“Publishers are doing this because the market exists now,” said Kuo-Yu Liang, a vice president for Diamond Comic Distributors, the largest distributor of English-language comics in the world. “It reflects the demographics of the consumer, who is both older and more affluent. They can now afford to buy the complete Fantastic Four or Frank Miller’s Sin City Library for $100 or so.” The coffee table-isation of comics, said Liang, is partly because of another factor — the consistent growth of trade paperback editions of graphic novels, like Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns or Alan Moore’s Watchmen, since the late 1990s. According to DC, the trade paperback edition of Watchmen will have sold an estimated 95,000 copies by this year’s-end — far more than the 22,000 sold in 2001. After Sin City was made into a film in 2005, sales of the trade paperback, published by Dark Horse Comics, started to sell in greater volume and in nontraditional outlets.

DC Comics, publisher of Batman and Superman, has two luxury lines — Absolute, an even larger coffee table-style edition that the company began publishing in 2002, and their own Omnibus series.

Paul Levitz, president and publisher of DC, said, “We love our passionate readers who spend $1,000 to $1,500 a year on comics. But there’s a lot more people who are willing to pay $300 or $400 a year on graphic novels and luxury editions.”

For small publishers, like Fantagraphics Books, based in Seattle, getting their trade paperback and collections into nontraditional places like chain and independent bookstores, is a matter of economic necessity.

... contd.