> I didn't see it pointed out but DC is owned by Warner-Discovery (or whatever it is called) so they have tons of lawyers on retainer to prevent anyone from actually publishing Fables but them.

I don't see a way around this:

> The one thing in our contract the DC lawyers can’t contest, or reinterpret to their own benefit, is that I am the sole owner of the intellectual property. I can sell it or give it away to whomever I want.

If he kept full ownership, and I obviously can't see any of his contracts, DC doesn't have any ownership and so can't stop any such publication. It's like how publishing a nice edition of Shakespeare doesn't give that publisher any proprietary rights to Hamlet.

> so they have tons of lawyers on retainer to prevent anyone from actually publishing Fables but them

That's not going to be a long court case regardless of how many lawyers they throw at it, since they would have been unable to produce anything showing that they owned the IP that you are allegedly infringing - because they simply didn't own the IP.

This was true before Willingham pulled this stunt. They never owned it, he did. The only one who could have sued would have been Willingham himself.

With this recent event technically everyone owns it (they too), but bringing that up won't help them at all.

Trademarks: I don't think they should have any, given that you can't trademark something you don't own. Searching trademark databases didn't yield anything.