A new publishing company, Best Sellers Illustrated, is making the news rounds this week because of their promotional tool for their War Of The Worlds adaptation. The graphic novel, based more on the Tom Cruise flick than the original story, is being promoted online through a trailer similar to those that Marvel used a few years ago. For some reason, this is being touted as something revolutionary, even though it’s just a standard camera pans over illustrated panels and pages with a voiceover. There’s nothing wrong with this approach, but I just don’t see where the $15,ooo budget went - the voiceovers are pretty bad, and the camera work is pretty boring. The company feels otherwise - they’re talking about buying ad time on MTV and other networks.

Stern’s trailer, produced for approximately $15,000 by a company called Sandpail Productions, has earned him, he says, “a lot of positive responses.” Now he’s considering buying airtime for it on cable networks like MTV and ESPN. The decision to make the trailer, he adds, was sparked after he saw Frank Miller’s Sin City, the box office success that also drove sales of graphic novels higher than previous Hollywood comic book adaptations.

“With Sin City, you had this box-office success that got a lot of exposure because it was adapted quite literally from the graphic novels, so the linkage between film and book was heavily promoted,” he says. “Therefore, it just seemed like a logical extension to me that, if a movie could be made so literally [from a graphic novel], why couldn’t a movie trailer be done in the same way?”

Read the story here and view the trailer here.

Comics, It's A Trailer!