...all at nine in the morning at Comic Con. Anyone who's been there knows that's pretty impressive stuff.

Read on to see what he had to say about creator-owned comics, the Archaia acquisition and plans to push through more all-ages original properties, now that the licensed books in the Kaboom imprint have helped strengthen the market for kids' comics.

ComicBook.com: In addition to taking on Archaia, which is a big kind of battery of Intellectual Property, it seems to me as though the days when you did mostly licensed work are waning and that you're mostly all original IP now, right? Ross Richie: I would argue, from my perspective, we never were [overly concerned with licenses]. When we won the Best New Publisher in 2005 from Wizard Magazine, we launched with original content. Zombie Tales, Cthulu Tales, a lot of the anthologies. Then we were doing Hero Squared--which is a book that's very close to my heart--all that sort of stuff. All of that sort of stuff and then of course 2 Guns, which was a very early book that we did.

As we started to build, looking at licenses is a great way to expand your business and so when we launched Kaboom, it was with a lot of Disney licenses and a big part of doing that is based on--if a spot like all-ages and kids' publishing is under-served, retailers are scared to buy those books because there might not be an audience. The conventional wisdom is that kids don't come into comic book stores. So launching originals in that space could be deadly. And it's a disservice to the creators if you can't serve them and provide an opportunity for them where they can flourish. We're very protective of people because they're literally giving us their dreams on paper, right? And I know if I gave somebody my dreams, I'd want them to try to do the best they could with it. So at one point we had twelve licensed titles through the Kaboom imprint that were all Disney-focused and that, on a market share basis if we just sliced Kaboom off as an imprint it was bigger than the next publisher behind us in market share alone.

That might contribute to the feeling that we do a lot of licensed material, but really what it is, is that it was giving commercial product to the retailers and now, a few years later, retailers have an identified section in the front of their store that has Adventure Time and My Little Pony and several publishers in the space and the ground really broke for everybody. Now, that's a valid way to publish comic books and so now I feel like we're in a place where we can do something like Herobear, which is an original, and it can be supported by retailers. I'm a very strategic thinker and so I don't really just sort of make it up. We'll have a very specific philosophy and a specific approach and you'll see us do more original content through the Kaboom imprint as we grow that and do it in a real systemic way. Last year, we launched eight originals and one of them was Supurbia, which really broke through and got everybody really excited. Then this year has been really exciting because between Six-Gun Gorilla and Polarity and Suicide Risk and Next Testament and now Day Men, the people have really been able ot get really excited about the original content that we're doing. And it's always been about that from the beginning, you know? Licenses are great but I don't want to be a cover band. I love certain comic books that are based on certain movies or TV shows, it's a blast, but at the core of it: we don't want to do Star Wars, we want to make our own Star Wars.

And we've done that with 2 Guns and that's really the dream, right? That you go out and you publish something that's an original idea and people want it and are excited about it. And the people that are excited about it are Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg--it's awesome. ComicBook.com: Obviously nobody ever sets out to make a bad comic, but it seems like smaller publishers have a better batting average. Is the drive to be just fantastic partially because you don't have a budget to take a chance on something that's just pretty good? Richie: Absolutely, yeah. Moreover, our mandate has to be...