(see logo, top left), stressing
Fiction Illustrated series. Note "Vol. 3" at top right.
Packaged by
Byron Preiss Visual Publications and published by
Pyramid Books, under vice-president Norman Goldfind, in 1976,
Chandler was written, drawn, and
colored by veteran comics creator
Jim Steranko. There is an introduction by crime novelist and former San Francisco private detective
Joe Gores, and a foreword by Preiss. The original cover price was one dollar. Preiss said the book was "created to retail at American newsstands alongside hundreds of other paperback offerings". The mass-market edition (), which Preiss said had a "50,000+ press run", was the third in a series from the publisher, and also known as
Fiction Illustrated Vol. 3. (See image at left.) It was supplemented by a separate edition for bookstores that was double the dimensions of the newsstand edition. Steranko in 1978 recalled the project's genesis: He elsewhere said that in creating the book he used
golden sectioning, "a mathematical formula to arrange elements in a unified structure, to create an image-to-text relationship that readers would be very comfortable with. The text on any given page related only to that page".
Dark Horse Comics had planned to publish a revised edition of
Chandler: Red Tide in December 1999, with revamped and more
hardboiled art and text by Steranko, but this did not see fruition.
Dark Horse Presents vol. 3, No. 3 (Aug. 2011) included a 13-page Chapter 1 of
Red Tide. ==Reception==