Old Company reprint rights

[bretmaverick2]

I was just wondering if anyone knows who would hold the rights to old titles published by defunct companies. This came up in a discussion of titles once published by Eclipse.

[MRP]

I was just wondering if anyone knows who would hold the rights to old titles published by defunct companies. This came up in a discussion of titles once published by Eclipse.

It depends. There are a lot of variables. Did the defunct company own the rights or did the creators? If the creators owned the rights, they still do even if the company is defunct. If the company owned them, what happened to them? In the case of Eclipse, they went bankrupt, and a lot of their assets including rights to certain characters, runs, etc. were sold off in bankruptcy court, so they went to new owners and what those owners did with them varies greatly. Todd McFarlance gobbled up a lot of the Eclipse rights, but some of them were questionably owned by Eclipse to begin with, hence the basis for the legal case between McFarlane and Neil Gaiman over the Miracleman rights. How old are the properties in question? Are they old enough to have fallen into the public domain?

There's no one stop answer here. The answer is going to vary property by property depending on the exact situation of that property and what happened to the company when it went defunct.

-M