by Rich Johnson
Comics bound together as books. What a silly idea. Comics were magazines; you read them once and shoved them in a closet to be thrown away by your mother years later, right? Plus, if you did read them a few times they usually fell apart. The pages scattered after the staples came loose and it became unreadable or an early version of Choose Your Own Adventure. Comics were a cheap and disposable form of entertainment with no long term value…right?
Before the dawn of the Direct Market, comics had been sold like magazines in grocery stores, drug stores and even department stores. The unsold copies had their covers ripped off and were sent back to the newsstand distributor for credit. Sometimes, they were sold in bundles without the covers by dishonest stores – I never bought them. I liked having the covers.
Unlike comics, books were viewed as important works of literature, to be read and then proudly displayed on the shelf as a way of telling the world that you were smart. Really important ones were bound in leather with gold accents, raised spine bands, thread-sewn acid free paper, with decorative end papers and a silk page marker. This special binding was not for guys with capes talking in word balloons. Hell, they were having a hard time getting in any binding that didn’t have staples. I think it was because in most people’s eyes comics were for kids. It was something you grew out of. Why would any publisher even consider putting them in book form?
I do remember mass market-sized black and white editions of Batman comics for sale when I was a kid. There was even a mass market edition of the classic Green Lantern/Green Arrow story by Denny O’Neil and Neil Adam. Someone at DC Comics – even back in the 1960s – was looking to binding up comics in a book format. I can only assume that they didn’t sell or sell well enough to continue putting comics in books. For me, it was a way I could read old comics without having to track them down at thrift shops or garage sales. I guess that was their fate: to be read then put away, and maybe make their way to another reader as a used comic.
I stopped reading comics in college – I couldn’t afford it. What brought me back into the fold was the publication of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. When I met Frank Miller, I (like so many others) told him he was the reason why I started reading comics again. I am sure this is something he hears all the time and yes I felt weird saying it to him, but I felt I need to thank him somehow. What first drew me to the comic was that it looked like a thin trade paperback. This format was new to me and I later learned these trades were called “prestige editions”. At first glance, it looked like a return to publishing comics as books, but these were numbered, like a series. The whole story wasn’t going to be in one book, it would be serialized in four of these mini trade paperbacks.
When the trade paperback of The Dark Knight Returns was first published, I was working as a Waldenbooks manager, a position I’d acquired right out of college. The Dark Knight Returns might have been the first graphic novel I ever saw in a bookstore. Now that I was hooked on comics again and because the bookstore had such a small selection, I started going to the local comic book shop and I began to buy comics again. I was on a budget so I mostly bought Batman, who was always my favorite character. I too would put my comics in bags and boards. It seemed the only way to save them and not have them fall apart like they did when I was a kid. I had no illusions that they would “be worth something someday.”
A few years later I was surprised to find more trade paperbacks and hardcovers on the shelves of the comic book shop: The DC Comics Archive Editions, The Essential Marvel series. There were even a few original graphic novels – Batman: Arkham Asylum and Batman: Digital Justice. I really wanted these books, but I also want my Waldenbooks employee discount, and thought, “Well, it shouldn’t be a problem ordering these and adding them to our inventory.” Running a bookstore gave me access to search all the authorized book distributors I knew; Ingram, Baker& Taylor, Koen, Golden Lee, and Bookazine, but no one carried them. I COULD NOT FIND THEM ANYWHERE!
I was frustrated and confused. These were books, so why weren’t they carried by book distributors? And it wasn’t just a selfish quest: Yeah, I wanted them, but I knew the customer base in my store and believed I could sell some copies. I found it odd that these books that were only available in comic book stores. The Tim Burton Batman movie was out at that time; wasn’t there some interest in these books?
To my complete surprise we received copies of a leather bound book titled The Complete Frank Miller Batman , which included The Dark Knight Returns, Batman: Year One and a Santa story. They also released a purple leather bound book titled Stacked Deck: The Greatest Joker Stories Ever Told. These were published under Waldenbooks propriety line of books called Longmeadow Press.
Wait a minute; did publishing comics in a book format just take a giant leap forward? These were bound like all those really important books you see advertised in magazines; gold accents, raised spine bands, thread-sewn acid free paper, with decorative end papers and a silk page marker – it was all there. The major book retailer of the day had decided to exclusively publish comics in a leather binding – graphic novels had arrived!
The book came and went, after the last copy left the store that was it for graphic novels. Like a comet they flashed briefly in the night sky only to disappear. Those books sit on my shelf to this day, proudly displaying their beautiful spines. I have owned them for twenty years. They have held-up, preserved over the years, the pages still secure. Hmmm, maybe I’ll pick one up and read it again.
Excellent article, Rich! Keep ‘em coming!
Di
Someone in my neighborhood used to stockpile those coverless comics and give them out for Halloween. A pretty awesome treat and a sneaky way to attract new readers, I must say.
I love this idea, but posting my comics to the states would cost too much:
http://bigbadvoodoolou.blogspot.com/2009/07/binding-comic-books-1-justice-league.html
Great series of articles and subject matter Rich!
At Comico during the mid 80’s we would save overprinted interior flats of Matt Wagner’s Mage and rebind them as volumes of Magebook.
Those volumes represented our first “graphic novels” which later led to other compilations like Doug Wildey’s Rio and Dave Steven’s Rocketeer as well as original works like Night and the Enemy by Harlan Ellison and Ken Steacy along with The World of Ginger Fox by Mike Baron and Mitch O’Connell which can now be previewed at our CO2 Comics website:
http://www.co2comics.com/pages/co2_ginger_fox_graphic_novel.html
The industry’s commitment to the graphic novel format played a significant role in galvanizing the idea that comics were no longer a product just for kids.
Nice piece of writing. Now, as a french guy, I can tell you that the single format also has a big appeal for someone surrounded with only expensive graphic novel format for years.
It desacralizes the whole “I’m an expensive large hard book, give me respect”. Not that you don’t have respect for a floppy, but it’s more humble, more affordable, easier to carry around, to show around…
There is a great essay by french author Daniel Pennac encouraging people who want to give others the joy of reading. He says: let them deal with books how they want. They want to carry it everywhere, write annotations, read it by small chunks,… let them do it.
Comics are perfect for that. I know I grew up wanting to read not thanks to usual books first, or french graphic novel, but to translation of Marvel comics in a magazine format, king of like a US floppy (only with more pages).
Hard nice books are an advantage, but it can also be a prison. For example, take a look at the Us floppy covers. They are so diverse, so imaginative. 90% of them would never be used/allowed here. Here, covers are, for most of them, boring a hell. Don’t play with the title, don’t be too dynamic, show this, show that…
And the joy of having something to read each month (instead of waiting 5 years to see published a sequel that is crap), searching in the dusty bans for floppies you wxant, discovering new ones that you can try because it’s not expensive, it’s not heavy…
I love the US floppy format. I do only have one complaint. At 4$ a floppy, and whith mostly publisher-ads inside, all of the ads should be put together at the end, like almost all the independant publisher do nowdays.
Ok, that was my clumsy “02.00AM in the mornging” attempt at a defense of the floppy Us format. Can’t go on and elaborate more, I have a french magazine to edit, a magazine trying to spread our love of Us comics in France.
Rich:
Maybe my chronology is wrong, but wasn’t, at least, MAUS and ELFQUEST widely available in bookstores at this point? A fair number of the Catalan books, too? There must have been… oh, 25-50 GN/TPs in print by the time that STACKED DECK came out (the indicia in my copy says 1990…)
I’m also surprised you didn’t talk about these being racked with the comic STRIP books in “humor”
-B
Great stuff, Rich! When’s the next entry?
Mass market paperbacks are the comicbook of the book trade. Cheap, stripable, perishable. As a kid, I remember finding numerous MM comicstrip collections at used bookstores and garage sales.
During the time Rich talks about, there wasn’t much. Marvel and DC had published graphic albums, and even created spinners to merchandise them. (c.1984) MAD had a successful MM line in humor. Raw and Maus were also in humor, with most of the other GNs. Elfquest was in science fiction, top shelf, with the other oversized books.
Marvel’s Essential line did not start until the mid-1990s. I think he means “Marvel Masterworks”.
In 1995, here’s what was available to most bookstores and libraries:
DC (via Warner Books)
MAD (via Warner Books)
Marvel (PGW)
Viz (PGW)
Dark Horse (Putnam/Berkeley)
WaRP (Putnam)
First [sic] (Putnam)
Cartoon Books (Ingram)
That’s it. No Image (not until the Spawn movie, and only then the Spawn trades via Random House), no Fantagraphics. Eclipse had been distributed by HarperCollins, but the returns killed the company. Warner had the Tintin albums, but that was as marginal as Viz’s Japanese comics. Read by ferners. Even comics shops didn’t sell them.
As for those beautiful hardcover Batman collections… I snagged a few when they were remaindered. Donated a copy to the public library.
Man… I remember combing the Fall Preview issue of Publisher’s Weekly, looking for ANY comics titles. Andrews McMeel was the oasis… they collected every comicstrip they published! And those huge Books In Print volumes, like phone books!
Libraries… if you don’t count strips (Calvin & Hobbes) or panels (New Yorker), then all that was left was history, shelved in 741.5, among the books on drawing. The juvenile department might have a “how comics are made” or the “Draw 50 cartoon characters” books but they were even more discriminating than the adult section. (“If you read comics, Timmy and Sally, you’ll go blind.”)
This was the Manifest Destiny period of comics.
Nice writing, Rich! Looking forward to reading more.
I think the first Maus hardcover came out in 1986 and Maus II in 1992 in a book format (can anyone verify?). As for other graphic novels being available at the time -yes I am sure there were more- just not in the bookstore I managed. I do now remember a few Elfquest books around but certainly bookstores were not the place to go looking for graphic novels. That’s why I was so happy to find them at my local comic book shop. But in order to grow the medium they needed to be expanded in new markets. I always believed that graphic novels in bookstores and libraries could lead new fans to the comic book shop.
As for the floppies, I always was a big fan of the comics as a reader and as a businessman. To be able to publish anything in multiple formats to recoup the investment and make it profitable is great. But as simmo pointed out in his blog, there is the idea of binding your own comics instead of bagging and boarding them is – interesting idea. I actually know a comic book executive who has been doing this for years.
And yes, it may have been the Marvel Masterworks and not the Essentials. I forgot to fact check that one. And as for the comic strips representing graphic novels – yes, I can totally see that as a valid argument. When I was having discussions with the OCLC about creating a designated Dewey Decimal number for graphic novels that topic came up, do collections of newspaper comic strips belong with graphic novels. I am actually in favor of them being shelved together in libraries and bookstores. My argument was that they are certainly first cousins of graphic novels and one like Lynn Johnston’s For Better or Worse is really a graphic novel or a fictionalized graphic memoir. It chronicles her life – people date, get married, have babies and they even die in her work (always was a big fan of hers).
Now that comics have actually grown a spine they need to grow the spine. More thick stuff please! I want thicker Ex-Machina hardcovers. Same with Fables. How’s about 100 Bullets in 4 volumes instead of 13? Why is Transmetropolitan being recollected in such short volumes? As more people watch TV on DVD and watch entire seasons, or series in a matter of days or weeks why can’t comics follow suit. Having to wait two to three years after buying the first hardcover of Ex-Machina until the last volume comes out makes no sense in a world of so many distractions and competing entertainment. When I was a kid I could actually remember the details of the last issue of a comic book. Now I simply can’t. Waiting up to a year between volumes of a series that is already finished makes no sense.
I can also say with some certainty–because I still have the press kits–that Warner Books released TPBs of not just Dark Knight, but Watchmen, Ronin and Saga of the Swamp Thing. Different covers from the comic-industry trades–and a full press kit to the “real” media (in my case, my college paper). These must have come out in 1987, because I did a phone interview with Alan Moore (scribbling my notes on the press kit, actually) as part of his round-robin to promote the Watchmen TPB and the interview appeared in my college paper in fall of ‘87.
Binding your own comics is a cost-effective way to maintain your collection, especially for runs of stuff you know will never be collected. I recently bound my complete runs of Ragman and Knights of the Pendragon. They look beautiful on the shelf and make for easy re-reading.
To the best of my knowledge, Elfquest was the first graphic novel series to make it into bookstores(1981). NBM had sporadic success with its Flying Buttress press in the late 1970s. The first book thatat called itself a “graphic novel” that made it into book stores was Contract with God by Eisner. It was shelved in religion and sold poorly. Thankfully, it found its way into comic book stores.
Love the headline.
As a librarian buying for a permanent collection, I heartily endorse comics with spines, whether they’re OGNs or bound collections of a floppy series. There are too many great stories out there that I can’t add to my collection because no one’s decided to issue them with spines.
About the first release of Maus: according to WorldCat records, Pantheon released it in 1986. There’s a single record in there for a 1977 Pantheon release, but I suspect that’s an error.
“Binding your own comics is a cost-effective way to maintain your collection …”
Really? I’ve thought about it, but always thought it was too expensive. How does the average joe go about this?
DC sent out review copies. My brother was working at a public radio station in Omaha, and brought home Watchmen, Ronin, Dark Knight, and Shadow: Blood and Justice!
I actively marketed GNs at the SuperCrown bookstore I worked at. Got permission from the manager (a Frazetta fan) to merchandise a slat wall with GNs. The Warner rep could not believe how well his GNs sold.
The first Pogo collection from Simon & Schuster was technically a graphic novel. Walt Kelly had reconfigured the daily strip panels into pages, with specific storylines each having a distinct chapter. New York Times bestseller.
Personally, I view panels, strips, comics, and graphic novels as different lengths of the same format. Poems can have different lengths, so too comics. Libraries have gotten savvy and now give GNs a dedicated “genre” space, both in the YA and Adult sections.
DC’s Deluxe editions follow the same model as DVD boxed sets: One collection a year (although sometimes more frequently) until the entire title is corrected. DC cannot do that with ongoing titles, as sales are lost while waiting to collect the hardcover, so smaller trades are published. The cheaper price point ($9.99-$14.99) also encourages impulse shoppers to try the title. If there is popularity, then DC will issue an Absolute Edition or a Deluxe Library volume.
(And Ex Machina hasn’t finished… the last issue ships in May, followed by Volume Ten of the trade in November.)
Here is a WorldCat search for graphic novels published from 1986 through 1990. Ernie Colón had AX published by Marvel? Oddities and regularities abound.
SRS
I love the standard floppy. Great format as Xavier Lancel points out. I hope it doesn’t go out of existance but instead becomes a vehicle for “done in one” stories that are too short for a standard “graphic novel”, which let’s face it, cut all the padding out of most of those and you have just enough story for a standard floppy.
Here’s an idea: take your standard 120 page+ graphic novel and de-decompress the hell out of it (combine panels, drop unnecessary ones, etc – I mean take a real tough approach) and you’ll probably end up with a pretty slim volume. I do it all the time when I’m reading the stuff.
Sorry my post drifted, but like I wrote give it a try.
I have a copy of the Warner Books version of Dark Knight, with the difference cover. It stands out because I can never find it in most comics database programs.
Hi. I enjoyed the article, and all of the comments. Funnily enough, I bought my first copy of “Dark Knight Returns” from a Waldenbooks in Pleasant Hill, CA in 1988. I guess that wasn’t the one you worked at, though. It fell apart from repeated readings long ago. I plan on getting the “Absolute” version one of these days.
If you are interested in having “floppies” bound into a nice collection, you should check out Library Binding in Waco, TX. I’ve had several collections bound by them and they came out very nicely. The most basic version costs $15(plus shipping). If one wants, there are plenty of extras that can make the collection pretty fancy – leather covers, silk endpapers, etc.
Here in Berkeley, the main library used to shelve graphic novels in the Fiction section by author, as well as having some titles in the appropriate genre section (The Walking Dead was shelved in Science Fiction). I felt that this showed a real respect to the works and was a big fan. That changed recently, and now there is a separate section of shelves in the same room as the fiction works for “Graphic Novels”. I don’t know – it feels like a ghetto to me. Obviously this is better than having them shelved in the 741.5 section (although there still are quite a few there as well. The Complete Crumb Comics and The Spirit Archives ended up there, among others). It’s also preferable to having every GN shelved in the “Teen” section. That was kind of mortifying, hanging out looking for a copy of “Fables” and feeling weird due to the signs everywhere stating that the computers, etc. in the room were for “teens only”. I know, I know, it’s a lot better than it used to be. Just allow me to kvetch a little bit. Thanks.
“I do remember mass market-sized black and white editions of Batman comics for sale when I was a kid. There was even a mass market edition of the classic Green Lantern/Green Arrow story by Denny O’Neil and Neil Adams.”
Back in the 1960s, Lancer Books published a bunch of mass-market paperback b&w reprints of several Silver Age Marvel characters, and those books are pretty cool collectors items now. In the 1970s, Tempo Books and, later, Tor also published comics reprints in that format. (The Tempo Books Superboy & the Legion of Super-Heroes reprint was one I remember as a kid, and I’ve since added many of the others to my library.)
Famously, Marvel had a pretty cool licensed publishing program with Simon & Schuster/Fireside through the 1970s, doing full-color trade paperback reprints of various character and various themes (“Bring on the Bad Guys”, “The Superhero Women” etc.) as well as an original Lee/Kirby Silver Surfer story that many point to as a bona fide early original graphic novel.
But all these proto-graphic novel programs petered out as licenses expired and publishers folded (though Lancer and Tempo execs famously went on to found other publishing companies.) Writ large, I do think that part of the story of the current success of book-format comics and bookstore distribution of comics is the story of comics publishers being able to themselves create work in those formats and to themselves create/access the necessary distribution networks and relationships without having to rely on licensed publishing deals like those that brought us the old Lancer/Tempo books, or the various proprietary editions from Longmeadow and whomever else.
All of which, I realize, is a bit of a different take on the story…
It occurs to me that nobody’s really talked about what a game-changer The League of Extraordinary Gentleman: Century 1910 could be. It is, I think, the perfect model for today’s economy. You pay $8 for a full story–was it 64 or 48 pages?–that’s part of a larger story. So you’re satisfied with the reading, but you’re also excited for the next bit.
But more importantly, it’s not bound with staples.
I personally think that when you start paying $4 for a comic–a movie on both major publishers’ part that I think has hurt sales across the board–you hit the point where you don’t want the thing to be bound with staples.
I personally have stopped buying comics alltogether for this reason. I still buy trade paperbacks, and follow a few writers and creator-owned series this way, but because of the price increase I’m loathe to try new superhero stories.
I think that DC’s Earth One initiative–having high-profile creators on high-profile graphic novel releases–is the right move for the industry right now. We need comics that have proper binding, that focus more on story than moving units. I’d also love to see publishers embrace the Century 1910 format. Warren Ellis has been doing it for years, for one.
Great column Rich! I wonder if we will discuss comics/graphic novels moving to devices like Kindle the same way envisioning comics bound and in a bookstore seemed odd or unusual. Personally I am not a fan of Kindle but I am a total book nerd – including collecting signed editions – so I think that’s the resistance to an electronic format. Plus I think comics specifically would lose a lot in electronic format but that’s just me! Can’t wait to see what you write about next!
Yes I will be talking about digital and about floppies – I was thinking of doing this in as a progression – but maybe I will jump back and forth in time (hey maybe I’ll even do a flash side-ways like LOST).
According to the Diamond sales charts, the LOEG Century prestige format sold 36.5K copies at a $7.95 price point! Those are great numbers for any independent title, UNBELIEVABLE numbers for a comic costing $8! (These are sales to comics shops, non-returnable, so quite amazing.)
Prestige comics as books are hit and miss. One: they are hard to merchandise in a bookstore. It takes more copies to make a display, and if shelved, disappear due to the thin spine. Two: customers view it as a comicbook, and complain about the price. Three: to justify the price, the insides have got to be great, partly to entice the customer, partly to entice the retailer to order copies for display. So it doesn’t work too well for ongoing series. (Although… if DC were to relaunch their Blue Ribbon digests as a prestige format…) Four: they are usually one-shots, so there’s almost no backlist.
The last DC title to use this format was DK2. Gladstone tried this format for Walt Disney Comics & Stories, and for Uncle Scrooge, which meant that they could be sold online as books. That didn’t work too well. The Left Behind series also used this format, to get into bookstores, where almost all off the LB readers were found. Again, the series didn’t last long. (Went to Jesus?)
Nowadays, publishers opt for the digest format, which is smaller with color, or for an introductory trade paperback priced at $9.99. (Later volumes at $14.99 – $19.99.) Digests run about 96 – 128 pages, and can contain original material. The kid’s department at B&N has lots of examples (Amelia Rules, Baby Mouse…)
The remnant of the Marvel/S&S arrangement is How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way, which technically is the oldest graphic novel in continuous print. Marvel’s first independent books were mass market paperbacks based on licensed properties… I think Star Trek might be the first by EAN. DC’s first, at about the same time, was Joe Priest, a graphic album, followed by various Science Fiction GAs edited by Julie Schwartz.
When you mentioned early graphic novels/book-form comics, you mentioned Marvel Essentials. I think, however that you meant the Marvel Masterworks series; a series of hardcovers, similar in format to the DC Archives. They predated the Essential collections.
Heavy Metal published Alien the Illustrated Story by Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson in 1979. It was the first Graphic Novel I remember seeing in the bookstores.
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