Marvel, DC Comics Announce Publishing Plans To Retailers At Baltimore Summit

I don't follow mainstream comics enough to know if this is a strange thing, but it strikes me that the usual flurry of announcements one used to hear coming out of mainstream comic book publisher panels at San Diego and Wizard World Chicago all kind of ended up at the retailer summit in Baltimore yesterday. That may be intentional, it may be that the strain of launching 52 and Civil War made longer range planning suffer for a while until the overworked editorial teams could get their bearings back. Maybe it just worked out that way. I honestly don't know.

The comics news site Newsarama has been all over both series of announcements. After years of dithering around with the stuff in a couple of formats, DC looks to be packaging the Jack Kirby New Gods material in multiple hardbacks, perhaps chronologically. They also made official (I think) the news that the last League of Extraordinary Gentlemen project at DC/WildStorm, The Black Dossier, has been moved back to January. They're also putting together some of their character resource books in a grander form, although that hardly seems interesting at all. Marvel offered up more of a varied, full press of personnel moves -- major writers to take over Runaways and former Marvel cornerstone property Thor, while the cartoonist Alan Davis returns to his not-extremely-successful-the-first-time Clandestine (pictured) -- and what strikes me as a very surprising step or two away from hardcore investment in superhero branding: a line of Classic Comics graphic novel adaptations targeted to bookstores and libraries, and a deal with the Dabel Brothers that targets their relationships with modern genre authors.

Anyone interested in mainstream comics publishing strategies should check out Newsarama's coverage. For supplementary information, the comics business news and analysis site ICv2.com has run free-standing articles on the Dabel Brothers and Runaways deals.
 
posted 2:55 am PST | Permalink
 

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