Earlier this week, Robot 6 posted a pointer to Roger Langridge’s blog where he said he was leaving the Muppet Show series:

The story I’m currently drawing, “The Four Seasons,” will be held back a few months, to be released next year sometime

and after that, no more. That’s a real shame. The Muppet Show is the best licensed comic I’ve ever seen, and Langridge perfectly captured the characters while doing fresh and creative things with them.

Given that the Muppet comic started in March 2009, making it almost two years since Boom! started publishing these books licensed from Disney (who have since acquired their own comic publisher, Marvel), of course, the rumors have started, as indicated in this comment posted by a “Valerie Smith” at the Robot 6 thread:

Although they’re still not talking about it, Boom has lost the Muppets/Pixar license as of the end of December, which is why there are no new solicitations in January. The biggest casualty of this is apparently Incredibles, which stopped abruptly at the end of issue #15, with the villains winning and the Incredibles despised by the public.

The regular Disney license is up with them this year, which is why, I suspect, they’re trying so hard to push the classic characters and piggyback on the success of Darkwing Duck. Having lost one portion of the license, I imagine they’re really trying to hold on to the othert portion, since it’s departure would mean that their kid’s line had no other properties.

Let’s all remember, though, that we have no idea who this person is, whether they’d actually know anything about any of this, or what their motivation might be in putting this rumor out there. People who reveal “news” like that in comments usually tend to include some kind of indication as to *why* they know, like “my comic shop owner saw advance material” or “my boyfriend’s an inker” or whatever. Just putting this out baldly without any context smacks of troublemaking, not information-sharing.

In the December Previews catalog, Boom! has offered two Muppet Show comic collections; if they’ve “lost the license”, then it’s a weird deal that lets them continue shipping new material in February. That bit about the Incredibles is just stupid, too — Boom has carefully planned its storylines in chunks to collect nicely. A company that puts in that much planning isn’t going to schedule a cliffhanger when a license expires. Most importantly, “no more Muppets comics” contradicts Roger’s statement that his last work on the title will come out next year, and I believe “respected comic pro” over “person I don’t know on message board”. I’m looking forward to reading that last story, made all the more bittersweet by appreciating it while I can.