Bluewater Productions Makes a Splash
This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on September 9, 2008 Sign up now!
By Tom McLean -- Publishers Weekly, 9/8/2008 3:09:00 PM
It’s been a little more than a year since Bluewater Productions, a comics publisher in Bellingham, Wash., began publishing its own comics books, releasing in a short span of time a long list of original comics and licensed titles based on the works of film legends like Ray Harryhausen and Vincent Price. The house also plans to expand its list further by adding comics based on classic TV shows as well as adding prose works and a line of manga-style adaptations of its original comics.
Founder, president and editor-in-chief Darren G. Davis, creator of Bluewater’s oldest and best-known original title, The 10th Muse, told PWCW that licensing is a good way both to build up the brand and to revisit some of his favorite childhood memories. “I loved Star Wars, but I loved [Harryhausen’s] Clash of the Titans more,” he says.
The movie connection is a natural for Davis, a Los Angeles native who began his career in marketing for E! Entertainment TV, USA Network and Lionsgate. A stint working for renowned comics artist Jim Lee at Wildstorm led Davis to become an agent for many of the comics industry’s top artists. Watching his clients create popular titles prompted Davis to try it himself, and Bluewater Productions’ The 10th Muse debuted as the #6 title on the November 2000 Diamond sales charts. At first publishing through indie comics publisher Image Comics, Bluewater later was affiliated with two other comics publishers, Avatar Press and Alias. When Alias decided to refocus its publishing program on the Christian market, Bluewater began publishing its own books in May 2007.
So far, Bluewater’s highest-profile project has been Ray Harryhausen Presents, a line of Harryhausen-branded comics titles that pick up where such classic films as Jason and the Argonauts, Sinbad and Flying Saucers vs. the Earth left off.
Keeping these titles distinct has been a challenge, Davis says. “We want to make sure that if you look at the Ray Harryhausen titles, that Sinbad doesn’t look like Perseus and he doesn’t look like Jason,” he says. “We chose different styles of artwork so they don’t compete with each other.”
Davis also says that the company benefits greatly from some direct involvement from Harryhausen, the 88-year-old master of stop-motion animation, the technique he created and used to make the aforementioned classic monster and adventure movies. “We take some of Ray’s original art and put it inside the books so we can show he wasn’t just a puppet master,” Davis says.
A similar relationship exists with the estate of the late great monster and horror actor Vincent Price, who will appear this fall in Bluewater’s first ongoing periodical comics series, Vincent Price Presents. Davis says the anthology will feature gothic horror stories, sometimes with Price appearing in them as a character and other times with the famed horror film star “hosting” the stories.
Davis has plans to expand his licensing efforts further, having picked up the rights to the movies of director Roger Corman, the 1950s serial Tom Corbett: Space Cadet and horror films such as director Mark Jones’s Leprechaun (1992) and director Steve Miner’s Warlock (1989). Bluewater also is looking into licensing classic TV properties from the 1980s.
“It makes sense for us because people will see that we’re doing Leprechaun and people will go, ‘I can trust that brand,’ so they’ll pick up The 10th Muse,” Davis says.
Davis says he expects Bluewater’s output to grow through the next year. Having just published its first graphic novel, Davis says he expects to put out one or two more graphic novels a month—both collected editions and original stories—while the current average of five periodical comics a month could rise to seven.
Bluewater also plans to publish manga-style versions of original titles such as The 10th Muse and The Legend of Isis,which would be serialized as color comics first and then collected into black-and-white volumes. The company also plan to publish two young adult novels in 2009.
The publisher is also placing a strong emphasis on comics for kids—everything is written at a PG or PG-13 level—and getting its books into libraries. “I started to [learn to] read through comics,” Davis says, “so I want to give back to kids.” Davis teaches classes and camps where kids are taught to make their own comics, and Bluewater offers comics-based lesson plans to libraries that order its books.
And much like every comics publisher these days, Bluewater has Hollywood studio connections. The Legend of Isis is set up with Kelsey Grammer’s Gramnet Productions at Paramount, while The 10th Muse is in development at Universal.
Dealing with studios and book distributors like Diamond, Ingram and Baker & Taylor has taken some time away from Davis’s writing comics. But he says he’s happy to start a series and then hand it off to another writer. “I love creating [characters],” he says. “I’m not going to say I’m the best writer in the world, but I really love creating.”
