NOTE: Despite being a Disney licensee, Vado wishes it to be known that he has no inside knowledge of the Marvel acquisition, and that his remarks should be taken strictly as his own opinions based on news reports.

“Marvel is the big winner here. My opinion, Disney overpaid (and Disney never over pays for anything) so it is obvious that Disney sees a huge licensing bonanza from the characters well down the line. Marvel books will, at some point, gain a stronger bookstore distribution partner should they decide to have their books sold through Harper.

“However it is worth pointing out that Disney does very little actual publishing of its own and has made most of its money by licensing characters out to third parties. It could be, again strictly conjecture here, that Marvel will end up being reduced to a licensing company and that its publishing will be scaled back dramatically as emphasis is put on content like movies and video games and less emphasis on things like publishing. Disney published its own line of comics years ago and pulled out. More recently they cut ‘Disney Adventures’ magazine, a publication with sales in the hundreds of thousands. So, seriously, publishing is not a big part of the equation here. I would expect publishing to scale back somewhat.”

Vado continued, “Big loser here are Disney licensees who created original content for their books and the creators who created that content. As is standard with any licensing deal, Disney owns the material that is created under the license and can, if they choose, republish the content once those deals expire without compensating either the companies who paid for the content or the creators who created the original material. Again, this is not a Disney thing, it is fairly standard of all licensing deals. SLG published collections of the Marvel Comics’ ‘Bill & Ted’ comics and did not compensate them for the artwork.

“While I am certain that the licensing deals which are in place will continue to their conclusion I have to wonder how some of the people who have jumped into the Disney Comics business will feel about creating new content for the company knowing that it all could become property of Disney/Marvel Comics at some point. Likewise, all Disney comic book licensees now get to feel dumb knowing that the money they are giving Disney is now also going to their biggest competitor in the field. As I said above, though, publishing is not a big part of the core Disney business so it is possible that even more licensing opportunities might open up.

“I am not certain how much creator-owned material Marvel produces, but those deals will more than likely become a thing of the past.”

Vado continued, “Another big loser could be Diamond and the Direct Market. It's now possible that Disney/Marvel will scale back on production, possibly focusing on cutting the line down to what it can actually manage to put out on time and just doing enough publishing to keep the characters in the public eye. It is also possible that Disney/Marvel might do all of their own distribution. In this regard the deal can be a huge game changer for everyone. Seriously, anything can happen at this point.

“At minimum I would expect that Diamond Book Distribution will lose Marvel from its catalog as they will no doubt move to Harper.”