ICv2 recently caught up with Dynamite Entertainment CEO Nick Barrucci to talk about the market and Dynamite’s place in it. In Part 2, we talked about Dynamite’s art book line, and plans for 2014. In Part 1, we talked about the market, variants, and what’s going on with key Dynamite lines such as Heroes, Robotech, Bob’s Burgers, and more.Let’s talk about your art book business, which has been a growing area for Dynamite. What are you doing in that category, and what have people been responding to?
We’ve done quite a few different art books. The main ranges are [artist specific and character or themed art books]. The artist specific titles include Sean Phillips, Howard Chaykin, Alex Ross, John Cassaday, Ramona Fradon, John Romita Jr. and Sr. and George Perez--a great variety of creators whose work we respect and we had a passion to put out retrospectives on. We put out two a year, the next one being Jock, from The Losers. We try to work with creators whose work we love, who we have a passion for, who we can spend 200 to 300 pages showing their career and artwork. These are passion projects for us.
What have your bestsellers been among the artist retrospectives?
They’ve all sold really well, they’re evergreen, they’re truly evergreen. Our best seller probably has been The Art of Alex Ross, a beautiful 300-page book, but The Art of Sean Phillips and Howard Chaykin have been doing exceptionally well as well. Two of the first ones we did were The Art of George Perez and The John Romita Legacy, and those have been fantastic. They all do well and we’re really proud of all of them.
The other art books we do are character based or themed. We’ve done The Art of Dejah Thoris, The Art of Vampirella, The Art of Red Sonja; we’re doing The History of Painted Comics. Our art books have a nice, wide range.
They’re great because we not only sell at the book stores and through Amazon, but we also get them into libraries and book clubs.
Where are your books sold, do you sell more through the book channel or the direct market?
The direct market is always the most important market for us, and we do still have the most support from the direct market. We’re pretty happy with the growth we’ve had over the past year. We were able to ship most of our high-end collections (definitive editions and art editions) in the fourth quarter and really bumped up our numbers through Diamond because we have great support in the direct market.
We also shipped the Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files: Ghoul Goblin, which did awesome.
Was that a relic from your past deal with the Dabel Brothers?
No, this was a new agreement.
It’s like saying "pick your favorite kid." I’m excited about the 20th anniversary of Chaos and the tenth anniversary of Dynamite and being able to re-launch the Chaos library. We launched Evil Ernie two years ago, and it did really well. It was a great six-issue series. We got the kind of reaction we were hoping for, and I think Chaos, the combined universe, is going to do so much more sales wise because it’s all the characters, but Evil Ernie was a great lead-in.
We’re re-launching Vampirella with Nancy Collins, who is best known in the comics industry for her work on Swamp Thing, but she’s also a successful prose novelist. We were reintroduced to her thanks to Gail Simone on The Legends of Red Sonja series. She did a great Red Sonja story and we approached her about writing Vampirella and re-launching the series with us. She’s really taking the character back down to the basics, the way Archie Goodwin defined Vampirella and really made her a character in the early ‘70s, Nancy is taking that essence to the next level. I couldn’t be more excited.
We have some big announcements coming for the John Carter world.
More Shadow with Howard Chaykin. As a fan, seeing Howard revisit The Shadow for the first time in 28 years is a dream come true for me. So on a personal level, that’s really exciting.
We’re working with Alex de Campi for the first time on a Lady Zorro series. I’ve been following her since Smoke, and she’s a really smart writer with a distinctive voice whose work I respect. That we’re finally getting to work with her is really exciting.
I think the fact that we executed the Gold Key characters so well is a proud accomplishment because we worked hard to get here.
We’ll be announcing the first wave of figures to be released by Dynamite Toys and Games at C2E2 this year. We’ll be bringing back the Eternal Toys brand as well, which was the cast line of action figures that Clay Moore worked with back in the ‘90s.
By Gen Con we’ll have our first game announced and be able to show it.
What am I most proud of? Dynamite has hit its 10th anniversary; I'm really proud of the achievements of everyone at Dynamite--from the team in the office to the creators we work with and the licensing partners we have. This isn't just about us, but it's about the work and the fans who support us. I have a great team of creators that we work with; everyone at Dynamite works at 100% all the time; and we’ve surprised people with some of our announcements over the past year. The fact that we were able to grow from the publisher that published Army of Darkness and Red Sonja to now working with creators as great as Garth Ennis, Neil Gaiman, Andy Diggle, and the list goes on. I’m really proud of the achievements we’ve made.
Last year was a transition year for us. This year there’s going to be a lot of execution that will surprise a lot of people, and next year, there’s a good chance that we will grow about 50%, if not more.
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