Removing Some Rights Barriers?

Back in December, I predicted that one of the big themes in comics for 2026 would be that a lot of legal barriers would be knocked down to allow publishers to "cross-pollinate" their intellectual properties. That is, we would see more inter-company crossovers AND more instances of publishers printing books featuring works already printed by other publishers. (Think: IDW's Artist's Editions of Marvel and DC comics.) We have indeed been seeing a lot of that this year, which I noted in April.

Of course, this isn't exactly new. We've seen cross-overs between Marvel and DC dating back to the 1970s, and the very earliest comic books were just publishers reprinting comics that had already appeared in newspapers. The reason why this type of thing typically happens -- as I explained back in my December post -- is because there is a lot of market uncertainty, and businesses in general veer more towards options with fewer risks. In the case of publishing, this means reprinting material there are known quantities for and doubling up on popular IPs.

What this means, internally to publishers, is that their legal departments are working a bit harder on ensuring they have all the rights squared away, and they're usually a little more flexible in negotiations with the other parties involved. That's how we finally saw, for the first time, a reprint of Marvel Two-in-One #21, which featured Doc Savage. The character was under license from Street & Smith when the original issue came out in 1976 but Marvel couldn't get reprint rights later, and so the issue wasn't included in the Essential reprint books which otherwise reprinted the entire run of that series. But they pushed harder for that and probably capitulated to some additional demands/money from Condé Nast (Doc Savage's current rights holder) in order to get a more complete set of the series for the Omnibus line.

What then occurred to me is that there are few other Marvel comics that have never been reprinted because of rights issues and, interestingly, many of them share something in common. The two biggest ones I can think of are 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Marvelous Wizard of Oz, both of which were treasury-style books Marvel did in the mid-1970s based on the movies... which are owned by MGM. I haven't gone through Marvel's full back catalog, but I suspect there's a few other comics they did around that time based on MGM properies that have never been reprinted either. (Does The Marvelous Land of Oz have rights issues? The story is based on L. Frank Baum's books directly, not a movie, but it uses some of the same character designs. I'm not sure how that was handled.) I don't doubt Marvel's lawyers have investigated what needs to happen to bring some of these treasury books back to print for the first time in the half-century since their original publication, but MGM is now owned by Amazon and I have no idea how much hardball they're playing on this kind of thing. They no doubt recognize the value of the MGM movie libray itself, but how greedy are they around derivative works like these comics?

Maybe the Spider-Noir show opened some legal doors for reprint rights somehow? I'm sure they're totally different sets of lawyers involved on both sides, but there's some discussion going on between Marvel and Amazon/MGM at least. but in this era of heightened what-can-we-do-that's-a-sure-thing publishing, I wouldn't be surprised to see the two companies come to an agreement in the not-too-distant future.

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