Sunday Morning at Scholastic

I received the color Bone the other day, the first in a series of nine books in full-color from Scholastic's reprinting of Jeff Smith's fantasy comic. This sent me scrambling to Scholastic's web site, where I soon got lost, but not before clicking my way through this interview with Jeff Smith, whose cartoon avatar somehow doesn't look drawn by Smith.

My favorite part of the press kit is a sheet with two lists on it. The first half of the sheet repeats this list from the Bone web site with Smith's 2003 Harvey Award win for Best Cartoonist placed on top, which intrigued me because it indicated for the first time that Smith like most cartoonists kind of flew under the laudatory radar for the last few years of his American series. The second one is a list of foreign publishers, which interested me because I've never seen one before broken down for a single title. That list:

United States by Cartoon Books
Spain by Dude Comics
France by Editions Delcourt
Germany by Carlsen Verlag
Italy by Panini
Brazil by Via Lettera
Argentina by Meridiana
Finland by Like
Norway by Bladkompaniet A.S.
Korea by Seoul Cultural Publisher
Sweden by Jemi
Denmark by Forlaget Carlsen
Japan by Shobunsha
Croatia by Bookglobe
The Netherlands by Lambiek

I know for prose authors the importance of foreign publication is often overstated, particularly from a financial standpoint, but I don't know if that's also true for cartoonists or not. Still, that list seems pretty considerable in that Smith self-published and would have had to forge most of the deals from within that company. This interview from the mid-'90s indicates that fell to company president Vijaya Iyer, who has probably always been unfairly overlooked in terms of the general savviness and effectiveness of that company's publishing strategies.
 
posted 10:33 am PST | Permalink
 

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