A fascinating project..IDW "reimagines" TOS episodes, writing by Orci

[plynch]

Re: A fascinating project..IDW "reimagines" TOS episodes, writing by O

I think the episode they did first is what concerns me. The Enterprise sent to explore what exits beyond the galactic rim. Great premise.

Two things that I question:

Why send your spanking new 'flagship' out for this type of duty?

Wouldn't you want to keep the cadet/captain closer to home, at least early on, dong milk runs and such to make sure he can handle the command?

I would.

But so much of Star Trek is unreal, I can take a little plothole here and there. At least it's exploration and not defeat the current bad guy. Oh wait, then Mitchell . . . Never mind.

 

[Kamdan]

Re: A fascinating project..IDW "reimagines" TOS episodes, writing by O

I just thought how funny it would be to do a re-imagining of Metamorphosis with Zefram Cochrane still rocking it out to Roy Orbison.

 

[Joker]

Re: A fascinating project..IDW "reimagines" TOS episodes, writing by O

Actually the number who hate JJtrek is so infinitesmally insignificant...

Shut up, will you. You make both sides roll their eyes with this shit. It's more tiresome than any of the "purists" who you deride.

 

[Ryan Thomas Riddle]

Re: A fascinating project..IDW "reimagines" TOS episodes, writing by O

Comics is a niche market, appealing mainly to the hardest of the hardcores of a given subject.

In the case of Star Trek, this is the very audience segment where there still exists a deep burning lingering hatred of JJTrek, which can't help potential sales.

In other words, they're proposing a project aimed at the very people they pissed off the most, with an approach guarandamnteed to piss them off even more.

Don't go writing that Eisner Award acceptance speech just yet, kids.

I read comics, grew up on TOS, and I don't have a lingering hatred of Abrams' movie.

And I'll probably pick this up.

So what's your market research for your argument?

Probably the same method as RAMA's.

 

[Vance]

Re: A fascinating project..IDW "reimagines" TOS episodes, writing by O

Yup, since it is already out of established "canon" these people need to chill and see how they work.

I'm going to ask this bluntly, but are you trolling?

Clearly your information about comic books, in general, is wholly off-base (7,000 unit sales worldwide is NOT a hit, by any stretch of the imagination), and you constantly have a need to interject about how much better NuTrek is than TOS - going so far as to constantly and continually insist that NuTrek is by far more popular than TOS, in the TOS forum, usually in the most condescening manner than you can manage by just skirting the flaming rules.

You're not being constructive, you're not being helpful, and I'm pretty sure that you know that. Could you please knock it the hell off so people can remain reasonable about these topics?

 

[T'Bonz]

Re: A fascinating project..IDW "reimagines" TOS episodes, writing by O

Actually the number who hate JJtrek is so infinitesmally insignificant...

Shut up, will you. You make both sides roll their eyes with this shit. It's more tiresome than any of the "purists" who you deride.

Do this again and I'll hand out warnings. The personal crap stops here. If you can't stand someone's posts, slap him or her on ignore.

 

[thumbtack]

Re: A fascinating project..IDW "reimagines" TOS episodes, writing by O

^Ohh, it's been a long time since the audience for comic books has consisted substantially of young people. Comics have had a hard time drawing in new, younger readers for a long time, and the mainstream Marvel and DC stuff these days tends to be too intense for young readers, with only the sidebar specialty lines like Johnny DC and Marvel Adventures being aimed specifically at kids.

IDW's Trek comics are aimed at pretty much the same demographic as the shows, movies, and most of the novels -- PG-rated, relatively safe for younger audiences, but aimed primarily at teen and adult audiences.

I see what you did there. However, who are you trying to convince that an aging fanbase is not a problem? Us? Or yourself?

 

[BillJ]

Re: A fascinating project..IDW "reimagines" TOS episodes, writing by O

I see what you did there. However, who are you trying to convince that an aging fanbase is not a problem? Us? Or yourself?

The 'aging fanbase' are the one's that are going to be buying the majority of these comics. It'll be the 'aging fanbase' that will keep these comics in production. The majority of comic buyers are in the 'aging fanbase' demographic. So I'm not sure how they could be the problem.

I've been a fan for thirty-five years and I plan on buying them.

 

[Christopher]

Re: A fascinating project..IDW "reimagines" TOS episodes, writing by O

However, who are you trying to convince that an aging fanbase is not a problem? Us? Or yourself?

What?? I specifically said comics "have had a hard time drawing in new, younger readers." How can you read a post where I specifically point out the problem and come away thinking I'm denying it?

 

[Forbin]

Re: A fascinating project..IDW "reimagines" TOS episodes, writing by O

However, who are you trying to convince that an aging fanbase is not a problem? Us? Or yourself?

What?? I specifically said comics "have had a hard time drawing in new, younger readers." How can you read a post where I specifically point out the problem and come away thinking I'm denying it?

Welcome to the internet!

 

[Warped9]

Re: A fascinating project..IDW "reimagines" TOS episodes, writing by O

Up until a couple of years ago I was into comics, frequenting a comic shop, and got to know quite a few folks there including the owner. He attested to what I could already see: that very few youths today bother with comics. His customers were ranging from some mid twenties and up, and most were in their thirties, forties and into fifties.

Candidly unless you are in love with the comics medium the value---the bang for the buck---just isn't there anymore, at least not in single issue comics. You pay a lot more than you used to for less page count and you're done with it in under ten minutes.

Trades and graphic novels are a better value, but those trades won't get printed if the single issues don't sell. And while some might begrudge animated straight-to-dvd films and the live-action films as not "the real thing' the fact is they're immediately more satisfying to the younger crowd and they're more dynamic. They move with sound rather than having to rely on words and static images, no matter how well executed.

Today's comics readership is an older and aging fanbase and most of the youths just aren't interested. They're more into gaming and online entertainment. Sadly it's the same with the model making hobby---a lot of younger ones just aren't into it and the model hobbyist is generally an older and aging crowd.

If IDW is aiming this comic at a younger crowd they're likely going to be sourly disappointed. Another thing to consider is popular film can influence comic sales, but it's usually a short blip and then the sales fall back to previous levels.

ST09 was popular, but it remains to be seen if it has staying power what with having to wait three years for the next film. And if that film doesn't score the same way (or better) then the popularity will wane even more. I strongly suspect that ST09 was mostly a transitional sensation that could easily fade out and be forgotten.

And the tie-in comics could also face the same problem as much as other ST09 tie-in merchandise: tons of it gathering dust on the shelves because beyond the momentary sensation of the film few really cared about spending money for it beyond the seeing the film itself.

 

[Herkimer Jitty]

Re: A fascinating project..IDW "reimagines" TOS episodes, writing by O

I can't see this project going anywhere for long. If they want to do NuTrek stories, then by all means do so... but this? This is just dumb.

This. I was under the impression that JJ and co wanted to do the whole timeline alteration thing so that they could free themselves of much of the burden of past continuity. This just seems like a counterintuitive move, IMHO.

 

[Christopher]

Re: A fascinating project..IDW "reimagines" TOS episodes, writing by O

This. I was under the impression that JJ and co wanted to do the whole timeline alteration thing so that they could free themselves of much of the burden of past continuity. This just seems like a counterintuitive move, IMHO.

The problem there is that you're thinking of the movies and comics as equal parts of a single uniform strategy. They want total freedom to tell whatever stories they want when making a multigajillion-dollar tentpole summer blockbuster, sure. But tie-in comics have no bearing on that. Instead of an audience in the tens of millions like a hit movie, IDW's Trek comics have been lucky to get more than ten thousand readers per issue. The comics and other tie-ins are a small sidebar, not part of the core narrative of the film franchise. So it's their job to stay out of the films' way and avoid telling the same kind of stories.

This happens with a lot of tie-ins. Look at Marvel's Star Wars comics that were published between the installments of the original trilogy. They weren't telling the same kind of stories that the movies were telling. They were doing side adventures that didn't significantly advance the story of Luke and Vader or Han and Leia or show any really decisive Rebel-Empire conflicts the way the movies did. Lucasfilm specifically forbade them from covering the same core elements that the movies were focused on. So they had to do other kinds of stuff to keep the audience occupied during the wait between movies.

 

[Botany Bay]

Re: A fascinating project..IDW "reimagines" TOS episodes, writing by O

Slightly off topic, but I had a few hours to kill today, and watched the new Abrams film "Super 8".

Talk about derivative, predictable rubbish. It's probably come and gone where most of you guys live, but avoid it at all costs.

Since the success of ST09, I've seen two of his projects - the badly fumbled cop-out ending to "Lost", and the awful "Super 8". Let's hope he's saving his best for "Star Trek 2". I think he's losing his touch, and I'll be very reluctant to go near anything with his name on it after wasting $20 on "The Goonies meets ET without any of the originality, fun or charm" today.

 

[Pauln6]

Re: A fascinating project..IDW "reimagines" TOS episodes, writing by O

I think that this is a worthwhile experiment. There was huge speculation about them rehashing old plots in the sequel (often with the same polarised views that we see here) and they have confirmed that they will not be doing that.

Doing it in the comic medium instead means that they are not putting all their eggs in one basket. They can mix and match with original stories and ongoing plot points and see which are the most popular at far less cost risk than a movie. They get to build on existing Trek heroes and villains in a way that the short-lived movie franchise (I'm assuming 3 movies, 4 at most) wont be able to do. With Orci supervising the writing the movies wont contradict the comics (any more than normal canon violations at least).

They can even feature Spock Prime as a recurring character. I will certainly look at this with interest and if it's good it will inspire me to go back and buy a trade paperback of Countdown and the movie adaptation to complete the collection.

I will say that featuring other characters like Chapel and Rand is quite important to me though because I prefer ensemble Trek, especially in a comic. Rand is certainly replacable by Uhura if they are happy to have only one woman in the principle cast (Rand's only key stories were Enemy Within and Charlie X) but that doesn't really work for me. If the other characters are conspicuously absent from their key reimagined stories I may start to waiver in my support.

 

[Forbin]

Re: A fascinating project..IDW "reimagines" TOS episodes, writing by O

Up until a couple of years ago I was into comics, frequenting a comic shop, and got to know quite a few folks there including the owner. He attested to what I could already see: that very few youths today bother with comics. His customers were ranging from some mid twenties and up, and most were in their thirties, forties and into fifties.

Same here. Most folks in my local comic shop are middle aged men 9and older) who've been buying comics since they were kids in the silver age. And while I was being told how valuable a comic collection could be when I was collecting in the 70s and 80s, I'm now told collections are almost worthless, because the market has been fading for years.

Last year I asked the woman who owns the shop if she'd be interested in buying my vast collection. She said "Look around you." I did. I was the only customer.

 

[Christopher]

Re: A fascinating project..IDW "reimagines" TOS episodes, writing by O

With Orci supervising the writing the movies wont contradict the comics (any more than normal canon violations at least).

That might be the hope, that having Orci supervising the tie-ins, they'll be kept consistent with what the movies are doing. But one should never make the mistake of assuming that the movies will be bound by the tie-ins rather than the other way around. The movies bring in hundreds of millions of dollars, while the comics bring in more like the square root of that. So any filmmaker who said "Yeah, that idea would really help our movie, but we can't do it because it contradicts issue 9 of the comic" would be laughed out of the room. The priorities are never going to go in that direction. No matter how much effort is made to keep the tie-ins consistent, that will always be set aside if the needs of the movie demand it. (And Orci knows it. He's on record as saying that Countdown, which he co-plotted, is not canonical.)

Besides, Abrams is in charge of the movies; Orci is simply one of his collaborators. Orci doesn't have the final say on what happens in the movies. If he did, the science in ST'09 would've probably been a lot better.

 

[Pauln6]

Re: A fascinating project..IDW "reimagines" TOS episodes, writing by O

That's interesting Christopher. I agree that it is almost inevitable that the movies will contradict the comics to some degree but we can hope that efforts would be made to minimise that where it doesn't impact on what they want to do in the sequels e.g. adjusting a line here or there in the draft script.

The biggy will be character death. If one of the actors decides not to return for one of the subsequent sequels will they transfer to another ship or go out in a blaze of glory? Will the comics be forced to reflect that?

There is another thread discussing how the earlier comics were banned from referencing subsequent movies at all so at least this is a step forward from that - no doubt to pander somewhat to the nerds among us.

 

[Warped9]

Re: A fascinating project..IDW "reimagines" TOS episodes, writing by O

Up until a couple of years ago I was into comics, frequenting a comic shop, and got to know quite a few folks there including the owner. He attested to what I could already see: that very few youths today bother with comics. His customers were ranging from some mid twenties and up, and most were in their thirties, forties and into fifties.

Same here. Most folks in my local comic shop are middle aged men 9and older) who've been buying comics since they were kids in the silver age. And while I was being told how valuable a comic collection could be when I was collecting in the 70s and 80s, I'm now told collections are almost worthless, because the market has been fading for years.

Last year I asked the woman who owns the shop if she'd be interested in buying my vast collection. She said "Look around you." I did. I was the only customer.

Comics used to be worth something because of their rarity. When comics were in their heyday they were also seen as disposable. I'm sure more than one or two folks came home from college or were visiting home after leaving the nest to find (to their horror) Mom and Dad and given away, thrown out or sold their collections for nothing at a yard sale. Any issues surviving those years were understandably considered collectibles particularly if they were in good condition. But in the '90s the comics companies started mass producing these things right around the same time as readership and distribution was shrinking. And it was made worse by publications of issues with "special" covers to convince folks these things were collectible. Previous comics were collectible because they were old and rare but beyond that there was nothing special about them other than they hadn't been trashed. The newly published "collectibles" and "specials" were just worthless.

Like you, Forbin, I don't know how many people came in asking the owner if he'd be interested in their '80s and '90s comics only to be told they weren't worth anything. They had to be early to mid '70s or older to have any value. And that was in the '90s. Maybe today not even those matter anymore.

Trades, as wonderful as they are, also killed the back issue market. DC and Marvel and others learned they could get paid twice for the same stories by publishing trade collections. For the customer you could often buy a trade for less than tracking down all the old back issues plus often the trades had no advertising in them---nice bonus. But now comic shop owners were swamped with back issues hardly anyone wanted anymore.

And all this was going on just as the new youth were discovering video and computer gaming and other online activities. Looking back it's as if the comics companies and distributors were hellbent on self-destruction in the face of massive disinterest from a youth market they could no longer count on.

I grew to hate cross title tie-in stories and multiple covers and more than two titles for a character---how many damned titles of Spider-Man or Batman or Superman do you need? And I also got tired of going through the Previews catalogue every month to figure out whether something was worth ordering. And the medium itself had become crap. Once a splash page was used occasionally for a particularly dramatic moment in a story and/or for the first page to grab attention. The splash page became evermore common and sometimes pages were little more than three or four panels. Contained within a mere twenty-two pages I was paying more and more for less and less. Gradually I let titles go until I was only looking at trades and then I walked away all together.

I had enjoyed comics, but they were no longer the easy and affordable entertainment they had once been...unless your reading list was very small.

Once in awhile I dip my toe back in. Last year I picked up the trades from some of John Byrne's Star Trek stories from IDW. Having frequented Byrne's website it's apparent he has no love for ST09 and I doubt he'd want to be involved in writing stories set in that continuity. Beyond Byrne (who obviously gets TOS) I haven't seen anyone or anything else Trek from IDW that I'd bother with.

Before this the last Trek comic that interested me was Marvel's Star Trek Early Voyages. And beyond the first half dozen issues or so even that started to wane before they killed it off.

What would pique my interest might be a straight-to-dvd animation of the original continuity in the Pike era, the Kirk era or perhaps even TNG. This year we'll be getting the straight-to-dvd adaptation of Batman: Year One---man I want to see that! Maybe this is the sort of thing to do to interest a broad general audience. I talk with a lot of younger folks and these DCU animated films (and Marvel) are something that interest the, much more than comics.

They could either do original stories and/or adaptations of previously published stories in comic or print form.

 

[Christopher]

Re: A fascinating project..IDW "reimagines" TOS episodes, writing by O

The biggy will be character death. If one of the actors decides not to return for one of the subsequent sequels will they transfer to another ship or go out in a blaze of glory? Will the comics be forced to reflect that?

It's a given that tie-ins will reflect onscreen canon as it stands at the time of their writing. That's their job. If the comics are set before the movie in which a character departed or died, then of course the character could still be there, but if they're set after it, then of course the character would be gone. Although past TOS comics from Marvel and DC have tended to keep pace with the contemporary movie continuities more than TOS novels have; most TOS novels have concentrated on the 5-year mission while the comics were set during the movie era and reflected the changes of each movie in turn.

However, these actors are already the second ones to play their respective characters. If one of them chooses not to return, there's no reason the role couldn't be recast yet again.