Fleetway

History: In 1959, a few months after newspaper publishers the Mirror Group bought long-established British publisher Amalgamated Press, the comic producing section of Associated Newspapers, chairman Cecil Harmsworth King renamed it after the building that housed the company's offices, Fleetway House in London's Farringdon Road. When one rival publisher, Odhams Press, bought out two of the others, Hulton Press and George Newnes Publishers, King decided to reduce his competition and so Fleetway bought out Odhams in 1961. All the individual companies initially continued as separate entities, but an umbrella company, IPC, was set up in 1963. However, after a management change in 1968, IPC absorbed all the subsidiaries, becoming IPC Magazines.

In 1987 IPC Magazines decided to sell its remaining comic titles, and so reinstated Fleetway, transferring all rights for characters in ongoing titles to the revived company - Fleetway owned all IPC comics characters and titles created January 1, 1970, plus 26 specified characters which appeared in Buster (an IPC title which predated the 1970 limit, but which was still in publication in 1987); IPC held on the rights for all the other comic characters and titles. The revived Fleetway was sold to Pergamon Holdings, who in turn sold it on to Egmont UK, who merged it with their comics section, London Editions, to become Fleetway Editions. Around 1996 the comics began listing the company as Egmont Fleetway, and in 2000, after selling 2000 AD and its related titles to Rebellion, Egmont dropped the Fleetway name altogether, and the remaining titles moved to Egmont UK's comics subdivision, Egmont Publishing. Rebellion has since bought the rights to all those characters and series that were retained as part of Fleetway.

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