Comics is a tough business. Expenses are high, margins are low. Just this month, AfterShock filed for bankruptcy so they can reorganize their debts. It's a common story.
IDW's an interesting case. For a long time, IDW really seemed to be the place that wanted to do licensed comics right. They had original properties -- notably, 30 Days of Night and Locke & Key -- but their bread and butter, month in, month out, was licensed comics. That's fine -- there's a built-in audience for the comics -- but that also comes with the expense of the license fee to the IP holder, and building their business on comics they don't own constricts their revenue over the long term to what they can sell on their own reprints. They can't option a Metal Gear Solid comic to a Hollywood studio, they can't sell the podcast rights to a Transformers comics, they can't sell My Little Pony comic art for a t-shirt, they can't sell the Spanish reprint rights to Star Trek: Boldly Go to a Mexican publisher. Other publishers were chasing Hollywood money, while IDW was chasing Hollywood with theirs. (I've seen a number of publishers come and go over my fifteen years in the industry that could be best described as Hollywood pitch farms. They made good graphic novels, but they were clearly chasing a greenlight with a graphic novel/storyboard.) IDW has moved off the heavy emphasis on licenses over the past five or six years. They publish much more original material now than they did in the past. Whether that's enough to keep them afloat financially, I don't know.
