Sixteen years ago, Bill Jemas played a lead role on the team that transformed Marvel from an insolvent comic book publisher and toy manufacturer into a world-class entertainment company. In 2013, Take-Two Interactive Software hired Jemas to start Double Take. Bill and his team commissioned a new generation of creators to deliver a wonderfully diverse and exciting universe with everything from hordes of Walking Dead to teams of superheroes, from mad scientists to attractive aliens.
“We believe that Double Take is producing some of the best comic books in the industry,” said Michael Coast, senior Story Editor at 2T. “Our books appeal not just to hardcore comic book fans, but to readers who are new to graphic novels as well.”
In conjunction with their graphic novels, 2T has developed the world’s first native mobile comic book player. Using panels to create a stop-motion animation effect to bring each story to life, the mobile player gives readers the optimal digital reading experience.
CBM: What made you want to do NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD?
Bill: Part of it was that everything else original was failing that we tried to do from the ground up and honestly it never was coming out as Mike and I would’ve liked. This happened for a good year and a half and never thought that anything was good enough for publishing. Part of it was hard to get anything from scratch and part of it was trying to get writers excited. So when you go to writers and say let’s do Night of the Living Dead that gets them excited. One reason we did NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD was to get the writers energized. It gave us two advantages. First, being in the public domain the new stuff that we created became our property. Second, using THE NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD as a springboard made it so more fun to do and be more creative.
CBM: THE NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD has a cult following does that put a lot of pressure on you because it does have such a huge following?
Bill: It did make it easier, so far in our first release of sales we didn’t sell a ton through Diamond but it was 5,000 units per title which for an independent publisher is pretty good. Among the retailers they like the idea of trying to sale of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. Then we found out that if readers tried one or two of our books they kept coming back for more.
CBM: How these books were written, different characters, different times and the fact that you don’t have to read them in order did that make it difficult to make them all come together?
Bill: It was very, very hard, one of the reasons we are doing 5 Books instead of 10 is because it was too damn hard. We thought we would publish monthly or at least every two months and it did take a good solid three months to get the 10 books out. It was a labor of love and we like the way it came out in the end. It was way too hard because we did want to keep the universe together. We started 10 different stories at different times during a day so keeping track of who was doing what at what time of day took us a lot of time. We had an enormous chart on the wall so we could see what character group was doing at different times of the day, it was very monumental.
CBM: What can we expect in the next 5 books that will be coming out in December?
Bill: Many superheroes. I think more that we wrote these books the more fun we had at experimenting. For example, zombies develop as their body and brains regenerated and we turned some of those characters into superheroes. We used a lot of that momentum to create the next 5.
Mike: Some of them contain characters that are in these first 10 series, but we do consider them new books so readers can hop and board and not feel like “Ok I need to read all the other books to get caught up.” Even though some of the characters are shared it’s a new jumping on point for readers.
Bill: We found out that this pathogen that was released in the 1960’s gave some characters near immortality, that turned out to be lucky because you are going to read that some of these characters’ haven’t aged.
CBM: Do you think digital comics is the future of comics?
Bill: Maybe! I would say that more people have read our digital comics than in print. Part of that is we really do give the readers an easy online experience. Kids don’t have comic books in their back pockets they have cell phones. You can click on any of comic on our home page and read the comics a panel at a time. They weren’t written and drawn in full pages and then jammed down into a reader they were written into panels that we when you read them they line up in sequence. We think the digital comic is important for bringing new readers. As to the future of comics? I don’t know! Comics and cook books are still the only categories with reader satisfaction higher in print then digitally. I do think digital comics are an important facet of growing the business, but I think there will always be room for graphic novels and periodicals.
CBM: You were at Marvel for one of the most important and yet tumultuous times in history, from that experience what you bring to Double Take?
Bill: I have a reputation for being divisive at Marvel. The fact is that we did more together in the four years that I was there then maybe the first forty years combined. Then we all got together and agreed that we would do Ultimate Spider-man. That is first time the licensing, merchandising, promotional guys and the editors all got together and said we are all going to do the same thing at the same time we are all going to operate as one company. I do think that is what I bring to Double Take. It is ten different teams creating content but we all see it as one big story one big family of characters and to a great degree one big family of creators. To get a team to work together and to stay on the same page I think that is the skill set that I bring. I brought that skill set to Marvel from the National Basketball Association were you need to play on David Sterns team or you can work at McDonald’s. So I think that is what I brought from Marvel to Double Take.
CBM: Is there anything else you would like I readers to know?
Bill: The one thing I would add, is that if the reader goes to
www.doubletakeuniverse.com you can see what the book of the day is and read the first three issue for free online or on your phone. I would love for people to read these books you’re going to enjoy them. Go to our website and get a free sample.
Mike: You can read each book individually and you don’t have to read all ten. We found that once we grab readers they embrace it and read all ten. It is fun when we do the super packs we found that those almost always sell out. They sell more than the individual copies of each theory. It has been a lot of fun not only building the universe and bringing it all together but to see readers responding so positive towards it.