darth genius wrote:
An utter failure from a marketing perspective and frankly, if I were the licensor, I'd have pulled the license from them if they refused to cancel, rebrand, and resolicit so this could be done right, comprehensively, from the beginning and make *everyone* involved a lot more money.  But the folks at Dark Horse are unencumbered by the burdens of competence.
Do license owners generally make money beyond the licensing fee i.e. is there some profit-sharing involved with new works?  It's unlikely that DH is paying royalties to BWS or Roy Thomas so the only one who stands to lose money from their "utter failure" is DH themselves. 
They seem to make a point of doing things differently than industry standard simply for the sake of being different.  The problem is that the industry standard is the industry standard for a reason.  Because that's what people have bought, and by voting with their wallets, it's what consumers have told publishers will get them to spend money.
Of course, you can look at Tokypop who first published their domestic manga at a size radically different from the past -- and now they're considered the industry standard.  You could argue that DC's Absolutes were a change.  Even Marvel's oversized HC line was a break from the past-- to the point now where some people refuse to buy their HCs unless they're oversized vs. the regular Premiere Editions (which I always thought was strange; after all, it's not like the original floppies are oversized).  So there's something to be said about bucking trends. 

I think the main problems facing Conan's HC line are overall poor planning (focusing on BWS versus the Conan license itself) and being cheap-- DH didn't want to pay to fix the coloring and other problems.