We caught up with Dynamite Entertainment CEO Nick Barrucci at New York Comic Con to talk about his company’s relaunch of Vampirella, the iconic character that originated in Warren Magazines. He gave us an idea of how this new incarnation fits into the history of the character under its previous publishers, and the support surrounding the launch.
Tell us a little bit about how you’re launching your new incarnation of Vampirella incarnation and what kind of support you’re giving it.
We have acquired one of the strongest female icons in comics after Wonder Woman. She’s been around for over 40 years. We’re giving her a considerable launch. We’re fortunate enough to engage Eric Trautmann, who’s worked on Action Comics with Greg Rucka. We were able to bring him in before anyone else tied him up for another project. We are beginning today; we’re not going back. We’re keeping her history a mystery. We’re focusing on the single ongoing series right now.
We’ve given her the best launch we can. We’ve talked to as many retailers on the phone as possible, and worked to get their support. We’ve worked with all the news sites we could from Comic Book Resources, Newsarama, and yourself at ICv2 to hit retailers. We also worked with Comic Shop News. Comic Shop News is a great supporter of ours. Being the free giveaway paper outlet in the industry is very important.
Our numbers show that we’re succeeding. We’ve got our preliminary numbers and we’re looking to be the top selling non-Marvel non-DC book with the possible exception of Buffy for November.
What’s your digital strategy for Vampi?
Digital strategy? We probably won’t touch on it ‘til January. The biggest reason is we’re not comfortable doing day and date release or releasing within 30 days. It’s not a model we’re attacking right now. It’s interesting to see Marvel and DC do it. Marvel’s done it with the Invincible Iron Man Annual; they just did it with Ultimate Thor and they seem to have great success.
DC’s doing it with Justice League: Generation Lost. DC isn’t announcing how successful that is so it’s hard to gauge.
For us, working on her [digital] premiere in January or possibly February seems to be the right way to go. For us it’s more important to make sure that we have the comic shipping well and shipping on time, with the Archives, the Masters Series (see “Vampirella Collections”), creating that foundation. I don’t want to distract us.
How long has it been since Harris published Vampi?
What ended up happening, they had trimmed the line down to a quarterly book for awhile. They worked to do a re-launch and they launched the re-launch at 1.99 each to get extra hype, to get more attention. They got a lot of positive reviews on the message boards, a lot of positive feedback, but it didn’t translate into sales.
When was the $1.99 re-launch?
It was only last year. For us it was definitely a challenge to overcome, that the book did not work as well as it should have last year because it’s too fresh. Many times when a book doesn’t work it’s almost like it becomes radioactive. You have to take it out of the market for three years. We bit off a lot and thank God we didn’t bite off more than we could chew.
You said you were happy with your orders. Is that better than the Harris book did?
In multiples.
Since the Harris book wasn’t doing that well and the frequency was low, is it more like introducing a new character? There’s a whole generation of people who haven’t seen it or might not be aware of it.
It is. It’s actually not too much different than the way we handled Red Sonja. Red Sonja had a great start. What Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith did was magic. It was absolutely magic. Over the years as Red Sonja evolved she ended up being in the blue costume and diminishing sales, and everybody gave up on her. She was like Spider-Girl to Spider-Man--couldn’t sustain her own title.
When we acquired Red Sonja our attitude was, well why can’t we go back to the basics that
The audience today didn’t realize that’s what we were doing, bringing Red Sonja to her roots. To everybody who hadn’t been in comics for 15, 20 years, it was just new stories. It’s not like we retold old Red Sonja stories, we just went back to the essence.
With Vampirella, the first seven issues of the magazine, in my opinion, were not that good. It was only when Archie Goodwin came to the magazine that she was more than T and A. I don’t know how many people know this but Louise Simonson was the editor at the time. The way he developed her and the way he made her work, Archie grasped her to where she became a character with more depth. She actually wore a jacket, it wasn’t just the bikini. She had many human aspects to her. It wasn’t just a woman who would show up in a bikini with fangs fighting. There was a lot of story that was told.
Vampirella had a good run up until the late seventies. There was nothing that happened in the eighties. And then the early nineties, with the comics speculation and the boom she was able to come back.
Bad girls.
Bad girls were big, especially in ’93, ’94. And she had some of the greatest commercial success of her career. And this is why I say that from 1993 or so until 2000, a lot of what made Vampirella work was David Bogart appreciating what Archie Goodwin brought to the table. If you look at the stories that Warren Ellis, James Robinson, Mark Millar, Grant Morrison wrote, the way they tackled the character, they brought her back to the Archie Goodwin years. I think that focusing on developing the character was important enough that she was able to sustain life and have stories that kept her going. You can see that David was the rudder for it. We’ve learned a lot from that. We’ve learned that we need to give the character depth to give her life.
Of course we have been getting interesting comments on the Internet because when we show the covers we’re showing iconic Vampi covers because that’s the way to open the door to the fans. We’ve also showed six or so interior pages where she’s wearing a trench coat, the costume’s underneath. She’s not just walking around in a bikini with thigh-high leather boots. She looks like someone who’s un-menacing. She looks like someone who you would just see walking down the street. And then when the situation arises, you see her become her true form.
So I like to think we’re going in the right direction. I like to think we have a character who’s going to be around for years, just like we’ve done with Red Sonja, just like we’ve done with many characters.