If it wasn't clear already, the comics industry is not in the best state. Especially for those outside the Big Two, who can't afford to sustain themselves off the back of movie adaptations of their work, the profit margins are pretty worrying. What happens when companies look like they're going out of business? Well, sometimes they just sorta go out of business. In other cases, however, they look to merge with other companies and pool their resources. It's something that happened a lot in the early days of the industry, once the initial comic book boom wore off, with DC in particular swooping down and buying the rights to entire stables of characters from other publishers like Charlton and Fawcett. There's already been inklings of such mergers happening, like Dynamite Entertainment and Dark Horse Comics teaming up for their digital storefronts. It's unlikely that DC and Marvel will ever become one huge conglomerate (they're owned by two separate huge media companies as it is), but once upon a time it seemed unthinkable that Mario and Sonic The Hedgehog would ever turn up in a video game together - and yet we live in a world where they appeared in a disappointing title where they competed against each other in the Olympics. So who knows? Stranger things have happened...
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
