Oh, man.
Long-time ADDTF readers may remember that back in the early days of this blog, I spent a lot of time talking about the importance of well-designed, uniform trade dress to the trade paperback/graphic novel/manga market. (Seriously–do a search for “trade dress” and you’ll find I spent the entire Spring and Summer of 2003 talking about it.) My thesis was that manga had a huge advantage over American comic collections not just because they were sized closer to regular prose books, but because you could actually enjoy looking at and have an easy time reading the spines when they’re lined up on a shelf.
Sadly, things have not improved much since back then. Dark Horse recently reprinted all the Hellboy collections in order to capitalize on the Hellboy movie–but they still haven’t numbered the books in the series! (Argh–this is maybe the most difficult series around in terms of figuring out which book comes when. Help us, DH!) (UPDATE: Augie de Blieck writes to say that they do, in fact, have numbers. Man, I’m glad to be wrong about that.) DC doesn’t number the collections of its big icon series; on some of those series they do number, the number is so small they may as well not have bothered. Marvel continues to shoehorn both classic old runs and pointless new miniseries into its “Legends” line, producing confusion, lousy sales, and bizarre circumstances such as the fact that the recent Spider-Man/Wolverine miniseries is in print as a trade paperback and the seminal Kraven’s Last Hunt is not. And Image’s yellow logo on the spines of each of its trade paperbacks is as ugly as sin would be if sin had botched cosmetic surgery.
So thank you, thank you, thank you to Brian Hibbs, whose latest column is all about How to Dress Your Trade Paperbacks. He tackles the issue from a number of fascinating and important perspectives, both general and specific: from discussing how the look of a trade impacts sales to dissecting exactly what constitutes good design to pointing out flaws in different companies’ programs to raising questions about the role trade paperbacks may be playing in mid-list titles reaching their breaking point to whether indie companies are shooting themselves in the foot by completely eschewing pamphlets.
Please, go and read it. These are issues that every comics company should be thinking about very carefully.