It's in San Diego, But Comic-con's All About Hollywood

by Calvin Reid, Heidi MacDonald and Douglas Wolk, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 7/15/2005

The crowds were unusually quiet at the first day of this year's San Diego Comic-con International, but deals ruled the day.

Topping off the news, Kazu Kabuishi, the organizer of the much celebrated comics anthology Flight, is attracting a lot of interest for acquiring the short story Amulet from the second volume of Flight, for a full-scale book project. S&S confirmed that it's in discussions with Kabuishi's agent, Judy Hansen. (Kabuishi already sold the third and fourth book of Flight to Ballantine in a 2-book deal inked around BEA.)

Originally published in collaboration with Image Comics, Flight began life an full color anthology of work by a young group of comics artists and web cartoonists, most of whom had never been published before. (It was the big book of last year's show.)

On the Hollywood side, interest in comic books keeps going up. DC Comics' Ex Machina, the story of a super hero who becomes the mayor of New York City, was optioned by New Line. Meanwhile, manga continues to be a hot commodity at the SDCC, with huge booth areas marked off for the largest manga publishing houses. U.S. manga publishers, who publish licensed Japanese titles, usually don't show off authors, but Tokyopop is using this years convention to do just that with Korean manwha author Lee So-Young. Later today they'll be showing off a new manga title, Sakora Refugees, whose author, Kurt Hassler, also happens be the head graphic novel buyer at Borders Books.

Speaking of Tokyopop, Felipe Smith has a new book called MBQ that is starting to attract attention. And Dark Horse made plans to publish a new book in the popular Ghost in the Shell series, to be called GITS 1.5: Human-Error.

On top of everything else, PW's Heidi MacDonald was awarded this year's Woman of Distinction award, handed out annually by the Friends of Lulu, an organization founded to support women in the comics industry.

Off the floor, Scholastic threw a big party for Jeff Smith's fantasy-adventure Bone, to celebrate sales (more than a 100,000 copies to date for Volume 1) and bring together its lineup of comics authors being published under the graphix imprint