Posted in: Comics | Tagged: alex segura, archie, dick tracey, HRL, michael moreci, Thomas Pitilli, Tribune

Archie's Dick Tracy Revival Canceled Due to Licensing Error

Published Tue, 16 Jan 2018 16:23:33 -0600

A week after it was announced, Archie Comics has been forced to cancel its planned Dick Tracy comic by Alex Segura, Michael Moreci, and Thomas Pitilli. The news was revealed in a series of now-deleted tweets by the Tribune Content Agency, which were captured by website io9 before disappearing into the Twitter ether. Here's what they said:

Due to an unfortunate error on our part, Tribune is sad to announce that there will not be a DICK TRACY comic book series from Archie Comics. While we had high hopes for the book and Archie Comics negotiated the deal in good faith and is not at fault, we discovered a preexisting licensing deal that precludes us from continuing with this project. We apologize to Archie Comics, the very talented creators and their many fans.

But in case you thought the deletion was a mistake, Segura confirmed the sad news was true on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/alex_segura/status/953308878325862400

According to the original story, the ill-fated deal began when Segura called up Tribune on a whim to ask about the rights.

"I was thinking about Dick Tracy and how cool it would be to have him back in comic form," Segura said. "I shot Scott Cameron at Tribune [Content Agency] a quick email asking about the rights, not expecting it to go anywhere, but it turned out the Tribune guys were looking to get Tracy back into comics, so everything rolled from there."

Or not.

So what's the licensing conflict that caused the quick cancellation? No one has elaborated, so we're going to have to assume it's the Detective Pikachu movie.