The House of Mouse snags the House of Ideas for a cool $4 billion.

Monday morning saw the announcement that the Walt Disney Company would be purchasing comic book publisher Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion. More news and information on the sale can be found here. The deal will give the massive media conglomerate control over a number of pop culture icons—from Spider-Man and the X-Men to the Hulk and Iron Man—to add to their already huge stable of characters, which already includes a number of characters created outside of the company, such as Jim Henson's Muppets. It also sets Marvel as an even stronger rival to DC Comics, itself a subsidiary of corporate behemoth Time-Warner. The impact to Marvel's regular comics publishing or its slate of forthcoming movies has not yet been announced.

That sound you just heard was the internet tearing in half. | Jason Green

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