Nordling Is Leader of the Pack
This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on Jan. 2, 2007 Sign up now!
By Chris Arrant -- Publishers Weekly, 1/2/2007
As a new year dawns, we're joined by a new company in the blossoming field of comics: the Pack. Placing itself as a content provider to publishers, the Pack plans to tackle a wide range of book and product categories using the comics medium. The company will create everything from series to graphic novels, in both fiction and nonfiction, for the book trade and for comics specialty markets. It will also be exploring the advertising and educational markets, as well as examining current animation and online technologies for a new target market.
Lee Nordling, president of the Pack, said that the company will act like a traditional book packager, setting up books with publishers that fill their specific needs, whether to increase their number of titles without having to stretch their infrastructure or to simply place them with a project "they'd just love to publish." But traditional graphic novel and comic book markets aren't the only ones they're going into, says Nordling, as the company will also be exploring advertising and educational markets. "There are so many terrific opportunities," he adds, "not only to create graphic novels and comics, but to bring our expertise to companies that have a desire to work in the medium but have yet to develop the infrastructure to produce it themselves."
For more than six years, Nordling has been the executive editor of the Platinum Studios Comic Book Department, which recently began publishing comics and graphic novels through Image Comics. Before that, he worked in management in the creative services departments at Disney Publishing and DC Comics. He also has a pedigree in newspaper strip syndication, working as an art director, writer, cartoonist and packager as well as writing the 1995 book Your Career in the Comics, (Andrews McMeel) which presented an overview of the business of newspaper strip syndication.
The Pack will act as the umbrella company for separate book/product categories for which Nordling has brought in several well-known names in the comic and animation industry. Veteran writers and editors Barbara Kesel and Brian Augustyn have joined the Pack for acquiring and developing new intellectual properties for graphic novels and comics. Kesel was an editor for DC Comics and Dark Horse, and Head Writer for Crossgen. Augustyn has written for virtually every major comics company and was at one time an editor for DC Comics. Dave Olbrich, founder of Malibu Comics and former publisher for Humanoids Inc. (U.S.), will be developing new nonfiction and adaptations of previously published nonfiction and fiction for the trade. Also joining the fold under the banner of New Media is Gordon Kent, who is a longtime animation industry professional and currently the supervising director on Cartoon Network's Class of 3000.
"I've always enjoyed working with partners, sharing ideas and making projects better, and I realized that if I walked into that same publisher's office with one or two others—the right one or two others—our team would be greater than the sum of our parts," says Nordling. "There is a bond of mutual trust and respect between us. We are of like minds in many areas, and complement each other well in other areas."
Exact details on the projects the Pack will be producing haven't been finalized, with Nordling saying "now is a period for development, then sales," but the company has several target markets for which it is preparing material. Nordling summed up this venture and its foundation: "Since graphic novel/comics growth is still moving faster than most publishing companies can effectively expand, we hope that the Pack and its beginning-to-end experience at producing comics will help to fill several niches that we believe are available."
