If Bleeding Cool is to be believed – and, seriously, I feel like I should just have a tag that says that, I use it so much – then Disney/Marvel has issued a decree that all Marvel superhero content has to be created by Marvel US, ending a long run of UK-and-presumably-elsewhere-created material that has included Alan Moore’s Captain Britain and well-loved runs for characters like The Black Knight and Spider-Man (with some recent all-ages material being written by Roger Stern, interestingly enough), not to mention entire series like Knights of Pendragon and Death’s Head.

It goes without saying that I think this is a pretty bad idea – The UK-originated material sells well and doesn’t conflict with the “main” US material at all, and also offers both future US-reprint material and the chance to discover new talent for Marvel US to use in their books – but it’s also a confusing decision: Disney has a lot of licensed material that’s originated outside of the US, and has done for years, without any conflict. So what’s the problem with the Marvel material that requires it all being brought in-house? Is this Marvel paranoia and/or greed, or part of a wider Disney plan (Maybe the Pixar comics license being transferred from Boom! to Marvel is only be the start of centralizing Disney’s comic presence)?

Whatever the answer, I hope that those British and elsewhere creators who lose work because of this decision find new gigs elsewhere, and soon; there’s a lot of really talented people who’ll lose out because of this, sadly.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 10th, 2011 at 12:06 pm and is filed under Marvel, News & Views. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.