IDW Publishing is mostly known for their licensed comics like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Sonic: The Hedgehog, and Star Trek, but they do have their own IPs that they’ve developed over the years, and now the deal has gotten worse for an already strugggling comic book industry as it appears IDW Publishing makes creators trade publishing for the entire rights to their IPs. Multiple comic creators have chimed in to let everyone to know not to work for the embattled company as a result.
A long battle in the comic book industry has been over creators’ rights. In the early days, even the creation of characters like Superman, Batman, or Spider-Man completely went to the corporation with no real recompense other than a paltry page rate as a “work for hire” for the artists to show for their efforts. Over the years, a lot of these instances have been fought with lawsuits, and industry standards have changed to some degree, but not completely.
Marvel Comics is especially notorious for not paying back-end royalties on creation. One might make a character like Miles Morales, who they turn into a movie version, and not get a dime for it beyond what was promised at the beginning. It leads to many creators grumbling about the industry, and there is a theory out there that a lot of more talented creators, when they work for big corporations, phone in their work because they know they don’t want to give their best ideas to someone who will own it as an IP farm.
At the smaller presses, this is usually deemed unacceptable. It’s not enough just to get a book in print for creators to give up their entire rights to their characters. Yet still, it persists with a lot of the publishing companies out there. Robert Kirkman’s Skybound has been known to do this with creations, pay for the books, and then own the IPs in the hopes of using them as a licensing farm.
IDW Publishing, however, has mostly been known for licensed products. They have had creator-owned works in the past, but they ended that program amid their financial problems in the last several years. Now, they’ve started to open up creator-owned projects again, but with a catch—they’re not creator-owned. IDW Publishing will take everything.
Yesterday, IDW CEO David Jonas spoke on his public investors’ call, talking about this new initiative. Like other recent calls, it seems like the CEO is spitballing any ideas to see what sticks in this failing comic environment rather than having any concrete plan.
He admits on the call that IDW cannot even take the financial risk of paying for comic art on spec, "We don't have the barometer of success to demonstrate that it would be wise for us at this time to take on the financial risk."
Further, he show little plan admitting he believes it’s just luck that drives product sales, “I do think that we'll achieve growth in those areas… I just don't think there's much we can do outside of getting lucky and being in the right place at the right time and having a hit book.“ One should be wary of being an investor in IDW with this at the top for certain.
He then spoke to development and creators not owning their work, "We're focused on generating internally generated content where IDW will have pretty much for the first time, company-owned content."
They will pay royalties, but, "the ownership of that IP will reside 100% with IDW… They're excellent stories, you know, they're compelling enough to pass the sniff test of our internal team, who thankfully have been doing this for probably hundreds of years combined, and have excellent storytelling intuition. We'll be creating crime stories, hero stories, and new horror stories. It's not so much that we're gonna be doing more, which I think what you may have seen from IDW 5 or 6 years ago, where the idea was ‘we're going to do a lot more content’ and there was a lot more spending. I think it was something of a spending spree to go out and create a lot of that content, but it was a little bit of a spray-and-pray. I think what we're trying to do is be much more thoughtful and preemptive in terms of what stories we want to tell, what genres we want to focus on, and want to have as much upside potential for IDW. And to think about these stories, not just in terms of ‘is it a good story? Is it a cool story?’ But h how would it function as a franchise?"
It’s clearly spitballing and rambling rather than any real plan. Several industry creators, though, voiced disapproval at a company taking a full IP and not giving creators anything but some royalties for their efforts.
Invincible creator Ryan Ottley chimed in, talking about how he’d just work for Image, though ironically his co-creator Robert Kirkman is known for doing much the same with Skybound as aforementioned:
Pop culture content creator Kneon from Clownfish TV chimed in as well with a poignant take on IDW as a company:
Earthworm Jim creator Doug TenNapel called the deal “insane” for any creator:
And Darkwing Duck writer Aaron Sparrow voiced his disapproval on working with IDW Publishing:
It seems the creator consensus is not to work for this company, which is evident in the level of talent that IDW Publishing has been getting for their “company-owned” books to start, who just appear to be clout-chasing identitarians who are friends with editor Heather Antos.
With books like this, IDW Publishing would need to get lucky indeed to make something sell.
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