Here are the other book, DVD and movie releases for the week!
HARDCOVER BOOKS
Labor Day is a long holiday weekend, meant for traveling, reading and super sales all over the place—from mattresses to furniture to clothes to electronics.
The book industry also partakes in these sales!
Borders is offering several weekend discounts and sales. Free shipping for purchases over $10. One free bargain book for every two purchased. And the coolest one:
My five suggestions:
Happy Reading!
As a web developer for several authors, I am always interested in clever marketing.
Well, DC Comics has done a gem, I think! Today I ran across the website www.AfterWatchmen.com, a DC site devoted to the comic books people should read after having read or watched Watchmen. Looking back on DC history, they have published an impressive line of literary comic book series by some of the best talent in the business. These graphic novels are absolutely fantastic, every single one.
The website features Watchmen but the majority of the space is devoted to titles that echo certain elements of the Alan Moore classic.
I dig the look of the website. I dig the Watchmen Doomsday clock being a couple of minutes after midnight. I dig the navigation of the website and the perfect list of great graphic novels on it!
Of those I have read, Kingdom Come, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns are my favorites.
It’s great that DC Comics has supplied that website, a stroke of marketing genius in my opinion. Sure, they publish Watchmen, but the other comic book publishers could just as easily market to readers who enjoyed Watchmen. I myself have not read the entire list supplied by DC but that is something I will remedy. To me, a well written graphic novel can be just as enjoyable as a novel or a movie.
As soon as I finish writing The Dark Thorn, I will be reading. Every day for hours a day. I simply must catch up on all the cool great stuff I’ve missed out on!
I will start with Fables.
And go from there!
With Watchmen being released everywhere at midnight tonight—and my review of the movie being posted here also at midnight tonight—I felt it important to observe one element from the review before it is released.
And if you are wondering, yes, I really enjoyed Watchmen. As a fan of cinema and as a fan of the graphic novel.
One of the terrible things that occurs when a graphic novel is adapted to the screen is a loss of certain story elements that simply can’t fit in with the movie medium. This happened to Watchmen when director Zach Snyder could not interweave the sub-textual story Tales of the Black Freighter from the graphic novel into the movie. Watchmen is a series of stories within a story, and fans will undoubtedly be sad that Black Freighter was not included.
But not to worry. Snyder and company created Tales of the Black Freighter anyway, voiced by Gerard Butler, and made it its own DVD release. Here is the trailer for it:
From a fan point of view, I am happy Snyder did this. From a storytelling point of view, I really hate it because it is one big tease. The reason the story Tales of the Black Freighter worked in the graphic novel is because in each page Alan Moore used it to give more meaning to the actual Watchmen story around it. Connecting the two tales creates a stronger resonance for the literary merit of the graphic novel—a small bit of literary merit that was missing in the movie sadly.
In a way, I wish Snyder could release a Deluxe Edition of the movie where Tales of the Black Freighter was interwoven in with the actual theater release. Won’t happen, but I can wish right!
Still, this trailer looks sweet! Enjoy!
Although the outcome is usually questionable, I really enjoy the anticipation when one medium decides to adapt work from another medium. It has the potential to be Superman: The Movie, adapted from a comic book. Or it has the potential to be Star Wars: The Thrawn Trilogy, books adapted from the movies. Or it can be Star Wars: Dark Empire, comic books adapted from books and movies. These kinds of crossovers have worked well and delivered some great entertainment!
But what happens when it goes wrong—and not because of creative influences but because of money?
What will happen to our Watchmen movie?
A few days ago, a judge ruled in favor of Fox Studios that it was wronged by Warner Bros. when the latter began to adapt the graphic novel Watchmen to the silver screen and planned to distribute it. I have no doubt it is the right ruling. But it sadly might push back the release of the Watchmen movie indefinitely—a movie many a fanboy and geek have been waiting for a long time—until some kind of settlement can be made. Will these two massive studios come to an agreement that benefits all and gives us our movie? We’ll see.
But I find it sad we may not get our movie and what could be a great adaptation and cross between mediums… we may not get to watch Watchmen.
More on this as it becomes available.
The week started out so well. Sales figures were coming in very strongly on the first book in Del Rey’s collaboration with the Dabel Brothers comic book publishers: The Dresden Files: Welcome to the Jungle, an original story by Jim Butcher set in his fan-favorite universe starring Harry Dresden. The individual comics sold very well through spring and early summer. When our Del Rey hardcover, which collects the four individual issues into gorgeous four-color hardcover and adds lots of interesting background material on how the story was created, went on sale 10/14 it immediately starting flying out of the stores.
On Wednesday Bookscan released its sales figures, and Welcome to the Jungle appeared at #17 on the hardcover fiction list. (Bookscan is a database that tallies actual sales from bookstores and other outlets nationwide. It doesn’t cover 100% of the marketplace, but it’s the most accurate reference publishers have as to how our books are doing week by week.) My pulse rate went up. Bookscan doesn’t predict the New York Times bestseller list slot by slot, but it’s a very strong indicator for where, in general, a book will land. Welcome to the Jungle seemed a real possibility for the top 15, which is the part of the list that actually appears in print in the Times Sunday book section.
Wednesday evening came around, the Times list was released electronically to publishers, I fell upon it with glad cries … and was dashed to the rocks below. No Jim Butcher, anywhere. Not only was it missing from the top 15, it appeared nowhere in the Extended List. Nada. Zip. Much wailing and gnashing of teeth ensued.
So what did I learn this week? [more after the jump]
Recently, shortly before awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature to French novelist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, a member of the Nobel committee, Horace Engdahl, caused no small controversy with the following remarks:
The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.
Many responded with a list of worthy American writers who disproved this charge: Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy.
Though it’s hard to disagree with that list, my first thought, actually, was that America’s greatest contribution to world literature may be its genre writing, and that it is in fact the Nobel committee that is “isolated, insular, ignorant”—in its continued refusal to acknowledge genre writers. This situation is unlikely to change, given that the committee’s record of judging even literary fiction is spotty at best. (To see some over the committee’s amazing omissions over the years, check out Ted Gioia’s “The Nobel Prize in an Alternate Universe.”) So like those other non-Nobelists, Proust, Joyce, and Nabokov, science fiction and fantasy writers will have to settle for a different kind of prize: continuing to actually be read by readers all over the world for years to come.
Still, we can dream. After the jump, take a look at 10 sci-fi/fantasy novelists deserving of the honor. Note that posthumous nominations are included—this is, after all, the stuff of dreams. Add your own nominees in the comments!
As an admitted newbie to the graphic novel world, I had no idea why my friends were so excited when DC Comics started handing out Watchmen at Book Expo last year. They urged me to grab one anyway and boy am I glad they did, especially now that I’ve seen the trailer for the movie (out in 2009):
What do you guys think? Are you going to see it?
For those who are also new to Watchmen, it’s hard to fully describe the plot. Suffice to say that it’s about superheroes in an alternate, dystopian 1985 where the threat of nuclear war is imminent. More information is here:
