Posted in: Comics, Current News | Tagged: Agent, BLACK BIRD, graphic novel, Sonny Liew

Black Bird by Sonny Liew, Picked Up By Chip Kidd for Pantheon

Black Bird, a new graphic novel by Sonny Liew, has been picked up by Chip Kidd for Pantheon Books for 2026.

Published Sun, 07 Jul 2024 14:57:06 -0500

Article Summary

Sonny Liew's 'Black Bird' graphic novel picked up by Chip Kidd for Pantheon.
Story explores a young cartoonist's collaboration with a reclusive billionaire.
Liew, acclaimed for 'The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye', adds to impressive oeuvre.
Set for 2026 release, 'Black Bird' anticipated to have a standout cover design.

Black Bird is a new graphic novel by Sonny Liew that has been picked up by Chip Kidd at Pantheon Books. He has bought world rights aside from France from Sonny Liew's agent Nicolas Grivel at Nicolas Grivel Agency. Kidd said Black Bird is the "brilliant and tremendously ambitious" story of "a young cartoonist in Singapore who receives a job offer out of the blue to collaborate on a story with a reclusive billionaire named Quinn," which includes "a fictional golden-age superhero vigilante whose story curiously overlaps with Quinn's own."

Sonny Liew is a Malaysian comic creator based in Singapore, best known for The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, the first graphic novel to win the Singapore Literature Prize for fiction. After studying illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2001, he broke into comics when Shelly Bond signed him on for Vertigo Comics' My Faith in Frankie together with Mike Carey and Marc Hempel. In 2011, he was nominated for an Eisner award for pencilling/inking SLG and Disney's Wonderland. He also worked on Marvel Comics' Sense and Sensibility, First Second Books' The Shadow Hero with Gene Luen Yang, The Green Turtle, and DC Comics' Doctor Fate with Paul Levitz.

Sonny says "Still a work in progress… but at least in progress, after a long period of being stuck in what seemed like a chicken-and-egg situation: where not having a book proposal to send to publishers meant no advances/moolah with which to buy time to work on material for a book proposal."

"Thanks to @nicolasgrivel for helping me understand that a book pitch didn't have to be a constraint on the evolution of the final thing. And then I came across similar sentiments in Nigel Hamilton's "How to Do Biography", where he wrote that a book proposal, while "a real document… the basis of an agreement or contract between yourself and a publisher or funding body", was also "of course a figment of your imagination", with it's real value being:"

"…a spur for self-discipline, and a test of your persuasiveness… which compels you to think through, in advance, the aim and objectives of your undertaking, then sets them out in a way that [others have] full confidence in you… a rehearsal – not so much of the eventual or eventuating book, but of your abilities at the outset both in conceptualization and in presentation."

"Or at least that's the story I'm sticking to for now"

Charles Kidd is an American graphic designer known for book covers. He is the associate art director at Knopf, and supervises graphic novels at Pantheon. He wrote and designed The Complete History of Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, The Golden Age of DC Comics: 365 Days, Batman: Collected, Bat-Manga!: The Secret History of Batman in Japan and Jack Cole and Plastic Man. He also designed Mythology: The DC Comics Art of Alex Ross and wrote a Batman/Superman story drawn by Ross for the book, as well as the graphic novel Batman: Death by Design.

Black Bird will be published by Pantheon Books in 2026. Odds are it will have a very good cover.

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