“Avengers: Endgame,” the 22nd installment in Marvel’s movie franchise, crossed the $2 billion box office threshold in less than two weeks. “The Walking Dead,” a hit for AMC with another spinoff coming, is based on an Image Comics series. And Netflix is streaming “The Umbrella Academy,” about a dysfunctional family of heroes from Dark Horse Comics, and “The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina,” about a teenage witch from Archie Comics.
These adaptations have fueled growth in the comic book industry: Sales in 2018 rose $80 million from the previous year.
A desire to expand their content to other platforms drew Lion Forge and Oni Press together.
“There’s a lot of alignment, and we were going down the same path,” said David Steward II, who founded Lion Forge in St. Louis with Carl Reed in 2011. Rather than compete, together they can have a “bigger, stronger, singular strategy,” Mr. Steward said.
The consolidated publishing effort will be run out of Portland, Ore., where Oni is based. James Lucas Jones, publisher of Oni, will be president and publisher of the new enterprise. The merger was negotiated by Edward Hamati, the president of Polarity, a media company Mr. Steward founded last year to help develop Lion Forge characters outside comics.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/08/business/lion-forge-oni-merger.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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