Author: Glenn Hauman

Enjoy the beach, everybody! And enjoy Ty Templeton’s take on the toliday– er, holiday. Darn alliteration.

Where is DC Comics?

Rizzoli is here with their licensed art books, as you can see at right– the proofs for The Joker look great (you can see the cover over the gentleman’s shoulder). Andrews McMeel Publishing has [[[The Batman Files]]] ready for an October release. Chronicle Books has a preview copy of Michael E. Uslan’s [[[The Boy Who Loved Batman]]], which will be out in time for San Diego Comic-Con and that I’m very much looking forward to reading.

But DC Comics itself is nowhere to be seen, save for one person passing by the Diamond booth. Random House, their distributor to the trade, isn’t pushing their books at all. Marvel is somewhat better represented at the Disney booth, but not well.

Do they think they’ve saturated the market? Or do they just not care about the bookstore and library markets anymore?

Related articles

• The comics day at BEA: Day 1 – Habibi and WImpy Kid rule (comicsbeat.com)
• DC Revamps Again! And Again! And Again! (comicmix.com)

BookExpo America is in town, and there are a few obvious themes, but a lot of it seems to be “more of the same”. Sales efforts seem to be going to the same old licensed properties and celebrity products– I was surprised that IDW didn’t even have any of Darwyn Cooke’s Parker adaptations on display, for example. (And don’t tell me it’s not because the next one is a while off, there’s a nice omnibus edition coming, it’s still one of the more prestigious properties they publish, and there’s a decent amount of backlist titles on display, although not complete by any means.)

E-pub  and blogging seems to be a much bigger deal here, with healthy showings from Google, Overdrive, and Amazon (both Kindle and their new print line) and the concurrent BlogWorld convention going on downstairs. Somehow, I think a lot more people are going to being migrating there over the course of the show.

We expect to be at the CBLDF party later tonight, and we hope to see you there.

BookExpo America, the largest industry convention for publishers, booksellers, librarians, and other folks in the industry, runs at the Javits Center in New York this week. It’s often used as a stalking ground for movie and TV studios to snap up properties for adaptations, so one wonders– what books should be adapted into comics form, and by who?

There have been a number of interesting translations over the years. The biggest success story of the past few years have included Darwyn Cooke’s adaptations of Richard Stark’s [[[The Hunter]]] and [[[The Outfit]]] and Marvel’s adaptations of Stephen King’s [[[The Dark Tower]]] by Peter David and Jae Lee, but there have been many others, from the recent adaptations of Ayn Rand’s [[[Anthem]]], Marvel’s [[[Wizard of Oz]]] and [[[Ender’s Game]]], Dynamite’s adaptations of Robert Jordan’s [[[The Wheel Of Time]]], BOOM!’s [[[Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep]]], longevity champion [[[Conan The Barbarian]]] which has been adapted and extended for over forty years, and reaching all the way back to [[[Classics Illustrated]]], which was your parents’ version of Cliffs Notes and Sesame Street.

More tantalizing are the versions that haven’t been made yet. Phil Foglio and Matt Howarth did their own version of the introduction to Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s [[[Good Omens]]], and Phil had already adapted the first book of [[[Myth Adventures]]] by Robert Asprin. Now we have Kevin Colden ([[[Fishtown]]]) showing his proof-of-concept for his version of Anthony Burgess’s [[[A Clockwork Orange]]]. Click through to see the first few pages.

What adaptations would you like to see? And by who? [[[American Psycho]]] by Bill Sienkiewicz, or maybe Howard Chaykin? [[[Catcher In The Rye]]] by Dean Haspiel or Evan Dorkin? [[[The Great Gatsby]]] by P. Craig Russell? John Ostrander writing [[[The Thin Man]]], or Mike W. Barr writing [[[Ellery Queen]]]? Personally, I’d love to see Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely take a crack at [[[Brave New World]]]…