A guide to comics part 5 (Licensed comics)

In this penultimate of my by no means exhaustive guide to comics I'm going to talk about licensed comics. Originally I was planning on folding the subject into either the post about company owned comics or the one about creator owned comics, but it really didn't fit either well enough.

Licensed comics are comics that aren't owned by the company that publishes them or the creator working on the comics. The characters in the comic are owned by a third party who gives the rights to a publisher to produce these books and the publishers then hire creators to produce these books. There's a tendancy to consider licensed comics as somehow lesser than other comics and less good. This is nonsense, there have been great and terrible licensed comics, just as there have been great & terrible creator owned comics and great and terrible compnay owned comics.

Therew are a couple of different wat comics can be licensed. Sometimes this can be a big company licensing a property to a publisher, for example Hasbro & Transformers and GI Joe, it could be a character from novels being licensed by the author or his estate,  for example Robert E Howard & Conan,

It can even be one comics creator allowing others to use their creation, for example Rob Liefeld created a character called Prophet in 1992. After the cancellation of the Prophet comic book it was relaunched by Chuck Dixon in 1995 before lying dormant for years until Brandon Graham relaunched it. Even though Graham's work is wildly different from Liefeld's original run, it's still a character owned by the original creator. It doesn't fir neatly in to either creator owned or company owned comics so I've included comics of these types as licensed.

The thing that makes licensed comics unique is they can have pretty big name recognition and they aren't tied to a particular publisher. For instance Transformers was licensed by Hasbro to Marvel between 1984 and 1994. Then it 2002 Dreamwave Productions, now closed, got the license until 2004. The license moved to IDW in 2005 and Transformers comics have been published there since 2006, to, especially recently, critical success.

Transformers aren't the only toy line owned by Hasbro and licensed out, the company also own G.I. Joe (and My Little Pony which I mention in passing because my daughter is such a huge fan of anything related to it and consequently I know far more about it than I ever thought possible).

G.I. Joe was also licensed to Marvel by Hasbro but they started earlier, in 1982, before ending in 1994 and 155 issues. The success of this comic was down largely to writer Larry Hama (he also drew a couple of issues) and one day in the future I'll go into some more detail about how good his work on G.I. Joe was, even though it was basically based on a line of toys.

After Marvel, and 8 issues produced by Dark Horse in 1996, the license went to Devil's Due Publishing, between 2001 & 2008. The Devil's Due series served as a sequel to Hama's work at Marvel. In 2009 the license was moved to IDW, home of the Transformers license, and the story started again with no reference to the previous comics. At least until 2010 when IDW launched G.I. Joe A Real American Hero, with Larry Hama as the writer and the series starting at issue 156. This became a sequel to the Marvel work and made the Devil's Due sequel no longer a sequel. G.I. Joe A Real American Hero is still being published by IDW and still being written by Larry Hama. Remember, this runs alongside, but is completely seperate from, IDW's other G.I. Joe comic that started in 2009.

There's also been a strange situation where Devil's Due, then license holders of G.I. Joe, published G.I. Joe vs Transformer crossover comics and Dreamwave, then license holders of Transformers, produced Transformers vs G.I. crossover comics. Luckily with IDW holding both these license now that shouldn't happen again. IDW are publishing a Transformers vs G.I. Joe series this week, in fact I got an e-mail today telling me my copy of issue 1 has been shipped, and I think it looks fantastic.

Transformers vs G.I. Joe by Tom Scioli

I think this serves as a good example of how crazy licensed comics can be sometimes. I'm not going to mention too many other things except to note that, at least in my mind, IDW, Dark Horse and Dynamite are the publishers who produce most licensed comics.

One last example of the occasional strange publication issues around licensed comics. Star Wars comics were published by Marvel between 1977 and 1987. The license moved to Dark Horse in 1991 and they continue to publish Star Wars comics. However from 2015 Star Wars comics will move back to Marvel. The reason? Marvel are owned by Disney, Disney bought Lucas Films and so now Star Wars will be published by Marvel. IT's a blow to Dark Horse, many of their best selling books are Star Wars books and they are generally well received critically too. Disney did allow some time between buying Lucas Films and pulling the license from Dark Horse and I'm confident Dark Horse has used the time to wrap up the Star Wars stories it was telling and preparing for life after the license has gone.