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Books are transnational through their stories and also through the ways corporations market and franchise characters and story concepts. Marvel's Miles Morales is one example of the layering of transnationalism.
TRANSNATIONAL STORIES provoke us to question why geopolitical borders exist. Books that contain the stories can be explained through capitalistic and imperial lenses, but stories, thoughts, and the lives that generate them are forever shifting. Take, for example, stories created within the Marvel Universe. Here, in this corporate empire, characters were created decades ago to thrill comic book readers in the United States. The stories soon shifted beyond that, inspired by creativity but sustained through profit. The characters left the borders of the comics and moved into novels, video games, toys and collectibles, costumes, television shows, graphic novels, easy readers, and movies while at the same time expanding from U.S. to global markets.
Recently, Marvel Entertainment licensed to Scholastic a multiyear Original Graphic Novel program aimed at middle-grade readers and published through Scholastic's Graphix Media Line. This venture was built off the success of novelized versions of the books for middle-grade and young adult readers. In this strategic move, Scholastic provides Marvel with access to marginalized readers who aren't always welcome in comic book spaces, but who have buying power and who enjoy reading stories of superheroes (Salkowitz, 2020). Writing in Forbes, Salkowitz (2020) hinted at the economics of this venture.
The deal represents a major move in the comics publishing market, estimated at just over $1 billion in 2018 according to industry site ICv2. That market is divided up between trade books sold mostly through bookstores-a segment dominated by Scholastic with its multi-million copy print-runs of top-selling young reader titles from Dav Pilkey, Raina Telgemeier and others-and periodical comics sold through comic shops, where Marvel is top dog at about 40% share.
Marvel Press, the prose-producing arm of Marvel Entertainment, began in 2003 and started publishing with Disney Books in 2009 when Disney purchased Marvel Entertainment. The books they print are based on Marvel characters but do not necessarily remain loyal to the canon. Marvel also develped a prose line with Scholastic that began in 2020 with Nic Stone writing Shuri: A Black Panther Novel. The books are "informed by the comics but...