15 Years and Counting at Top Cow

by Thomas J. McLean, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 2/6/2007

A lot has changed in the comics business since a group of artists left Marvel en masse in the early 1990s to form Image Comics. But Image cofounder Marc Silvestri said Top Cow Productions, a comics packager and multimedia publishing studio he founded in partnership with Image Comics, has always gone pretty much according to plan—to create the kind of comics he really wants to make.

"When Image Comics first came around, it seemed like a real opportunity to do what I wanted to do, which was create things and work in an atmosphere where that was not only welcome but pretty much rule No. 1," said Silvestri. "That really hasn't changed for me —that's still what drives me."

Fifteen years and 1,400 comics later, Silvestri remains the creative core of Top Cow. Top Cow's comics feature slick, dynamic illustration and a powerful mix of action-adventure and grim fantasy. Silvestri still draws comics and trains young artists in the company's Los Angeles studio, which has produced such talents as Michael Turner and David Finch. "It's something that I've found, especially now later on in my career, that is really rewarding," he said.

Those artists also benefit from Top Cow's relationship with Marvel. Top Cow packages books for Marvel, gaining additional exposure for its artists and the right to publish crossovers such as The Darkness/Wolverine and Cyber-Force/X-Men. Silvestri has just finished drawing a Civil War special (based on Marvel's wildly popular crossover series) written by acclaimed comics writer Brian Michael Bendis. "I still kind of geek out and become a fanboy when the opportunity to work with somebody like Brian Bendis comes up," said Silvestri, who made his name drawing X-Men and Wolverine for Marvel.

Running the business end of Top Cow is CEO and president Matt Hawkins. A few years back, Hawkins said he and Silvestri decided to focus the company on its core business of building brands through comics. Functions once handled in-house, like film and TV development, were outsourced to companies that in other circumstances would be rivals.

Top Cow's partners include Platinum Studios for TV and film development, DC Comics for international distribution, Dynamic Forces for e-commerce, Bandai for manga-style digests, Union Entertainment for video games, Spacedog for Web operations and Vidiator for mobile phone content. The company also has a deal with Direct-to-Drive, the download service of gaming site IGN, to offer older Top Cow books for download.

That leaves Top Cow proper lean, with eight full-time employees, 10 or so exclusive artists and a freelance pool of up to 100 contributors. "We don't really need to be publishing for the sake of publishing, so our focus has more been on building a backlist, on building original I.P. that we own," Hawkins said.

The direct market (or comics shop market) accounts for about 80% of the company's business, with general bookstores making up 10% and ancillary revenues the rest, Hawkins said. "We're still very dependent—gladly—on the direct market," he says.

Top Cow typically publishes four or five comics and one trade paperback edition a month. "If you do a small boutique line of books, like four or five titles, you have a much better possibility of adhering to high-end quality," Hawkins said. The company has also made a greater effort in recent years to go after top writers and has worked with such writers as J. Michael Stracyznksi (Rising Stars), Warren Ellis (Down), Paul Jenkins (The Darkness) and Mark Waid (Hunter-Killer).

Silvestri said the company has always focused on story and character, and has moved away from the Image stereotype of flashy art and impossibly proportioned, scantily clad women. "We noticed a long time ago that there was going to be a shift, a welcome shift quite honestly," he said. "I don't think it's so much a shift away from good art, as a shift to good art plus good story, where one's not going to suffer just to bring the other one up."

While the direct market has recovered in recent years from the rapid sales declines of the 1990s, Hawkins said he worries about the retail channel's aging demographic, rising price points and the future of the traditional periodical comic book format. "I see a lot of people going direct to graphic novel [or book format], and I think that's a huge mistake for a lot of reasons," Hawkins said. "It eliminates the entire groundswell possibility of building an audience. It also doesn't allow you to amortize your costs across as many different SKUs."

Nevertheless, Top Cow has seen significant growth in its bookstore business and expects that to continue. Hawkins said the company consults early on with the major bookstore buyers to ensure they are receptive to products for that market. That has resulted in items like the Compendium editions, which collect 50 issues of Top Cow's top series, Witchblade, The Darkness and Tomb Raider, in a single, full-color volume. The company also will make a big push with its Ultimate Darkness Collection, which will be published to coincide with the release of the highly anticipated The Darkness videogame from 2K Games in May, and features the same cover art as the game. Top Cow leaves packaging its titles in manga format to Bandai.

The company's 2007 plans focus on its two most popular properties, The Darkness and Witchblade. Both franchises will come together in this summer's First Born crossover, a three-issue stand-alone series painted by Croatian artist Stepjan Sejic, about the birth of Witchblade wielder Sara Pezzini's child.

The Darkness is currently featured in a tie-in video game comic and will return with a new ongoing series in the fall, written by Phil Hester. "The take on The Darkness will be quite different from what people are expecting," said managing editor Rob Levin.

Witchblade continues its run as a monthly comic, having recently passed the 100-issue mark. An anime version of Witchblade, which Top Cow licensed to Japanese animation company GONZO, will come to U.S. TV screens, likely in late summer, with DVDs from Funimation due in October. The anime led to a separate manga version of Witchblade that Top Cow will publish in traditional American comics format with the pages flipped to read left to right, retouched and recolored with input from and new covers by original artist Kazasa Sumita. Manga-style digests will follow in the summer from Bandai. And look for a new series, Madame Mirage by Paul Dini and Kenneth Rocafort, to debut in the second quarter.

Silvestri says Top Cow has turned out pretty much exactly the way he wanted it to when he started it. "We had an idea of what the company would be, and 16 years later, it is that. And it's on track to be even more."