As I noted yesterday, Marvel’s VP of Licensed Publishing, Sven Larsen has been posting about various Marvel projects on his FB page. If you’re into the story behind deluxe reprints, this is for you! In his first post, he gave some thoughts about the current Marvel narrative (bad) and why it isn’t accurate.
I was speaking with one of our new leaders last week and told him that I thought we didn’t celebrate our victories enough at Marvel. I know the general narrative is “Marvel sucks, everything DC touches turns to gold” right now (and I preface this all by saying you’ll find no bigger fan of what Marie Javins has accomplished at DC than me. Hi Marie!). But me and my co-workers have to fight back against that. We’ve got the #1 movie in the country right now (#3 of all-time), Insomniac just released a kickass WOLVERINE game and I sat in a meeting yesterday where we talked about not just one but three upcoming comics that have sold over 300K each. What a terrible time for our business
Even in my little patch of the Universe there are remarkable things happening. We got out a John Byrne X-MEN book this year and not only does it exist, it’s a NYT best-seller. That’s just one of a ton of good things that happened this year and I’m going to start writing about them here. Partially to remind myself that they exist. Partially to counter the negativity. And partly because these are projects that attention should be paid to. While I’m at it, I’ll probably write about some of Marie’s books and some of the other great stuff that’s out there as well. I’m lucky enough to work with talented folks throughout the comics industry and so many of them are just killing it right now. I want to celebrate that.
Can you guess the little nugget that caught my eye in the above? “not just one but three upcoming comics that have sold over 300K each.”
Taking a wild swing here, but guessing those are the Marvel Midnight launch, which just happen to be three titles. We know that Absolute Batman sells more than 300,000 copies of each issue (a LOT more, some say) so Marvel Midnight launching at this level would be a very good sign for Marvel and continued high level comics sales in general.
In another post, Larsen talked about Taschen’s Marvel reprint line. If you’ve been going to bookstores as long as I have, Taschen’s lavish, clever art books have long been the gold standard for things you want to leave on your coffee table to impress guests. Their Marvel line includes several oversized reprints of the classic 60s Spidey, FF, X-Men and Avengers comics. At $200 a pop they definitely show that you have invested in your coffee table offerings and are perhaps the most deluxe color comics reprints.
Taschen has just begun a more affordable $25 reprint line, in the compact size but with 700 pages of Silver Surfer, Spider-Man and the like. Larsen recounts how the original line began, spinning out of Taschen’s The Stan Lee Story, Larsen and then publisher John Nee pitched the idea to the publisher.
Next thing I knew, John and I were driving up the Hollywood Hills to Benedikt Taschen’s LA headquarters, Chemical House. If you haven’t seen that house, go ahead and Google the place. It’s a real life James Bond super-villain lair.
What I didn’t know then (but know very well now) is that Benedikt got his start as a teenage comic book dealer in Germany. In fact, some of Taschen’s earliest publications were funded by the sale of Benedikt’s collection. He had taken our idea and ran with it. In this amazing house, John and I were presented with what he wanted to do, an entire line of some of Marvel’s most classic work. I think it was the easiest “yes” either of us had ever given.
Those large Taschen volumes are the gold standard for comics collections as far as I’m concerned. But they are also pricey. So what a joy to see them now as affordable $25 hardcovers (less than what the original Masterworks cost). Each format Taschen produces gives me different insights in to the original material. And weirdly, the bibliotecas remind me of the Pocket Books collections of Marvel comics I read growing up in the ’70s. We started out making art books and now we’re making Compact Comics on steroids.
I also did not know (until now) of Benedikt Taschen’s comic book origin story – or of his incredible house. It’s kind of interesting to me that when he started out, back in the 90s, the idea of a traditional book publisher putting out comics reprints with the same standards as art books was a pipe dream for comics readers – but now it’s a no-brainer.
These $25 700 page Bibioteca collections look to be a fantastic way to collect this classic Marvel material. The first four volumes are out this month and include Spider-Man, Avengers, Fantastic Four and X-men. Silver Surfer and the Hulk are coming later this year.
As Larsen also notes, Clover Press is bringing back the Marvel Masterworks line in a Kickstarter launching soon – and with redesigned covers which I think are an improvement on the old grey ones. So many more Marvel reprints coming.
As Marvel embarks on its new era, it’s good to know its most foundational material is still available in many formats – whether to decorate the den or, hopefully, to read. Also hopefully, we’ll have more licensing tales from Larsen to come.
