Among the latest arrivals in this week’s new releases is the eagerly-awaited Heroes hardback collection, which comes in two different cover editions, one by Jim Lee and one by Alex Ross. Although some of this material may have been seen by some fans in the online comic strip that accompanied the TV show I think it will still be new to a lot of readers who didn’t see those. And since a lot of us are addicted to this brilliant series (and not just the comics folks, I think, it has a pretty broad appeal) and we’ve been starved so far for Heroes tie-ins I think this is going to be huge – good choice for a Christmas pressie for the Heroes fan in your life. And there are some nifty Heroes T-shirts on the way soon too (I’ve got a liking for the one with the characters as drawn by painter Isaac); let’s hope figures aren’t too far behind as I want a Hiro action figure for my desk.
(detail from Alex Ross’ cover for the new Heroes collection from DC, out today)
Also arriving for New Comics Day this week is another graphic novel which has a broad appeal well beyond the traditional comics-reading community, the Dark Tower: the Gunslinger Born. I’ll admit right now I was never a fan of the original prose fantasy novels, but I was clearly in a minority because they were international bestsellers (and popular with some of the members of my own SF Book Group too), so not surprisingly the comics issues generated a lot of interest well outside the comics media. In fact we’ve had a hat trick of new graphic novels recently all drawing on either television or books which had huge, established, international fan-bases already, between Heroes and the Dark Tower this week and the first collection of Joss Whedon’s new Buffy series last week.
As I said these are all titles with a much wider appeal, graphic novels that interest folks who don’t consider themselves comics readers as well as existing comics fans – pretty savvy marketing then for the publishers to bring them out at this time of the year just as we’re all thinking about what Christmas presents we’re going to buy for the people in our lives (and more importantly what presents we want to drop hints to them to get for us!). Yes, I know on one level that could be taken as cynical marketing, but at the end of the day a publisher has to not only release a good book, they have to release it at a time when they think it will enjoy maximum sales (same reason we see so many TV chef and celebrity biographies in October and November) and since most of us will indeed be out and about looking for gift ideas you have to admit it makes sense; besides, we want them!
Thu, Nov 8, 2007
Film, TV and radio, New arrivals