Comic Industry Sources Leak IDW Publishing Upcoming Loss of Star Trek License And Potential Death Of Two Comic Companies Due To Heather Antos Influence

According to my latest sources, the comic industry's major woes are continuing. Smaller companies are taking the brunt of the impact on sales declining, as a weak Marvel and DC Comics means people come into the shops less to check out new books in general. Two troubling spots in the industry are, in particular, IDW Publishing and Valiant Comics.

I’ll cover Valiant first, as I’m a longtime fan and this is a little less shocking news compared to what I’m hearing coming out of IDW. Valiant is a company started in 1992 by Jim Shooter and others, creating a third superhero universe that rivaled Marvel and DC. It featured some great talent, but it was bought by Acclaim, the video game company, which went out of business a few years later. In 2012, Valiant was relaunched with incredible talent attached—and it’s one of the best-kept secrets in comics that this relaunch world is some of the best comics of the last decade.

However, Valiant became mired in the content wars for streaming. It was bought by Chinese-owned DMG Entertainment, which wanted the company as an IP Farm. They cut the comics line and made bad hires like Heather Antos, who brought in her cronies and destroyed several of the books from 2020 to 2022.

Alien Books began publishing a new iteration of Valiant this year, rebooting nearly everything to try to honor the 2012 continuity again (as Heather Antos neglected it), with a myriad of titles that are good but not great. Our reports are that this relaunch has failed to move the needle as many long-time Valiant fans feel they’ve been burned too many times and that sales are slumping out the gate even as they’re building a line-wide event called Resurgence.

On the IDW front, matters are getting even worse. The company laid off 40% of its workforce in the last year, and retailers tell me that nothing from the company is selling outside of Kevin Eastman’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles continuation, The Last Ronin. That book, by itself, with different reprints, is propping the company up completely.

IDW relies on licensed properties, having completely cut its creator-owned division, which makes the company an expensive venture to have to pay for all of its lines. One of these lines is Star Trek, which has been mired with controversy again because of Heather Antos’ influence which has turned the books into bad fan fiction and an identity politics virtue signal fest.

According to numerous industry sources, these books haven’t been sold. Even though the gatekeepers within comics promote Star Trek and nominate it for major awards like the Eisners annually, fans roundly criticize the books for their poor writing. It seems like the awards are more meant to please Heather Antos than to indicate their quality.

However, it gets worse for IDW. A source came forward to me from Paramount, which holds the license to Star Trek. This source tells me the execs at Paramount are very displeased with what’s going on—whether it’s the product or Heather personally, it’s unclear. However, they note that sales are low, and Star Trek has a very expensive license.

IDW is said to be losing the Star Trek license at the end of the year and will not renew it. As of now, it's unclear where Star Trek comics might land publishing-wise.

This would be a huge blow to IDW Publishing, as they’ve been producing Star Trek comics for more than 20 years. The company can’t be much longer in this world if this trend of losing properties continues.

Regardless, Heather Antos's influence on the two companies might have sunk them both.