2008 will be a year of new ventures for Top Shelf. For one thing, the company's coproducing a movie. Co-owner Chris Staros reports that Disney has given a green light to Mandeville Productions to make a movie of The Surrogates, which Top Shelf published in 2006; Top Shelf Productions is listed as one of the producers. Bruce Willis is set to play the lead, Harvey Greer, the detective set on using his own body instead of a robotic "surrogate." The graphic novel's author, Robert Venditti (who has a prequel to The Surrogates due out in 2009), is a consultant for the film.
Top Shelf has published more than 175 comics and graphic novels in its lifetime and is known as a place that's friendly to most comic genres. "We're the kind of publisher who embraces the whole industry," said Staros. "We like Marvel and DC; we like the people who work there. We're friends with all of them. And we have a pretty diverse line these days. We're doing comic books for kids, for adults. Erotica. Some genre work. Some non-genre work."
That The Surrogates was picked up by Disney came as a surprise. Staros receives about a phone call a week from Hollywood, and he and his partner, Brett Warnock, retain an agent there, Jason Grode, but little ever comes of these calls. A few years ago, 20th Century Fox bought the rights outright to Top Shelf's Creature Tech, but that project remains in limbo. The Surrogates has been on the fast track from the start. The book came out in 2006. Producer Max Handleman grabbed the idea and pitched it to Mandeville Productions, which put it before Disney, and the deal closed in July and August of 2007. Disney quickly set up a writing team, then started casting the film.
Top Shelf also reports that it’s expanding its kids’ line in '08. It’s planning a second Corgi book for summer and has two new series, Johnny Boo by James Kochalka, about a little ghost and his sidekick, Squiggle, and Yam by Cory Barba, about a little boy whose sidekick is a small, ambulatory television set. Barba's comics began appearing in Nickelodeon magazine in 1998, which has published Yam as well as other work. Some of the Nickelodeon pieces will be reprinted in the Top Shelf book, but most will be new material. Yam is a bit like Top Shelf's long-running Owly series in that it's a kids comic with wider appeal. In addition, Andy Runton's Owly is still going strong, with no end in sight. "I think Owly is Andy's main passion in life," said Staros.
On the more adult side, Top Shelf appears to have inherited Alan Moore's unconscious from DC comics. Black Dossier will be the last League of Extraordinary Gentlemen volume that DC puts out. "We're kind of Alan Moore's main publisher these days," said Staros, who is still gleeful over the success of Lost Girls, a project Top Shelf nursed for six years before publication. Top Shelf is scheduled to put out League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century in 2009. In 2010, it will publish Moore's The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, which he's co-writing with his friend Steve Moore. When Alan Moore turned 40, he declared himself a magician and began exploring what he saw as the magical aspects of himself. Staros described Moon and Serpent as Moore's "complete magical and religious philosophies and thinking all rolled into one big, giant, friendly how-to book." Moon and Serpent will deal with ideas that Moore touched on in League and Promethea. Meanwhile Top Shelf says it has other projects with Moore in the works, but aren't ready to announce them.
Staros explained how books come to Top Shelf: "We don't deal a lot with agents." A lot of artists the publisher takes on are people seen at the cons—Top Shelf attends more than 20 a year. "A lot of the things that we publish are from people getting out there, publishing their own stuff, producing their mini-comics." Top Shelf does publish one or two things each year through blind submissions, but Staros said most things in his P.O. box are from artists still in their "formative" period. Like other graphic novel publishers, Staros and Warnock attend portfolio reviews at art schools, including Savannah College of Art and Design, or SCAD. It was on a visit to SCAD that Staros discovered then student Brett Weldele, who went on to draw The Surrogates.
