Does anyone know...

[Phaedrus45]

How much do the various comic companies expect to shell out for rights to print comics based on various copyrighted material. Of course, Marvel used to do this quite a bit: Rom, Conan, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica. But, except for them buying Dabel Bros. and doing Stephen King's Dark Tower, they just dropped doing them for the longest time, and now we see the companies who bought up the rights reprinting their old stories.

Does anyone know what companies, like Dark Horse, are generally paying for this stuff? I would figure a company like Marvel would have enough money to start getting some of this stuff; but, they all seem to be going to the independant comic companies.

 

[Elijya]

Because they do no out-right own the properties, there's less room for profits, and a big company like Marvel needs to concentrate on properties which they do own. Back in the 70s and 80s when comics were a much bigger industry, it was easier to have diversification which included liscensing other properties. But once sales figures fell, and Marvel went through a bankruptcy, it made less sense to continue to publish books you saw less money from than books which you owned outright.

Dark Horse and the others (everything except Marvel and DC basically) are drastically smaller companies. Dark Horse has something like a 5% market share versus Marvel and DC's 30-40% (each). They do not really have a board of directors, investors, or a parent company, and aren't publically traded.

These days, if you're going to publish a book you don't see full profit from, it makes more sense to publish creator owned books, because that endears important and talented writers and artists to your company.

As for actual, specific figures, I have no idea, and I don't know if companies are very open about how much they pay for things like that. I know that in the Chronicles of Conan trades (the trades DH publishes that reprint the riginal Marvel Conan series) there are some extensive introductions that detail the history of the series and gave some specific figures about what Marvel was paying to use Conan, which affected what artists they could afford to pay. ButI do not have them in front of me, and those refered to arrangements made in the early 1970s, so it would hardly be reflective of what is paid today.