somewhere broader in his final post, describing what he sees as a broken labor psychology unique to the comics industry:

“This is the mentality I’m trying to break. Damien Hirst isn’t doing anything for the people. Jeff Koons isn’t doing anything for the people. Takashi Murakami isn’t doing anything for the people. But in the comic book industry, comic creators and especially artists are conditioned that they’re lucky they’re even working in Comics and their gratitude should be on display and overflowing at all times. I think it’s a disproportionate expectation on this particular creative segment than you would find in any other creative field. Rock stars aren’t writing songs for you. Film directors aren’t putting you in a movie. Yet, comic book artists are supposed to give away free drawings and sign as many books as you want. I’m speaking in extremes to make a point. The farther I run away from this mentality, the more creative I can be, the more great collectibles I can produce and the more happiness I exchange with people. This is my truth. The language and the perspective surrounding the commerce of Comics and artists in the comic book industry is severely broken. Just like the gallery system in the fine art world is widely regarded to be a broken, failing system. In the art world a gallery takes a whopping 50% of the top of any art sold. Artists allow themselves to be taken advantage of for decades and then it’s too late.”

Mayhew is not being contrarian. He is making a business case in real numbers. Thirty Absolute Batman sketch covers at $2,000 each is $60,000 gross. An artist spending a weekend at a convention pays for travel, hotel, table fees, and opportunity cost on production time, and hand-sells to whoever walks by. Mayhew’s argument is that the same artist, staying home with a mailing list and a Whatnot stream, can generate multiples of that revenue while retaining full control over pricing, inventory, and the customer relationship.

He is also describing something the independent publishing community has been learning through hard experience: the convention and direct market retail infrastructure does not serve creators as well as it serves itself. The same dynamic that has creators waiting for a comic shop to order their book, or an online retailer to commission their cover variant, can be cut entirely with a direct relationship to the collector. The crowdfunding wave that built ComicsGate, Rippaverse, Ghost Machine, and dozens of smaller creator-owned operations in the last decade runs on exactly the logic Mayhew is articulating. Build a mailing list. Sell direct. Price according to the actual market value of your work, not according to what a con floor or a retailer will tolerate.

A livestream on Whatnot or YouTube is not a replacement for the creative energy of a convention floor, and Brooks and Gerads are not wrong that face-to-face time with fans does something that no digital interaction fully replicates. But as a pure revenue model, Mayhew’s math is hard to argue with. He has $1 million in inventory, a customer base built over thirty years, and zero need for a middleman to move product. He is 56. College tuitions are real. Retirement is real. The con floor is not the mechanism that solves either.

Is Mayhew right that comic artists should build direct and skip the conventions? Let us know in the comments.

Subscribe now

450 pages of classic superhero storytelling that puts character first. The Flying Sparks Omnibus collects the complete saga of Meta-Girl — the kind of cape comic the mainstream forgot how to make. Sign up to get your copy.

NEXT: IndieGoGo Is Still Refusing to Approve Indie Comic Creators: Joe Sonntag Is the Latest

Joe Sonntag, creator of Reaper Destroyer, raised over $75,000 on IndieGoGo for his first issue. The campaign fulfilled. Backers got their books. By every commercial and ethical measure, it was a success.

Subscribe now

Now Sonntag is trying to launch Reaper Destroyer #2 on the same platform, and the approval queue has been running for more than two weeks with no explanation.

On May 13, Sonntag posted an update to his pre-launch page:

“Where can you back?! The day is almost here! May 15th is approaching fast and I am excited to launch! One problem though. There may be an issue delaying the IGG page for backing. As you know the new IGG is kind of clunky and a lot of hoops to jump through to get this campaign approved for launch. The pre launch page was already approved but we have to go through the process again. Why you ask? Well you would have to ask IGG about that. So what do we do? On May 15th, if this page is not ready to go, you can find all of the same tiers on my company’s website superiorpresscomics.com.”

May 15 came and went. On May 23, eight days after the planned launch, Sonntag posted again:

“I am still waiting for approval on the Reaper Destroyer #2 Campaign. Hopefully this will happen soon and then I’ll set an actual date for the IGG launch. If you don’t want to wait for IGG you can also go right now and pre-order the book on my companies at superiorpresscomics.com.”

No explanation from IndieGoGo. No stated violation. The platform where Sonntag previously raised $75,000 and delivered every reward to every backer cannot produce a reason to approve his sequel.

Reaper Destroyer is a dark science fiction action comic about a man imprisoned in supernatural armor, tormented by the Spirit of Death, and fighting for his soul. It is exactly the kind of 90s-inflected dark hero work that built Image Comics. Nothing in IndieGoGo’s stated terms of service applies to it.

The pattern behind this delay has a long paper trail.

IndieGoGo’s history with ComicsGate and conservative comic creators stretches back to 2018. In October of that year, the platform shut down the Alt-Hero: Q campaign written by Chuck Dixon and published by Arkhaven Comics. The campaign had already raised over $100,000 and was in post-campaign store mode when the Trust and Safety team refunded all pledges, citing a terms of service violation without specifying what it was. Dixon is one of the most accomplished comic writers in the industry’s history, responsible for definitive runs on Batman, Robin, Nightwing, and Punisher across decades at DC and Marvel.

By 2022, multiple ComicsGate creators including Mike Baron, Ethan Van Sciver, and Shane Davis had discovered their campaigns were shadowbanned: hidden from search results, blocked from Google, accessible only via direct link. IndieGoGo’s own help center confirmed the practice, stating campaigns are not guaranteed to appear in search and offering no appeal process. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression documented the broader pattern, noting that in multiple cases the platform retroactively decided campaigns violated its terms after they had already gone live and raised thousands of dollars. In 2024, Cecil Jones was banned from crowdfunding his Cash Grab 2 comic on the platform with no explanation.

IndieGoGo’s terms of service grant the company complete legal cover: “We have the right to monitor, terminate, suspend, or delete any User Account at any time for any reason, or no reason. It is our policy not to comment on any reasons for termination and we have no obligation to provide you with a reason for termination.” That clause applies to every user on the platform. The documented pattern of its application runs in one direction.

When Gamefound acquired IndieGoGo in late 2024, the hope in the independent comics community was that new ownership might mean a genuine reset. Asked directly whether old bans would be upheld, the company said new projects would be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. Sonntag’s case has been under review for more than two weeks.

His situation sits inside a crowdfunding infrastructure that is becoming broadly hostile to independent creators regardless of political affiliation. Last month Kickstarter suspended multiple funded campaigns after its payment processor Stripe flagged mature content, including one that had already raised over $10,000 from 198 backers. Kickstarter later reversed the policy and publicly admitted the crackdown was driven entirely by Stripe’s requirements, while conceding that Stripe can still freeze campaigns at any time under its own rules. BackerKit’s Trust and Safety team has left applications without response for weeks. Crowdfundr has absorbed some of the displaced traffic. Gamefound is now the presumed serious alternative for tabletop and comics crowdfunding, but has not yet demonstrated whether its moderation culture differs from IndieGoGo’s in practice.

Sonntag found his workaround. He is selling directly through superiorpresscomics.com. Reaper Destroyer #2 features cover art by Jon Malin, Ethan Van Sciver, Brett Booth, and Oliver Isabedra alongside Sonntag’s own cover. His audience is waiting. They should not have to navigate platform politics to buy a comic.

Direct-to-creator is the cleanest model available to independent publishers right now, or going to free-speech sites like IndieCrowdFund. The corporate crowdfunding platforms add discoverability and payment infrastructure. They also add gatekeepers who can delay or remove campaigns with no stated reason and no recourse.

Sonntag’s backers proved once that they would show up in numbers. The platform that collected its fees from that campaign’s success has spent two weeks deciding whether to let him come back.

Have you backed Reaper Destroyer or other independent campaigns and run into platform problems? Let us know in the comments.

Subscribe now

450 pages of classic superhero storytelling that puts character first. The Flying Sparks Omnibus collects the complete saga of Meta-Girl — the kind of cape comic the mainstream forgot how to make. Sign up to get your copy.

NEXT: Dark Horse Workers Unionize: The Letter That Tells You Everything About What Embracer Did to This Company

Dark Horse Media staff announced today the formation of Dark Horse Workers United, affiliated with Communications Workers of America Local 7901. Fifty-nine eligible employees signed a letter sent to interim CEO Jay Komas requesting voluntary union recognition by June 3, 2026. If Komas does not voluntarily recognize the union, Dark Horse Workers United will petition the National Labor Relations Board for an election.

The full press release reads:

Subscribe now

“MILWAUKIE, Ore. — Today, a supermajority of staff at local comic book publisher Dark Horse Media, including associated comics retailer Things From Another World, announced their intent to unionize with Communications Workers of America (CWA), Local 7901. Dark Horse Workers United sent a letter to interim CEO Jay Komas requesting that he voluntarily recognize the union by June 3rd. Absent voluntary recognition, Dark Horse Workers United will petition the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for an election.

In a show of solidarity, 59 eligible employees signed onto the letter, which explained the staff’s motivations for forming Dark Horse Workers United. Among these is a desire for equitable pay, workplace democracy, and a continued commitment to creator-owned comics.

‘We, the workers of Dark Horse Media, have come together to form one union, Dark Horse Workers United (DHWU), with our parent union, the Communications Workers of America (CWA). In solidarity we stand together to contend for our rights as workers, vote as a democratic body, and improve our material conditions.’

Founded by Mike Richardson in 1986, Dark Horse has remained one of the world’s premier comic book publishers for 40 years. The company has earned a massive fanbase publishing creator-owned titles (Hellboy, Umbrella Academy), licensed books (Star Wars, Aliens) and manga (Berserk, Trigun). Dark Horse was purchased by Vanguard Visionary Group in 2018, and then by Embracer Group in 2022.

On March 4, 2026, it was announced that Richardson was no longer with the company. In their letter to interim CEO Jay Komas, Dark Horse staff expressed their desire to improve conditions for workers and maintain Richardson’s legacy of publishing creator-owned comics.

‘The looming uncertainty from recent layoffs, wage/hiring freeze, change in leadership power, emergence of artificial intelligence, and return-to-office policies (despite their economic impact on employees) have fueled us to organize and collectively address our concerns. These are just a few examples of why we are seeking a democratic workplace.’

Meg Ward, President of CWA Local 7901, said: ‘CWA Local 7901 is proud to support the staff behind the beloved comic book publisher, Dark Horse. Dark Horse Workers United was formed because of the love Dark Horse employees have for their work, their colleagues, and the comic book industry. DHWU wants to see the company be a leader well into the future. We look forward to working collaboratively with Dark Horse leadership.’

Dark Horse Workers United looks forward to joining their fellow unionized workers at Image Comics and Seven Seas Publishing in bringing the labor movement to the comics industry, ensuring that comics publishers continue to thrive.”

The letter’s most important sentence is buried in the middle: “The looming uncertainty from recent layoffs, wage/hiring freeze, change in leadership power, emergence of artificial intelligence, and return-to-office policies have fueled us to organize.”

That sentence describes what Embracer did to Dark Horse after acquiring it for approximately $30 million in 2022. The Swedish gaming conglomerate that bought Dark Horse as part of an aggressive acquisition spree with over 20 companies in a single year, valued at over $1 billion, before they ran into catastrophic financial trouble in May 2023 when a planned $2 billion investment from Saudi-owned Savvy Games Group collapsed. Embracer announced a comprehensive restructuring including layoffs and studio closures, spinning the company into three separate entities: Asmodee Group, Coffee Stain & Friends, and Middle-earth Enterprises & Friends. Dark Horse landed in the Middle-earth Enterprises division.

Mike Richardson had assured staff in 2023 that Dark Horse was self-funded and insulated from the Embracer turmoil. That assurance did not survive contact with February 2025, when Dark Horse confirmed sweeping layoffs of approximately twenty staff members, citing “increasing overhead, changing market conditions, and external economic factors.” The cuts came after new demands from Embracer, per Bleeding Cool’s reporting at the time.

On March 4, 2026, Richardson himself was removed from the company he founded forty years earlier. No successor has been announced. Jay Komas holds the interim CEO title. The employees who built the publisher’s editorial reputation under Richardson are now organizing to protect the conditions that remain.

Then there was the incident where three physical store locations Richardson opened in the 1980s, which funded the original launch of Dark Horse Comics, closing by September 2026. The stores are going. The founder is gone. The staff is now asking a corporate interim CEO to recognize a union before they petition the NLRB.

The union announcement names Image Comics and Seven Seas Publishing as fellow-unionized publishers. Image Comics workers won their NLRB union representation election under CWA Local 7901, becoming the first comic book workers to form a union in the United States. Dark Horse Workers United would be the second publisher to complete that process.

The comics industry in 2026 is not healthy. Diamond’s bankruptcy removed the single distribution infrastructure that had served the direct market for forty years. Hundreds of comic stores closed between 2020 and 2025. Dark Horse’s retail chain is shutting down. Its founder was fired on the company’s 40th anniversary. Its staff is unionizing against a Swedish gaming conglomerate’s interim CEO, citing wage freezes, AI concerns, and layoffs.

The letter from Dark Horse Workers United explicitly invokes Richardson’s legacy of creator-owned comics as part of what they are trying to preserve. The employees understand what Embracer is. They watched it happen in real time. The union is their answer to a corporate owner that bought an institution, stripped its management, froze wages, and handed it to an interim CEO while the founder’s retail stores were shuttered.

What do you think Dark Horse Workers United’s chances of voluntary recognition are before the NLRB deadline? Let us know in the comments.

Subscribe now

450 pages of classic superhero storytelling that puts character first. The Flying Sparks Omnibus collects the complete saga of Meta-Girl — the kind of cape comic the mainstream forgot how to make. Sign up to get your copy.

NEXT: Geoff Johns Will Buy Back Unsold Copies of His New Comic, And It Reveals Everything About Ghost Machine’s Model

Things From Another World is closing. Dark Horse announced yesterday that its two Oregon retail locations in Milwaukie and Beaverton will shut on June 30, 2026, with the California store at Universal CityWalk following on September 30. The e-commerce site, TFAW.com, went dark in April 2025 after 25 years of operation.

Subscribe now

The closure is not a minor footnote. Mike Richardson opened his first store, Pegasus Fantasy Books, as a 400-square-foot shop in Bend, Oregon in 1980. That store became Things From Another World, which became a chain of eleven locations at its peak, and the revenue from that chain funded the launch of Dark Horse Comics in 1986. Dark Horse became the third-largest comics publisher in the United States — the home of Hellboy, Sin City, the Alien and Predator licenses, Star Wars comics during their pre-Marvel era, and decades of creator-owned work that could not find a home at the Big Two. The store that built the publisher is now gone.

Richardson was fired from Dark Horse in March 2026 by new owners Embracer Group, on the eve of the company’s 40th anniversary. Dark Horse frames the TFAW closure as part of modernizing operations and building a more connected organization under Fellowship Entertainment. In plain language: the corporate owners who replaced the founder decided the retail chain he built was not worth keeping.

The closure lands inside a direct market that has been shedding retail locations for years without admitting the trajectory. Between 2020 and 2023, hundreds of comic stores across North America closed, unable to survive the combination of pandemic pressures, rising costs, and shrinking customer bases. Diamond Comic Distributors, the industry’s sole distributor for decades, filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January 2025 after years of cutbacks and the loss of its relationships with Marvel and DC. The distribution infrastructure that moved comics from publishers to shops for forty years collapsed inside twelve months.

The retail closures kept coming in 2025. Destiny City Comics in Tacoma, Washington closed when its rent increased beyond what the shop could sustain. Bleeding Cool tracked a single month in early 2025 where twelve stores closed across the country while seven opened — a net loss that describes an industry contracting faster than it can regenerate.

The sales picture tells the same story from a different angle. The direct market had one bright spot in 2025 and one in 2026: the DC Absolute line, led almost entirely by Absolute Batman. Industry analyst SKTCHD reported going into 2026 that Absolute Batman is “far and away the leader, with its in-store sales reaching new heights with each issue and its secondary market exploding to honestly preposterous levels,” while noting that the other Absolute titles — Wonder Woman, Superman, Martian Manhunter — were not replicating the same momentum. One book is carrying the visible health of an entire publishing line. The question SKTCHD posed for 2026 was whether the Absolute line’s new readers were discovering other comics on the shelves, and the honest answer, as of mid-2026, is that it is happening slowly.

Outside of Absolute Batman and select Energon Universe titles from Skybound, the direct market is not a growth story. Marvel’s market share fell from 39% to 29.4% in two years. DC’s recovery is real but concentrated in a handful of titles. The mid-list — the books that fill out shop orders and keep retailers from gambling everything on one or two titles per month — is thin. When a shop owner in Tacoma says rent has increased beyond what comics revenue can cover, the implicit admission is that the book portion of the business cannot carry the fixed costs that comics retail requires.

The TFAW closure fits the pattern. The Universal CityWalk location was one of the highest-profile comic stores in the country as a publisher-owned shop in one of Los Angeles’ busiest tourist corridors. If that location cannot justify staying open, the economics of publisher-owned retail in the current market are not defensible regardless of foot traffic.

Embracer Group’s statement frames the closure as forward-looking restructuring. What it describes is a company that bought Dark Horse, fired its founder, and is now disposing of the parts of the business it does not want while rebranding everything under Fellowship Entertainment’s licensing apparatus. The stores that once funded the publisher’s existence are being treated as legacy overhead.

Mike Richardson built a comic store chain, used the profits to launch a publisher, ran that publisher for forty years, and was fired by corporate owners on its anniversary. The stores he started are closing six months later. This is the full arc of what happens when independent publishing infrastructure gets absorbed by a corporate entity that views the creative history as an asset to be monetized and the physical community infrastructure as a liability to be shed.

The direct market’s problems are structural, not cyclical. Absolute Batman is a genuine phenomenon. It cannot save every shop that cannot make rent when the rest of the rack is not moving product consistently. The TFAW closure is the most historically significant retail casualty the direct market has seen in years. The industry will not acknowledge what it means.

What does the comics retail landscape look like in five years if the current trajectory continues? Let us know in the comments.

Subscribe now

450 pages of classic superhero storytelling that puts character first. The Flying Sparks Omnibus collects the complete saga of Meta-Girl — the kind of cape comic the mainstream forgot how to make. Sign up to get your copy.

NEXT: Geoff Johns Will Buy Back Unsold Copies of His New Comic, And It Reveals Everything About Ghost Machine’s Model

Geoff Johns announced this week that he will personally buy back any unsold copies of The Trillion Dollar Kid #1 from retailers who cannot move them. The offer applies to Ghost Machine’s new series, which Johns co-writes with Brad Meltzer, with art by Gene Ha. The announcement landed on Bleeding Cool today and is circulating through the direct market.

Subscribe now

The buyback offer is unusual in the corporate comics context. Publishers do not make these guarantees. Writers do not absorb retail risk on their own books. Johns is doing it because Ghost Machine operates as a creator-owned collective, where the people making the books have a direct financial stake in what moves and what does not.

Ghost Machine broke into the top 30 best-selling comics of 2024. Rook: Exodus #1 and Redcoat #1 both cracked the annual chart, making Ghost Machine one of the few Image lines outside of Kirkman’s Skybound imprint to achieve that kind of retail penetration in its launch year.

That performance did not happen by accident. Johns assembled the collective in late 2023 by pulling marquee talent out of the DC infrastructure: Gary Frank, Bryan Hitch, Jason Fabok, Peter Tomasi, Ivan Reis, Francis Manapul, and Brad Meltzer all joined, with Reis formally announced at CCXP alongside Johns. These are artists and writers who spent their peak years building the DC house — the people behind Blackest Night, Infinite Crisis, Green Lantern: Rebirth, and the Geoff Johns era that defined DC’s publishing line from roughly 2004 to 2018. They left together, built their own shared universe under Image, and launched it with a 64-page anthology in January 2024.

The Ghost Machine universe currently runs four shared lines: The Unnamed, a genre-hero anthology including Geiger, Junkyard Joe, and Redcoat; Rook: Exodus, a far-future science fiction epic; The Rocketfellers, a time-displaced family adventure series; and Hyde Street, a horror universe written by Johns with art by Reis. A Geiger television series is in development at Paramount TV with director Justin Simien attached. The line is expanding rather than contracting.

The Trillion Dollar Kid is the newest entry, a standalone title outside the four existing universes. The buyback offer on issue one reflects Johns’ understanding of how independent comics retail works. A new series in a crowded market asks retailers to gamble on first-issue orders without the safety net of a known franchise. Johns is removing the risk on the retailer’s side. The message to shops is direct: order what you think you can sell, and if you are wrong, you will not lose money on it.

Whether the series holds beyond its first issue will depend on the book itself, not the buyback policy. But the offer is a signal of how Ghost Machine operates relative to Marvel and Disney, where the executive who called AI “pretty fun to use” is now running editorial while the editors who knew the books are being walked out the door. Ghost Machine’s founders left corporate publishing, took their talent with them, and built something they own. Johns is now backing that ownership with his personal finances.

The direct market needs more of this and fewer of Marvel’s blind bag speculation schemes.

What do you think of Ghost Machine’s output so far, and are you picking up The Trillion Dollar Kid? Let us know in the comments.

Subscribe now

450 pages of classic superhero storytelling that puts character first. The Flying Sparks Omnibus collects the complete saga of Meta-Girl — the kind of cape comic the mainstream forgot how to make. Sign up to get your copy.

NEXT: Kickstarter Reversed Its Content Policy, But Stripe Still Controls the Money

Last week Kickstarter began suspending funded campaigns mid-run under new mature content guidelines, including one that had already raised $10,592 from 198 backers, because Stripe's payment processing rules conflicted with content Kickstarter had already reviewed and approved. Yesterday Kickstarter COO Sean Leow issued a public apology and reversed the policy.

Subscribe now

Leow wrote: “The decision we made was an abandonment of the core counterculture, f*ck the establishment spirit of Kickstarter, and it left our community vulnerable.” He confirmed outright that the botched guidelines “were primarily driven by requirements from our payments processor, Stripe.”

The old policy is reinstated. Under the restored rules, pornography and illegal content remain prohibited, as they should be. The previous guidelines were less specific and less restrictive than last week’s overreach, which had banned censored imagery, lingerie, mature language, and content that Kickstarter itself had already reviewed and approved.

Pornographic content does not belong on a general trade platform. Kickstarter functions like an Amazon for creative projects, a storefront that anyone at any age can browse, funded by creators who need it to reach the widest possible audience. Keeping explicit sexual content off that general storefront is a reasonable baseline. The problem last week was not that Kickstarter has content standards. The problem was that a payment processor with no creative mandate and no relationship to the independent comics community unilaterally suspended funded campaigns based on terms it had not communicated clearly in advance. Creators who built businesses on the platform, planned print runs, and made commitments to backers had the ground cut from under them mid-campaign by Stripe’s compliance team.

The reversal does not fix that problem. Kickstarter acknowledged in the apology that Stripe can still freeze campaigns under its own rules, and that the platform will advocate for affected creators but cannot guarantee protection from Stripe’s enforcement. The suspended campaigns that were shut down last week — including Luis Torres’s Pyro Vixen campaign with over $10,000 already raised — have not been made whole. The underlying architecture has not changed. Kickstarter COO Leow acknowledged directly: “Stripe operates under its own legal and compliance requirements separate from Kickstarter’s own rules. And even Stripe’s rules are dictated by a larger system shaped by financial institutions that govern how money moves globally.”

That is an honest admission that Kickstarter does not control its own platform’s enforcement. The money runs through Stripe. Stripe answers to card networks and banks. Kickstarter answers to all of them, regardless of what its own community guidelines say.

The practical outcome for independent comics creators is unchanged. A campaign that Kickstarter approves can still be suspended by Stripe at any point. Creators who run mature content campaigns, not pornographic content, but the kind of fantasy art, horror covers, and genre fiction that has built the independent comics market over the last decade, remain exposed. The apology is a PR document. The infrastructure is still Stripe’s.

Pat Shand of Space Between Entertainment, whom FP quoted last week, was right when he said the community needs an age gate, not a blanket ban. A responsible platform separates adult content behind a verification wall rather than banning it from a general storefront where children can browse freely. Kickstarter has reinstated its old rules, which is better than last week. What it has not done is build the structural solution that actually protects creators and audiences at the same time.

The creators who got suspended mid-campaign are still owed answers. The platform that let it happen is still dependent on a payment processor that can do it again.

What would a genuinely creator-protective crowdfunding platform look like to you? Let us know in the comments.

Subscribe now

450 pages of classic superhero storytelling that puts character first. The Flying Sparks Omnibus collects the complete saga of Meta-Girl — the kind of cape comic the mainstream forgot how to make. Sign up to get your copy.

NEXT: Dan Buckley Is Out And Marvel Just Handed Its Comics Division to a TV Executive

DC Comics keeps returning to Dick Grayson’s origin, and that is not a complaint. Mark Waid and Chris Samnee’s Batman and Robin: Year One ran twelve issues from October 2024 through October 2025, now collected in a single volume. The Dynamic Duo has been rebooted, revisited, and reimagined more times than any publisher could count, so the question isn’t whether this story needed to exist. The question is whether Waid and Samnee did it justice.

Subscribe now

The setup is familiar: Bruce Wayne takes in orphaned Dick Grayson, fresh off the loss of his parents at the circus, navigating the tension between a grief-stricken child and a driven, demanding guardian who has never parented anyone in his life. On the criminal side, a new mob figure called the General is dismantling Gotham’s organized crime families, with Two-Face and Clayface woven through the chaos. The mafia framework recalls Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s The Long Halloween, and Waid doesn’t pretend otherwise. He plays in the same register: Gotham as a city of competing criminal power structures, Batman threading through them as both detective and force.

The twists with Two-Face and Clayface are solid, and the mystery sustains itself across twelve issues without overstaying its welcome. Where the story loses a step is in the resolution. Like a lot of mafia-arc comics, it resets to baseline. The General’s threat collapses tidily, the status quo reasserts itself, and the book closes without leaving a scar on Gotham or its characters. That’s a feature of the genre more than a failing specific to Waid, but it’s worth noting for readers expecting a permanent shake-up.

What carries the book is the Dick Grayson subplot. The child welfare angle, where a social worker intervenes and Dick briefly ends up in foster care before Bruce legally secures his guardianship, gives the story its best material. The dynamic between Dick’s instinct to throw himself into danger and Bruce’s measured effort to train that impulse into something disciplined tracks across all twelve issues. That’s real character development, delivered slowly enough to feel earned. Dick Grayson’s arc from reckless grief to controlled partner reads as one of the better training narratives the character has received in decades.

The book also does what DC has mostly failed to do with Dick Grayson: it lingers in this time period instead of sprinting past it. Modern comics rushed him into adulthood, into Nightwing, into team leadership, until the boy wonder years became a footnote. Year One treats that window as the story’s natural home. There’s a warmth here, a nostalgia that isn’t saccharine, that comes from watching two damaged people figure out how to be family to each other. That’s what a “Year One” format should deliver, and Waid gets it right.

Then there’s Samnee. Chris Samnee is working at Alex Toth levels of draftsmanship, and this is some of his finest work to date. His line economy is absolute, but the backgrounds in Gotham, the shadows on the architecture, the blocking in the action sequences, add layers that his Daredevil run with Waid didn’t always have room for. The difference here is colorist Matheus Lopes. Samnee’s prior work leaned into flat, graphic color schemes. Lopes builds depth into the shadows, shifts the palette scene by scene, and amplifies the noir atmosphere without muddying Samnee’s clarity. The combination is the best Samnee has looked on a page.

One thing conspicuously absent from this book is anything that doesn’t belong in a Batman and Robin story. No retrofitted agendas, no subversive reframings of who Bruce or Dick are as characters. Just a clean, confident superhero comic doing what the form does best. That sounds like a low bar in 2025, but given what DC and Marvel have been publishing, it’s actually a relief.

Batman and Robin: Year One isn’t a comic that will get referenced in ten years the way The Long Halloween or the original Batman: Year One gets referenced. It won’t redefine the character or change how readers think about the Dynamic Duo. What it does is deliver a well-constructed, genuinely fun Batman story with art that earns its place among the best the character has seen. That’s enough.

8/10

Is there still room for classic Batman-and-Robin stories in modern comics, or has the market moved past them? Let us know in the comments.

Subscribe now

450 pages of classic superhero storytelling that puts character first. The Flying Sparks Omnibus collects the complete saga of Meta-Girl — the kind of cape comic the mainstream forgot how to make. Sign up to get your copy.

NEXT: Dan Buckley Is Out And Marvel Just Handed Its Comics Division to a TV Executive

Marvel Comics published its biggest leadership shakeup in decades today. Dan Buckley, who has run Marvel’s publishing operation in various capacities since 2001, is out. Brad Winderbaum, Marvel’s head of television and animation, is taking over as head of Marvel television, animation, comics and franchise. David Abdo, most recently general manager of Disney Music Group, arrives as Marvel’s new general manager of comics and franchise.

Neither Winderbaum nor Abdo has a comics publishing background.

Buckley will stay through mid-2027 to support the transition. Kevin Feige, who added publishing to his portfolio in 2023, put his name on the announcement. “Brad’s exceptional creative leadership and David’s deep experience in operations and digital innovation will be a powerful pairing as we begin building out the next 90 years of Marvel’s comic book legacy,” Feige said.

The announcement arrived the same week Marvel’s Eisner Award nominations were shut out by DC, which dominated the industry’s most prestigious honors following its dominant Q1 2026 market share. DC now holds 34.7% of the direct market. Marvel holds 29.4%, down from 39% eighteen months ago. It is the first time in this century that Marvel has lost its direct market position to DC. The restructuring is Disney’s response to that collapse.

Buckley’s record at Marvel is complicated. He oversaw the publisher during its peak period of cultural dominance, shepherding the direct market through the MCU’s rise when comic sales benefited from film franchise heat. Under his tenure Marvel ran events like Civil War, Secret Invasion, and the Krakoa X-Men era that generated genuine reader excitement and short-term sales spikes. He also presided over the rotating creative team strategy, the endless miniseries model, the price increases, and the ideological content decisions that drove the publisher’s core audience away in measurable numbers. Rob Liefeld called for his removal publicly over a year ago. David Gabriel, Marvel’s SVP of Sales, was let go in April. Now Buckley follows.

Winderbaum’s television track record is the reason Feige picked him. He has been with Marvel since Iron Man and served as executive producer on Hawkeye, Loki Season 2, Agatha: All Along, Daredevil: Born Again, X-Men ‘97, and Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man. His mandate is to bring the comics line into closer alignment with Marvel’s television and streaming output. That integration has been Feige’s stated goal since he took publishing oversight in 2023.

The strategic logic is legible. Marvel’s comics have functioned as an independent creative operation largely disconnected from what the MCU is doing on screen. Feige wants the publishing line to serve franchise development, introduce characters before they appear in film, and create a coherent pipeline between the page and the screen. Winderbaum, who has operated that pipeline from the television side for fifteen years, is the tool for that job.

The risk is equally legible. The comics direct market is not the MCU. It is a specialty retail ecosystem with a specific, historically loyal audience that has been abandoning Marvel in measurable numbers for two years. That audience’s grievances are not about lack of franchise integration. They are about price hikes, cancelled miniseries, ideological content, and the loss of sustained creative runs that build reader attachment. Bringing in a television executive and a Disney Music Group operator to fix a publishing problem assumes the problem is strategic rather than creative. The readers leaving Marvel are not leaving because the comics don’t connect to the films. They are leaving because the comics stopped being worth buying on their own terms.

C.B. Cebulski, Marvel’s editor-in-chief since 2017, will now report to Winderbaum. His position in the new structure is the one to watch. Cebulski has been the public face of Marvel’s creative output through its entire market share collapse. Whether Winderbaum empowers him to correct the publishing strategy or overrides him in favor of franchise integration tells you what the new leadership actually intends.

Abdo’s presence is the most unusual element. The general manager of Disney Music Group has no documented relationship with comics publishing or direct market retail. His mandate appears to be operational and digital, which suggests Marvel is looking at its publishing business as a digital media operation rather than a print-first specialty retailer. That reframe has real consequences for the comic shops that have carried Marvel’s physical product for decades.

Rob Liefeld predicted this restructuring publicly before it happened. He called for Buckley and Gabriel to be removed, both are now gone, and he is currently publishing creator-owned work at Image while Marvel installs television executives in the chairs those men vacated.

Not everyone is accepting the transition framing at face value. Kneon at Clownfish TV put it plainly: “There’s no way Buckley left willingly. They shitcanned him and bought out his contract. And he’s being forced to train his replacements and say nice things if he wants that parachute. IMHO.”

The structure of the announcement supports that reading. Buckley staying through mid-2027 to “support the transition” is the standard corporate language for a forced exit with a payout contingent on cooperation. His statement through Feige’s announcement was warm and institutional. Nobody who leaves a job they built over two decades on their own terms gets described as staying to “support the transition.”

The next 90 years of Marvel’s comic book legacy that Feige referenced in his statement begins with DC holding the top market share position for the first time this century. Winderbaum and Abdo inherit a publisher that has lost nearly 10 points of market share in eighteen months and whose most vocal critics were right about the people they said needed to go.

Does replacing Buckley with a TV executive fix what’s broken at Marvel Comics, or does it confirm that Disney sees publishing as franchise infrastructure rather than an art form worth saving?

Subscribe now

450 pages of classic superhero storytelling that puts character first. The Flying Sparks Omnibus collects the complete saga of Meta-Girl — the kind of cape comic the mainstream forgot how to make. Sign up to get your copy.

NEXT: Daredevil Editor Reacts To Being Fired By Disney Marvel

On May 15, Devin Lewis posted his farewell from Marvel Comics after sixteen years with the company. He wrote it as a thread on X, in the voice of someone who had loved his job.

Subscribe now

“Not a trick! Not an imaginary tale! Just some bittersweet news to share: my final day as an Editor at Marvel Publishing has come and gone. I started as an Editorial Intern in 2010, and getting to play in the Marvel sandbox for 16 years was the honor of a lifetime.”

He continued: “In my time at Marvel, I’ve been lucky enough to work on some of the company’s biggest franchises, but, more importantly, with some of the industry’s biggest brains and hearts.”

And: “From Subterranea to the Blue Area of the Moon and everywhere in between, there is no limit to what the imaginations, keyboards, pencils, inkwells, and palettes of Marvel’s mightiest can concoct. Watching them work their magic across each and every page has been a dream come true.”

His closing line: “So while this chapter at The House of Ideas may have come to a close, I’ll still say with my whole heart: #MakeMineMarvel. On to the next adventure...!”

It is a gracious exit statement from someone who clearly believes in the company he worked for. The company demonstrated less belief in him.

Lewis began at Marvel as an intern in 2010, was promoted to Editor in 2017, and spent his tenure on Daredevil, Punisher, Moon Knight, Spirits of Violence, and 1776, and was the editor who commissioned Ty Templeton’s Daily Bugle strips, a ten-year run of Marvel-themed humor features now canceled alongside his departure. He was cut alongside SVP David Gabriel (20-plus years at Marvel), editors Darren Shan and Lauren Bisom, and communications director Timothy Cheng, as part of the Disney reorganization that has seen over a thousand total employees fired. Between Lewis and Shan alone, approximately ten current Marvel series were left editorially uncovered simultaneously.

The 300,000-copy Daredevil #1 number being cited as evidence of his success requires more scrutiny than it is receiving. The launch was packaged inside Marvel’s new “True Believers Blind Bags” program, which are sealed bags containing a random variant cover from a list of 17 variants, including blind-bag exclusive covers by Daniel Warren Johnson and Dan Panosian available nowhere else, plus ultra-rare hand-drawn sketch covers by undisclosed contributors. The 300,000 figure includes speculators buying multiple blind bags chasing rare covers, not readers buying a comic because they wanted to read it. Stephanie Phillips’ previous Marvel work did not move those numbers. The character, the #1 designation, and the blind bag speculation program did. The numbers will not hold. They never do when they are built on variant cover engineering rather than reader demand for the story.

Phillips is a writer whose work consistently draws mixed-to-negative audience response on character-driven grounds. Reader reviews of Planet She-Hulk described the book as ideologically driven, stripping the character of her established femininity and personality to produce a harder, angrier version audiences did not ask for. One reviewer put it plainly: Phillips emphasizes feminist themes to the detriment of the characters she writes, and audiences have noticed. Putting her on the flagship Daredevil launch in 2026 is a choice that reflects Lewis’s editorial priorities as much as it does anything else. A Daredevil run built around blind bag speculation and a writer with a thin track record on major characters is not a publishing success. It is a sales trick attached to a franchise name.

Lewis’s record across the street-level Marvel line is not uniformly bad. His tenure included the period when Chip Kidd’s Daredevil and subsequent runs moved the character through interesting territory. But the line he built in his final years leaned on variant cover programs, Red Band mature content labels, and a rotating cast of writers chosen for cultural identity rather than commercial track records. Spirits of Violence, Werewolf by Night: Blood Moon Rise, Blade: Red Band, these are books built around an aesthetic rather than a market. They sold to a core audience and no wider. Moon Knight: Fist of Khonshu added a fourth ongoing Moon Knight title to a line that already struggled to sustain one. The Daredevil relaunch handed to Phillips, with its sixteen variant covers and blind bag gimmick, is the logical endpoint of that approach: maximum short-term sales engineering, minimum long-term reader investment.

Marvel’s not had a lot of consistent editorial direction in recent years so it remains to be seen whether this is a good move.

What does Marvel’s publishing operation look like in five years under this management? Let us know in the comments.

Subscribe now

450 pages of classic superhero storytelling that puts character first. The Flying Sparks Omnibus collects the complete saga of Meta-Girl — the kind of cape comic the mainstream forgot how to make. Sign up to get your copy.

NEXT: WotC Is Becoming A Brand Licensor And The Justice League TTRPG Is The Latest Proof

IDW Publishing announced Star Trek: Zero Point in February as the companion series to its new flagship Star Trek ongoing launching in September. Zero Point arrives in October, written by Charlie Jane Anders, following lesbian Captain Raffi Musiker as she commands a starship tasked with preventing tomorrow’s disasters, guided by a powerful artificial intelligence wearing the face of a familiar ally that may know too much and understand too little about hope. No artist has been announced.

Subscribe now

Anders was unambiguous about his intended audience. “I’m determined to write a Trek comic that newbies can read with no homework required: there are no easter eggs, no callbacks to deep lore. Anyone who loves Becky Chambers or Martha Wells ought to be able to pick up this comic and get a fun science fiction story about artificial consciousness and exoplanets.”

That is a Star Trek comic explicitly designed to avoid being a Star Trek comic. The franchise turns 60 this year. IDW’s response to that milestone is a companion series built for readers who have never watched a single episode and don’t plan to start.

The hire of Anders follows a visible pattern in how IDW is staffing its Star Trek line in 2026. We reported on the Stargazers WEBTOON series, an officially canon “Boys Love” romance set in the Deep Space Nine era, written by Sam Maggs, an openly lesbian activist whose public statements describe a career dedicated to LGBTQ representation as a primary creative goal.

Anders occupies the same lane. In his own words: “I really had a fire lit under me again, and a feeling that I have to do what I can with whatever platform I have to help trans people be more visible and to help people to see the humanity of trans people.” That statement came after Donald Trump’s 2016 election win, and he described the political moment as the catalyst for foregrounding trans visibility in his work. He followed it by writing “Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue,” a short story about a trans woman undergoing brutal medical conversion therapy, which she described as “very explicitly my kind of response, as a trans person, to the Trump era.”

Anders co-created Escapade, a transgender mutant superhero, for Marvel’s Voices: Pride anthology in 2022, and co-organized the Cross-Gender Caravan, a national transgender and genderqueer author tour. His writing memoir is titled Never Say You Can’t Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times By Making Up Stories. His podcast with Annalee Newitz, Our Opinions Are Correct, has won multiple Hugo Awards. His public identity as a writer is inseparable from his transgender activism. He has said directly that “my experiences as a trans person always come back in my writing,” describing the core subject of her work as “the desperate struggle to claim your identity, an identity that people either don’t understand or are hostile to.”

None of that is hidden. IDW knew exactly who they were hiring, and this is what Heather Antos has done with the Star Trek brand consistently.

The full picture of IDW’s Star Trek 60th anniversary lineup tells the story plainly. In May: Star Trek: Celebrations 2026, an LGBTQIA+ anthology featuring the franchise’s queer characters, produced by an all-LGBTQIA+ creative lineup, described in IDW’s own promotional copy as “exemplifying Gene Roddenberry’s mission for us all to one day celebrate infinite diversity in infinite combinations.” In September: the flagship Star Trek #1 with lesbian Seven of Nine continuing from Picard. In October: Zero Point with Raffi Musiker, written by a transgender activist who has stated her platform exists to advance transgender visibility and who has explicitly described her fiction as a response to political opposition to trans identity. Running alongside all of this on WEBTOON: the Boys Love DS9 romance written by a lesbian activist.

Raffi Musiker is not an accident of casting in this lineup. She is Picard’s most overtly politicized recurring character, a character whose arc across the Picard series centered heavily on substance abuse recovery, broken family relationships, and a same-sex relationship with Seven of Nine. Handing her a solo series to a writer whose stated creative mission is transgender visibility is a deliberate editorial decision, not an incidental one.

What IDW is not building is a Star Trek line for the existing Star Trek audience. The fans who watched The Original Series, The Next Generation, and Deep Space Nine, who built the fanbase that makes the Trek brand valuable enough to put on a comic cover, are not the target. The target is a reader who, in Anders’ own description, loves Becky Chambers and Martha Wells and wants a story with no prior homework required.

Paramount cannot get Starfleet Academy renewed past Season 2. The DS9 WEBTOON romance launched with what appears to be AI-art visuals on a mobile platform. The Star Trek: Legacy series fans spent years demanding was handed to IDW as a monthly comic. And the companion series to that comic is written by someone who has publicly described her fiction as political activism.

The brand is being used. The audience it was built on is not being served.

What would it take for you to trust a Star Trek comic line with your time and money at this point? Let us know in the comments.

Subscribe now

If the golden age of Trek and Babylon 5 left a hole in your sci-fi diet, The Stars Entwined fills it — interstellar espionage between two civilizations on the brink of war. Read The Stars Entwined on Amazon!

NEXT: Ncuti Gatwa Admits Nobody Watched Doctor Who And He Doesn’t Understand His Own Ending

Paramount and WEBTOON announced two new “officially canon” Star Trek webcomic series. The first, Stargazers, launches May 17 and is set aboard Deep Space 9. The second, Recollection, arrives this summer. Both are described as canon additions to the Trek universe.

Read more

Marvel’s Midnight Universe Is a DC Absolute Clone That Won’t Last

Marvel Comics announced its Midnight Universe publishing line this week, launching in August 2026 with three titles: Midnight X-Men by Jonathan Hickman and Matteo Della Fonte, Midnight Fantastic Four by Benjamin Percy and Kev Walker, and Midnight Spider-Man by Phillip Kennedy Johnson and Scie Tronc. The line bills itself as a horror reimagining of Marvel’s biggest properties, with X-Men turned into vampires, the Fantastic Four origin twisted into cosmic body horror, and Peter Parker transformed into a spider hybrid by Oscorp.

The pitch is obvious. DC’s Absolute line dragged DC from a 17.8% market share in Q2 2024 to 34.7% in Q1 2026 while Marvel fell from 39% to 29.4% in the same window. Marvel lost the top spot in the direct market for the first time in years, and the Midnight Universe is the corporate response.

The vampire angle on Midnight X-Men also puts Marvel in the position of copying independent publishers. Arkhaven Comics, founded by Vox Day, has been running Midnight’s War, a vampire comic co-written by Chuck Dixon, since 2020. The series launched on Webtoon, crowdfunded a hardcover through Kickstarter in 2023, and published its collected Volume 1 through Arkhaven in 2024. The concept, the word “Midnight” in the title, and the vampire-driven premise all precede Marvel’s announcement by years. Marvel’s marketing and editorial team either didn’t seem to care about the blatant copying.

Editor-in-chief C.B. Cebulski invoked the New Universe and the Ultimate Universe in his announcement, framing Midnight as a continuation of that tradition. The comparison does not flatter it. The New Universe launched in 1986 and collapsed by 1989. The original Ultimate Universe ran fifteen years before being folded into the main line. The second Ultimate Universe launched in 2023, already shed titles, and is functionally over. Marvel’s “new universe” track record is a consistent pattern of splashy announcements followed by quiet cancellations.

Hickman’s name on Midnight X-Men will bring some readers. His Krakoa run was the last time Marvel’s mutant books moved the needle. But the other two launch titles carry no equivalent pull, and a line lives or dies on its weakest books as much as its strongest. When issue three sales reports come in across all three titles, the picture will be clearer.

The structural problems are worse than the creative ones. DC’s Absolute line succeeded because it launched with a unified identity and Absolute Batman built genuine word-of-mouth from day one. Midnight staggers its three launch titles across three consecutive months: August, September, October. The initial press cycle expires before the line is even fully on shelves. By the time all three books exist simultaneously, the announcement will be six months old.

The quotes in Marvel’s press release read like a countdown clock. Johnson calling the line “history being made” and promising readers will “see things in these books that shock you” is the standard language for every Marvel new-universe launch before the sales data arrives. Percy announcing he can “lean into his worst instincts” on Fantastic Four describes an attitude, not a plan.

Marvel is chasing DC’s playbook eighteen months late and lifting a concept independent publishers already developed, with a staggered launch, on a line named after the time of day. The Midnight Universe will sell on name recognition in August, drop sharply by issue three, and face cancellation conversations by mid-2027.

What do you think: does the horror angle bring you in, or is this another corporate trend-chase that ends the same way they always do?

Subscribe now

450 pages of classic superhero storytelling that puts character first. The Flying Sparks Omnibus collects the complete saga of Meta-Girl — the kind of cape comic the mainstream forgot how to make. Sign up to get your copy.

NEXT: Scott Snyder Says the Comics Market Is “Scary” Whie The Industry Keeps Saying Everything Is Fine

Scott Snyder is the writer behind Absolute Batman, DC’s best-selling title in years. The book was pulling close to 200,000 orders per issue at its peak, and it was the only thing in the market that was working. He is also one of the DC Next Level advisors shaping the publisher’s creative direction for the next 18 months. When he says the market is in trouble, it is not an outsider’s complaint. It is a diagnosis from the person whose book is currently holding the ceiling up.

He said it in his Best Jacket Press Substack newsletter, talking about his role advising incoming DC Next Level writers:

Subscribe now

“I don’t know if it’s a byproduct of streaming or if it’s an era of comics that’s gone. Like eight or nine years ago, when there was really more of a predilection for these long, long runs where a story in a plot would go for a very, very long time.”

The thing keeping him up at night as an advisor is pacing. Readers are not investing in long stories the way they used to. Arc lengths are compressing. Writers pitching slow-burn narratives are being told the endings need to land earlier. Snyder is the one delivering that message because the sales data is making him.

He addressed the market’s broader condition directly in his January 2026 year-in-review newsletter: “This market is scary, but it’s thrilling.” His advice to creators: “You’ve got to look at the market and be like, ‘What’s my biggest swing right now? What’s my biggest tent book? What is the thing that I can do that says this hasn’t been done? It has to exist. It’s dangerous. It’s urgent.’”

That is not a man describing a healthy market, as much as DC Comics and the media have been saying comics are in great shape in the recent couple of years.

His prescription for survival is urgency: stories that feel like they have to be told right now, in comics, and nowhere else. “The key to finding modern sales success, whether it’s a DC pitch, whether it’s a creator-owned book, is that you’ve got to meet the market where it is. That awareness of the market is key going into this year for aspiring freighters.”

The industry’s official position does not match this. Publisher statements, trade press coverage, and PR cycles around major launches consistently describe a market in growth. The talking points emphasize new readership, expanded diversity of titles, manga crossover appeal, and the Absolute line’s sales performance as proof that comics are thriving. Snyder himself participates in this framing when the occasion calls for it, noting “a lot of things are overperforming and there’s a lot of new readership and a lot of excitement.”

What he is also saying, in the same breath, is that the conditions that produced decade-long creator runs are gone. That readers are not buying into slow builds. That the ending needs to be stronger because the creator can no longer count on the audience staying through the middle.

The data underneath the optimism tells the same story his private advice is telling. Fandom Pulse has covered the Marvel market share collapse across this year: from 39% in 2024 to 29.4% in Q1 2026. DC’s Absolute line is outperforming Marvel, but it is doing so in a market where the floor beneath it keeps dropping. Robert Kirkman notes that Absolute Batman is bringing new readers into comic shops and those readers leave with Image titles too. The halo effect is real. But the halo is hovering over an industry where titles outside the top sellers are getting cancelled faster than any point in recent memory.

The early cancellation pattern is visible in solicitation data. Books that would have run 24 issues eight years ago are being solicited for 12. Runs announced with ambitious multi-year visions are wrapping at issue six. Writers pitching to Snyder’s DC Next Level program are being told to write the ending earlier because reader attrition is faster. The compression is not editorial preference. It is market response.

Snyder is calling it scary and thrilling simultaneously. Those two words are not contradictory. They describe a market where the safe middle is gone, the top is performing, and everything below it is fighting for survival.

Is Scott Snyder’s honest assessment of the comics market something publishers should be saying publicly, or does the industry need the optimistic narrative to survive?

Subscribe now

450 pages of classic superhero storytelling that puts character first. The Flying Sparks Omnibus collects the complete saga of Meta-Girl — the kind of cape comic the mainstream forgot how to make. Sign up to get your copy.

NEXT: DC Artist Ram V Said Read the Pirated Comics, But Jimmy Palmiotti Said It Will Kill Independent Creators

Ram V, writer of DC’s Detective Comics, Swamp Thing, and The Rare Earth Collective, posted a thread on X this week about comics piracy that got 208,000 views and touched off one of the more honest conversations the industry has had about the subject in years.

Read more

450 pages of classic superhero storytelling that puts character first. The Flying Sparks Omnibus collects the complete saga of Meta-Girl — the kind of cape comic the mainstream forgot how to make. Sign up to get your copy.

ReadComicsOnline.to is down. It has been down for weeks. Users who try to access it get a dead page. The domain resolves to nothing.

For readers who depended on the site, the disappearance has been jarring in a way that goes beyond losing access to a free resource. ReadComicsOnline was not a site that hosted current releases for people who did not want to pay. It was the closest thing the English-reading world had to a comprehensive archive of comics history, including decades of out-of-print material that no publisher is currently selling, no digital storefront carries, and no library system has digitized. When it went down, that material went with it.

Subscribe now

Nobody knows exactly why. No official shutdown announcement has been published, and no publisher has claimed credit for an enforcement action. There hasn’t been a domain seizure notice. No operator statement has been posted. The site stopped working, and the silence around its disappearance is as complete as the disappearance itself.

On X, user @wrdjsn put it plainly: “unclear if Readcomiconline has been shut down or just broken but if it’s the former this is like the burning of the Library of Alexandria even if you wanted legal access to some things i don’t think you’d be able to find them except through there.”

The Library of Alexandria comparison is dramatic but not wrong in the specific way it applies here. The site hosted thousands of issues that exist nowhere else in accessible digital form. Bronze Age runs of titles that have never been collected in trade paperback. 1970s and 1980s series that sold poorly, were cancelled after a few issues, and have been out of print since before most current readers were born. Obscure publishers from the Direct Market era. Stories that document the history of the medium in ways that no currently available legal resource replicates.

The publishers who own the copyrights to most of this material are not selling it. Marvel and DC have made their most commercially valuable backlist available through Marvel Unlimited and DC Universe Infinite respectively, but neither platform approaches comprehensive coverage of either company’s history. Independent and now-defunct publishers have no digital presence at all. The material exists in long boxes at estate sales and in mylar bags at aging collectors’ homes. ReadComicsOnline put it somewhere a reader with a browser could reach it.

Reddit has made the topic difficult to discuss. Users across multiple subreddits have reported threads about the site’s disappearance being removed and accounts being warned for mentioning alternatives or asking what happened. The communities most likely to have practical information about where the archived material can now be found are the communities least able to discuss it openly on the platform most people use for these conversations.

The enforcement pattern around comics piracy sites is documented. In 2011, the FBI shut down HTMLComics.com, which had claimed over 100,000 issues and 1.6 million daily visitors. The shutdown followed a coordinated action involving Marvel, DC, and other publishers working with the Department of Justice. In 2025, the manga piracy site Comick shut down after its operator described making “fatal mistakes” that led to enforcement action. HiAnime, one of the largest anime streaming piracy operations, went offline in March 2026 after being added to the U.S. Trade Representative’s notorious markets list. The infrastructure around shutting down piracy sites has become more effective and more coordinated across the last decade.

What distinguishes ReadComicsOnline from those cases is the lack of any official record. HTMLComics generated court documents. Comick generated an operator statement. HiAnime generated a USTR notice. ReadComicsOnline generated nothing except a dead URL and Reddit thread removals.

Fandom Pulse does not advocate piracy. Publishers have legitimate copyright interests and the legal framework protecting them exists for reasons that apply to working creators. But the preservation problem is real and predates the enforcement conversation by decades. A significant portion of American comics history is not commercially available, not held in accessible institutional archives, and not being actively preserved by the companies that own the rights. The material that filled ReadComicsOnline’s servers existed in a gap that the legal market has never chosen to close.

That gap is still there. The site that lived in it is gone.

What should happen to out-of-print comics that publishers are not selling and have no plans to digitize?

Subscribe now

450 pages of classic superhero storytelling that puts character first. The Flying Sparks Omnibus collects the complete saga of Meta-Girl — the kind of cape comic the mainstream forgot how to make. Sign up to get your copy.

NEXT: The Complete Firefly Extended Universe: A Collector’s Guide for Browncoats Going Beyond the Show

Flying Sparks, the indie superhero series fifteen years in the making, is getting the omnibus treatment. The complete saga of Meta-Girl and Johnny Benvinutti is now live on IndieCrowdfund, collecting every issue into a single 450+ page volume packed with bonus material, much of it never published before.

The campaign is live now: https://indiecrowdfund.com/projects/jda/flying-sparks-omnibus

Subscribe now

What is Flying Sparks?

The premise is simple and it works: Chloe Anderson is a physics student who moonlights as the superhero Meta-Girl, using her mad scientist professor’s inventions to fight crime. Johnny Benvinutti comes from an Italian crime family and recently discovered he can shoot lightning from his hands. He runs his criminal operation out of a coffee shop front business.

They meet. They fall for each other. Neither one knows the other’s secret.

It’s Romeo and Juliet with capes and laser gauntlets, and unlike the big two publishers, the story actually goes somewhere. Characters grow. Relationships develop consequences. The romance intensifies as the stakes climb across the full run, building to a finale that has a big payoff.

P. Alexander, the Hugo Award finalist editor of Cirsova Magazine, called it the best superhero graphic novel of the last decade. That kind of praise from a guy who reads more indie genre fiction than most publishers tells you something about the quality on the page.

The Art Team

Jethro Morales illustrated the bulk of the series. Morales came to the project with professional credits on Dynamite Entertainment’s Dejah Thoris and Green Hornet, plus Vampirella and Army of Darkness. He has since gone on to work for Marvel Comics. His classical line work and clean panel layouts gave Flying Sparks a visual polish that most indie comics never touch. Close-ups land because Morales draws faces that actually act.

Elias Martins closed out the series, finishing the story’s final arc. Martins is now working with Del Arroz on multiple upcoming projects, including a new Terran Imperium comic and the Adventures of Baron Von Monocle tie-in graphic novel, The Steam Knight. Readers who pick up the omnibus will be seeing Martins’ earliest collaboration with Del Arroz before his work on those future titles hits shelves.

The Origin Story Behind the Comic

Flying Sparks didn’t start with a Kickstarter or a publishing deal. I began the project by pulling money out of my regular work paycheck each month to pay Morales for four finished pages. There was no one to sell to and no guarantee anyone would read it. I stockpiled pages for years, building the comic in the background because he cared about the story and these characters.

The whole thing was born out of frustration with Marvel and DC. When DC launched the New 52 and canceled Batgirl, retconning years of character development in the process, Del Arroz walked away. The big two do this constantly. They undo storylines and reset continuity whenever it suits them. Character arcs that readers invested in for years get thrown out for the next relaunch. Nothing sticks. Nothing grows.

Flying Sparks was built to be the opposite. One writer, one vision, characters who become more heroic as the series progresses. The personal drama drives the superhero action rather than getting discarded for the next crossover event.

The Omnibus and the Leatherbound

The omnibus collects the entire run in one volume, 450+ pages with bonus content that has never been available before. For collectors, the campaign also features a leatherbound edition. Our previous leatherbound comic release for Ayla Rin set a high bar for production quality, and this one aims to surpass it. If you want the finest physical edition of the complete Flying Sparks saga, the leatherbound is the tier to look at.

The campaign is running on IndieCrowdfund, a free speech indie crowdfunding platform with strong fulfillment tools. Head to the campaign page for full tier details and pricing.

Back the Flying Sparks Omnibus here: https://indiecrowdfund.com/projects/jda/flying-sparks-omnibus

What do you think of the Flying Sparks omnibus? Are you backing it? Let us know.

Subscribe now