Just as DC has to pay Warner Bros. for rights to publish a Looney Tunes comic and Warner Bros. has to pay DC for the movie rights for a Superman movie — at fair market value as we learned from the Siegel case — so, too, Marvel would have to pay Disney/Pixar.

Of course, being two companies owned by the same parent would and should give Marvel the edge in publishing Disney properties, just as DC should be able to publish Bugs Bunny and Scooby-Doo before another company could.

However, as far as Marvel publishing the Disney stuff, that’s a more difficult undertaking because if they want to reprint the European stuff, they’d have to hire people to acquire and translate it just as Gladstone and Boom had to. If they try new stuff, again they have to hire new staff to do so because those characters have a core audience that has strict expectations so you couldn’t just assign Uncle Scrooge to Rick Remender or Bendis.

Marvel will likely publish the duck/mouse characters, but it will take awhile to put the pieces in place — moreso than it did for the Pixar stuff. They may even decide that it’s not worth their effort and continue to let Boom do it because for the kids of today, the Pixar stuff is worth more and may even have a higher recognizability than the Donald and Mickey characters.

Anyway, either way, the upshot is that Marvel will have to pay Disney or Disney/Pixar for the rights to publish stuff with those characters.

Now let’s look at Boom. They didn’t do right by Mickey and Donald at the start. They tried to make the comics “cool” without remembering that the characters still had to sound like themselves. They took a lot of flak until they improved… but they did improve. The books are now at a nice midpoint between the classic flavor of Gladstone and a more modern, dynamically designed product.
To see the license given to Marvel, who (it’s easy to imagine) will screw things up again by making the same mistakes they did in the 1990s, or that Boom did initially, will be a shame. Have we always got to wait while a new publisher kicks out the “old blood” and then learns the hard way… again?

The worst is that when the books fail and the line implodes, it may not have anywhere else to go, even if another publisher wants it. To save face, Disney won’t dare take it away from Marvel no matter how badly they do; or how few comics per month they eventually put out.
I’d love to be proven wrong.

Frankly, it amazes me that people were saying Boom! might keep the license even after the Disney/Marvel deal. Once Disney bought the largest comics publisher in America, why would they farm their characters out to somebody else for just licensing fees when they can publish themselves for the whole ball of wax?

Now they just need to find a way to use this opportunity to get more comics in front of more kids and start rebuilding that market.

Hurm….