RIP Dark Horse Comics

Yesterday, Embracer Group dropped a press release to announce "its intention to spin off Fellowship Entertainment on Nasdaq Stockholm." Embracer Group, if you don't know, is the private equity firm that bought Dark Horse back in 2022. It's day-to-day operations were still headed by Dark Horse founder Mike Richardson until early March of this year when he was unceremoniously fired.

So why do we care about this press release?

Let's start simple. This "intention to spin off" basically means that Embracer Group is formally splitting into two different companies: Fellowship Entertainment and Embracer Group. This 'new' Embracer Group will basically continue to act like the old one, focusing on buying up other companies and either making them more profitable (by radically cutting costs -- i.e. laying people off) or turning around to re-sell the company for a profit. Frequently, they try to do both. Fellowship, then, will be more focused on owning/managing a variety of IP franchises. That is, if you want to make a product about some character they own, they're who you will have to pay the licensing fee to. The Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit is probably their most well-known propety now (hence the name "Fellowship") but they also own Tomb Raider and other Eidos games, as well as Dark Horse.

According to the press release, Fellowship "will focus on dedicated IP management, aiming to transform franchise ownership into recurring revenue streams across games, film, consumer products, and additional areas." The first key phrase there is "IP management." There is no talk about storytelling or immersive gaming or anything like that anywhere in the announcement. Just IP management. That means that all they want to do is just own the rights to a bunch of properties, and then sit back and let licensing fees roll in while they do jack shit. That's what "recurring revenue streams" are. They don't care who puts out another Tomb Raider game or if there's an ongoing Lara Croft comic book or anything like that; they just want to be able to essentially rent out the character to the highest bidders. They're not the ones who are going to continue publishing The Lord of the Rings books or making another Tomb Raider game; they just go to collect the paychecks.

So why did they buy a comic boook publisher like Dark Horse?

Because Dark Horse is not a comic book publisher. I mean, yes, they do publish comic books and their most popular ones are themselves either licensed (e.g. Star Wars, Stranger Things...) or creator-owned (e.g. Hellboy, Umbrella Academy...) but they own a number of properities themselves including The Mask, Time Cop, and Ghost. They also have some degree of control over other properties they don't own outright; for example, while Mike Mignola still technically owns Hellboy, all of the media properties -- the movies, shows, and video games -- are managed by Dark Horse and they get a slice of the pie just for managing the contract. That's what Embracer Group wanted when they bought the company in 2022; they didn't care about the comics -- they just wanted the IPs.

This is part of why Embracer Group outright closed Things From Another World's online presence last year. It involved actual work on a day-to-day basis. They don't want that. They want to kick their feet up on the desk and let the checks roll in. I expect we'll see the physical stores close before long either -- they're probably only still open because of existing rental contracts for the physical store locations.

Am I saying that we'll stop seeing comic books with a Dark Horse logo on them? Probably not. They're going to do the same thing that Marvel has been doing more slowly over the past several years. The comics will continue, but their actual production will be farmed out to other publishers. I have been pointing this out for nearly a quarter century now, but no one has seemed to catch on -- Marvel stopped being a comic book publisher in 2000 and became a "character licensing company." They realized their worth was in owning Spider-Man and the X-Men, not in publishing Amazing Spider-Man and Uncanny X-Men. We see that more and more now, with an increasing number of publishers putting out comics in Marvel's name: Abrams, Scholastic, IDW, Titan... That's why Disney bought them. Embracer Group is trying to do the same thing with Dark Horse. They don't want to publish comics; they want people to send them money so they can rubber stamp another Mask movie.

I don't know what kind of timeframe Embracer Group is working on, and what other legal or financial factors might be at play, but if you want to mark the official end of Dark Horse as a publisher, this is it. The comics will continue for a while, but the company isn't a publisher any longer.

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