Yesterday at his panel, Marvel Chief Creative Officer Joe Quesada announced a Dexter comic, in the continuity of Dexter novels. This comic will be written by Jeff Lindsay, who happens to be the creator of Dexter and author of those novels. This is interesting on a number of levels.
You may have noticed a few crime/mystery novelists setting up shop at Marvel in recent years: Greg Rucka (remember, he was known as a novelist when he first dipped a toe into comics with Whiteout), Victor Gischler, Duane Swierczynski, Gregg Hurwitz and Charlie Huston all come to mind. This is likely the influence of Marvel EIC, Axel Alonso, but regardless, Lindsay is continuing a trend.
This could be viewed as an extension of Marvel’s literary line, especially in the context of their Stephen King comics. It could be looked at as a TV license. While this will be the literary Dexter, the TV series factors into this. The idea of one of these authors being able to run a parallel comic series is very interesting. Lindsay could, in theory, be kicking out one Dexter prose novel and two Dexter graphic novels (assuming 6-issue arcs) each year.
This comes at a time when Vertigo appears to be contracting and stepping away from crime titles. Remember, Axel edited 100 Bullets when he was at Vertigo. In addition to the crime novelists, Marvel has Criminal and Scarlet coming out from the Icon. Add Dexter to the mix. Some takes on the Punisher fall into the crime/mystery category. That’s almost enough for a crime line at Marvel. Is there more to come?
This is such a strange inversion from the early days of Vertigo, when Marvel wouldn’t even touch anything that wasn’t about capes.
Now, as Marvel has slowly started to branch out into non-superhero stuff (almost dragged kicking and screaming into it by Ed Brubaker, it sometimes seems), DC’s own non-superhero output is shrinking.
Vertigo seems to be settling into being a (mostly) horror comic producing line. They do still have their crime line of original graphic novels but they ate released here and there.
The Dexter comic new follows the release of the Castle graphic novel.
Add the fact that Marvels’ top writer made his bones producing crime comics while another of their top writers has, as the article mentions, damn near showed the publisher that hey, you can sell comics without characters in capes ( mostly).
Good for them.
I don’t know if this factors in, but Bendis was writing crime/mystery comics before he came to Marvel.