IDW Publishing

Website: idwpublishing.com

Style Classification: Licensed Properties; Creator Owned Content

Notable Works: (currently) Transformers; Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; Godzilla; Wynonna Earp

Story:

Founded in 1999 in San Diego, IDW has grown into the fourth largest producer of comics in the United States. They have one of the most successful stables of well-executed licensed property divisions in the industry, cornering the market on original stories from the Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, Godzilla, Transformers, X-Files, Star Trek, and even Dungeons and Dragons universes.

On the creator-driven division, they have signed exclusive deals with the likes of Kevin Eastman, half of the creative team of TMNT. They publish a wide variety of content that shows how the market has changed, like Time Looper (about a lesbian time-traveling bureaucratic underling) and Wynonna Earp (about a supernatural division or marshals whose star is the eponymous Wynonna). This cowgirl werewolf- and vampire-hunter has been green-lit for a television show on SyFy.

Publishing hundreds of original comics and graphic novels a year, to go along with their line of novels, video games, and other various television and digital content, IDW is a force in the industry, for sure.

They won an Eisner Award for their recent "Little Nemo's Return to Slumberland" limited series, a re-imagining of Windsor McKay's classic surreal work from the '20s and '30s.