Will Comics Adaptations Push Out Originals?

A couple years back, I was part of a Cybils judging panel that gave top marks to the comics adaptation of Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl, which I for one preferred to the prose novel. This year I was pleased to see Eric Shanower and Skottie Young’s adaptation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz win Eisner Awards not just for best graphic novel for kids, but best graphic novel for any age.

Lately we’ve seen announcements of more adaptations of bestselling fantasy novels, including Jonathan Stroud’s Amulet of Samarkand and Rick Riordan’s Lightning Thief. All this attention and money for graphic-novel versions must be good for the comics form and its creators, right?

Actually, I worry about what those high-profile adaptations mean for new novel-length comics.

Several years ago, soon after lots of upper- and middle-class American couples were having babies, there was a little boom in books for pre-readers, including original board books. There was also a boom in adapting established picture books, such as Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd’s Goodnight Moon, into the board book format—though fans complained that the adaptations were too simplified.

In a short time already-known titles drove out the original offerings with any more text than a few labels. Parents recognized the older books, perhaps from their own childhoods, and saw them as a safer buy than unfamiliar titles. The expense of printing board books made publishers reluctant to invest in poorer sellers.

Will the same dynamic play out in comics? The Lightning Thief has already enjoyed many months on bestseller lists, lots of fans, and a Hollywood marketing budget that—even if the movie sank—dwarfed what the publishing industry can pay for. How will an original comics adventure compete with that, even if it’s been conceived from the start to make the most of its format?

An additional pitfall, though not as deep, is that publishers, knowing they have a ready audience, will issue comics adaptations that aren’t very good and leave new readers less than thrilled by the format. The treatment of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight has already prompted worries along that line.

Of course, the comics business has long thrived on adaptations, whether they’re Classic Comics, TV spin-offs, reworked newspaper strips, or the endless new adventures for established characters. And brand-name properties can offer work for budding talent. As one encouraging recent example, Raina Telgemeier was able to establish (and feed) herself by adapting Ann S. Martin’s Babysitters Club novels into comics form while she completed her own Smile.

Still, I hope that the next Bone won’t get lost behind a pile of production-line Harry Potter comics licensed soon after the movie revenue has started to fade.

Reasons to Smile

Today Roger Sutton announced that Raina Telgemeier’s memoir Smile is an Honor Book in the Nonfiction category of the 2010 Boston Globe/Horn Book Awards.

Even before that news, the book’s first printing sold out—despite the fact that it’s still possible to read Smile on the web. Like Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid (discussed here), Telgemeier’s book took a path to publication that seems paradoxical yet worked.

Both Kinney and Telgemeier shared their stories on the web before finding publishers. That exposure helped them to build a following as they developed their vision. Lots of people liked the result. Some of those people probably still see no need to buy the books, but many more did buy, and told their friends as well.

Since I ended my SCBWI New England conference workshop on comics scripting by suggesting that this model looked like the best route to publication, I’m delighted to have a new example of success to point to.

Jason Green interviewed Telgemeier for Playback:stl about her choice to display finished pages on the web as she created them, starting in 2004. Telgemeier explained:

I really love the print medium, and so [that] was always what I wanted to do, was to make books. And the webcomics thing happened because people kept saying, “Put your stuff on the web! Put your stuff on the web!” I didn’t know how to do that! I didn’t know what an FTP program was, I didn’t know how to get comics from my page to a screen. I had to have it all explained to me, over and over again, in detail, before I sort of figured it out.

And once I did, it was like, “Oh, I get it, you can get a much bigger audience this way, and you can really do a lot of interesting things with page layouts,” and stuff like that. But, because I came from print, I was still not stretching my wings too far as far as the format of the story, and I knew that I wanted to print it someday. So, I think it was like I was making a print graphic novel, but I was serializing it on the web on a weekly basis.

Before then, Telgemeier had self-published her mini-comic Takeout, another way of developing an audience. That route was easier years ago, given the economics of comics distribution, but today the web is clearly more affordable and powerful. Of course, you’ve gotta have appealing content and the energy to promote it.

In the same year that Telgemeier started to share Smile, Scholastic’s David Saylor announced that the firm had commissioned her to adapt Ann S. Martin’s Baby-Sitters Club into comics form. The success of those books helped put her name on booksellers’ computers.

Telgemeier could probably have published Smile herself, based on that success, but the effort would have taken a lot of her time. Instead, she signed with Scholastic. That firm has a powerful distribution arm, including those school book fairs. It has the capital to invest in color printing, as with Jeff Smith’s Bone, which sets the print edition of Smile off from the web pages. And there’s still cachet in coming out through a major publisher—but that’s not as valuable as an already established readership.