Having spent the better part of 2002 attempting to browbeat the comic-book industry into doing what it wants, Marvel seems to be taking a different tack this year. ICv2 features a report that The House That Jack Built¹ has turned a tentative about-face on its misguided policy of encouraging overorders in comic-book shops by refusing to reprint unexpectedly popular comic books, a policy that has had retailers furious for some time now. The company has announced that it will consider reprinting the first issue in its new romance comic, Trouble. In addition, the company is working diligently to ensure that at least some copies of its new, Spider-Man-derived prose novel for teenage girls, Mary Jane, makes its way into Direct Market retailers' hands before the book appears in bookstores on July 2nd.

Marvel's engaged in something of a balancing act, here. On the one hand, the company clearly wants to break into the bookstore market, where a wider array of potential readers lies in wait. On the other hand, the company has met with resistance so far; the current king of graphic novels in bookstores, manga publisher TokyoPop, has given Marvel the kind of vicious thrashing the company hasn't seen since it first went head-to-head against DC in the early 1960s. Furthermore, Marvel still depends on the Direct Market for its bread-and-butter sales, and cannot afford to get retailers too angry.

To see this balancing act in action, we turn now to Comic Book Resources, which extensively covered last Friday's Trouble press-conference. Mark Millar had some interesting things to say:

" 'Within comics themselves, within the established market of 330,000 readers, whatever exists out there, there may not be a gigantic market for something exclusively romantic,' commented Millar. 'But, if you can combine it with other successful elements and can do something that appeals to a wide, mainstream audience, then that's what excited me about the possibilities here. For people who like Spider-Man, they get something out of it. This is the first comic I've ever written that my wife read from page 1 to page 22, understood it and quite enjoyed it.'

"Mark was asked if he researched the current state of romance books before beginning on this project. Included in this discussion was reaction to the cover to Trouble #1, which was a 'live cover' depicting two teenage girls in bathing suits, which some fans claimed was pornographic.

" 'I actually did have a good look at this market and when I first saw the covers [to Trouble] I wasn't sure what to make of them until I walked into a book store and actually saw that's what these covers look like [on teen novels today]. It was interesting to see the comic book reaction... It's not pornography. It's exactly what twelve-year-old girls read and it's what their eyes fixate on when they walk into a bookshop. What excited me was that this book could be stacked next to those things, but also stacked along side Origin, Kingdom Come and Marvels. Even those books, as good as they are, not everyone is interested in them or can pick them up. So this is quite a unique thing and a catalyst between the two genre's.' "