Del Rey’s Dallas Middaugh writes to let us know he’s teaching a class at NYU this Saturday entitled ‘Publishing the Graphic Novel’ The class is shy a few attendees so check out the NYU link or the info below and sign up for what sounds like a very informative event:

As to the class itself, what I try to do is give a primer on the graphic novel business. I’ve been reading comics for decades, and working the biz for the past ten years. I start with breaking down how comics are perceived and read, touch a bit on the history of the medium, and then jump right into the business of making, selling and distributing graphic novels.

I’m a year wiser and thanks to the great feedback from my last class, this is going to be a lot of fun. I hope to see you there!

The syllabus follows after the jump.

Center for Publishing
School of Continuing and Professional Studies
New York University
Spring 2010

Course Title: Publishing the Graphic Novel
Course #: X59.9193
Term: February 6 – February 27 (no class February 20)
Day and Time: Saturdays, 10:00am – 3:00pm
Instructor: Dallas Middaugh, Associate Publisher for Del Rey Manga
Contact info: dmiddaugh@randomhouse.com (email)
Location:
_________________________________________________________________

Course Description
The growth and popularity of graphic novels have been explosive in recent years, as readers and publishing houses discover the excitement and possibilities of this category. This weekend intensive focuses on all types of graphic novels including manga, superheroes, memoir, and literary; and the elements of successful creation, sales, and marketing strategies. Students explore what works for adult and adolescent audiences and what makes effective art and editorial content. In addition, students examine how to introduce graphic novels into the mainstream, through online and other innovative channels, as well as a self-publishing venture.

This is not comics, but it’s so close. Taschen Books, publisher of many fine art books–some comics related–and many art reference basics, is having a warehouse sale this weekend at all its stores worldwide. 1000 Pin-Up Girls, 1000 Chairs…the International Male retrospective…there is something for all our needs.

Beginning Friday, January 22nd through Sunday the 24th, thousands of slightly damaged and display books from Taschen publishing will be on sale for 50-75% off in our TASCHEN store in Soho. These will include new, rare, out-of-print, and collector’s edition titles crossing all genres— contemporary art, photography, design, comics ,architecture, pop culture, and erotica.

Details for TASCHEN Store New York Sale:
TASCHEN Store SoHo
107 Greene Street, NY 10012

Friday, January 22, 11am- 8pm
Saturday, January 23, 11am- 8pm
Sunday, January 24, 12pm- 7pm

Other TASCHEN stores worldwide:

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Well gang, here is the game changer. Here is the bestseller. This is the book that’s going to drive all-new readers into comics shops, with full support of the publisher. Unfortunately it’s Twilight so the new readers are barbarian girls. Borders, get ready. EW.com has an excerpt of an exclusive interview with Stephenie Meyer and a one-page excerpt of a 10-page preview that is set to run in this week’s issue. That’s right, 10 pages of comics in EW. Do you remember the magazine industry?

The manga — which is being published in hardcover on March 16 — will have a 350,000 initial print run, and $19.99 price. Artist Young Kimis not a character in Scott Pilgrim, but at least hasn’t been replaced by a guy yet. Little was known of Kim, but she is Korean has a fine arts background and this is her first manga — a very faithful adaptation of the book, which will be presented in two volumes. According to the EW piece, Meyer had mucho input:

The text of your original novel is boiled down so carefully that it doesn’t feel like anything is missing. Were you the one who did that?

I was definitely involved. I didn’t do the original “script” for the book, so to speak. But when I got the dialogue with the images, I did a lot of tinkering. In a couple of places, I asked for missing scenes to be inserted. For example, the conversation in the car that Bella and Edward have after she faints in Biology.

Hachette also put out a press release, which you can read in the jump.

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Over at his blog, Kean Soo reports that the first volume of his Jellaby series has gone out of print.. Published by Hyperion, Jellaby, a lovable monster who has adventures with a little girl, had appeared in several Flight anthologies and Soo’s own website. Ironically, tThe second volume, Monster in the City is being published in April, still available and Soo worries that the unavailability of Volume 1 will hurt its sales
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Is there anything more charming than the past’s bright-eyed view of the future? Daniel Sinker has been blogging the book 2010: Living In the Future, a 1972 children’s book by Geoffry Hoyle that envisioned a peaceful — if simply drawn — future where autos were shipped through tubes, people boarded airplanes as they might a bus, and food is delivered by conveyor belt. Although Hoyle fell prey to the common fallacy that a future world of automated marvels goes hand in hand with a wardrobe of jumpsuits—looking like a mechanic being synonymous with scientific advances, we suppose — a lot of it is eerily on the mark, like this prophecy of Fresh Direct:
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Nestled in this account of author Neil Gaiman’s entry into the world of reading glasses is the news that he’s guest editing next year’s BEST AMERICAN COMICS, the Houghton Mifflin anthology.

Also realised very late last night that the problems I’ve had reading comics for the next Year’s Best American Comics that I’m guest editing has nothing to do with losing my love for comics and everything to do with the fact that somewhere in the last year I must have started needing reading glasses for small print and had not realised this. I found a pair of reading glasses and the world became one with good, easy-to-read comics in it once again… I suppose more things like this will happen as I age. How odd.

Previous editors include Anne Elizabeth Moore and Harvey Pekar, followed by Matt Madden and Jessica Abel with guest editors Chris Ware, Lynda Barry and Charles Burns. Gaiman certainly brings a different sensibility to the project, so let the hot stove league chatter begin now.

Since we never got around to doing a gift giving guide because we’re so lame/lazy, we’ll steal this post from Jeet Heer on the best comics anthologies of all time — as proud owners of every volume on the list, we can very easily back up that any one of these books would make a great gift. Some are OOP, but you might be able to find a used copy for a reasonable price. You should avail yourself of Heer’s insights in the link, but our own comments are appended:

1. The Smithsonian Book of Newspaper Comics, edited by Bill Blackbeard and Martin Williams.
A fantastic grounding in the Golden Age of the comics strip, and a fine platform to show further outgrowths.

2. The Toon Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics edited by Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly.
An amazing compendium of two genres — the comical comic and the animation-influenced comic. Plus, great comics for kids.

3. Art Out of Time edited by Dan Nadel.
The dusty, weed-choked byways of the comics highway often produce the most gorgeous landscapes.

4. An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories, two volumes, edited by Ivan Brunetti.
Everything you need to know about Alt.Comix in two beautiful, essential volumes.

5. McSweeney’s 13 edited by Chris Ware.
An appendix, or sidekick to the above, combining the Alt All-Stars, conventional literary lions and a soupçon of the past masters. Call it the pluperfect ’00s guide to comics.

Heer disallows The Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Comics for its perfunctory superhero contents and poor reproduction, and indeed its 1982 viewpoint is a bit dated, but it is a handy guide to the essentials as they were once understood, and as Heer points out, with an anthology reflects autobiography, it’s useful to know that these are the comics that most of the folks now in charge of making them viewed as the Penguin Classics of the four-color world.

More suggestions in the comments.

Today’s big DC news story is WAR OF THE SUPERMEN, the big Superman event for 2010 everyone has been speculating over. James Robinson and Eddy Barrow kick things off with a Free Comic Book Day issue.

While surely notable, the announcement of a new crossover storyline has failed to ignite the website-crashing uproar that yesterday’s Earth One, aka “Ultimate DC” announcement did. And now the retailer perspective — via Brian Hibbs and Chris Butcher is coming in. If this were just another reboot, people might be a little interested, but the fact that it’s a GRAPHIC NOVEL LINE reboot is what has people sitting up.

Hibbs — a pamphlet man to the end — runs numbers and concludes that the revenue stream for an OGN series is less than the revenue stream for a periodical-to-collection model. Actually, it’s a little hard to argue with this — it’s the TV-series-to-DVD argument. Both delivery systems work, and make for two separate revenue streams. Yet no one releases long, complicated stories as a series of direct-to-DVDs. They do however release the occasional standalone story.

But on some matters, it seems to us, Hibbs misses the mark:

The bottom line is that customers are much less likely to plunk down for a Big Ticket item than they are for a periodical, which is one of the reasons that the OGN doesn’t, to my mind, make a ton of sense. And while it is possible that the “bookstore reader” will flock to superhero-OGN work… well, I kind of don’t think that will happen… and, even if it does, I have a hardish time picturing them wanting it again and again — because this theoretical 2x a year strategy IS a periodical, just much slower than usual.

Go into a bookstore and you see that book series are an extremely lucrative staple of the publishing world, albeit mostly, these days, for women and YA.

Now, we DON’T KNOW any of the business details of the Earth One books. Are they YA? Are they $9.99? Are they tankoubon? Or are they $30 deluxe packages? If the former, it’s a very, very different publishing model from the latter, and one that is a proven success — just not yet with superheroes.

Butcher comes at it from a slightly different angle, while also pointing out the lack of format information that would make this line’s target much clearer. Butcher offers informed speculation:

It’s pretty clear to me that DC is attempting to develop a continuity-light series of graphic novels featuring their core characters, to introduce new readers to their IP, and re-capture the attention of lapsed readers. They’re phrasing the move in terms that their existing, painfully hardcore readership can understand, like “new continuities”, in the hopes that the Direct Market-shopping fans of their IP will still support this new format, to give them a large non-returnable sales-base with which to expand their mass market sales. (As a refresher, book sales through comic stores are “non-returnable”, and 10,000 non returnable sales (my prediction) is a great base from which to set your print-run and distribute the work to the larger market, which can return unsold books for a full refund (and which sticks publishers with lots of unsold books).)

Hibbs’ post has a long and lively comment section which interested parties should read.

Bonus: J. Caleb Mozzocco speaks from a reader’s perspective.

The much traveled fantasy adaptation imprint run by the Dabel Brothers has been acquired by Dynamite Entertainment. Les and Ernest Dabel have made a name for themselves over the past decade by making deals with the top authors in fantasy and SF to adapt their works to comics format — George R. R. Martin, Laurell K. Hamilton, Robert Jordan, Orson Scott Card, Jim Butcher — the list goes on and on. Their latest hit is IDW’s Mercy Thompson series by Patricia Briggs. Over the years, the Dabels have teamed with a multitude of publishers to package books and periodicals: Devil’s Due, Alias, Image, Marvel, Del Rey, and IDW, making Dynamite their 7th partner.  While the books have often sold extremely well, the business arrangements haven’t always been smooth, with freelancers owed money from several projects, according to a recent report at Bleeding Cool.

However the new deal with Dynamite is a different sort of deal for the Dabels, according to the PR. Instead of packaging the books, Dynamite is taking over creative and production control of the line, leaving the Dabels, presumably, to do what they do best: negotiate deals with some of the world’s most popular authors.

Although no specific titles are mentioned in the PR from Dynamite, the books will begin shipping next April.

Dynamite Entertainment announced today that they have signed a comprehensive agreement with Dabel Brothers Publishing to transition all of their titles to the Dynamite brand. 

Dynamite will immediately assume creative development, production, printing, marketing and sales for all titles handled by Dabel Brothers Publishing.  This includes books that were in the works and projects not yet announced.  For the bookstore market, all graphic novels (unless pre-existing agreements prohibit from doing so) will be published by Dynamite and distributed through Diamond Book Distributors.   

“Dynamite has impressed us with their ability to market their titles to such a broad audience,” says Vice President, Les Dabel.  “We are extremely happy about this transition, and I am stepping back now to let Dynamite do what they do best.”  

“We look forward to working with all of the distinguished authors on their great works and helping to bring them to a larger audience,” stated Dynamite President, Nick Barrucci.

Founded in 2004, Dynamite Entertainment is home to several best-selling comic book titles and properties, including Red Sonja, Project Superpowers, The Boys, Army of Darkness, Battlestar Galactica, The Lone Ranger, Zorro and more.  Diamond awarded the company a “GEM” award for Best New Publisher in 2005 and another “GEM” in 2006 for Comics Publisher of the Year (under 5%).  Dynamite has also been nominated for several industry awards, including the prestigious “Eisner” Award, and consistently works with top flight and fan favorite creative talent such as Alex Ross, John Cassaday, Garth Ennis, Jim Lee, Michael Avon Oeming, Matt Wagner and many others. 

The first books will be shipping in April 2010, with subsequent titles shipping thereafter.

With ASTERIOS POLYP, and Crumb’s GENESIS finally, FINALLY published and in our hands, and Joe Sacco’s FOOTSTEPS IN GAZA galleys making the rounds, it may be that Craig Thompson’s HABIBI is now the Godot of graphic novels. Since the success of BLANKETS in 2003 — one of the best loved (by readers anyway) and influential graphic novels of the decade — Thompson has produced only the travelogue Carnet de Voyage, and has been working on the 600-page novel based on Islamic art and mythology since 2004.

Thompson’s infrequent posts about Habibi on his blog are always a prod to wonder when it will finally come out.

According to this entry, he’s been working on rewriting the ending for the last five months, and above, a peek at the first page he’s drawn since June. Just think of its eventual release as something to look forward to.

Amazon has its nominations for Best Book Cover of the Year up and there are a few familiar friends in the nominees — graphic novels get a category but it’s shared with art books, and the only comics nominee is ASTERIOS POLYP. Readers can vote for their favorites while entering a sweepstakes, so good deal.

Come March, Random House will publish Backing Into Forward a memoir by Jules Feiffer, master cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter and all around renaissance man. According to an early review, it includes much material on his time as Will Eisner’s assistant and other matter from the comics business of the period. As well as a fantastic resource for comics history buffs, Feiffer’s life is compelling material in general and he’s as strong and insightful a raconteur as we’ve ever encountered.

Speaking of Kazu Kibuishi, he has a nice post up examining what the contributors to the anthology FLIGHT #1 have done in the five years since it came out. At the time, the fresh new cartoonists within were hailed as a new force in the industry — and they have mostly gone on to very productive careers in animation and comics. Kazu didn’t include last names, so they’ve been added:

7 out of 19 have worked on completed films, either as production designers or story artists:
- Enrico Casarosa (Ratatouille, Up)
- Jake Parker (Horton Hears a Who!)
- Vera Brosgol (Coraline)
- Khang Le (Monster House)
- Chris Appelhans (Monster House, City of Ember, Coraline, Fantastic Mr. Fox)
- Phil Craven (Kung Fu Panda, the forthcoming Kung Fu Panda 2)
- Clio Chiang (the forthcoming Princess and the Frog)

11 out of 19 have published one or more graphic novels (or will have a graphic novel published in 2010):

- Enrico Casarosa (The Venice Chronicles)
- Kazu Kibuishi (Daisy Kutter, Amulet, the forthcoming Copper collection)
- Jake Parker (Missile Mouse, forthcoming Scholastic GNs)
- Vera Brosgol (forthcoming First Second GN)
- Jen Wang (forthcoming First Second GN)
- Neil Babra (Hamlet)
- Bengal (Meka, Naja)
- Dylan Meconis (Wire Mothers: Harry Harlow and the Science of Love, Bite Me!)
- Derek Kirk Kim (Good as Lily, The Eternal Smile)
- Rad Sechrist (Tom Sawyer)
- Kean Soo (Jellaby)

It’s certainly an impressive body of work — especially where comics for kids are concerned. But as Kazu notes, it perhaps wasn’t as much a movement as some very talented people who came together. And of the 12 who had webcomics running at the time, only 3 do now.

I’m sure The Beat will have more on this later in the week but don’t forget that the new version of The Prisoner starts on Sunday. And, as a tie-in, the Thomas Disch novel is back in print too.

Drew Friedman writes of his upcoming collection of illos:

This is my cover for the upcoming book, “The Kingdom of New York”, the Best of the New York Observer, due out later this month from Harper Collins. Aside from 20 years of articles, columns and reviews, the book will feature hundreds of covers by Victor Juhasz, Philip Burke and Robert Grossman, and yours truly, as well as loads of caricatures by Barry Blitt (He even drew me).

Via Flog

Publishers Weekly has published its Best Books of 2009 list and David Small’s STITCHES was named one of the Top Ten books OVERALL. There is also a Best 11 graphic novels:

Parker: The Hunter, Darwyn Cooke and Richard Stark (IDW)
Driven by Lemons, Josh Cotter (AdHouse)
Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth,Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou with art by Alecos Papdatos and Annie Di Donna (Bloomsbury)
The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders, Emmanuel Guibert and Didier Lefèvre (First Second)
Asterios Polyp, David Mazzucchelli (Pantheon)
Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe, Bryan Lee O’Malley (Oni Press)
Footnotes in Gaza, Joe Sacco (Metropolitan)
A Drifting Life, Yoshihiro Tatsumi (D&Q)
You’ll Never Know: A Good and Decent Man, Carol Tyler (Fantagraphics)
Pluto, Naoki Urasawa (Viz Media)

Amazon has also listed its Best of 2009:

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Abby Denson’s DOLLTOPIA tour continues on the west coast, with CUPCAKES! Starting tonight in Vancouver. BOO!

October 31, 12pm Halloween event @ Elfsar Comics, 1007 Hamilton St., Vancouver BC
November 1, 2pm ECUAD, Emily Carr Theatre (SB 301), 1399 Johnston Street, Granville Island, Vancouver BC
November 4, 6pm In Other Words, 8 B NE Killingsworth St, Portland, OR
November 5, 5pm Floating World Comics, 20 NW 5th Ave, Portland, OR
November 6, 7PM Dolltopia reading and signing at Modern Times, 888 Valencia St, San Francisco, CA
November 7, 1PM Dolltopia signing @ A Different Light, 489 Castro Street, San Francisco, CA
November 7, 6-8PM Dolltopia signing @ GRSF, 618 Shrader St, San Francisco, CA
November 8, 1pm Cartoon Art Museum, 655 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA

When R. Crumb does a book tour, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Thus, his appearance Tuesday with Françoise Mouly in Richmond, VA has gotten lots of online coverage.

Here’s Harry Kollatz Jr. at RichmondMagazine.com.

Last night, R. Crumb entered with a pratfall that seemed to surprise the University of Richmond’s director of museums, Richard Waller. Waving and smiling, the artist tripped off a platform, his arms flailing and cap flying, and went “SPLAT!” But he dexterously rebounded with a grin. Perhaps this demonstration of agility came from the physical regime of his wife, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, herself a noted cartoonist.

Chris Pitzer has a report on the talk as well as a panel with Anders Nilsen, Kim Deitch, Hope Larson and Gabrielle Bell that was part of the week’s festivities.

The panel discussion brought in Gabrielle Bell, Kim Deitch, Hope Larson, and Anders Nilsen. All fantastic comic creators coming with different views and histories of making comics. So, that was kind of troublesome, since I wasn’t really sure how to tie them all together. Erling stepped in and suggested the scope should probably fall into creation, history (with a nod to Crumb), and publishing. He also suggested a few questions, which turned out to be very helpful.

And at Comics Worth Reading, Ben Towle has a blow by blow. Since Mouly is moderating each stop of the Crumb tour, we were wondering how she would keep it fresh, but based on this, it’s clear she’s not playing pattycake:

Next on the screen was Crumb’s two-pager, “Don’t Touch Me” (from Snatch #3) which depicts an apparent rape, followed by the “punch line” in the last panel: “I never get to come!” In a rare bit of almost-regret (maybe? almost?), Crumb recalled showing this strip to a woman he knew and being genuinely surprised by her horrified reaction. Mouly wondered though if it wasn’t his intention to shock. “I intend to shock–but I don’t want them to run away in horror!” he replied. The discomfort in the room became almost palpable when he glibly remarked about “all women having rape fantasies, right?” and mentioned that “even Freud said all women were masochistic.” Then, after a moment, “Let’s move on…”

BONUS: A picture of Crumb from 1968, taken by animator Ward Kimball, and hosted by Michael Barrier:

Ward Kimball gave me this snapshot of Robert Crumb, the great underground cartoonist, when I interviewed him for the first time, at the Disney studio on June 6, 1969. The photo is dated December 1968, which I believe is when Ward first met Crumb, in San Francisco. I was publishing Funnyworld in those days, and Ward had written to me about Crumb in November 1968: “Have you seen Robert Crumb’s new comic book, ‘SNATCH’? I dare you to run reproductions from this public hair-raiser in ‘Funnyworld.’” (No, I didn’t take him up on that dare.)

[Thanks to the fellow who wrote to us in what looked to be Romanian to send us this link.]

You’re one of the world’s most revered but reclusive cartoonists and you’ve just put out a book that confronts the biggest human enterprise of all: religion. So how to do you promote your book tour?

If you’re R. Crumb, hardly at all, as this statement at his website shows:

Robert, in accordance with his agreement with W.W. Norton Company (the publisher of his latest book), will spend much of this autumn promoting Genesis. In late September he will hold a two day press event in Paris, and in the middle of October start his press tour of the US in New York City. From there he is headed to Richmond, Virginia. From there he attends an event in L.A. where all 200+ pages of the original art which comprises the book will be shown at the Hammer Museum. From L.A. he goes up to San Francisco where he will do some interviews but also take some time off to visit friends. In the middle of November he goes to the University of Texas in Austin to finish the tour. Upon his return to France, he looks forward to beginning the new book he and Aline plan to do together.

While the listed itinerary for the Contractual Obligations Tour may be a bit light, our Intern Kate dug up the complete schedule, which kicks off TOMORROW in NYC at B&N:

10/23: New York BARNES & NOBLE/Union Square
In conversation with Francoise Mouly
7:00 PM
33 East 17th Street
New York, NY 10003
212-253-0810

Pre-signed copies available for sale.

10/24 — Los Angeles: Hammer Museum’s exhibit of all of Crumb’s art for GENESIS goes on display.

10/27: Richmond UNIVERSITY OF RICHMOND/Modlin Center for the Arts
In conversation with Francoise Mouly
7:30 p.m.
28 Westhampton Way
University of Richmond, VA 23173
(804) 289-8592

Technorati Tags: Crumb, Religion

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With his long awaited GENESIS adaptation finally hitting shelves, somewhat reclusive cartoonist R. Crumb is having a, for him, orgy of publicity. First and perhaps most excitingly, a show of his art is up this month at the Hammer Museum in LA:

The UCLA talk is presented in conjunction with the exhibition “The Bible Illuminated: R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis” on view Oct. 24–Feb. 7 at the Hammer Museum. On display will be 207 pages of the original artwork from the Book of Genesis, including the front and back cover. Crumb will also speak at Hammer’s Lunchtime Art Talks series on Nov. 4.

An Evening with R. Crumb, Oct. 29 at 8 p.m. at Royce Hall. Tickets are priced at $60, $44, $36, and $18 tickets available for UCLA students.

But there’s also the press tour you never thought you would see! R. Crumb interviewed in USA TODAY!

“I ended up with the old stereotypical Charlton Heston kind of God, long beard, very masculine. I used a lot of white-out, a lot of corrections when I tried to draw God.”

With a mixture of anticipation and anxiety, the art world has been awaiting Crumb’s long-rumored illuminated manuscript, a four-year, monastic-like effort to adapt every word of the first book of the Bible in distinctive pen and ink.

Bonus: USA Today’s Faith & Reason blog analyzes his view of the Scripture.

AND, the Washington Post’s religion column presents another in-depth analysis:

And more Crumb, drawing four to nine panels on most pages, and inking in the words in capital letters, comic book-style. But a primitive comic style that derives from Disney and fuzzy-animal comics, with little of the extreme cinematic angles, close-ups and diagonally split panels that artists such as Will Eisner brought to comics art in the 1940s — techniques that live on in graphic novels and newspaper strips such as “Judge Parker.” Crumb stays with a head-on, eye-level style as if he were drawing for small children. Part of his energy has always come from the ongoing joke of putting a fuzzy-animal style together with heinous perversities and despairs, a mating dance done to the music of his creepy obsessions with women built like linebackers, with his Rapidograph pen and with his style, which never changes, regardless of topic. It’s as if Picasso had spent his entire career in his blue period, doing art as ritual.

AND, a fine review of GENESIS from Print Magazine by Bill Kartalopoulos.

More to come, surely.