IDW CEO Ted Adams on the State of the Comics Industry
Posted: Fri Jun 21, 2013 10:04 am
Pop and geek culture website ICv2 has published a three-part, in-depth and interesting interview with IDW's CEO Ted Adams, in which they touch upon various aspects of the comics industry and the company's faring. There isn't any specific focus on one franchise, but Transformers does show up in a couple of answers, quoted below. You can check out all three parts of the interview here, here and here.
[W]e launched our IDW Limited business last year. The idea is that these are extremely high end books; they are at a minimum signed and numbered, they come in really nice gravity boxes, in some cases they have original pieces of art in the books themselves. These are really high value items aimed at a pretty small segment of the audience who’s going to want that highly collectible item.
We launched with a couple of Transformers books and a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles book and had a great response to them. Then we started to hear from the direct market that these were books they would also like to offer to their customers. We’ve since figured out how to do something similar to what we did with the Artist’s Editions where now the IDW Limited books are available through the direct market through Previews just like the rest of our products.
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And you mentioned our long-term evergreen brand, which is Transformers. We’ve been in business with Hasbro going on seven or eight years. We’re well into the second year of the re-launches of both of the Transformers books--More than Meets the Eye and Robots in Disguise. And those books, like the Turtles, have rock solid, steady sales. The creative teams on those books are hitting home run after home run and the fans are really responding to that material. Another great franchise for us.