King of Comics
Stephen King is doing a prequel to his "Dark Tower" series of books as a comic book mini-series to be then collected as a hardback, through Marvel Comics. This is obvious big news in comics and it brings to a head all the problems and issues facing the comic book industry and its fan base.

Now if Marvel Comics were a book publisher this would be an obvious deal: Stephen King sells a ton of books, thus it's good for Marvel to publish one of his books because it's very likely it will sell a lot of copies. The problem is that Marvel Comics is really not a traditional publishing house, simply there to sell books. Marvel Comics is a licensing publisher, there to exploit trademarks owned by Marvel Comics. In that regard, this deal doesn't do Marvel a lot of good. Now if King were to write a Spider-Man story, tne the advantages it offers the line of Marvel Comics product would be more obvious, as the idea would then be that people who had otherwise not read a Spider-Man story might do so if King's name on it.

If King were to announce he were writing say, "Blade" for Marvel, fandom would be ecstatic. It would be the best of both worlds, it would be bringing new people to comics, new fanboys would be made and all geeks would live happily ever after. But mainstream comic book readers who just read Marvel and DC super hero comics aren't going to be excited about King doing a "Dark Tower" prequel through Marvel. They're going to see it as a wasted opportunity to further exploit super hero comics to the greater public.

To most mainstream comic book fans, getting everyone to read and love endless monthly super hero serials is the only quest that a publisher should bother to undertake. New ideas? Waste of time. Fanboys don't want new ideas, they want old ideas done the way they like.

King's mini-series will hopefully be smartly advertised outside Wizard Magazine and will almost certainly bring a slew of King fans into comic book stores. Will those King fans instantly become fans of the comic book medium and sign on for a monthly slate of X-Men comics? Probably not. King fans are always a tough market to study because they tend to read his stuff and only his stuff. I'm not a believer that people are dying to fall in love with the comic book medium, I think people are content with the mediums of TV, movies and prose as their primary mediums of entertainment. Is it possible someone might read King's comics and start reading comics? Sure. And I'm sure some will. I just don't think it will be so staggering an amount. I'd also be surprised if those new readers flocked immediately to super hero comics. King's most loyal fanbase tends to be older and, thus, probably less inclined to start needing a spandex fix. But I think the tight AIT/Planetlar and Vertigo books might catch their fancy. The books aimed at real adult people.

If Marvel's goal is to just sell a profitable comic, they've probably just done a great deal. If their goal was to attract more readers to their line of super hero comics, I think the dice roll's still against them. If their goal is to hopefully attract Stephen King to follow-up with a Marvel project, then that's a possibility too but I have no idea how to predict if that's going to happen or not.

For fanboys endlessly looking for a comic book project that will validate their nerd existence to the rest of the world, this probably won't be it. In the world of book publishing, Stephen King's name still brings forth a hint of derision, after all.

But horror's still a notch or two above super hero books in the public's mind. I can't see Stephen King being the one to level the playing field in that regard.