With a number of significant media tie-ins coming up, Marvel Comics is preparing for the rest of 2004 with major book publishing initiatives.
The biggest media crossover, of course, will be the Spider-Man 2 movie, opening June 30. "It's obviously going to be a big Spider-Man year," said Marvel's marketing manager David Gabriel. Besides an adaptation of the film itself, several more hardcover and paperback volumes of the Ultimate Spider-Man line will appear: the eighth and ninth trade paperback collections are due this year, including one called Hollywood due shortly after the movie opens. This year will see collections of Amazing Spider-Man (written by Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski), Spectacular Spider-Man, the adjectiveless Spider-Man series (whose first volume will appear in November to tie in with the DVD release of Spider-Man 2), Spider-Man/Doctor Octopus: Year One, and a coffee-table collection of the covers of Amazing Spider-Man's first 500 issues.
Meanwhile, the company's prose imprint Marvel Press will release the YA novel Mary Jane 2, about Spider-Man's girlfriend, and a paperback edition of last year's Mary Jane.
That's not even counting the wall-crawler's flagship title in the new Marvel Age line of manga-sized all-ages digests (in color, with a $5.99 or $7.99 price point). The Marvel Age Spider-Man series features newly rewritten and rewritten versions of the character's adventures from the '60s, to be followed by other Marvel Age titles later this year. Gabriel reports that the digests (promoted by two million free issues given to school kids) are doing well in Barnes & Noble and Borders, and have also been surprisingly successful in comics stores.
There'll be a few more Marvel movies this year, and books to tie in with them: a prequel to the Man-Thing movie to accompany its release in October, a collection of the early black-and-white Blade stories from the '70s for the December release of Blade III, and more.
There won't be another X-Men movie until 2006, but bookstores continue to do very well with anything with a big X in the title, and Marvel's got some cult-favorite talent on upcoming books: Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon is writing an Astonishing X-Men volume (to be drawn by John Cassaday), and Chris Claremont, the writer most closely associated with the classic X-Men stories, is writing an Uncanny X-Men volume that's being drawn by Alan Davis. The final collection of Grant Morrison's New X-Men appears in July; two more volumes of Ultimate X-Men are due later in the year. And the 30th anniversary of the series' most popular character, Wolverine, will be celebrated with a best-of hardcover collection in October.
And there's a couple of high-profile books coming in the fall. Bestselling Sandman author Neil Gaiman's much touted Marvel 1602 will be released as an October hardcover, with a big media push. Marvel's new Icon imprint (launched for its most successful creators) will offer three collections. The first two will be Bendis and Michael Avon's super hero noir series Powers, Powers: Sellout (Sept.) and David Mack's Kabuki, which may appear in a trade collection late in the year. Finally, there'll be a second coffee-table Art of Marvel hardcover released in time for the holidays.
