Quite a few people have commented on the quiet news item dropped in PWCW’s Wendy Pini interview: that DC no longer has the rights to ELFQUEST. But only Chris Butcher puts it into the context of the times:
No one seems to have commented on the idea that the big Elfquest deal went down right around the time that DC was rapidly trying to increase their bookstore presence. Elfquest was acquired about a year before DC made it’s deals with Titan and Humanoids, so far as I can tell, with the first original Elfquest graphic novel, Humanoids, Titan, and the entire CMX line launching within a few months of one another in summer/fall 2004. That bookstore push was both ill-considered and a failure, and aside from CMX (which has been completely rebranded and relaunched since the initial push), Elfquest was sort of the vestigal tail from that period, now finally fallen off. While I don’t personally think much of the viability of the brand (a book called Elfquest couldn’t make an impression in the era of LORD OF THE RINGS?) there are still fans, and the books do turn at least once a year for us, so that’s… something. Anyway, it’s interesting to see DC reconsidering their bookstore presence, elves replaced with minxes and wierd euro-sci-fi replaced with… Identity Crisis.
The DC deal for British material was with 2000 AD and its publisher Rebellion – not Titan.
Maybe I imagined it, but I thought that Richard Pini had announced months ago that the DC deal was finished after the next Archive edition wraps up the original Quest, though at the time hadn’t decided if that meant a return to self-publishing (which seems to be the news here) or something else.
He mentioned it on the Elfquest forums a while back (I saw a remark about the news a week or two ago and went looking), but I don’t think it was highly publicized. Certainly no press releases or anything.
Yeah, sorry about that goof…