Like Dan Clowes and Craig Thompson, Scott Pilgrim creator Bryan Lee O’Malley is opting for a major publishing house after first finding success with an independent comic book publisher.  Random House’s Villard Books will publish O’Malley’s next work, Seconds, which is slated to appear sometime in 2013.

 

According to Publisher’s Weekly, O’Malley has remained steadfastly silent about the content and direction of his new work.  Certainly there is no denying that O'Malley has become one of the most successful alternative comics creators of the 21st Century.  His six Scott Pilgrim graphic novels published by Oni Press have sold over a million copies collectively, and while the movie adaptation Scott Pilgrim vs. The World was a box office dud (earning just $47.7 million worldwide versus a cost of over $60 million), it has stimulated huge continuing sales of the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels, with one volume remaining in the BookScan Top 20 in June some ten months after the movie opened (see “Naruto Back on Top in June”).  Scott Pilgrim remains the bestselling “alternative” comics property on ICv2’s authoritative list of the “Top Fiction & Reality” titles with a sales lead built up through the first six months of this year that will be hard to top.