Oh, sure, you have comic books. But do you have books about comic books? Great big ones? If not, Dorling Kindersley (DK) is coming to the rescue this fall with not one but two new oversized hardcover books about the history of two large forces in the comics world: Marvel Comics and DC’s Vertigo imprint.
The Vertigo Encyclopedia (Sept., $30, 240 p) will break down Vertigo’s most famous series in detailed chapters in the front of the book, showcasing work like Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s Preacher, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and Y: The Last Man, with a second section detailing Vertigo’ssmallerprojects. DK and DC have had success with volumes about individual superheroes and a larger DC Encyclopedia, but the offbeat nature of Vertigo makes the new book a little different.
“It’s not an identical structure to the way the superhero books were done,” explains Karen Berger, senior v-p and Vertigo executive editor. “It looks at each series and gives overviews of the characters, and goes behind the scenes.” The Vertigo Encyclopedia isn’t your traditional comics universe history because Vertigo isn’t your traditional comics universe. Most of the projects are unrelated from one another and from the DC universe, though some have crossed the border for companywide events like Crisis on Infinite Earths or the Vertigo-only Children’s Crusade. “We started off doing weird, edgy, irreverent takes on characters in the DC Universe,” Berger recalls. She grandfathered in books like Animal Man and Swamp Thing—which had gained adult readerships during the tenures of writers like Grant Morrison and Alan Moore—and then set about building the imprint’s audience. “It let us lay the groundwork to do more and more creator-owned material,” she says.
Now, the company specializes in what Berger calls “contemporary fiction in graphic novel form,” like Rick Veitch’s Can’t Get No and Harvey Pekar’s The Quitter. The encyclopedia will follow Vertigo’s history right up to the present and a little ways into the future—Berger is tight-lipped about the projects explored at the end of the book, which haven’t been announced yet.
DK is doing an initial print run of 30,000 copies, 25,000 of which are earmarked for U.S. release (the company is based in England) and will also be marketed in the U.K. and Australia.
On the Marvel side, The Marvel Chronicle has a higher price point ($50) a higher page count (352) and a gift box with two prints of the cover image (Jim Cheung’s densely populated Marvel Universe in both color and black and white) inside. It’s a big book for a couple of reasons: on the one hand, it’s probably wise for Marvel to go the extra mile to justify this book’s existence—Marvel history books have been around since before Les Daniels wrote Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World’s Greatest Comics in 1991. (By the time Chronicle hits the shelves, the publisher will be approaching seven fabulous decades).
On the other hand, there’s no shortage of interest—DK’s own Marvel Encyclopedia (2006) sold a healthy 69,000 copies, and the initial print run for the new book is a suitably optimistic 95,000. The book will break Marvel’s history down in decades, starting in 1939 with the first Human Torch story from Timely (the company that would become Marvel). The book is “basically a giant time line,” according to Marvel editor Tom Brevoort, who wrote the section on the 1950s. It will explain what was going on in the real world and what was going on in the Marvel universe, and sometimes, what was going on when the two intersected, with a topical story like Peter David’s AIDS story in Hulk #420 and the company’s 9/11 tribute books. The Marvel Chronicle is due in bookstores in October.
