It’s the biggest pop culture event in North America and preview night at the San Diego Comic-con International, held from 6 pm to 9 pm the night before the show opens, is easily one of the biggest opening nights in entertainment. So many tens of thousands of fans jam the floor of the San Diego Convention Center, that the three hour preview night has come to be known as the “new Saturday.” Among the news items turned up at preview night: a new graphic novel from James Patterson, Nate Powell will draw John Lewis graphic autobio, First Second goes digital and 30 years of the groundbreaking indie comics hit, Love and Rockets.
While most of the real news will come of San Diego starting today, people around the floor were talking about, among other things, Neil Gaiman’s new multi-book deal with HarperCollins, and the tragic death of a female fan who was struck by a car while trying to cross the busy road that runs in front of the Convention Center. The show also continues to slowly grow beyond the friendly confines of the sold-out San Diego Convention Center. It seems that every nearby parking lot and open field (not to mention bars, restaurants, hotel party space) has been taken over to stage some sort of Comic-con-related promotional event, party or whatever. Indeed with tickets to Comic-con sold out for months, hotel rooms much the same, and a proliferation of other nearby off-site events, you can have a pretty good time at Comic-con and never make it to the exhibition floor.
But we’re lucky enough to have a pass and braved the throngs on the floor to, well, get a preview of publishers' plans. Here’s a quick rundown. Top Shelf announced that award-winning comics artist Nate Powell will draw the new autobiographical graphic work coming from Civil Rights legend Rep. John Lewis.
Yen Press is the manga and graphic novel imprint at Hachette, and Yen Press publishing director Kurt Hassler was showing off promotional material for Zoo, a graphic novel adaptation of a forthcoming James Patterson prose novel. It’s Patterson’s first graphic novel for adult readers and Yen Press’s first graphic adaptation of a Patterson novel (among his other graphic novels are Witch and Wizard, Maximum Ride and Daniel X) that isn’t done in the manga style. Art will be done in a Western comics style by artist Andy MacDonald. The graphic novel will be published about 2 months after Zoo is published in prose. Hassler was also pumped up about the forthcoming adaptation of Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire, with art by Ashley Marie Witter, which will be published in the fall.
We’ll have more on Viz Media later, but during preview night the manga publisher and anime distributor was using its booth to tape fans giving little promos for Neon Alley, a new Viz service that will distribute Viz anime (many of which are based on its bestselling manga series like Bleach, Death Note and Naruto) through an as yet unnamed gaming console channel. Neon Alley will allow fans to stream their favorite anime right through the gaming consoles in their homes. While Viz’s Candice Uyloan was coy about which gaming company they plan to partner with, she did promise PW that Viz will announce its partners in the venture very soon.
We stopped by the booth of First Second, Macmillan’s graphic novel imprint, while editorial director Mark Seigel was chatting with acclaimed comics theorist Scott McCloud (Understanding Comics). In this instance the publisher, Seigel, is his own publishing star, and he had a few advance copies of his forthcoming Sailor Twain, a mystic graphic novel set in the 19th Century world of the steamships that plied the Hudson River between New York and Albany. First Second marketing coordinator Gina Gagliano pointed out a new forthcoming work (probably 2014) called, The Ren, a teen romance, set during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s written by Joe Illidge and Shawn Martinborough and illustrated by Grey Williamson.
Gagliano also said that First Second has just started releasing its comics in digital editions, though right now only on the Apple platform. Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese, nominated for a 2006 National Book Award, has been released on the Apple platform. First Second will release about 10 of its titles as fixed format e-books in the fall simultaneously in print and digital. The house has also released Between the Panels 2, a digital sampler of its upcoming graphic novels. Other First Second graphic novels slated or digital editions include Feynman, Anya’s Ghost and Orcs.
At the NBM booth, publisher Terry Nantier was preparing for new books by Rick Geary, Lovers Lane, a new nonfiction work in Geary’s ongoing series about notorious19th century murders, and Stan Mack’s Taxes, The Tea Party and Those Revolting Rebels, a revised, updated and renamed edition of Stan Mack’s Real Life American Revolution, originally published in 1994. NBM is also on “the verge” of a bigger digital distribution deal, Nantier said, with more details on the unnamed vendor to come. Currently NBM has about 20 of its titles available via Comixology and the publisher has also signed a deal with French digital distributor Averotix.com to distribute digital editions of its Eurotica line, a line of explicit erotic Euro-comics distributed in the U.S. by NBM. Kids comics publishers Papercutz, NBM’s sister company, is also distributed digitally by Comixology.
Canadian indie house Drawn & Quarterly has new and typically beautiful books by Brecht Evans (The Making of) and Adrian Tomine (New York Drawings); and Tomine will be launching the book with an exhibition of the drawings at the PowerHouse arena in Brooklyn as part of the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival. But in an unusual announcement, the house is also publishing Rookie Yearbook One, a collection of blogposts, articles, illustrations, fashion reporting and other materials from Rookiemag.com, the wildly popular online publication aimed at teenage girls, edited by Tavi Gevinson. D&Q’s Peggy Burn’s said the house will launch the book with a 40,000 copy first printing in the fall and a party at Housing Works during Fashion Week.
And last but certainly not least, indie house Fantagraphics is going all out to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Love & Rockets, the groundbreaking indie comics series created by Los Bros: Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, brothers whose stories of about two punk chicano girls and their friends transformed alternative comics. There’s a panel devoted to the acclaimed works of Los Bros on Saturday; at least three publications out now, Love and Rockets: New Stories # 5, the latest stories from Gilbert and Jaime; God and Science: Return of the Ti-Girls, Jaime’s superheroine epic; and The Adventures of Venus, Gilbert’s children’s graphic novel. And Fantagraphics director of publicity Jacquelene Cohen—looking fabulous, may we add, in one of her vintage stewardess dresses—also pointed to a series of six new L&R T-shirts and this reporter promptly bought two of them. Finally Fantagraphics was also showing off copies of No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics, edited by Justin Hall, a 300-page anthology of gay comics, seven years in the making.
