Featured Writer Archive: Tim Broderick
I read comic books as a kid, the same ones you did. Fun reads for the most part, some hairy and scary. But still they were comics, in book form. Cheap for a kid in the 1940s—a dime at the local drugstore.
Addictive? Yes. Couldn’t wait to get the next issue.
But to think of them as graphic novels? Oh heavens.
Then came Road to Perdition, a decade ago. At 304 pages, that was nooo comic book. A true graphic novel—an adult read—and a natural to become a movie. Good movie, too, with Tom Hanks in 2002. Road opened me to a segment of the book business I didn’t even know was out there. When I learned that Chicago graphic novelist Tim Broderick was going to speak at a meeting of our Midwest chapter of the Mystery Writers of America, I determined I was going to be in his audience. What follows is the story I wrote out of Tim’s presentation and additional conversations we’ve had.
Enjoy.
The changing publishing scene for graphic novels
Marvel and DC Comics owned most of the real estate eight years ago.
There were a few independents, Chicago graphic novelist Tim Broderick told members of the Mystery Writers of America’s Midwest chapter at a meeting last month. They knew their markets, were doing well, but they were small and they weren’t taking genre stories.
There also was the web, and that’s where Broderick broke in in 2000 with his first graphic novel, Lost Child. He followed that with Something to Build Upon, published by Twilight Tales in 2005, and Cash and Carry, published by Echelon Press this year. Broderick will publish the fourth graphic novel in his Odd Jobs series, Children of the Revolution, online.
“In my opinion, the best storytelling is on the web,” Broderick said. “New artists go to the web to promote their work. It’s a huge movement now.”
This hasn’t escaped Marvel and DC. Both use the web to do digital delivery of their comics.
Broderick’s work has gotten notice. Warner optioned his series for television. “I have a script at home,” he said, “but I don’t know where they are in pitching it.”
Back to the industry’s recent history. Marvel, DC and the others sold to the comic book stores and they sold direct. Then came the change in the form of Manga, the Japanese invasion. Most notable of the Japanese series was Pokemon.
“The Manga publishers had large catalogs. All they had to do was translate their series into English. They could publish a new book in a series every other month or the whole series at once. Kids loved it.” And the Manga publishers came in with packages of products: books, games, collector cards, movies and television series. They sold to the mass merchandisers—Walmart and the other big-box stores.
They also sold to the chain bookstores. “Borders has been kept afloat the last two years by the Manga sensation,” Broderick said.
Del Rey, HarperCollins and other mainstream prose publishers took notice and have brought out their own graphic novel series that they sell to bookstores. And, like the Manga publishers, their storylines are diverse. “Romance, horror and sci-fi sold well in Japan, and it sells well here,” Broderick said.
Graphic novels, including comics, is a significant market, bringing in $370 million in sales last year, up 400 percent from 2001. Half of those sales were foreign titles. Manga publishers alone put out 1,500 titles last year, up 25 percent from 2006, says Milton Griepp, publisher of ICv2, the online comics trade journal.
For writers and artists wanting to break into the field, all this means opportunity.
“Marvel, DC and the Manga publishers are property acquisition companies,” Broderick said. “If you want to write for them, draw for them, you’ll do work for hire. They will own the characters you create and the stories. The money’s good, and Marvel and DC pay on time.
“You also can submit your original work to them, but you may end up giving away a lot of rights that you wouldn’t if you went through a standard prose publisher. And prose publishers are getting in the game, both by licensing existing work and publishing original work. I think this will increase.
“Smaller comics publishers offer contracts that are more like standard prose publishers—you retain and share a variety of rights. I love these companies, but they can’t publish everything and for the most part they’re not genre publishers.”
There is money to be made if you have an intriguing character and an exceptional storyline or you have a name that says “bestseller.” Dean Koontz brought out his first graphic novel, “In Odd We Trust,” in April and it, said Broderick, hit #10 on the graphic novel bestseller list.
For Marvel and DC, they want super-heroes in tights, Broderick said, although DC now has a crime series out. The Manga publishers want characters that are drawn in the Japanese style. Other publishers, be they conglomerates or independents, are more liberal. They will take genre graphic novels.
“The best way to start,” Broderick said, “is to write your novel as a script because the artist is a storyteller, too. He wants to do his thing. The art, the cartoon relays more information than words, so you want to have a minimum of words in your graphic novel.”
Two definitions are in order:
Comic book—It’s a serial, 30 pages, full color. Hero meets villain, defeats villain, moves on to the next villain in the next book.
Graphic novel—Each is a self-contained story. “The emphasis is on content, not super-heroes. If you can do a prose novel, you can do the same story as a graphic novel,” Broderick said. “The graphic novel is visual storytelling. It’s the movies.”
Need proof of that? Think of Max Allan Collins’ and Richard Piers Rayner’s Road to Perdition and, now in film production, Alan Moore’s and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen.
* If you want to know more about Broderick and his work, go to his website: timbroderick.net
© Jerry Peterson.
