TOS Comics....

[Warped9]

I guess it's a question of how you use the past. Is it an excuse for the story, or is it a springboard to another story?

This is a good point and one I feel is missed so often.

I reject this whole idea of writing for the audience. They do it comics, they do it books and they do it for films. And far too often it's stupid and boring.

The audience are schmucks collectively speaking. Do something that perhaps may seem familiar yet goes off onto the less traveled paths. I want something that's unpredictable, where I don't know where we're going, but if you've hooked me then I'm reasonably sure it'll be cool when we get there.

The last Star Wars trilogy is case in point. Following Anakin Skywalker was brutally stupid as the main story because we already knew the ending. And making matters worse they didn't give us enough of anything else to care. Now if they'd given us a story with the Anakin storyline buried in it in the background then you might have had something.

Too often it's about retreading old ground rather than breaking new ground.

 

[Therin of Andor]

I reject this whole idea of writing for the audience.

Sadly, the tie-in novels and comics are commercial ventures, and therefore must be highly commercial.

You want niche: you have fanzines and fanfic.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

I reject this whole idea of writing for the audience.

Sadly, the tie-in novels and comics are commercial ventures, and therefore must be highly commercial.

And yet, Ian, Star Trek fiction was incredibly successful for a number of years by publishing continuity-light "strange new worlds"-ish novels. It's when Star Trek fiction turned more inward and more continuity-heavy that sales declined, the traditional series were shunted aside for niche ideas, the prestige hardcover format was abandoned, and the line was halved. Causation or correlation? I don't know.

 

[Warped9]

Take Marvel's Early Voyages for example. In the beginning it was great. Seeing as they started just before The Cage events I could tolerate references to Talos IV and go on from there. I didn't consider this in any way official yet I enjoyed it anyway. But the moment they felt they had to tie-in to the movie era they started to lose me. And then the art soon started to suck and it's just as well they ended it.

But in the beginning they had something and I was excited about a Trek project unlike I had been for a long time. I also liked the backgrounds they were giving Boyce and Number One. They explained the death of Pike's first Yeoman. And I liked Nano the Lliran Communications Officer. He made me think of Arex but he was bipedal.

Reading Early Voyages in the beginning made me really wish we had an animated series of it written at the level of early 90's Batman TAS.

 

[ATimson]

Causation or correlation? I don't know.

Given that it also corresponded to the televised franchise's death, "correlation" seems like the more likely answer here.

But then, as someone who likes the continuity-exists approach, I may be biased in how I see events of the last few years.

 

[Daddy Todd]

Causation or correlation? I don't know.

Given that it also corresponded to the televised franchise's death, "correlation" seems like the more likely answer here.

But then, as someone who likes the continuity-exists approach, I may be biased in how I see events of the last few years.

It also correlates to the catastrophic sales decline of the entire publishing industry, and the near-total collapse of the market for all things Star Trek. I think bigger market forces are at work, and not simply that Treklit readers are disenchanted with the current interconnected story lines.

But I'm not a marketing guy, so my conjecture is just that.

 

[Therin of Andor]

And yet, Ian, Star Trek fiction was incredibly successful for a number of years by publishing continuity-light "strange new worlds"-ish novels.

Many of which were still "prequels, sequels and returning guest characters", which was my point.

It's when Star Trek fiction turned more inward and more continuity-heavy that sales declined, the traditional series were shunted aside for niche ideas, the prestige hardcover format was abandoned, and the line was halved. Causation or correlation? I don't know.

Neither do I, but continuity-heavy novels are a very different aspect of the argument. Those years were continuity-heavy to each other, not necessarily of the canonical episodes.

People have also pointed at the standalone manuscripts and proposals, created as a result of Richard Arnold's insistence from 1989-1991 (with flow-on effects for several years), as a particularly lean period, but the books were still selling very well - probably because TNG was still on the air and being very successful in the ratings.