October 5 was a landmark date for American graphic novels. For the first time, a book from an American comics publisher appeared on the New York Times extended hardcover bestseller list: the Neil Gaiman— written anthology The Sandman: Endless Nights, from DC/Vertigo appeared at #20 on the list.
DC and Marvel, the two largest American comics companies, are doing better than they ever have in the book trade—DC's president and publisher, Paul Levitz, reports that bookstore sales this year are triple what they were five years ago, and he expects 30% growth for 2003. But both companies are also trying to figure out how to catch up with the manga revolution—which has stolen some of their thunder in the book market—and how to reach the elusive market of girl readers.
Marvel is entering that field with a Marvel Manga format that it will introduce in November: digest-size books, printed in color, with a price point of $7.99 or $8.99. Sentinel, Mystique and Runaways are self-contained stories with ties to the X-Men and Spider-Man lines, appropriate for school-age audiences. The company is also making a play for teenage girls with YA prose book adaptations of top comics series: Judith O'Brien's Mary Jane, a prose story focused on Spiderman's girlfriend, was very successful (it will appear in paperback soon), and O'Brien's Mary Jane II will appear in time for the Spider-Man II film's opening in early July 2004.
Marvel consistently does well with media tie-ins like X-Men and Spider-Man titles: lately, the X-Men Evolution books, based on the cartoon series, have been selling well, according to David Gabriel, Marvel's manager of sales/administration. The next major Marvel film is The Punisher, opening in April, and a group of Punisher-related books will appear well before then, including a hardcover edition of Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon's Punisher: Born. A Fantastic Four feature film is expected for the 2004 holiday season, and Marvel's already gearing up for it—by the end of this year, there will be three different Fantastic Four series running, and they'll be collected in book form by next fall.
Gabriel notes that Kmart and other retailers have expressed interest in Bob Morales' The Truth, an unusual retelling of Captain America's origins from an African-American perspective, for Black History Month promotions, so it will appear as a trade paperback in late January. Wolverine: The Brothers, collecting the first story line from 2003's bestselling new series, will be out in February, as will the fourth and final volume of the mature-readers cult hit series Alias. Other major Marvel projects due this winter include a coffee-table book, The Art of Marvel Comics (which will be promoted through sci-fi.com), in November and a collection of the covers of the first 500 issues of Amazing Spider-Man due in February. And, next July, Marvel will have a Neil Gaiman hardcover of its own, collecting his much-anticipated 1602 miniseries, a retelling of the Marvel Universe set in Elizabethan England.
DC has a substantial Gaiman backlist from its Vertigo imprint, notably the extremely popular Sandman books, whose redesigned paperback editions have just started to appear. "We've really made the field's largest commitment to the idea of the high-end original graphic novel," Levitz says. "We've been developing this program for over a decade and have stuff in the pipeline for the next three to four years. It's the natural spearhead that drives the program with collected editions, archives and the children's digests we've just introduced."
Kids' Comics, Manga
Those kids' comics digests include two Powerpuff Girls books (picked up by Scholastic Book Fairs), and they'll soon be joined by Scooby-Doo and Justice League volumes. Levitz notes that there is lots of material to draw on: "We've been publishing material for kids since people who are geriatric were kids." Then there's the manga issue—as Levitz points out, "Japanese publishers put a lot more into creating a manga culture in America than American publishers did." DC has already had one of the most successful American manga-style books with Jill Thompson's Death: At Death's Door, but it's also currently talking to publishers, creative people and editors in the Japanese manga world. "By this time next year, you'll see us with a significant presence in manga," Levitz says.
High-end graphic novels like Endless Nights, Levitz believes, will become a more and more important part of DC's business; the Batman: Hush hardcover also sold very well in bookstores. Next up are Eisner-winners Brian Azarello and Joe Kubert's Sgt. Rock: Between Hell and a Hard Place and science fiction author David Brin and fantasy illustrator Scott Hampton's The Life Eaters, both in November. All the issues of bestselling author Brad Meltzer's Green Arrow: Archer's Quest will be collected in a single volume in December. January will bring The Saga of Seven Suns, a hardcover original graphic novel by science fiction writer Kevin J. Anderson with artist Robert Teranishi.
DC also has some significant media tie-ins coming up. The Catwoman and Constantine movies, starring Halle Berry and Keanu Reeves, respectively, are both due next year, and the critically acclaimed comics that inspired them are being collected into multiple paperbacks. The hit Teen Titans animated series on the Cartoon Network will yield books of its own. And one box-office flop has turned into a major bookstore success. "We're on the seventh printing of [Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's] The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," Levitz says. "We just kept getting more and more orders and we're not seeing any returns." Volume 2, by the same team, is due in December.
Both Marvel and DC note that their bestselling graphic novels continue to do well over time. "What's best about this evolution of our field is that it's the good stuff that sells," Levitz explains. "And once it catches on, it stays in the catalogue seemingly forever. There are still not enough people who've discovered comics. And then maybe somebody hands them [Alan Moore's classic epic] Watchmen."
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