In the wake of news that Marvel Comics had taken over control of comic books based on Disney's Pixar characters, we speculated last month that BOOM! Studios had also lost the rights to continue publication of its popular and critically lauded comics based on Disney's The Muppet Show property. While official word is still forthcoming, it appears that any future Muppet Show comics will come not from BOOM! but from Marvel. This information comes from The Muppet Show cartoonist Roger Langridge, whose unreleased work seems to be in some kind of legal limbo.Writing on his blog, Langridge said he had "no idea" what will become of his unreleased The Muppet Show work, which was to be published by BOOM! last November but postponed by Langridge for personal reasons. In the cartoonist's estimation, his work finds itself caught in an arcane legal feedback loop.

As far as I understand it, the unpublished work I've done for Boom isn't technically Disney's until it's published, and obviously Boom can't publish it without a license. So it's in a kind of limbo right now. In the best of all possible worlds, I'd like to think that Boom and Marvel can come to some kind of arrangement whereby Marvel can eventually release the work. I'm only a cartoonist, real business stuff makes my brain hurt, so I'm not sure how that would work - I guess Disney/Marvel buys the rights from Boom or something. Or maybe they have to go out into the woods at midnight and bury Kermit in effigy with some chives in order to break the curse. Something like that. However it happens, I would very much like for it to see the light of day eventually.

Marvel has already announced plans to reprint Pixar-based material already created and published by BOOM! Studios, which confirms some of Langridge's reading of the legal situation. We've yet to hear whether an in-progress The Incredibles storyline will be completed at Marvel, although we certainly hope that and Langridge's The Muppet Show arc, called "The Four Seasons," will find their way to comics stores somehow.

Langridge posted the following unreleased pages from the story:





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