The Comics Pantheon Likes
by Dan Nadel -- Publishers Weekly, 10/20/2003
The Pantheon line of graphic novels is based mostly on "mutual enthusiasms," says Pantheon editor-in-chief Dan Frank.
"We publish what we like—we
meaning myself, Chip Kidd and now Anjali Singh." Kidd and Frank are well known
for their enthusiasms; Singh, however, is less familiar. An editor at Pantheon's sibling, Vintage, it was Singh who brought in the very popular autobiographical story Persepolis
by Marjane Satrapi, which garnered rave reviews and major media coverage. Singh is busy translating the next volume, which is tentatively scheduled for August 2004, and has recently acquired the French cartoonist Joann Sfar's The Rabbi's Cat, an anthropomorphic tale of a philosophical cat in Algeria.
Singh describes it as "a subtle way of exploring religion and some of its hypocrisies, and the fact of being Jewish in North Africa." The translated edition, which will collect the first three French volumes, is tentatively set for a spring 2005 release. According to Frank, Sfar and Satrapi's books are a signal: the house is looking to bring in more foreign books. Other upcoming releases for 2004 include Chris Ware's Big Book of Jokes (possibly fall), a collection of Art Spiegelman's New Yorker covers and a collection of Amy and Jordan comic strips by underground comics legend Mark Beyer (spring 2004).
Of course, the big news for Pantheon this fall is Alex Ross's Mythology (designed and written by Kidd), a handsome, coffee-table collection of Ross's eye-popping illustrations of DC's famous heroes, which has an initial first printing of 105,000 copies.
There's also Outside of Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz, which has sold nearly 200,000 copies in hard- and softcover combined. This may be Pantheon's most mainstream comics title and is testimony to the unusual editorial visions at work. Frank says the editors "get a kick out of being so diverse. We don't want to publish just one kind of graphic novel; we want to simply publish material that is different and unusual, no matter what the category."
Keeping Pantheon's comics list to just two to four titles a year dovetails nicely with the broader goal for the line, a fitting idea for the field in general, which is, Frank says, "making graphic novels a part of our larger list as much as possible, so they fit with the selectivity and quality of the list in general."
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