Publishing house Harry N. Abrams recently promoted Charles Kochman to executive editor. Next Spring, he’ll start heading up his own imprint, Abrams ComicArts, which will specialize in comics and comics related books. Kochman already has four titles planned: The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics by Denis Kitchen and Paul Buhle; The Art of Jaime Hernandez: The Secrets of Life and Death by Todd Hignite (designed by Jordan Crane, with an introduction by Alison Bechdel); Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman’s Co-creator Joe Shuster by Craig Yoe; and Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? by Brian Fies.
Kochman has already hired an editorial assistant, Sofia Gutiérrez, for the imprint. And he said the imprint will be flexible about its publishing schedule, anticipating four titles a season, but not wedded to that number.
Abrams publisher Steve Tager said launching the new imprint “makes sense. We’ve published comics and pop culture titles in the past—we’ve sold half a million copies of the Art of Walt Disney—so Charles is building on a history that Abrams already has.”
Discussing the titles already scheduled, Kochman focused on Yoe’s Secret Identity, noting that it’s an unusual collectino of S&M comics secretly created by Joe Shuster. They were thought to have been destroyed, but Yoe discovered them in a shop in Britain, who verified their authenticity. The comics, called Nights of Horror, are fetish fantasties with characters that look like Clark Kent and Lois Lane. “They’re chained and being whipped and there’s women kissing women. It’s a great story, and no one ever connected them to Shuster,” Kochman said.
Before joining Abrams in 2005, Kochman was an editor at DC Comics and Mad magazine.
For more on the new imprint, see this Publishers Weekly article.