Titan Books

Titan Books was founded in 1982 and for many years operated out of the Forbidden Planet store in Drury Lane, London (UK). In 2000, now a part of TEG the company moved to its current residence on Southwark Street in South London, not far from the Tate Modern. Titan Books originally came to prominence as the first British trade paperback/reprint publisher for long-running UK comics anthology series 2000 AD’s –focusing primarily on the lead character Judge Dredd. However, it soon added to its roster with a major distribution deal with DC Comics – starting with The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller in 1986. The DC Comics deal was in many ways the first deal of its kind, bringing Graphic Novels produced by the comics giant to UK books and entertainment stores, making popular characters like Batman, Superman and the Green Lantern available to a general audience. This was quite an innovation and helped pave the way for a burgeoning Graphic Novels market in the UK today. In 1992 Titan Distribution was sold to Diamond Comics and the team who co-owned the company parted ways. Nick Landau and Vivian Cheung took over full ownership of Forbidden Planet and in 1993 launched the umbrella company Titan Entertainment Group. It was in the 1990s that Titan Books seized on the opportunity to begin publishing movie and television tie-in books. Fans of major sci-fi and supernatural movies and TV shows were hungry to learn more about how they were made. With lavish art, concept drawings, info on special effects and interviews with the cast and creators, these books take you behind the scenes of some of the biggest shows and movies of their time. Some of the very earliest ties in books came from Alien, Terminator, Star Trek and Star Wars amongst many others. In 1995 TEG launched Titan Magazines to help provide a swelling audience of thirsty fans more information on their favourite shows in a current and up-to-date way, launching magazines for Star Trek, Star Wars, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, X-Files and many others. With fans ever hungry for more, Titan produced many fiction tie-in titles that took stories of major movies and shows further, introducing major new canon storylines for key and minor players in each franchise. Some of the earliest fiction Titan produced was for Star Trek Next Generation, and has since grown to include Alien and Aliens, Terminator, Planet of the Apes and many TV shows including X-files, Supernatural, 24 and Fringe.