Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-24949615-20160902102913/@comment-61022-20160912192407

About ROM, Micronauts, and various other rights issues with licensed properties. Of them all, Conan, Kull, Red Sonja, Godzilla, Shogun Warriors, ROM, Micronauts, Fu Manchu, Doc Savage and Godzilla were all part of the Earth-616 universe.

While the licenses to used characters owned by the respective owners, characters that were created for the comics based on those series are owned by Marvel. In a lot of cases, Marvel developed a lot of the back story for these characters, particularly ROM, Transformers, and Micronauts.

For example, the majority of the characters created FOR Micronauts (such as Bug, Arcturus Rann, Marionette) are still owned by Marvel. They can also still use the "Microverse", because Marvel had previously established a "micro universe" as early as an issue of Captain America Comics from 1940s (The issue number escapes me at the moment). However characters like Baron Karza and most of the robots and centaur people are owned by whatever company owns the rights to Micronauts.

All the supporting cast members in Godzilla are owned by Marvel (hence why they still appear in later comics, particularly the Red Ronin and Doctor Demonicus). When Marvel took out the license they only licensed the use of Godzilla from Toho, hence why you don't see any other trademark Toho monsters, like Mothra.

With Red Sonja, Conan and Kull, any characters that weren't derived from the books are owned by Marvel. Same deal with Fu Manchu and Doc Savage. Again, hence characters like Kulan Gath, and Shang-Chi can still be used by Marvel.

The Dire Wraiths were created for the comic book specifically to give ROM foes. The ROM toyline only had one toy -- ROM -- and it didn't sell very well and was scrapped soon after. So all the other Spaceknights and the Dire Wraiths are owned by Marvel.

Marvel also owns the rights to the Circuit Breaker character who appeared in their Transformers comics. Anytime IDW reprints those comics they need permission from Marvel (which they have, especially with Issue #3 with Spider-Man)

Marvel often employs subtle trademark tricks to get around some of the continuity issues with these trademarked characters. With Godzilla, they've mutated the monster further so it looks significantly different. It appeared in Uncanny X-Men under the name Leviathan recently.

Ditto for Fu Manchu, who appears full masked and not by his real name in his more recent appearances.

On the otherside of the fence, when IDW did "Regeneration One" for Transformers (which continued the Transformers story from the end of Marvel's issue #80) they vaguely reference Circuit Breaker and she's replaced by a new-ish character named Circuit Smasher. Different enough.

I figure the use of Dire Wraiths in the new IDW ROM comic is problematic. But if they look different enough, that might force IDW to change their names, or make a deal with Marvel.

I really hope it results in Marvel making a deal with IDW to re-publish both ROM and the Micronaut books Marvel published in the past. The two companies have worked together before with New Avengers/Transformers and the deal to reprint of Marvel Transformers comics that feature characters that Marvel owns, you'd think if these titles were profitable they'd work together on this because fans are interested in reading these.