Pipeline and Sundry: Movies, Mergers, and Une Mort
Mergers and Acquisitions
I wrote a piece a few years ago about the lack of M&A from Marvel and DC. Six years later, and they’re still not buying anyone. DC is celebrating WildStorm’s 30th anniversary this year, but they made that purchase more than 20 years ago. Marvel is renewing their CrossGen trademarks, but that was a fire sale purchase by Disney before they bought Marvel.
Neither of the Big Two have picked up anything since then. It’s a little strange.
But Papercutz, American home of The Smurfs and Asterix, has been purchased by Mad Cave Studios.
Who?
Yeah, I thought the same thing. I had to look them up. They’ve been around for about 7 years now and have a small array of books that appeals to the usual type of horror/sci-fi/genre crowd you’d expect. They’re picking up Papercutz to boost their younger readers division.
Papercutz editor and co-founder Jim Salicrup is sticking around for the transition and then he’ll be gone in a year or two.
What does that mean for fans of European comics? I don’t know. Nobody knows. It’s all speculation.
However, you wouldn’t be wrong if you wanted to start worrying. Papercutz has been continuously publishing The Smurfs since they picked up the license, but have changed formats often enough that it feels like three different licenses. I placed my bet on the “Smurfs Anthology” format and lost. It ceased after the fifth volume. They’re now chasing the audience that wants smaller books, which is the easiest way to turn me off.
The new Smurfs series on Nickelodeon might help prolong the Smurfs license with Mad Cave Studios.
And the there’s Asterix! Papercutz is only three or four books away from publishing the entire Asterix collection. The next one is due in the fall, and then the last three are due out next year.
In case you didn’t notice, the Papercutz editions of Asterix haven’t been the topic of conversation anywhere. They’re not burning up the Direct Market or lighting up Scholastic Book sales or becoming viral vidoes on TikTok (“BookTok”? “ComicTok”?).
But — Papercutz has to work far enough in advance with these books that I imagine most of the work is done for the next two books, at least.
Will Mad Cave want to publish the rest? Next year is when the next new Asterix volume would be due out in France in October/November. Will Mad Cave want to stick around that long? The Mad Cave press release on their purchase doesn’t mention Asterix at all. (“…the Papercutz catalog includes famed licensed properties The Smurfs, Loud House, Geronimo Stilton, Casagrandes, and more!”) The Forbes article gives it a passing mention, at least.
Will they subscribe to the Sunk Cost Fallacy and finish things out? Or will they cut their losses?
Are they really in this just for the Nickelodeon licenses?
I don’t know. I really don’t. All of the above is my feeling towards how things are working out. It’s possible that the Asterix sales are higher than expected and they’re super excited to pump out the last few books and complete the series.
It’s possible.
I’ve just been in comics long enough to never expect happy news.
Needless to say, I’ll be tracking this acquisition very closely in the years ahead for this one corner of its publishing program.
One last note: Mad Cave has a subscription program that’s pretty smart. You pay $20 for a four or five issue series. You get the digital issues as they are published, and then the trade paperback is mailed to you on its release. I like that idea.
I’ve flipped through a bunch of their first issues now and, well, I’m not interested in any of them. But at least they’re trying something here!
The Seventh Art — Movies!
The second “Old Geezers” movie is out today in French movie theaters. If we’re lucky, it’ll stream somewhere eventually with English captions. (Amazon Prime had it streaming for a while, but now you have to buy or rent it.)
The short video I caught on Twitter the other day would indicate that they’re still pulling from the source material, and continue to have the best casting of any comic book adaptation since it was announced that Patrick Stewart was playing Professor X…
“La Grande Odalisque” is in the works now, too, though you’ll have to wait a while more for it. There’s an actress and a director attached and a description as being like a “female Mission Impossible,” but that’s it for now.
In the meantime, read my review of the first of the two books in the series.
La Petite Mort
Jean-Jacques Sempé died last week at the age of 89.
He is the cartoonist behind “Le Petit Nicolas,” one of the series written by Asterix co-creator Rene Goscinny.
It has never been translated into English for us to enjoy, but it has produced a movie or three.
Sempé is the last of the cartoonists with whom Goscinny worked to pass away. Feels like the end of an era in French cartooning now, for sure.
Read about Sempé’s entire life at Lambiek.net.
It hit me that I didn’t know that Sempé was still alive. He hadn’t be making any waves for such a long time, health issues maybe ? It’s been so longthat Goscinny left us that it feels a bit surreal. Sempé still had some books out but I’m guilty of not really checking them out beyond the occasional browsing in bookstores. He was also a newspaper cartoonist, that is the most commented part in today’s headlines about him over here.
From what I’ve read about him, he wasn’t a big comic book fan. He preferred illustrations and single drawings to sequential drawings. He only did “Le Petit Nicolas” because his friend Goscinny would write it and I have to think Goscinny wrote it in a way to keep Sempé happy. =). So once his major work was done, he moved on to other worlds and had success there.