Publishers Weekly's Calvin Reid is reporting that HarperCollins is planning to publish the complete black-and-white run of Scott McCloud's Zot! in a deluxe 576-page black-and-white trade paperback ($22.95) that will debut in July 2008 at the San Diego Comic-Con and will contain new notes and observations by the author.  The collection will include the last nine issues (#27-#36) in the series, which have never been reprinted before.

The reprinting of Zot! ties into to one of the major trends in the graphic novel market.  It is an example of the current movement to republish backlist titles in large omnibus editions, which is a real benefit to retailers who only have to stock one volume instead of three or four.  The decision to reprint only the black-and-white issues of Zot! was made by the author, who felt that the series, which began in 1984, really took off in 1987 when it switched to black-and-white.

Publishing the black-and-white issues of Zot! is also appropriate because it highlights the fact that one of McCloud's major inspirations in the 1980s was manga -- in fact Zot! is one of the first American comics to demonstrate a significant manga influence.  Though he didn't know how to read Japanese, McCloud pored over volumes of manga analyzing their narratives without benefit of text, which provided him plenty of insights into manga's many visual storytelling elements, knowledge that McCloud put to great use in a series of books on visual narration, most notably Understanding Comics (1993) and Making Comics (2006). Of course manga wasn't the only kind of comic books that McCloud analyzed, but with its cinematic multi-panel breakdowns, it is clearly one of the most visually-driven of all forms of comic expression.