BLOCKBUSTER PUBLISHING AND BOOK PACKAGERS

Starting in 1960 the US book trade entered a period of mergers and acquisitions as presses were bought up “by huge conglomerates involved in activities other than publishing.”Footnote ²¹ Thomas Whiteside's The Blockbuster Complex (1981) provides a useful contemporary perspective, albeit one fixed on the conglomeration of the book trade to the exclusion of older, surviving publishing models. Whiteside notes that once multinationals invested unprecedented sums of money they expected more “financially rational structures” and “long-range financial-planning programs.”Footnote ²² By the 1970s, conglomerated publishing houses wanted to maximize profit at the moment of a book's release, a state of affairs forced by the severe decline of independent bookstores and the rapid growth of chains such as B. Dalton and Waldenbooks. These chains sold their stock quickly and at high volume, taking advantage of computerized sales and inventory tracking so that information on titles selling well in one region was swiftly communicated to stores nationwide.Footnote ²³ Mediocre sellers were quickly removed to create space for faster-selling stock. New books were typically “dead in days or weeks.” Publishers saturated the market with new titles in the hope that the next “big book” (with sales in the region of 300,000 copies) would outweigh the average performance of new titles (1,200 copies a year).Footnote ²⁴ The release of a new book was turned into a media event via advertising and placing authors on talk shows.Footnote ²⁵ New titles were meant to be as attention-grabbing as possible and the chain stores attracted a wider range of customers than the smaller independent bookstores: in this climate, the mass appeal and novelty value of book-format comics made them a tantalizing prospect for publishers, and East Coast trade presses ventured into the market with various titles, including Burne Hogarth's Tarzan of the Apes (1972) and Jungle Tales of Tarzan (1976), Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's The Silver Surfer (1978), and Jules Feiffer's Tantrum (1979).

Another key transformation in North American publishing was the rise of softcover houses. The established presses earned relatively little income from hardback books; they made much more money selling the reprint rights for popular hardcovers to softcover publishers.Footnote ²⁶ To circumvent these high licensing fees, paperback houses moved further into original book publication.Footnote ²⁷ Gil Kane's 121-page Blackmark, published by Bantam Books in 1971, represents an early example of how original graphic novels were attractive to softcover publishers; in 1979 Bantam published Byron Preiss's heavily illustrated fantasy novel Dragonworld.Footnote ²⁸ Nonetheless, most book-format comics published by paperback houses were reprint editions, such as the two volumes of Green Lantern Co-starring Green Arrow written by Denny O'Neil with art by Neal Adams.Footnote ²⁹ The first was published in January 1972 and the second in June the same year, both from the Paperback Library and stating they contained “two complete novels” on their covers.Footnote ³⁰ The Green Lantern Co-starring Green Arrow comic was at the leading edge of the “relevancy” movement that saw mainstream superhero comics grappling with social issues such as racism, drugs, poverty, and labour unrest, a trend reported in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Newsweek.Footnote ³¹ The Green Lantern paperbacks were conceived by Preiss and aimed at “the college market,”Footnote ³² as confirmed by DC editor Carmine Infantino in 1970:

Reality proved somewhat different: Preiss conceded that “they did not sell very well.”Footnote ³⁴

Publishing house Simon and Schuster was at the leading edge of conglomeration; in 1975 it was bought by Gulf & Western, a corporation with interests in mining, automobile parts, and filmmaking. It was run by Richard Snyder, a proselytizer for blockbuster publishing trends who lauded the chain stores for making the book trade less aloof and elitist.Footnote ³⁵ Under their young-adult imprint Fireside, Simon and Schuster brought out a line of books reprinting Marvel comics; between 1974 and 1979 eleven of these “Origins books” were published, so-called because the first volume was Origins of Marvel Comics.Footnote ³⁶ In 1978 Preiss expressed his gratitude that the Origins books netted sales of 90,000 copies because this compelled major publishers to “acknowledge that there is an audience for comics in book form.”Footnote ³⁷ Publishers could make huge sums selling the movie rights for their titles, in terms of both licensing fees and extra sales from added publicity, and Snyder boasted that Simon and Schuster generated “the software of the television and movie media.” Many publishing houses established offices in California to get “in on the ground floor of movie tie-ins,” such as the West Coast imprint Simon and Schuster Productions.Footnote ³⁸ Fireside's publication of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's original graphic novel The Silver Surfer in 1978 may well be attributable to the search for synergy with the film industry. Rumours of a Silver Surfer film went back to 1972,Footnote ³⁹ and in 1979 it actually seemed to be happening:

The film was reportedly an adaptation of the Silver Surfer graphic novel.Footnote ⁴¹ Given the book's length and self-contained narrative, it is reasonable to think that the writer and Simon and Schuster had this endpoint in mind during its gestation. The book certainly fitted the blockbuster logic of publishing media-savvy authors, since Lee was “an increasingly regular sight on television talk shows and in newspapers.”Footnote ⁴² The Silver Surfer motion picture never materialized but Snyder's enthusiasm for comics-based Hollywood tie-ins was undiminished: Ridley Scott's film Alien (1979) and Steven Spielberg's madcap comedy 1941 (1979) were adapted into book-format comics either published or distributed by Simon and Schuster.Footnote ⁴³

The conglomeration of the book trade did not lead to the establishment of internally borderless corporate empires where intellectual properties passed seamlessly from publishers to film studios owned by the same multinational. This is partially due to the creative control wielded by a new kind of agent moving into the book trade from the film industry and/or legal practice. These agents ensured they got the best possible deals across corporations, not within them. Further, with in-house editors spending decreasing amounts of time actually editing books, agents came to exercise unprecedented creative authority. These agents, known as “book packagers,” would generate ideas for authors and bring writers, studios, and fashionable subjects into conversation. Packagers could have a book's licensing rights finalized before the first draft was finished – in some cases, before writing had begun.Footnote ⁴⁴ The term was another migrant from Hollywood cinema, where, in the 1960s, executive producers orchestrating similar contractual complexes were described as “packaging a deal.”Footnote ⁴⁵ This was the role played by Byron Preiss, styled as a “graphic story producer”Footnote ⁴⁶ or “visual producer,”Footnote ⁴⁷ akin to “the producer of motion pictures.”Footnote ⁴⁸

“THE ADVENT OF THE PRODUCER IN THE FIELD OF GRAPHIC-STORYTELLING”

Byron Preiss, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford Graduate School of Communication, had been an intern at DC when he proposed the paperback edition of Green Lantern Co-starring Green Arrow.Footnote ⁴⁹ DC had made Preiss “director of … a comics education program” called Edugraphics and he collaborated with creator James Steranko on a comic about drug addiction published in tabloid form and distributed to children in Philadelphia.Footnote ⁵⁰ Preiss briefly wrote comics for other publishers; in the mid-1970s National Lampoon serialized his comic strip One Year Affair, a fifty-two-episode musing on modern dating etiquette. The strip, drawn by Ralph Reese, mined incongruous material (including alcoholism and miscarriage) to deliver a gag at the end of every instalment.Footnote ⁵¹ One Year Affair began in 1973 and by the time the strips were collected as a small landscape book in September 1976 Preiss had written two titles in BPVP's Fiction Illustrated series. The biography at the back of the One Year Affair book asserts that Preiss's “adult graphic novels … had been acclaimed as an important step forward for the comics medium,” rather ignoring the internecine battles that Fiction Illustrated triggered within the comics world.Footnote ⁵²

BPVP brought comics creators together to deliver books to publishing houses as finished packages. Preiss sometimes wrote these books himself, or he paired up writers and artists, or he bought the rights to creative properties that other creators developed under his editorial control.Footnote ⁵³ Preiss operated as a book packager and not a self-publisher on the basis that if you only published a few books at a time, the resources invested were not likely to recoup adequate profit; he pursued multiple projects simultaneously, which, as we will see, stretched the time he was able to devote to each book. Preiss had reputational reasons for working with established publishing houses too:

A letter to the Comics Journal fanzine latched onto BPVP as a pioneering model for comics “aimed at the adult market.” Fan Tony Robertson admired how BPVP joined creative talents together and agreed profit-sharing deals with publishers, calling Preiss “the first producer … in graphic stories”Footnote ⁵⁵ (the latter phrase a common synonym for comics in the period). Preiss would have approved of the analogy, aspiring as he did for comics to operate on the same level as films and books, a sentiment he shared at the 1977 San Diego Comic-Con on a panel about the “Future of Comics.” The graphic-story producer asserted that most stories combining images and words “to date – with a few notable exceptions – have been unsophisticated.” He told the Comic-Con audience that future releases would draw “upon sophisticated concepts which are ordinarily filtered out or watered down in the more usual comic media”; Preiss added that his next book would extend the “graphic language” developed in Fiction Illustrated.Footnote ⁵⁶

Preiss's example of publishing with Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (HBJ) was an indirect allusion to his own “entrepreneurial packaging ability” in striking a deal with HBJ-owned Pyramid Publications.Footnote ⁵⁷ Pyramid's senior vice president Norman Goldfind was a supporter of Preiss's efforts and Pyramid published two series of BPVP's books in the mid-1970s. The first, Weird Heroes, was a mixture of original prose novels and short stories in the style of early twentieth-century pulp fiction, illustrated by artists working in comics. Correspondence between Preiss and veteran creator Will Eisner evidences that the packager initially conceived of Weird Heroes as a series of comics narratives rather than illustrated prose. Contributors had reportedly committed to Weird Heroes in spite of the fact that any financial rewards would be slight or nonexistent, which Preiss explained to Eisner as a necessary compromise to ensure that the books were published.Footnote ⁵⁸ On other BPVP projects, though, creators comment that it was hard to get paid and they went into “extraordinary debt.”Footnote ⁵⁹

The second Preiss-produced series at Pyramid was Fiction Illustrated, “America's First Adult Graphic Novel Revue.”Footnote ⁶⁰ The Fiction Illustrated books were referred to as “graphic novels” by fans and retailers,Footnote ⁶¹ and Preiss claimed that because one of them had been reviewed in the New York Times “on an equal footing with other books” his “new format” was recognized by the “straight periodicals … on an equal level with regular books”; further, the audience for them was “growing.”Footnote ⁶² Schlomo Raven (1976), the first Fiction Illustrated volume, was written by Preiss with art by Tom Sutton.Footnote ⁶³ Preiss's introduction contended that the series was important because it constituted novel-length graphic stories that a “major publishing house” was marketing to “adults not adolescents.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Preiss also wrote the second volume, the SF odyssey Starfawn (1976), with art by Stephen Fabian. Preiss's introduction to Starfawn inserted Fiction Illustrated into the debates over creators’ rights pulsing away in the 1970s comics world, drawing attention to Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's legal struggle for recognition and financial recompense for creating Superman. Preiss hailed Fiction Illustrated's relations of production as evidence of the victory of creators’ rights: what “Siegal [sic] and Shuster had to fight for is what FICTION ILLUSTRATED has rightfully obtained from the start. … Credit for the writer and artist, profit-sharing and valuable promotion are all part of the effort behind America's first adult graphic novel revue.”Footnote ⁶⁵ BPVP trumpeted Fiction Illustrated as “important proof” that “the comic book is being considered as a commercially viable and intellectually respectable form of adult literature.”Footnote ⁶⁶

The Fiction Illustrated books made extensive use of first-person verbal narration. Schlomo Raven contained two parodies of hard-boiled crime fiction, specifically Chandler's and Hammett's Hollywood adaptations. The two stories are infused with wisecracks, one-liners, and surreal interjections, but while they read like comics, the prose narration between panels is substantial; the second story in Schlomo Raven starts with six pages of verbal preamble. At the beginning of Starfawn the starship Destiny heads out to search for alien life and to study cosmic rays; official record keeper Daystar Stern introduces the mission and crew members with a verbal narration outside the panels that comments on the events shown within them. In this instance, Fiction Illustrated's predilection for prose-heavy first-person narration is made legible as the reader listening to Stern's report. The “Captain's Log” from the television series Star Trek is the obvious point of reference, just as in the first and third Fiction Illustrated books the first-person narration was rendered comprehensible as a convention of hard-boiled detective fiction and film noir.

The third Fiction Illustrated book was Steranko's Chandler: Red Tide (1976),Footnote ⁶⁷ and the fourth and final instalment was Preiss and Ralph Reese's Son of Sherlock Holmes, published in January 1977.Footnote ⁶⁸ The digest-sized Schlomo Raven and Starfawn, distributed to bookstores and newsstands, seemed to lose sales because of their dimensions, “lost in a sea of larger and better produced magazines.”Footnote ⁶⁹ A reviewer noted that “newsdealers persist in displaying [Schlomo Raven] with the Archie digests.”Footnote ⁷⁰ To rectify this situation, Chandler was released as a one-dollar digest-sized softcover, a “deluxe edition” large paperback ($4.95), and a signed, numbered bookplate edition ($7.50). The revenue on the larger books proved greater than on the digests and Son of Sherlock Holmes was only published as a large softcover retailing at $4.95.Footnote ⁷¹ As well as being described as a graphic novel, Chandler’s cover proclaimed that it was a “visual novel”; this was how Steranko referred to it and the term “visual novel” became closely associated with Preiss's prose-heavy books.Footnote ⁷²

Norman Goldfind had been instrumental in ensuring that Pyramid took on Fiction Illustrated and when he left to found the Baronet Publishing Company BPVP began packaging books for Goldfind's new enterprise.Footnote ⁷³ Three books appeared, The Illustrated Roger Zelazny (February 1978), The Illustrated Harlan Ellison (December 1978), and the first volume of The Stars My Destination (March 1979).Footnote ⁷⁴ The first two were adaptations of stories by noted SF authors, some of which adopted comics conventions, and some of which added illustrations to the words, but both books were advertised as collections of “graphic stories”Footnote ⁷⁵ nonetheless. The Illustrated Roger Zelazny was issued as a $9.95 softcover and as a signed, numbered edition of 2,500 copies ($14.95 each), and The Illustrated Harlan Ellison was released as an $8.95 softcover and a signed, numbered edition of 3,000 copies retailing at $14.95.Footnote ⁷⁶ The Illustrated Roger Zelazny was BPVP's biggest success with graphic-story publishing, reissued as a Science Fiction Book Club edition (July 1978) and a mass-market paperback from Ace Books in April 1979. That month BPVP announced that the hardcover edition of The Illustrated Roger Zelazny had sold out and 20,000 softcover copies had been printed.Footnote ⁷⁷ The Stars My Destination adapted the first part of Alfred Bester's 1956 novel, with popular comics artist Howard Chaykin providing the art and Preiss organizing the page layouts and words. In 1978 Preiss also produced two “graphic novels” for other publishers;Footnote ⁷⁸ the first was Empire, written by celebrated SF author Samuel R. Delany and illustrated by Chaykin.Footnote ⁷⁹ Advertisements boasted that the print run for the $9.95 paperback would be 50,000 copies, with 1,500 signed, numbered hardcovers retailing at twenty-four dollars each.Footnote ⁸⁰ The second was an adaption of Theodore Sturgeon's SF novel More Than Human (1953) by writer Doug Moench and artist Alex Nino, published by Heavy Metal and distributed by Simon and Schuster.Footnote ⁸¹

A second volume of The Stars My Destination was printed but never released. Baronet suspended publishing activities in 1980 because of “financial setbacks” but this was “nothing to do” with sales on the first volume (60 percent of 12,500 softcovers sold).Footnote ⁸² Fan Kevin C. McConnell tried to rouse his peers in a show of solidarity with the publisher who had “done much to advance the graphic novel form by showcasing the fine productions of Byron Preiss, as well as such unprecedented works as Will Eisner's [1978 graphic novel] A Contract with God.” McConnell entreated his peers “to obtain a copy of Volume One [of The Stars My Destination] and savor it.” He even printed Baronet's address so readers could express their interest in buying a second volume.Footnote ⁸³ Marvel eventually published a complete edition of The Stars My Destination graphic novel in 1992.

Even before Baronet's financial problems, Preiss made a direct address to fandom to buy his products. This was in a piece he wrote for the Comic Reader in September 1978, which framed BPVP's books as “an important step forward” for comics, an evolutionary leap that included other pioneering texts such as Art Spiegelman's experimental collection Breakdowns (printed in 1977, distributed in 1978). Preiss wrote that fans must support “expensive books of comic art,” whose costs made them risks for their publishers, if “comics are to grow”:

It seems odd that Preiss saw his books as comparable to the self-conscious modernist experiments in Breakdowns, but for Preiss what he shared with Spiegelman was a refusal to take the language of comics for granted:

Precisely because of his desire to reach non-comics readers by redeveloping the conventions of comics, fans gave Preiss a vicious reception.

“DOWN WITH BYRON PREISS!”

As cultural studies scholar John Fiske notes, fans “discriminate fiercely” about whom and what belongs within the remit of their collectively constructed fandom. A major “criterion of discrimination” is authenticity.Footnote ⁸⁶ The way that the words in Preiss's graphic novels occupied more space than the images, the way he minimized or eliminated speech balloons and handwritten lettering, these were all seized upon as evidence of the books’ – and therefore his personal – inauthenticity. One of the few comics critics to write about BPVP's texts, R. C. Harvey, argues that Steranko's Chandler (1976) should not be considered a “graphic novel” because “the pace of the story is controlled by the prose that runs in uniform columns under the pictures.” While the “pictures create the story's mood … they add no new information to the story.”Footnote ⁸⁷ In fact, Steranko told the fan press in 1977 that his intention was to move away from comics and exploit a “new format” in “adult books.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Nonetheless Harvey's point was shared by a multitude of fans and creators who called the Fiction Illustrated books “phoney-comics”Footnote ⁸⁹ and criticized the series on the ground that it “hardly qualifies as comics”Footnote ⁹⁰ and that by claiming them as such BPVP was going to “set comics back forty years.”Footnote ⁹¹ One fan objected, “When the adult graphic novel is produced, it won't be in this fashion.”Footnote ⁹² BPVP became a byword amongst fans for transgressive word–image combinations.Footnote ⁹³

Samuel Delany recollected Preiss telling him that Empire would have no speech balloons because “they made things look too comicy.”Footnote ⁹⁴ This was the substance of what Preiss told convention-goers in 1977, that “separate, typeset text was necessary for commercial reasons, namely to impress publishers and get a foot in the door.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Steranko concurred that this was required to appeal to an older audience.Footnote ⁹⁶ Yet it caused other professionals to wonder if the company was “sort of embarrassed” about the medium:Footnote ⁹⁷ if BPVP was committed to comics, why did it compromise one of its core formal principles? Fan Ron Harris was a vocal antagonist of BPVP in the monthly mailings of the amateur press association CAPA-alpha, calling Preiss a “snob” because he “simply couldn't convince himself that it was ‘classy’ to publish comic books.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Harris pointed out that the packager “consistently misspells Siegel's name,”Footnote ⁹⁹ implying that Preiss had blown his audition to be considered an authentic member of fandom. Fiske reminds us that boundary policing within fan communities requires getting such details right: the display of knowledge “helps to distinguish a particular fan community (those who possess it) from others (those who do not).”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Systematic studies of comics fans bear this out, that the exercise of “‘true’ expertise” is the mark of a “proper” fan.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Matthew J. Pustz's Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers (1999), an ethnographic study of fandom, notes that due to the lack of wider social esteem accredited to comics, a “kind of siege mentality” operates amongst fans. As a consequence, newcomers are likely to face challenges designed to gauge the extent of their comics knowledge. These challenges work “as a kind of secret handshake, allowing a new person with the requisite expertise into a group where fannish experiences are openly shared.”Footnote ¹⁰²

Ron Harris asserted that Preiss's presence in the comics world was unearned, alleging that he only “got into mainstream comics through the back door … by virtue of some educational work he did with Jim Steranko,” and that BPVP's books were not “real graphic stories.”Footnote ¹⁰³ In a letter to the Comics Journal Dan Recchia sardonically proclaimed that “the Byron Preiss Golden Books for Adults … deny being comic books, as if they were before the HUAC committee,”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ a lurid example of the accusations thrown at Preiss. Calling them “Golden Books for Adults” suggested that BPVP was publishing children's illustrated books and ludicrously calling them adult reading matter. More perniciously, Recchia framed Preiss's books as witnesses brought before Senator Joseph McCarthy, disavowing a forbidden past (as comics) and betraying former allies in order to buy grace in the eyes of a hostile society. In 1980 one of Preiss's defenders, SF writer Harlan Ellison, ventriloquized BPVP's critics thus: “This schmuck Preiss … has wandered into our holy and sanctified grove and is pissing on the trees.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Here Ellison encapsulates the attempt by fans to render Preiss a trespasser who lacks the respect and knowledge necessary to enter the “sanctified” vale of fandom.

There was another way in which BPVP was adjudged to have transgressed the rules and codes governing the comics world: one could take comics seriously, but self-importance was to be guarded against. Proclaiming that one's publications were going to cause a revolution in the status of comics was a sure way to earn enmity. One fan articulated this rule out loud: “comics projects … that vigorously insist they be given due recognition are very rarely those which truly deserve it.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Fandom lambasted Preiss for being “pompous”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ and having “delusions of grandeur.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Just as BPVP was associated with abandoning comics conventions, the company became synonymous with self-promotion.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Even sympathetic readers complained that Preiss “spends so much time talking about concepts and credits and people and editorializing” when he should “let us judge it for ourselves.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ Preiss responded to criticisms with greater hyperbole, taking out a five-page advertisement claiming that BPVP was the culmination of ten years of hoping and dreaming:

Unfortunately, by italicizing “Marvel” and making it out to be a series and not a company, Preiss's knowledge of comics – the password needed for him to be accepted within fandom – was erroneously expressed once more.

Preiss's status as persona non grata was evident in the rules of a competition that ran in the Comics Journal: “Anyone [is] eligible to enter: Stan [Lee], Jenette [Kahn] – heck, even Byron Preiss. Really!”Footnote ¹¹² Hostility towards BPVP's books was so widespread in the Comics Journal that a fan noted of issue 57, “For once someone didn't put down The Stars My Destination.”Footnote ¹¹³ Noting it was “trendy to pin Byron to the wall,” Harlan Ellison was enraged by “the shit I read that's directed toward this guy.” Ellison explained it had “hurt” Preiss, and that the visual producer “gets very defensive and very crazy and he tries to fight back” by responding to the criticisms.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Preiss had other defenders and Harvey Kurtzman's foreword to Schlomo Raven praised its “format” as “a paperback comic book,” though Kurtzman did not refer to its content.Footnote ¹¹⁵ He was a judicious choice to offer prefatory words, since his work as a writer and artist at 1950s publisher EC was valorized by fans as some of the most significant comics ever produced. As comics historian Amy Kiste Nyberg put it in 1998, “If there is a ‘canon’ of comic books, E.C. Comics may be found at the head of the list.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Ever since they were published, Kurtzman's war stories have been praised for combining “careful attention to historical detail, thoughtful and ironic writing, and a sense of moral outrage,”Footnote ¹¹⁷ and EC was also known for provocative and thought-provoking crime, horror, and SF comics. EC's reputation with later generations of fans was undoubtedly enhanced by its fate: in 1954 most of the major publishers formed the Comics Magazine Association of America and implemented a censorship board to stave off the threat of government regulation. EC had achieved strong sales but, with the horror genre prohibited and others profoundly restricted, the company struggled in an industry whose products were limited “to a supervised, puerile level.” EC essentially withdrew from the periodical comic market and its later attempts to reach beyond comics (“picto-fiction” magazines that combined images and text with the emphasis on the latter) sold “dismally” and were soon cancelled.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Interestingly, EC's “picto-fiction” broadly resembled BPVP's books in the 1970s; more significantly, Kurtzman represented a perceived golden age when US periodical comics could be disrespectful towards authority, could imply sexual intercourse, and entertain moral ambiguity – in other words, when American comics could be adult reading material.

Like Kurtzman, many readers of BPVP's publications responded favourably to their book-like qualities, though not all felt that Preiss exploited them successfully.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Preiss, nonetheless, was given credit for realizing projects most fans and creators just talked about,Footnote ¹²⁰ and for representing the kind of direction comics needed to go in.Footnote ¹²¹ One fan thought that with More Than Human BPVP had produced its “closest [effort] to traditional comics” and, taken with other 1970s novelization projects, was ushering in an era when comics would break out “into the big wide world outside our little ghetto.”Footnote ¹²²

THE EMPIRE OF BYRON PREISS

Conversations about Empire began in the winter of 1976 when Preiss, Chaykin, and Delany sat down to devise a visual novel.Footnote ¹²³ Delany and Chaykin had looked to collaborate since the late 1960s and the artist and Preiss were old school friends.Footnote ¹²⁴ Around this time Chaykin was enjoying the success of the Star Wars comic based on George Lucas's 1977 film. The licence was awarded to Marvel without a fee, but Lucas had two stipulations: to maximize publicity the comic had to appear before the film's release and the artist had to be Chaykin. Initially the comic sold 57 percent of its print run, solid but not spectacular. Once the film was released sales of the comic rocketed and the first issue eventually sold over a million copies.Footnote ¹²⁵ By the time of Empire’s publication in October 1978 Chaykin had bowed out of monthly work commitments at Marvel and DC in order to pursue independent projects.Footnote ¹²⁶ The mixed-media art from Empire which Chaykin previewed on the convention circuit was greeted with palpable enthusiasm.Footnote ¹²⁷ Fans and reviewers had taken umbrage at Preiss writing three of the Fiction Illustrated books but now scripting duties were turned over to an award-winning SF author acclaimed in the New York Times Book Review.Footnote ¹²⁸ At the 1977 San Diego Comic-Con, Preiss asked how many people wanted the forthcoming Empire to use speech balloons, suggesting that he was sensitive to the fans’ anger at the lack of balloons in BPVP's previous offerings.Footnote ¹²⁹ Preiss told the Comic Reader this new project was “what people have been asking for and that it's in the comic medium.”Footnote ¹³⁰ Empire should have been BPVP's finest hour, yet Preiss was accused of ruining a good idea by being an obtrusive presence in the construction of the text. This time the accusation came from his collaborators as well as the fans.

The book's narrative involves a band of rebels jumping from one action-packed episode to the next, searching for the fragments of a mysterious technology that, when pieced together, will collapse the information control system that the draconian Kūndūke empire uses to rule the universe. Into this story Delany interwove elements of catastrophe theory; from mathematicians to Star Wars fans, Empire had the potential to appeal to multiple audiences, and it was published in hardcover and softback editions by Berkley Windhover. Before publication Mediascene reported that David Hartwell, Berkley's SF editor, was so confident that this “breakthrough novel in graphic story form” would be a hit the print run was planned for 50,000 copies.Footnote ¹³¹ Preiss extended the marketing tactics he adopted with Fiction Illustrated. Advertisements, posters, and convention publicity identified Empire as a sophisticated reading experience in terms of appearance (Chaykin's painted art, typeset lettering, large pages, and square-bound format) and subject matter (Delany's use of catastrophe theory). BPVP claimed to have achieved another leap forward in the history of comics and Preiss promoted it with techniques he hadn't tried with Fiction Illustrated, such as previewing Empire in the popular comics anthology magazine Heavy Metal.

While the marketing announced “Delany delivers a true graphic novel,”Footnote ¹³² the writer protested in a 1979 interview with the Comics Journal that “I never thought of it as such … I think of it as a comic book.”Footnote ¹³³ Bob Toomey's Comics Journal review sneered, “it is not a novel. It's an expensive comic book, and a pretty bad one at that.” Toomey hated Empire, writing that the plot was predictable and illogical and the dialogue was “terrible.” What bewildered Toomey was Preiss's page layouts and Chaykin's acquiescence: every page of Empire was divided into three uniform vertical panels or three uniform horizontal panels.Footnote ¹³⁴ This was only a template, so there were full-page spreads as well as pages where the three panels were subdivided or amalgamated. The fan-oriented periodical Mediascene rhapsodized about these formal parameters as a “departure from accepted comic line art standards,” but then Mediascene was owned by Preiss's friend Steranko. Reading Empire was supposedly a cleaner and more holistic experience than reading other comics because it was “uncluttered by word balloons or crude hand-lettering … utilizing a special floating-axis page structure, designed by Byron Preiss, to integrate art and type into a totally original unified form.”Footnote ¹³⁵ Toomey's position was that varied page layouts were an essential component of comics storytelling: panels of different shapes and sizes accelerate and decelerate the pace of the narrative as appropriate, whereas Empire’s page layouts were a “definite step backward,” “a straitjacket on the artwork” that produced a monotonous reading experience. The monotony was worsened by the use of uniform type instead of hand-drawn lettering. A lot of the type was placed outside the panels, and dialogue might start above one panel and end beneath another, leading Toomey to complain it was “difficult to tell who's speaking.”Footnote ¹³⁶ Conversely, the few newspaper reviews that Empire received understood it as a coherent, thrilling reading experience. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch called it “a visual tour de force” and thought the “three column vertical or horizontal grid” layout “more dramatic and flexible” than the “box panels” of periodical comics.Footnote ¹³⁷ Empire was reviewed elsewhere as “an experiment to be applauded,”Footnote ¹³⁸ suggesting that Preiss's aim of making comics more legible for non-comics readers had been, at the very least, partially successful.

In his interview in the Comics Journal Delany remarked that “Byron's insistence on the vertical–horizontal thing was a mistake,” as was the proscription on speech balloons, since they unnecessarily restricted the visual “language” of comics available to the creators.Footnote ¹³⁹ By 1979 Preiss had, apparently, realized that the floating-axis design was “not too good an idea.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Surprisingly, the Comics Journal did not publish Delany's most strident thoughts:

Delany reported that half the script had been rewritten and the verbal text was frequently positioned in the wrong place. “Byron had a lot of projects going at the same time, and although he paid as much attention as he could to each individual one, I think things just slipped up.” As a result, the reader does not navigate the published pages in the way Delany intended, and some dialogue is attributed to the wrong characters. Preiss and Delany disagreed on where words should be positioned on the page and the two “had a battle royal” over the first page. Preiss eventually deferred to Delany but the top of one panel was inexplicably severed.Footnote ¹⁴² Pages [20] and [21] are the wrong way round, some dialogue is in quotation marks but not all, and Delany was forced to change his captions from the past tense to the present tense because of Preiss's selective rewriting.Footnote ¹⁴³

After seeing his interview in print, Delany wrote to the Comics Journal to ameliorate his criticisms, admitting that responsibility for the layouts was spread among many people and that collaborative work always brings a degree of confusion. Delany had returned to his script and on random sampling discovered 39 percent of his lines had been rewritten. Further, he praised Preiss for going about his projects without the cynicism dogging the big “commercial outlets.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ And Delany had already stated in the summer 1979 interview that he was broadly happy with Empire and, “for all the things that were done with it, I feel very much that it's still basically mine and Howie's story.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵

Having consulted a 1978 manuscript of Delany's script, on most occasions Preiss's changes to the dialogue did not make it less understandable, though Preiss sometimes mangled the poetry of Delany's sentence construction. For example, in the 1978 script the characters Qrelon and the Nizerine Eleyn jump into a pool to escape a Kūndūke massacre, and Delany had written, “Down the Nizerine swam, and down. And down Qrelon followed, into the side passage where a cold current tugs them along.” Preiss simplified this to “Qrelon followed the Nizerine down, down, into a side passage where a cold current caught them” [82].

In other places Preiss's editing tore holes in narrative logic. Page [58] of Empire is markedly different from Delany's script. This is the moment that the protagonists Wryn and Qrelon have alone on Qrelon's spacecraft Proteus after a succession of action-packed incidents. Both versions have the characters exchange lustful looks that change the relationship between them. In Delany's script, rebel fighter Qrelon encourages archaeology student Wryn to touch her, but after an ellipsis in the action during which the characters are physically intimate, neither is fully satisfied and Qrelon concludes, “Never mind, boy. Let's just split the blame and stay friends.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ The published version has Wryn profess, “Qrelon, you know I really like you a lot,” and Qrelon returns his affection but decides that “there's no time for things such as this” until their mission is complete. Preiss's editing, then, tried to maintain the sexual tension between the main characters, tension dispensed with by Delany's script. This jarred with Chaykin's art, since the panel showing the outside of the asteroid pirates’ base was rendered superfluous: the purpose of this panel was to signify the plot jumping forwards in time during the characters’ sexual intercourse. In the final, published version it is unclear why Qrelon is suddenly missing her clothes and looking rueful.

One last example of how Preiss “imposed” his “ideas about how a plot achieves a certain kind of suspense” can be found on pages [102–3].Footnote ¹⁴⁷ At this point in the story Wryn is wandering inside the Kūndūke's frozen information system, called “Ice,” searching for a means of uploading the Meta-Max demon into the heart of the system. When the Meta-Max reaches the centre of Ice it will sabotage the Kūndūke's rigid control of information throughout the universe. At the same time Qrelon has been captured and sadistic intelligence officer Loiptix tries to force her to pull a lever that will drop a section of crystal onto Wryn, thus ending the rebellion. The writer and artist originally conceived of a full-page spread and three vertical panels for this culmination of the narrative, but “Byron ended up cutting off the bottom of the full page thing and dividing up the three panel sequence into whole lots of little panels.” He created new panels out of the bottom of the full-page spread and got Chaykin to paint three more, so in the published version the action takes place over eight panels and not four.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Preiss made these changes at the galley stage and, according to Delany, the alterations stem from a fundamental disagreement about the suspense generated by this scene. In the original, Wryn does not know about Loiptix's evil designs but Preiss thought this dramatic irony – where the reader knows the character has to hurry but Wryn doesn't – wasn't suspenseful enough. For it to be exciting, Wryn had to know his life was in danger. Delany recollected Preiss insisting, “you have to put some of my kind of suspense in it”; at such a late stage of production, “anything that Byron ‘tried’ now would be in the finished book.”Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Chaykin's new panel on [103] (the bottom left-hand corner) shows the information flow within Ice but with no regard for the events taking place – it seems to stand outside the narrative. Another new panel on [102], on the bottom right, depicts an empty chamber within Ice. These panels invite detached contemplation of Ice's interior corridors, not excitement. Delany confessed to the Comics Journal, “From this page to the next page I really don't know what's going on – I really don't!”Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Delany's tale of Preiss changing these pages immediately before production is supported by the fact that page [102] is the only one in the book violating the floating-axis template.

Fans had already complained that BPVP's artists were “strait-jacketed,”Footnote ¹⁵¹ and in the wake of Delany's Comics Journal interview Steven Rowe wondered “what will happen when the creative people will be allowed to create.”Footnote ¹⁵² News of Preiss's revisions confirmed Rowe's prejudice that the graphic-story producer's main contribution to BPVP's publications was to spoil them. The year before, Rowe wrote in CAPA-alpha, “Down with Byron Preiss! I read the except [sic] of EMPIRE in HM, and … [the] figuration of the words was barbaric – blame it on editor Preiss – he's an easy target.”Footnote ¹⁵³ Ron Harris complained of More Than Human that artist Alex Niño's “creativity” was so limited that the artist was “hardly necessary at all.”Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Chaykin defended Preiss on the ground that he worked hard, made things happen, and explored “technical avenues” that no one else would. But when the artist described his working relationship with Preiss on The Stars My Destination it became clear that, against Chaykin's preference to lay out his own pages, Preiss gave Chaykin boards with the panels drawn in. Chaykin said he “had nothing to do with the layout … The book is Byron's. I illustrated the book.”Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Preiss's editing was criticized in Jim Dawson's review of The Illustrated Roger Zelazny, which Dawson described as a “blatantly offensive” book omitting essential characterization from the original stories. Preiss had not so much adapted Zelazny's prose as he had “eviscerated” it, deleting parts without thinking of continuity or legibility.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Even in the late 1970s atmosphere of the Comics Journal this was shrill language and Heavy Metal editor Julie Simmons complained that Dawson's review was “a one-sided, unwarranted, negligent piece of reporting … more like a personal vendetta toward Preiss & co., than a factually based comment.”Footnote ¹⁵⁷

The reception of BPVP's books was, as Simmons commented, clouded in the atmosphere of vendetta and the perceived need to avenge Preiss's betrayal of comics. Reviewer Pierce Askegren called The Illustrated Harlan Ellison an “uneven melange” and wondered “how much of the finished product Ellison saw prior to publication.”Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Ellison defended Preiss's editorial changes on the grounds that the packager was torn between “publishers and printers and artists and writers and his own artistic sensibility.” In this figuration Preiss was not the artful book packager but a creative worker pulled in several directions at once.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ On another occasion Ellison defended Preiss by stating that he was “a producer” and producers “have to get the product out.” The SF writer lampooned the fans’ formulation of Preiss as a monster who “locks Howie Chaykin into a dark closet and beats him with a cat-o’-nine tails until he does shitty layouts,” stating that if Delany or Chaykin had refused to compromise on Empire then Preiss would have backed down.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ This misses the point that Preiss had the final say because the pages were entrusted to him on their journey to the publisher.