One remarkable trend at last month’s Comic-Con International in San Diego was the number of children’s comics that were being announced—not graphic novels (though there were plenty of those), but single-issue comics, the sort of thing kids used to buy for a dime at the newsstand.
The newsstand is long gone, as is the 10-cent cover price, but kids go to comic shops now, and the publishers want to offer something just for them. At the Diamond retailers’ lunch, Marvel announced it would be offering retailers two children’s series in discounted bundles, with the titles alternating from month to month: Spidey and His Amazing Friends, a preschool comic based on the animated series, and Spider-Man: Homeroom Heroes, middle grade comics first published by Panini in Europe. This news follows DC’s move last year to reformat its graphic novels Primer and Batman and Robin and Howard as three-issue comics series.
As go the big guys, so go the smaller ones. Many of the announcements made at the show included both comics and graphic novels for young readers. Most will be collected into graphic novels for the book market, but publishing them first as comics gives retailers something to offer their younger customers and builds an audience for the eventual trade edition.
Rocketship Entertainment announced it was partnering with Rovio to publish titles based on the Angry Birds mobile game, including a series of three early-reader comics by My Little Pony comic writer Katie Cook. The deal also includes three middle grade Angry Birds graphic novels written by Paul Tobin, writer of Dark Horse’s Plants vs. Zombies series, with art by another My Little Pony contributor, Thom Zahler. The three titles, The Haunting of Hog House, Level Up, and Breaking the Bank, will be crowdfunded in a single Kickstarter campaign and then published, one a year, starting in summer 2025.
Dynamite Entertainment announced a new set of retro licenses based on animated properties including Ben 10, the eco-warrior Captain Planet, and the Saturday morning cartoon The Herculoids (the latter to be written by Bone contributor Tom Sniegoski).
Sandy King Carpenter, founder of Storm King Comics, has long included a children’s line, Storm Kids, alongside more adult fare (which focuses heavily on Carpenter’s husband, horror filmmaker John Carpenter). “I had people come to my booth for the adult horror, bringing their kids,” Carpenter said, “and I felt that there was a spot that I could fill for age-appropriate horror.” That means ghost bunnies and other less scary concepts for four- to eight-year-olds (‘so they can be part of the party,” Carpenter said) and middle grade titles such as The Grimms Town Terror Tales that get into deeper issues such as death and separation. “It’s what’s appropriate to handle—what scares you and hopefully makes you feel empowered to face life,” Carpenter said. Storm Kids’ plans for the future include a one-shot comic, Once Upon a Grub, a prequel to the Grimms Town books, as well as a Ghost Whiskers by Thom Zahler, a middle grade story about a boy who moves with his family to a house filled with ghosts and talking cats.
Graphic novels were still very much a presence on the show floor, and bestselling author Raina Telgemeier attracted a long line of young fans to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund booth, where she was signing copies of her often-challenged graphic novel Drama. Telgemeier also joined Scott McCloud at the Beat’s 20th-anniversary panel to discuss the duo’s upcoming collaboration, The Cartoonists Club.
At its booth, Mad Cave was featuring the first volume of Fate: The Winx Saga, an original graphic novel pitched as a sequel to Netflix’s Winx series, which will officially go on sale on August 13. Mad Cave is publishing the book, by writer Olivia Cuartero-Briggs and artist Christianne Gillenardo-Goudreau, as part of its Maverick YA imprint, in contrast with its other Winx books, which are published by the middle grade imprint Papercutz.
As in previous years, several book publishers had prominent spots on the show floor to promote their graphic novels, including Ben Clanton’s Tater Tales, the follow-up to Narwhal and Jelly, and Carolyn Palmer’s Camp Prodigy, a tale of nonbinary preteens at orchestra camp.
While children colored Bluey pages and adults geeked out over the latest Marvel and DC announcements, there were indications of a growing middle ground of titles for all ages. Dark Horse announced a new edition of Star Wars: The Prequel Trilogy, originally published by Disney in 2017 as a middle grade graphic novel. The Dark Horse edition will have a new cover and no kid-specific branding. Like Jeffrey Brown’s Star Wars books (on prominent display at the Chronicle booth), it is being pitched at adults as well as children, a winning combination at a show where the youngest fans arrive in strollers or perched on their parents’ shoulders.
