debacle over the phantom?
The Phantom property was licensed to Moonstone, as it has been for quite some time. When comics and superheroes were in the fiction ghetto, the licensor, King Features, didn't care that Moonstone wasn't making huge bank for them. Pop trends have changed, and superheroes are cool again. Dynamite basically exists as a shell company for Hollywood proposals, so they figured they could probably get a sweet deal out of King for the Phantom license, and essentially just bought the license without even
consulting the current sub-licensor, Moonstone! Dynamite announced that it would begin publishing Phantom comics, counting on two things to bully Moonstone: 1) if Moonstone put up a fight, the larger publisher with the larger fanbase (Dynamite) would automatically win the PR War. 2) Moonstone wouldn't know its rights and wouldn't fight Dynamite's new Phantom comics, which would then take up valuable Phantom-buying dollars away from Moonstone. 3) Most fans (like you, presumably) wouldn't even know that Moonstone was
publishing Phantom comics. Only the hardest-core of Phantom fans have been buying that book, because it's really good, but it doesn't have Dynamite's distribution and financial backing and Hollywood seed money. 4) Ideally, Dynamite even seemed to plan to try and get
Moonstone to stop publishing! They seemed to be positioning themselves for some kind of legal attack to that effect, which Moonstone couldn't have funded a defense against.
But Moonstone
did put up a fight to defend their license, which wasn't set to expire for several more years, and they did it the
smart way: the court of public opinion. Moonstone was either going to lose in the court of public opinion (due to lack of fans), or lose in a court of law (due to lack of funds), but in the court of public opinion, the negative publicity would at least drive Dynamite away from it.
And that's exactly what happened: Moonstone's head released a scathing attack on the head of Dynamite, and although Dynamite at first tried to defend themselves, they quickly saw a bad publicity storm brewing, and withdrew.
The most despicable thing about the entire affair was the way Dynamite made themselves look like the mature, being-the-adult side by withdrawing. "We'll let them publish their little Phantom book if that's really what they want, because we're not gonna be *******s about it," even though the entire thing had been a strongarm tactic by them that had basically backfired.
More people need to know about what they want. Moonstone's gonna go under some time in the next few years, and people need to know that Dynamite is a bully publisher with even fewer ethics than the rest of them, and not the kind of business that a society interested in morality should support.