If you don’t know First Second Books as an imprint, you know many of their books. From Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese to The Adventure Zone to last year’s brilliant biography Messenger by Marc Bernardin and Ron Salas, their output is eclectic and impactful. More importantly, always entertaining.
So it was interesting a few weeks before Comic-Con to get a press release that the imprint was splitting into two. After almost 20 years in the game, First Second Editorial and Creative Director Mark Siegel was creating a second house — 23rd Street Books — for adult graphic novels. We met in the lobby of his hotel in San Diego on the second day of the convention to talk about the move and to remind me that I wanted to pick up a few books from their booth.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Derek McCaw: I’ve been a fan of First Second for a long time. Why split the imprint now?
Mark Siegel: We’ve been going for 18, 19 years. I mean, the imprint is the same age as my son. And we’ve always been doing (graphic novels for) adults from the start. That was always the intention was like children’s, teen, and adult, to play in those three spaces and to have an ideal editorial home for creators to do projects in every space that they want to work in.
But I had to learn a lot about publishing, and about publishing in America, and about publishing graphic novels and like there’s just all these specific things. It turns out that the publishing game is very different in these age categories. Reviews are like a different world, almost, for children, even in the institutions like libraries but also in the direct market. There’s a kind of a separation there.
Now, we’ve had a few hits in adults. You know, the biggest one is the Adventure Zone series. It’s doing great. But for the most part, the First Second brand has been associated with young readers and YA, you know, because of some very high-profile awards and, you know, some of our hits in those spaces.
It’s been, like, over the years, a kind of a… you know, I felt like there was a problem for us to figure out and solve. It’s like how to do it right. It feels like our presence in children’s and in YA is very strong. It feels like it plays to all the strengths of our sales force and our marketing and publicity teams. But then on adults, we need to specialize how we do that and do it really well.
Eventually it came together. We talked about doing different approaches, but the cleanest and most exciting was to have its own brand. But two sides of the same coin. So, you know, you’re going to see them supporting each other. It’s not as clear-cut as and convenient as the categories sound. Also graphic novels have this peculiar habit of just blurring age categories from the start. We have some books where people argue whether they’re Children’s or Adult.
Like Robot Dreams is a good example. It’s wordless, it’s very cute, and it looks young, but it’s actually exploring some very deep themes. And that’s been over the years, one of those that keeps coming up. Some librarians put it in adults, some librarians put it in children. It’s not like there’s a totally exact science here.
Generally speaking, I think that there are strictures that go with children’s publishing, and some of them are good strictures. Some of them are being able to make sure the content is appropriate for a middle grade reader and with adult you kind of pull some of that off. But then it’s also not just about the sex and the violence and things, it’s also about themes that speak to adults.
Derek McCaw: Like in Robot Dreams, though I think our views have changed a lot, many Americans still have a specific idea of what comics are, and that goes for animation as well. Whereas I’m sure in Europe, they have no problem saying “this is for children; this is for adults.”
Mark Siegel: There’s no problem. You know, I’ve heard French editors joke about how “oh, American editors are just obsessed with age categories. That’s all they talk about.”
It’s kind of a running joke. There’s a little truth to that because of the way books are sold. The channels they go through, it’s a little more rigid here. And then there’s issues with censorship and things like that. In principle, you know, it’s freedom of speech. Yes. But I also believe in tailoring for young readers. You know, there are things that I wouldn’t have wanted my kids, when they were young, getting traumatized by something.
We want to have a care. We want to have a curated list for our young readers. And then we have the problems of like, you know, Miyazaki’s Shuna’s Journey is truly an all ages. Adults are buying it. Kids are buying it. And we’re going to have some of these issues. That’s going to come up. We’re going to have to make a call. But fortunately, I think, there is room with graphic novels to do crossover.
Derek McCaw: The problem is with that label “All Ages.” A lot of Americans think that means it’s for kids. We’ve lost some of that ability to say, look, something actually can be for everybody. So what are you looking for? I see there’s a catalog.
Mark Siegel: Yeah, so that’s a little teaser for 2025. That’s our first year we’re launching in 2025. And I’m looking for… some of the same guiding principles are not changing from First Second. It’s about authors, it’s about voices. We do have occasionally something that can become a franchise, but it’s still fundamentally an author house. More than looking for the ideal project, I’m looking for long-term talent, people that we can support over many years.
Derek McCaw: You have people like Gene Luen Yang, whose work is so disparate…
Mark Siegel: Exactly. That is it. We have a brand for our imprint, but it’s not personal. It’s a home and it should become, like, First Second has become a symbol for certain values and certain beliefs, I guess, in art and in storytelling. So there’s going to be some of that. You know, the eclectic, styles and the genres and the kind of content, the variety of non-fiction. Then I’m very interested in pushing into really fun high-quality adult fiction.
Derek McCaw: Will you recategorize some of your books? Like last year’s Messenger. Is it YA or is it Adult?
Mark Siegel: Well, that’s the thing. Now we’re going to be looking at projects differently, including looking through our backlist and to see what belongs where. Sometimes I think the choices we have made in the past were, okay, we might have a better structure to support YA so we’ll pull it that way. But now we’re going to have both structures. Then we can decide, okay, this particular project, we can we can push it further if we go in Adult or if we go in YA.
But as you were saying earlier, what am I looking for? I’d say what I’m not looking for is, there’s a certain kind of… there’s a lot of very heavy material in nonfiction and also in fiction. And I feel like today we’re at a time in history and in the world where us grown-ups are a bit exhausted, you know, and a bit burned out.
Derek McCaw: I think that’s the understatement of the decade.
Mark Siegel: Yeah. Yeah. It’s a tough time for most people nowadays at some level or another. For some people it’s harder than others but still generally there’s a sense of weariness, so I feel like I’m looking for some lift in some form or another. Some wow factor, sometimes some escapism, but still going for quality at every level.
Some houses are not fans of editors. We believe in artists, of course, we believe in authors, but I do believe also in the editorial partnership. It’s not about correcting or changing or turning someone’s project into something else, but it is about offering some service to a creator to make their thing as good as it can be.
I love the fact that many of the authors I’ve worked with, whether it’s like Vera Brosgol or Gene Yang or Ben Hatke, so many good, good people who are hungry to push their work. They want the feedback they want it, and they still ultimately make the decisions, but they’re not protecting themselves from that feedback. I think for most creators it’s a win.
Derek McCaw: At the beginning, you said you had to learn a lot about graphic novel publishing, and you just talked about artists having this hunger. So what got you into this?
Mark Siegel: I grew up in France. I grew up in a culture that you could say the mainstream reader had comics as part of their reading diet. I remember, I think in grade school, you know, history textbooks, every so often a chapter would be excerpts from Asterix or something.
It wasn’t quite the ghetto that American comics got put in, where it was fringe. But now that’s changed. Right now it’s moved a long way from like the 90s. Owing partly to manga shifting the gender balance in comics and then also shifted the influences that creators were drawing from. So now you’ve got like the European influence, the Asian influence, and then the American influence, talking to each other and making new kinds of graphic novels that we haven’t seen before.
I feel like I was lucky to be in New York at that moment, around 2004, when manga was peaking, one of its peaks. And I missed a kind of a certain kind of graphic novel in my reading. So I wanted to make this house. At heart, I’m probably not a businessman, but I was lucky to get teamed up with some good business people who taught me a lot about the workings of publishing. In a house that’s … I don’t think First Second could have happened anywhere but Macmillan, for real. It’s privately owned. It’s not a corporation. So they were okay taking a long-term bet on me.
And it didn’t pay off right away. It paid off in prestige, and it paid off in awards that had never gone to comics before and starred reviews and all this stuff. But it took a while to start making money. That kind of long-term bet is part of what I want to bring into this new chapter. It’s not just about this quarter or this season.
It’s definitely about a legacy of great books. Thanks again to Mark for the conversation. Fanboy Planet is an Amazon affiliate. Purchases made through links on this and other pages may generate a commission for this site.
