Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Zot! Zot! Zot!

(Sorry for the repetitive headline, but I felt like I had to one-up Chris Roberson, who pointed me at this Publishers Weekly story.)

HarperCollins has announced that they will be reprinting all of Scott McCloud's great Zot! comic, in one big volume, in July 2008.

On the one hand, this is great news, since it's been out of print for ages, and the last quarter of the series was never collected.

On the other hand, I already have the three Kitchen Sink trade paperbacks collecting the first twenty-seven issues (not to mention all of the original comics), so buying most of this for a third time just to have the end in a shelf-friendly form makes me a bit grumpy.

And, on the gripping hand, HarperCollins says their whole book will be 576 pages long...but just the story pages from the first three Kitchen Sink books (including 27 of the 36 total issues) add up to 586 pages. So, either Harper is actually going to be doing it in two volumes, their one book will be closer to 750 pages, or somebody made an unfortunate math error.

(And it looks like the webcomics won't be included, or the Chuck Austen-drawn two-parter "Getting to 99," or Matt Feazel's "Dimension 10 1/2" stories," no matter how long the book is. I'm not sure the webcomics could be reprinted on paper -- but that doesn't stop me wanting them to be.)

Update, 9/26: I misread the PW story; this volume will fit everything into 576 pages by starting on issue 11 and skipping the first storyline (all 250-ish pages of it). I can understand if McCloud isn't as fond of his earliest work; it does have uneven patches. But leaving it out entirely doesn't seem right to me, either. But at least this explains my question.

2 comments:

Chris McClelland said...

The original color work is not going to be reprinted which may lead to your page count discrepancies.

Chris Roberson said...

That's certainly how it appears. In my hurried reading of the release, I had taken it to mean that they'd be doing the first issues in B&W instead of the original color. But it appears that the reprint will only cover the B&W stuff to begin with. "While early issues of the series, which was originally published by Eclipse Comics, ran in color, the new edition will include only the black & white material." So that would explain it.

Post a Comment