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!
