Andy Krieg wrote to ask…
Since you have worked with a lot of licensed characters on your various comics, I am hoping you can explain some questions I have around what happens when that license moves from one company to another.
I have seen an awful lot of repackaged releases of licensed character material when said character moves between companies. For example, when Conan moved from Marvel to Dark Horse, Dark Horse started to reprint Conan comics Marvel had produced. And when the license moved back to Marvel, Marvel started to reprint Conan comics Dark Horse had produced. You can see repackaged materials at various companies for licenses such as Star Trek, Star Wars, G.I. Joe, ROM the Spaceknight, Planet of the Apes, Red Sonja, etc. Heck, the whole Disney line has moved from company to company, with Carl Barks reprints (among others) happening at all of them.
My questions lie around how this material is transferred from company to company. Did Marvel keep a file cabinet full of all their Conan work that got wheeled out the door when Conan moved to Dark Horse? Or as the comics are written, does the owner of the licensed character get all of the pages, scripts, etc. for the comic each month, and they keep a record of it? Is this something covered in a standard contract between the licensee and licensor companies?
Are there companies out that whose purpose is to store and maintain these libraries of material for companies that own licensed characters? It seems like something most companies wouldn't have the expertise to do for themselves. And where does the material go when the person or company licensing off some character no longer exists? I'm guessing some estate might still hold rights to people like Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope and the Three Stooges. But Dell's Four Color run is full of odd and obscure licensed characters (e.g. Timmy, Johnny Mack Brown, The Little Scouts, etc.). Where would the materials for characters such as these reside?
First off, I've never known any comic book company to keep scripts or anything except the finished pages and covers. Secondly, I'll let you in on a dark secret of the comic book business: In the pre-digital era — before pages could scanned into computers and saved as digital media — the comic book companies were often real sloppy about retaining copies of their own material…pages they knew they would someday want to reprint or sell overseas. Never mind preserving the material done for a licensed property like Conan, there were times when Marvel wanted to reprint an issue of Spider-Man or Hulk and had to scramble to find something to print off of.
This may sound like corporate irresponsibility — and it was — but it was also often a matter of short-term frugality. Before digital, it cost money to shoot extra photostats and/or negatives of pages and it looked better on the budget sheets to not spend a lot of the company's dough to preserve material for the future. DC spent a lot more money on its "library" than Marvel but at times, even DC had no source material to use when they wanted to reprint something.
Back then, reprinting a comic book usually meant you had to have a sharp copy of the black-and-white line art. When they didn't have that, they sometimes had to photograph off old printed comics with filters to try and bleach out the color. There was a process that Joe Simon came up with — though someone else later grabbed credit for it — whereby, they'd take an actual printed copy of an old issue and bleach the colors out of the page with chemicals. Those pages, of course, then had to be retouched and cleaned-up. Sometimes, they'd just pay an artist to trace the pages out of a printed comic and create new black-and-white line art.
I should devote a few of these ASKmes to discussing other ways this was done…but you asked about licensed books changing companies…
There have never been any standard contracts as far as I know but usually, the owner of the property receives copies of every issue in a form that would allow them to duplicate the material and sell it to others. When I wrote Disney comics for Gold Key, Gold Key would send photostats of every page they published to a department at Disney which would store them. When they could sell the rights to reprint that material to some publisher (foreign then, anywhere now) they could duplicate those pages for the new publisher. I would imagine all that material has long since been digitized and that since digital became industry standard, there are no more stats.
So when Dark Horse reprinted a comic done originally by Marvel, they probably had access to whatever the copyright holder had. If the copyright holder didn't properly preserve that source material, that was a problem but not a huge one because digital technology today makes it much, much easier to print off a printed comic. A lot of the reprinted material you buy today is made possible by digital reconstruction. Sometimes, they just scan a comic, tweak the scan and reprint the page with its original coloring.
This is fortunate because a lot of copyright holders didn't preserve whatever they once had. There are to my knowledge no companies that preserve this material for the copyright holders. In most cases, whatever the original publisher had was not preserved unless the copyright holder did…and in most cases, they didn't.
Bob Hope — there's a name drop — once told me (and others I know) that he owned the publication rights to those Bob Hope comic books DC put out from 1950 through 1968 and he had a few complete sets of the published issues. I would imagine that if someone today wanted to reprint them, they'd first have to make a deal with his estate. Then they'd have to figure out if anyone anywhere kept the old black-and-white film or stats and if so, was that material in good enough condition? The answer would probably be no so they'd have to resort to digital reconstruction, either using Bob's copies or someone else's.
They might also find someone had some of the old original art. There have been reprints of some comics that have been made possible because some collector had pages but that doesn't happen very often.
