After more than 30 years in the graphic novel business, Byron Preiss has seen it go from big to little and back again.
But now, after taking another leap into the comics field last April with the graphic novel division of his four-year-old company, ibooks, he sees the most recent growth of the comics market as permanent, based on "real enthusiasm from readers and buyers."
For Preiss, who has reason to be wary of another comics craze, the key difference between now and the past is the recent creation of graphic novel sections in trade book stores and libraries, enabling both venues to more easily support the medium. The entire ibooks catalogue, consisting of titles in a number of genres--nonfiction, science fiction, mystery and others--is distributed by Simon & Schuster; the graphic novel line has an impressive two-thirds of its sales through the bookstore market rather than the comics shop market.
Preiss sees his line as "one-third creator vision, new work; one-third collections of previously uncollected material; one-third commercially appealing properties." The line employs two part-time editors, both veterans of the comics business: editor-in-chief Steven A. Roman and senior editor Dwight Zimmerman. Together they've produced solid work in every area of the ibooks list.
Preiss is publishing Yossel, an acclaimed new graphic novel by comics veteran Joe Kubert, his longtime friend and "first boss" when Preiss worked at DC Comics as a young man. Yossel is a "what if" autobiography, asking what might have happened had Kubert's Polish-Jewish family not left Poland before the Nazi invasion. It's Kubert's loosest, most atmospheric work and has evoked comparisons to Maus.
Preiss is also very proud of Blacksad, an anthropomorphic animal detective story that takes on racism; it is translated from the French edition, which sold 100,000 copies. Preiss reports that both titles are hovering at the 5,000--6,000 range in copies in print. He is also issuing translated volumes by the French master of comics noir, Jacques Tardi, and collections of adaptations of the works of Raymond Chandler and Ray Bradbury.
His commercial properties include a flourishing line of manga-sized books--Sunn, an original title, has seen orders of approximately 9,000 copies--and the forthcoming "digitally remastered" reissue of a 12-year-old graphic novel called Terminator: The Burning Earth, which is also the first comics work by the extremely popular artist Alex Ross (Mythology).
All of these projects are a fraction of the some 160 titles ibooks will release this year. Ibooks is growing prodigiously, led by Preiss's infectious enthusiasm for books and comics. He started out in the comics field at DC in 1971 and throughout the '70s and '80s--indeed, long before the graphic novel marketplace developed--producing such graphic novel projects as The Illustrated Harlan Ellison and The Illustrated Roger Zelazny with companies like Berkley, Pyramid and Baronet Publishing.
In the 1990s, he produced an acclaimed CD-ROM of the great Will Eisner's The Spirit as well as the work of R. Crumb. All of these projects, he says, led to what he's doing with ibooks now. He's finally able to place graphic novels in the hands of a ready and willing audience. Preiss has been there since the beginning, and now he's happily returned to the comics marketplace yet again.
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