Dorling Kindersley will be publishing two big coffee table books about comics in the coming months.
The first, The Vertigo Encyclopedia, by Alex Irvine, will be released in mid-September. The 240-page volume lists at $30 (Amazon is already offering it for pre-order at $19.80) will be a history and celebration of DC Comics‘s Vertigo imprint. It will start with detailed chapters of the line’s most famous series, such as Preacher by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, and Y: The Last Man. The second section will go into some of their smaller projects. Remarking on earlier DK/DC collaborations covering individual superheros, Vertigo Executive Editor Karen Berger says “It’s not an identical structure to the way the superhero books were done. It looks at each series and gives overviews of the characters, and goes behind the scenes.” DK plans an initial print run of 30,000 coopies.
The second, larger comics project is Marvel Chronicle by Tom Brevoort, Tom DeFalco, and Matthew Manning, focusing on (obviously) the Marvel Comics universe. This 352-page volume lists for $50.00 (again, Amazon’s already got it cheap, at $31.50) will release in early November. This book, however, will come in a gift box with “two prints of the cover image—Jim Cheung’s densely populated Marvel Universe in both color and black and white—inside,” according to Publishers Weekly. This year-by-year history won’t be the first Marvel retrospective published, but DK expects great interest, and they’re planning a first print run of 95,000 copies. The book will “break Marvel’s history down into decades, starting in 1939 with the first Human Torch story from Timely (Marvel’s progenitor).” The book will relate real world events to action in the Marvel stories of the times.