I’ll go ahead and say it: Marvel’s “Marvel Age” initiative impresses me.
Listen, I’m as skeeved out by the endless exploitation of the Stan/Jack/Steve years as the next guy, but Marvel’s in a tough spot: The people on the business end don’t want the publishing people to do anything to which Marvel can’t fully control the licensing rights; at the same time, advances in creators’ rights (or at least a general awareness that such things exist) have lead creators to be reluctant to, well, create anything they themselves can’t own, meaning that when they work for the Big Two, it’s really a question of reshuffling the same old characters and concepts; and Marvel as a publisher finds itself beholden to a reactionary Direct Market and the failed monthly-pamphlet format, both of which prevent it from producing comics in the cost-effective and popular format young readers prefer, as well as actually putting comics where those readers would even see them. Meanwhile, there’s an entire thriving sequential-art industry–manga–that doesn’t find itself in this bind, and is making a killing because of it.
If I ran Marvel, I’d have spent the last couple of years frantically trying to find a way to repackage the best existing work the company had into a format that could tap that market. The thinking behind Marvel Age, especially as detailed by their seemingly quite-on-the-ball Sales Manager David Gabriel, shows that Marvel’s finally trying to do exactly that.
They’re even talking about switching to a direct-to-digest format, if sales warrant, and this time at least it seems that this isn’t just talk. Good for them. For now, though, it makes sense to essentially repackage old material, either directly (in the case of Runaways, Sentinel and, I think, Spider-Girl), or via modernized adaptations (Marvel Age Spider-Man). That, after all, is one of the advantages of the big American manga publishers, who have a decades-old backlog of preexisting Japanese comics to select from, translate, package, and publish at a much lower cost than producing brand-new stuff. Moreover, choosing Runaways and Sentinel for repackaging out of all their recent crop of manga-influenced titles, as opposed to the much-hyped and thoroughly woeful Trouble, shows that someone at the company is actually paying attention to the quality of the content, not just catch-phrases about art style or romantic plotlines.
But there’s still a lot more they could be doing with their books. Back at 2003’s San Diego Comic-Con, I was told that Ultimate Spider-Man was going to be converted into digests. I don’t know if this is still in the works, what with Marvel Age Spider-Man now in play, but it should be: There are now over 50 issues of this uniformly high-quality, perfectly age-appropriate book available. Moreover, success with an Ultimate book in this format would naturally pave the way for similar publishing initiatives on Ultimate X-Men, and perhaps even Ultimate Marvel Team-Up and (God willing that there are enough issues to collect) The Ultimates. The Ultimate books–including, if the first issue is any indication, Ultimate Fantastic Four–are as close to a match for the manga audience as anything Marvel’s got. Please, House of Ideas, allay our fears and do the right thing with them! (That last link courtesy of Big Sunny D.)
Meanwhile, as Shawn Fumo points out, DC are learning that manga-sized digests are the way to go from the type of source they might really listen to: the bookstores themselves. They’ll be publishing their newly-acquired title Elfquest that way, and perhaps doing more experiments a la Death: At Death’s Door, but they should be looking into wholesale repackaging as well. Their various animated-series adaptations would be perfect for younger readers, and I remain 100% convinced that a digest-sized reprint of the complete Sandman run would be a goddamn blockbuster. (Similar arguments could be made for quite a few Vertigo series, especially Transmetropolitan.)
Honestly, this is something that even altcomix publishers could learn from. I’d certainly be interested to see how some old Love & Rockets stuff, particularly Jaime’s, would do in manga format; I’d imagine quite well. Blankets is a great fit as well; it may be tough to shoehorn that book into a digest without splitting it up, but could trade dress be experimented with in an attempt to catch the eye of shoujo fans? Hell, even Jim Woodring’s Frank stuff might find an interesting new, young audience if repackaged appropriately. I don’t want to get carried away here, but there are many possibilities. And from a publisher’s viewpoint, I’d think they were both intelligent and enticing.