Marvel Comics and Random House’s Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group have reached an agreement to allow The Stand: Captain Trips, the hardcover graphic novel adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand, to be distributed in the general bookstore market beginning in January 2010. The book was originally released exclusively through comics shops, also known as the direct market, in March after Marvel acknowledged that it did not have permission from the prose book’s original publisher, Doubleday, now a part of Random House, to distribute it to the general bookstores.
While Marvel has declined to go into the details of its agreement to publish a comics version of The Stand, in an interview earlier in the year with PW Comics Week, Ruwan Jayatilleke, Marvel senior v-p, strategic-development & acquisition, and David Gabriel, Marvel senior v-p, sales & circulation, acknowledged the distribution restrictions on Marvel’s license to publish the work. At the time the two outlined elaborate plans to publish the book exclusively through comics shops. Marvel titles are distributed to the book trade by Diamond Book Distributors.
