City Of Heroes: DC, Marvel Go For the Book Trade

DC and Marvel, the two largest American comics companies, are doing better than they ever have in the book trade-DC's president and publisher, Paul Levitz, reports that bookstore sales this year are triple what they were five years ago, and he expects 30% growth for 2003. But both companies are also trying to figure out how to catch up with the manga revolution-which has stolen some of their thunder in the book market-and how to reach the elusive market of girl readers.

Marvel is entering that field with a Marvel Manga format that it will introduce in November: digest-size books, printed in color, with a price point of $7.99 or $8.99. Sentinel, Mystique and Runaways are self-contained stories with ties to the X-Men and Spider-Man lines, appropriate for school-age audiences. The company is also making a play for teenage girls with YA prose book adaptations of top comics series: Judith O'Brien's Mary Jane, a prose story focused on Spiderman's girlfriend, was very successful (it will appear in paperback soon), and O'Brien's Mary Jane II will appear in time for the Spider-Man II film's opening in early July 2004.

Marvel consistently does well with media tie-ins like X-Men and Spider-Man titles: lately, the X-Men Evolution books, based on the cartoon series, have been selling well, according to David Gabriel, Marvel's manager of sales/administration. The next major Marvel film is The Punisher, opening in April, and a group of Punisher-related books will appear well before then, including a hardcover edition of Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon's Punisher: Born. A Fantastic Four feature film is expected for the 2004 holiday season, and Marvel's already gearing up for it-by the end of this year, there will be three different Fantastic Four series running, and they'll be collected in book form by next fall.

Gabriel notes that Kmart and other retailers have expressed interest in Kyle Baker's The Truth, an unusual retelling of Captain America's origins from an African-American perspective, for Black History Month promotions, so it will appear as a trade paperback in late January. Wolverine: The Brothers, collecting the first story line from 2003's bestselling new series, will be out in February, as will the fourth and final volume of the mature-readers cult hit series Alias. Other major Marvel projects due this winter include a coffee-table book, The Art of Marvel Comics (which will be promoted through sci-fi.com), in November and a collection of the covers of the first 500 issues of Amazing Spider-Man due in February. And, next July, Marvel will have a Neil Gaiman hardcover of its own, collecting his much-anticipated 1602 miniseries, a retelling of the Marvel Universe set in Elizabethan England.

DC has a substantial Gaiman backlist from its Vertigo imprint, notably the extremely popular Sandman books, whose redesigned paperback editions have just started to appear. "We've really made the field's largest commitment to the idea of the high-end original graphic novel," Levitz says. "We've been developing this program for over a decade and have stuff in the pipeline for the next three to four years. It's the natural spearhead that drives the program with collected editions, archives and the children's digests we've just introduced."

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