New publisher for Ships of the Line

In part one (of two) of an interview with StarTrek.com Doug Drexler has revealed the Ships of the Line calendar is on its last year with Pocket Books (and Andrews McMeel Publishing?) as Rizzoli will become the publisher for the 2013 edition onwards. Drexler also revealed it was only down to the efforts of him and his band of artists that Rizzoli didn't kick off their run with a best-of-old-stuff edition:

Rizzoli is the new publisher. Pocket Books is not continuing on. I don’t know exactly the reason. All I know is that their licensing agreement with CBS came up again and it didn’t survive through that. So, Rizzoli has picked it up. Their publishing schedule is totally different from Pocket Books’. If it was Pocket, we would have until March to finish the image. But Rizzoli just got the license and there wasn’t enough time. Their thought, was, “Let’s do a Best of….” issue.

Now, frankly, when you’re making a transition like that it’s really important how you look when you come out the other side. You can’t look like a retread. So I talked to my buddies who work on the calendar and I said, “Look, they want to do a rerun thing. Personally, I’m not going to do that; I’m going to create new art for the rerun price, and you guys are free to do that as well if you want. I hope you will.” And everyone just jumped in. We actually got the calendar together in about three weeks. I think it’s one of the best-looking calendars yet. So, sometimes extra-cool stuff comes out of adversity. I’m real excited about it.

No news yet on what effect this will have on the other Star Trek calendars. We look in fairly safe hands though; Rizzoli's output for this years includes tie-ins such as Buffy, Smallville, and True Blood calendars, as well as more creative subjects such as a zombie calendar, or the glow-in-the-dark lunar calendar.