Comics Prose: Pros & Cons?
Continuing to do a little catching up on items this week, I see that both Dark Horse and Marvel are launching prose publishing lines.
Marvel Press will focus on producing novels based on their superheroes, with three subset, target audiences: grade school readers, young adults and adult. For Marvel it's presumably at least as much of an attempt to bring in new readers as it is to establish itself in another market.
Over at Dark Horse they'll be launching both M Press and DH Press.
The distinctions between material likely to be put under M Press or that selected for DH Press is still a little murky, though the general sketch given is that the former will be given to straight storytelling, even if it it might also wander into non-fiction/autobiographical material, while DH Press will focus on pop culture items, whether they're stories or focused textbooks on pop culture themes. Based on what's mentioned so far, DH appears to be where anything with photos or illustrations will land, while M will be pure prose.
Dark Horse, at least, will be unveiling their new lines at Book Expo America in Chicago, June 3-6. A quick look over that event's site demonstrates that there's a fuss being made not only over children's books, but over graphic novels and comics.
The Dark Horse effort appears to be just another publishing line, not that there's anything wrong with that. It remains to be seen what quality they'll channel into the marketplace, and whether or not they'll find themselves a niche or two to fill.
Marvel's approach is part of a broader marketing effort for their existing characters (though you'll need to refer to them as "properties" when speaking to anyone from accounting on up through the company's board of directors), and I appreciate that. Giving kids and young adults superhero-themed novels, which they have a much better chance of being allowed to do book reports on, could see many more kids more willing to take on these assignments. In the 1970s (and, come to think of it, a little in the 1960's) there were paperbacks in this line, primarily written by writers already working in comics. I have a few of them from back then, and the results were uneven.
Looking around I see that there's been something of a glut of these novelizations in more recent years. Here's one roundup of Marvel novels pulled together by someone who skips the 1970s line as they're all out of print, though he does mention The Avengers Battle the Earth Wrecker by Otto Binder (1967) and Captain America: The Great Gold Steal by Ted White (1968).
(The former is one I don't have, though it might be interesting to track it down as Otto Binder is someone who had been working in comics since the Golden Age era. The latter is one a friend gave me some years back, and is written by Ted White, who has done much comics-related and science fiction/fantasy work over the years. If memory serves, he was also active enough in comics fandom that he contributed an early chapter to the celebration of comics, All In Color For A Dime.)
Ultimately, as uninterested as I am in all of the Spider-man and X-Men related prose novels that have apparently been pumped out in the past decade or so, I can hardly damn the idea on principle. I'm simply cautious about the content when I see that the first item on the new imprint's agenda is a sequel to 2003's young adult novel Mary Jane, put out by Marvel's general publishing arm. Its sequel will be out in June, some "fantasy Wolverine title for adults in October, and then a middle grade Spider-Man title in November."
Publishers, booksellers and librarians, though, they're all on the same page in wanting to promote reading among children and teens. There's too many people there for them all to suckle from J.K. Rowling's teat, to put it indelicately -- and Marvel doesn't even have a shot at that -- so they're all interested in expanding the market.
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