Chandler: Red Tide - Publication History

Publication History

Packaged by Byron Preiss Visual Publications and published by Pyramid Books, under vice-president Norman Goldfind, in 1976, Chandler was written, drawn, and colored by veteran comics creator Jim Steranko, who also provided the cover painting and oversaw production, including design and typography. There is an introduction by crime novelist and former San Francisco private detective Joe Gores, and a foreword by Preiss. The original cover price was one dollar.

Preiss said the book was created to retail at American newsstands alongside hundreds of other paperback offerings". The mass-market edition (ISBN 0-515-04078-9), which Preiss said had a "50,000+ press run", was supplemented by a 750-copy limited edition with a tipped-in signature plate. The latter edition was double the dimensions of the newsstand edition.

The third in a series from the publisher, it is also known as Fiction Illustrated Vol. 3. (See image at left.)

Steranko in 1978 recalled the project's genesis:

Chandler was a fill-in book. That particular number of Fiction Illustrated was to have been Ralph Reese's Sherlock Holmes book . Ralph had worked on it for a year, and Byron realized ... that the book couldn't get out in time. He asked me if I would do a book to replace it. There are two men you never ask to fill in on a late deadline: Neal Adams and myself. We're both overcommitted. Byron's a good friend and I tried to do what I could for him, so I said I would do this book. It was produced in 2½ months where it should have taken at least six months to do. It was my first visual novel, and it was a major project.

He elsewhere said that in creating the book he used golden sectioning, "a mathematical formula to arrange elements in a unified structure, to create an image-to-text relationship that readers would be very comfortable with. The text on any given page related only to that page".

Steranko, who retained rights to the character, was then assigned to create a 12-page "Chandler" story for Penthouse magazine, working with executive editor Art Cooper. When Cooper departed Penthouse, the project was canceled and Steranko was paid a kill fee.

Dark Horse Comics had planned to publish a revised edition of Chandler: Red Tide in December 1999, with revamped and more hardboiled art and text by Steranko, but this did not see fruition. Dark Horse Presents vol. 3, #3 (Aug. 2011) included a 13-page Chapter 1 of Red Tide.