The Absolute Editions
This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on November 21, 2006 Sign up now!
by Chris Barsanti, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 11/21/2006
Comic books being by and large an insubstantial medium—flimsy newsprint and low prices making disposability an easy option—there's something almost daunting about what DC Comics has been doing for a few years now with its Absolute Editions. Indeed Absolute editions are to your average comic book what a leather-bound Complete Yale Shakespeare is to a dog-eared, standard-issue high school paperback of Romeo & Juliet. Priced between $75 and $100, weighing up to seven or eight pounds, hundreds of pages thick, snugly fitted into handsomely designed slipcases, smartly and expensively bound and featuring top-quality, gloriously colored reprints of classic DC story lines, they are hand-designed to sit on a library shelf, to withstand the test of time and fickle audiences; they even have ribbon markers.
Although many of the titles in the Absolute series are the expected greatest critical hits from the DC library, the books aren't intended as simply another way to squeeze income from an already-popular line. The series began back in 2002, when the DC imprint Wildstorm released an Absolute edition of the first 12 issues of its controversial series The Authority. Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen followed, along with Planetary; the Bond Girl-style action spoof Danger Girl,; and second volumes of both The Authority and Extraordinary Gentlemen. While Absolute editions are clearly popular titles with dedicated fans, many of these books were not obvious choices for deluxe treatment, which helps illustrate how DC uses the these high-end editions in unexpected ways.
DC president and publisher Paul Levitz said that the process of choosing the candidates for these editions comes often "when you've got a creative person or editor who sees an opportunity in the marketplace and says, 'Wouldn't it be cool to show this art in a different manner?' " Another primary consideration, Levitz said, was "to find something where the work has a certain level of importance to a reasonably sized group of people."
It wasn't until 2005 that DC published Absolute versions of titles that were a no-brainer for the deluxe treatment: Alan Moore's The Watchmen and Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee's Batman: Hush. A set containing both volumes of Frank Miller's Dark Knight followed this year. Levitz noted that works like Watchmen and Dark Knight, which are 10 to 20 years old, were perfect for the Absolute series, because they had "stood the test of time," achieving a certain renown both within and especially outside the comics community. He said that "the passion with which people still speak [of them]" made it clear to DC that this would work. This doesn't mean that DC is sticking strictly to comics classics. This year DC published Absolute editions of genre-redefining works like Darwyn Cooke's New Frontier and Alex Ross's Kingdom Come. Levitz acknowledged that with titles like those, it's less of a sure seller for DC and "more an aesthetic judgment." There have been 13 Absolute editions so far, and Levitz said that DC plans to release another four in 2007, an annual number that he thinks works quite well for DC.
And how are the Absolute editions working in the marketplace? DC's Bob Wayne, vice president of sales, declined to give precise sales figures, but did said "overall, they're selling very nicely" in both the comic book specialty market and in the general book trade, adding that success is obviously a large part of the reason DC has published so many. (According to figures compiled by industry Web site ICv2, the recent Absolute Sandman has sold around 5,000 copies in the direct sales market.) When it's one of DC's more recent series, sales of the Absolute edition are usually less than the standard hardcover, Wayne said, but if the book comes from "deeper in our library," it generates better sales of the Absolute than the original hardcover.
Wayne sees a bright future for Absolute editions, pointing to "a growing interest for the right material to be presented in the premium format." Another example is the first volume of Neil Gaiman's Sandman (three more are likely to follow, according to Wayne). The book is a ravishingly designed package with an embossed leather cover. The project first came about, Levitz said, because Neil Gaiman had been "nudging us periodically" to go back and polish up the material. Since the first issues of Sandman had been published on newsprint, the color and print quality left something to be desired. Even when the issues were collected as trade paperbacks, Levitz says, "the whole business was still very young, so we weren't investing an enormous amount in upgrading." Of the 20 issues of Sandman in volume one of the Absolute edition, 18 feature completely new coloring.
A key feature included in Absolute editions is the extra materials included in each slipcased set. The New Frontier edition includes previously unpublished story pages and an alternate ending, while the Sandman Absolutes offers Gaiman's original typewritten proposal for the series—something of a Rosetta Stone for the dedicated. Georg Brewer, DC's v-p of design and DC direct creative, said that selecting extras for each title is a lengthy procedure: "we spend a great deal of time talking with the talent to see what material is available. From this we try to pick those elements that will add to the understanding of the stories or will give the readers a glimpse into the creative process."
Levitz echoed Brewer's emphasis on these DVD-like extras, pointing out the focus on the nuts and bolts of creating comics. He pointed to a bonus feature in the Absolute Sandman that guides readers through a stories' script and pencil stages, offering a level of storytelling deconstruction even the most serious fans seldom get to see. "The actual process of making comics, though hardly secret, is still one that they rarely see."
