Coming at you next month is the tenth anniversary edition of Koushun Takami’s cult classic Battle Royale. To celebrate, we did all sorts of great things for the new edition, but the most obvious is our creation of a new cover.
Of course, when a book has sold 100,000 copies thanks in part to its unusual cover, change is hard. Everyone still liked the slick red and black cover:
At the very least, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, eh? But, we actually licensed the cover out to someone else, so we had to change it. The first idea, I kind of liked. Keep the images, just flip the colors. Also, since Battle Royale would now be part of the Haikasoru line-up, we could use the standard imprint fonts for the cover.
Well, I thought it was snazzy. Others ’round the office though, well as the kids say they just weren’t feelin’ it.
So it was back to the drawing board. My friend Robert had given me some images from Mao-era Chinese propaganda posters. As Battle Royale takes place in a notional “republic” described by one of the characters as “successful fascism” we decided to try to use some of the aesthetics of propaganda. We gave the characters faces. Operation Jerome and Mindy was under way! Battle Royale is a thriller as well as a near-future satire, so we combined those ideas. Tada!
But honestly, everyone missed the iconic lines of the silhouette from the original cover. So we tried something like this:
But now they just looked like unhappy vacationers. Poor Jerome and Mindy, with mosquito bites and misplaced luggage and those collars that explode if they refuse to kill their school chums…
Wait, that’s it! School chums! We got the idea to make a reference to the movie. One of the haunting images from the film in the grainy photo of the class of students. Yearbook photos, that’s the ticket! And since many VIZ employees are Japanese or Japanese-American, we could even just take snaps of them for free! Here’s a publishing pro-tip: management likes stuff that’s free.
The problem with this cover was internal, really. We couldn’t help but just see our colleagues and work friends when we looked at it. Then we’d start laughing. Outside of the context of the office, maybe this cover does depict realistic-seeming high schoolers, but for us we just couldn’t separate the people we knew from their images.
And then we decided that an iconic cover needed an iconic image. Say, the rising sun from the Japanese flag.
And we were done. So, be sure to look for the FINAL cover here next month when you hit your local bookstore. Jerome and Mindy are waiting for you!
Tags: Add new tag, cover art, how sausage is made, koushun takami
I got a grin out of the story of how the cover came to be- and the various intermediary stages. It’s funny how, after you guys had mulled a few thoughts around, the cover was just nailed it like that!
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Ken H. and wintermuted. wintermuted said: TOO COOL. RT@aicnanime RT @LostPhrack: This is kind of neat. "Battle Royale - Evolution of a cover" - http://bit.ly/1aeNF3 [...]
To me, the classmates looked fine. When I saw that version of the cover, my first reaction was actually, “Ah, perfect!” I wanted to ask: what’s the rationale behind putting “the novel” on the book? It was never there on the original, and while I understand the film has the primary foothold in the Battle Royale franchise, I feel like “the novel” clutters it up a bit.
Hey Brad,
Partially, we stuck in “the novel” because there are a lot of “books” named Battle Royale, specifically the multiple volumes of the manga. The manga was also collected in what was called an “ultimate edition”, so if we called ours the “anniversary edition” or “special edition” it would be a crime against the English language. So “the novel” will help bookstores order this edition more easily.
(Also, in general, putting “a novel” under a novel is sort of a signal that the publisher is going upmarket and thinks that a book is important. Our “the novel” is a variation on that. Pulp Supreme!)
For a while, internally, we were calling the book Battle Royale Deluxe, but dropped it when we found ourselves constantly appending the words “with cheese” to it.
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@Nick Yeah, I could see that happening easily.
Hello from Russia!
Can I quote a post in your blog with the link to you?
Sure, of course!
[...] edition, it definitely fits the story (check out the Haikasoru post about the design evolution here on their [...]