Bundled, Tossed, Untied And Stacked



By Tom Spurgeon

* the release of the new Marshal Law collection is imminent in a way that anything about it hardly counts as publishing news -- we should have it in our hands in about six weeks. Still, I was delighted to see a final cover image, as that's been a long-delayed book and one that I've been looking forward to reading/owning/seeing.

* I know that I've almost certainly discussed the Fall Renée French book from Yam Books, Hagelbarger And The Nightmare Goat on this site at least once before now, but I'm not sure that I knew there were some preview images available. French is in a really good place right now creatively, and I'm always delighted to see her work with really good, tiny boutique houses like Yam -- I know the books will look great, and it brings the publisher to the attention of a bunch of different artists that pay attention to what French is doing.

* another book that is almost upon us is a grand collection of Bob Fingerman's Minimum Wage series, a 1990s alt-comic that seemed both completely of and slightly ahead of its time. I would imagine that it has a much bigger potential audience that will hopefully catch up to it in this form. Here's a free preview from that book that I saw when Heidi MacDonald tweeted it out.

* Viz Media will be doing Ben 10 books inspired by the hit cartoon series and licensing success. I think that's a good match. It'll be nice to buy some of those for some super-energetic boy-children of my friends.

* DC announced its next major storyline in its Batman book by Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo will be a story about the character's origins and early adventures as now defined by the New 52 universe. I made a twitter joke about this yesterday, but I think it's legitimate for a publisher to seek press for storylines on major books like that, and I think it's worth paying some attention to as publishing news. One thing I like about the way they've handled that Batman book recently is that they make buying that serial comic sound important and worth doing just for itself: not because it's part of a wider storyline, or because it has implications for X, Y and Z editorial-driven plotlines, or because it ties into a movie. I think it's a model worth following, really.

* the other piece of DC Comics news worth noting is that June will only see 50 serial comics come out from the publisher rather than 52, which would be a branding problem in most cases historically but not these days, not really. As I recall, some of the recent interview with DC executive spoke in terms of publishing according to what the market would bear, so it's not a huge surprise. I do think it's interesting to note that with Before Watchmen leaving the marketplace and with a potential shrink away from 52 serial comics, that seems a significant amount of books overall, just the bulk of them, that we won't see now. I mean, I'm sure they'll have best-sellers, and they sold a lot of variant-cover Justice League Of America books recently and should sell a metric ton of the Snyder-Lee Superman and seem to be orienting themselves to more books featuring top characters, but that's a slightly different strategy. Enough to note, anyway.

* via a tweet from Jog comes this article describing a new Masamune Shirow work.

* Koyama Press sent out a pair of press releases while I was in the Pacific Northwest. The first was to announce a distribution deal with Consortium Book Sales And Distribution. They already do Nobrow Press and Uncivilized Books as part of their 100-plus publisher line-up. That sounds like a good match for them. The other was to formalize their debuts for TCAF: Michael DeForge's Very Casual, Julie Delporte's Journal and Victor Kerlow's Everything Takes Forever. It's nice to see people use TCAF -- and events like SPX and BCGF more generally -- as publishing launchpads for new books. I think shows work well for publishers that way, and vice-versa, at all levels.

* finally, new Seth! And it's auto-bio.


 
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