Stephanie Fierman - Marketing Observations Grown Daily

stephanie fierman talks about a graphic novel for the business world

Tuesday April 08th 2008, 12:12 pm
Filed under: dc comics,publishing,stephanie fierman

For the past three years, I’ve worked for the greatest comic book company in the universe, DC Comics(yes, the whole universe, and we comics people know our universes…).

And as I’ve written before, certainly one of the most significant boosts to the comics business and the U.S. publishing business overall has been the rise of the graphic novel, essentially a long-form comic in book form. A graphic novel can be about anything, just like a “regular” book:  life, death, war, biography, sex, fantasy, you name it. The business has gotten an enormous push into the mainstream thanks to efforts including Art Spiegelman’s In The Shadow Of No Towers and several non-superhero graphic-novel-based movies in recent years including V For Vendetta , Constantine and A History of Violence (all DC/Warner Bros. Entertainment films, natch). The graphic novel business in the U.S. and Canada was pegged at $330 million at the end of 2006 and is likely to see another 10%+ growth when final numbers for 2007 are tabulated.

Now comes the first business-oriented graphic novel, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko:  The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need. Billed as a career advice manual for just about anyone who wishes for a better career, the “first business comic book” is written by Dan Pink, a former speechwriter for Al Gore and the author of several influential books on the changing workplace, including Free Agent Nation (2002) and A Whole New Mind (2006).

Told through the eyes of a cublicle-dweller named Johnny Bunko, Pink’s overall message is that there is power in making career decisions for basic, true reasons, such as doing something you love, rather than tactical ones, like taking a job because you think it will be lead to something else.

The book itself looks great.  In the U.S., graphic novels provide a fresh and new way to tell any story. It’ll be interesting to see how the book sells. Watch this space.
graphic novel manga Johnny Bunko Daniel Pink