There's still seven issues of Assimilation to go. If Q doesn't show up, I'd be surprised.
Exactly.
IDW to publish post-Nemesis TNG Borg story, possibly Destiny
- Thread starter cdgodin
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Exactly.
I'll be keeping an eye on this since I am curious to see an alternate take on the post-Nemesis time frame. I'm one of the few people who didn't mind Countdown, so it wouldn't bother if this was in the same continuity. If it is I wonder if they'll use the Online storyline, or ignore that to go in their own direction?
AAAUUUGGHHHH! TRADE WAITING!
Oh, well. Q showed up in the final Star Trek/X-Men crossover as well.
*checks "Countdown"*
You're 100% right. I somehow only remembered the beginning of that speech bubble about his return
Pretty hard, actually. Books take a lot longer to develop, write, and publish than comics, so it would be difficult for the two to stay current with each other on an ongoing basis. It's the same reason the TV shows couldn't pay much attention to the novels, because they came out so much faster and they couldn't wait around to see what happened in the books -- and the same reason that despite their best efforts, a number of books ended up getting contradicted by new episodes before they even hit the shelves. Comics don't come out at quite the same pace as TV shows, but it's sufficiently faster than novels that the same coordination problems arise.
Also IDW is in California and Pocket is in New York, so they can't coordinate as closely as they could if they were in the same place (granted, less of an issue in the age of e-mail and teleconferencing, but apparently still a factor).
Not to mention that they're targeted at different audiences. There's some overlap, certainly, but there are plenty of people who buy comics but not novels, or vice-versa. So if their continuities were dependent on each other, it might confuse people who only read one or the other. And the different media have different strengths and emphases as well. Comics rely more on action and spectacle, so they're probably better served by, for instance, keeping the Borg around as a perennial threat than by going along with their final defeat in the novels.
Why? Why is a different take on the post-Nemesis timeline a bad thing?
I'm in as long as they don't have Picard on his knees sobbing on the bridge at the end...
Fair enough - the practicalities of comics and novels moving at different speeds had not occurred to me.
I just like a coherent(ish) universe. I realise that for everyone like me, there's probably (at least) one who doesn't give a hoot !
True, though it's not like there aren't enough gaps in the novel timeline where an action-based comic miniseries could fit (glares toward the Ascendants arc).
However, IDW might see such a project as being so niche that it's of no benefit to them. Fool's Gold was, from what I understand, a poor seller, and once burned on a DS9 project IDW's likely to be cautious about the next one -- assuming there is a next one, that is, since there hasn't been one yet.
Excited to hear about this one. Looking forward to it!
Well, just imagine one of IDW's writers pitches an Ascendants storyline for the comics. It could be conceived, written, drawn and out on sale while a Pocket author was still ploughing through a proposal and a first draft manuscript. Or, if it came out as a comic mini-series, there is less chance of a Pocket author pitching it again. The overlap of comics and novel readers is perhaps only a small segment of the market. Novel-only readers hate being told that there is a comic mini-series they should read. (We've seen that complaint here, with people whining that they didn't understand references in the novels to events that occurred in "The Gorn Crisis", "Double Time", "Divided We Fall", "n-Vector", and so on).
The team at CBS Consumer Products would have to approve both proposals and both final drafts. As in the past, they might recommend some cross-pollination. Or not.
While I'm sure there are logistical problems with the comics and novels lining up with pocket's one a month schedule, it can't be terribly hard when Star Wars has been doing it for some 20 years.
Well, there you have folks at Lucasfilm in overall charge of coordinating things. And Lucasfilm is an 800-pound gorilla that has a way of getting what it wants. And even so, new SW productions often contradict what was in the books and comics, so you kinda have to wonder whether it really matters so much to keep them consistent with each other.
I dunno, in theory you probably could make it work if there were an incentive to do so. But if you ask me, the fact that Star Wars does things one way is a good argument for why Star Trek should do things differently. No point in being repetitive. There's value in having multiple perspectives on a work of fiction, multiple alternatives that can stand on their own.
Christopher my point was less about should they do it, but that it is certainly possible. Indeed, when Trek comics were at Wildstorm there was a fair amount of book-to-comic continuity.
Way back when DC Comics had the comic license, and Pocket was about to launch its first "giant novel" ("Enterprise: The First Adventure"), the two editors had dabbled in some cross pollination of concepts. However, when it came time for DC's first annual - and both companies decided to do a TOS origins story, racing to meet a deadline for the then-upcoming 20th anniversary - neither writer was keen about making their stories line up. The two projects ended up making very different choices on how the TOS crew came to be.
While it was a bit annoying for fans who love everything to be part of one great tapestry of Trek history, both "All Those Years Ago..." and "Enterprise: The First Adventure" have their fans. And critics. Would these projects have been more successful if Mike Barr and Vonda McIntyre, both already successful, crowd-pleasing Trek authors but presumably total strangers, were forced to consult closely with each other as their deadlines loomed, compromising ideas they'd already come up with about how Kirk's crew came together?
Would many fans have cared, or noticed, one month after the anniversary? How many diehard fans (already only 1% of the viewing audience) were collectors/readers of both the novels and the comics? The middle intersection in the Venn diagram is getting very small.
There were a few instances of book-to-comic continuity -- i.e. something originating in the books and then showing up in the comics. There was Tiris Jast as DS9's first officer in Wildstorm's N-Vector miniseries (seeded there at Marco Palmieri's request). There was Divided We Fall, which featured the DS9 Relaunch cast. And there was New Frontier: Double Time, which was largely written to explain away the chronology error between two NF novels. But the other crossover elements were comic-to-book -- things that originated in the Wildstorm comics and were later adopted by the novels, such as the Damiani from Perchance to Dream, the events of The Gorn Crisis, and some bits from Enter the Wolves like President Thelian.
And except for N-Vector, the book-to-comic continuity elements came about in comics written by novel authors -- much the same as was the case with DC in the '80s (Diane Duane using her novel characters in the comic issues she wrote) and IDW recently (comics written by KRAD using characters or elements from his prose fiction). Other comics writers may have their own ideas and prefer to take things in a different direction.
K.W. Jeter was also a Trek novelist, so was probably delighted to preview Jast in his comic mini-series before the Bolian's novel appearances.
^Right -- what I meant, and should've said, was that the continuity elements came from authors who were currently contributing to the novel continuity, and generally bringing in elements from their own books (though I guess that doesn't apply to Ordover & Mack's Divided We Fall, since Dave didn't contribute to the DS9 post-finale books until Warpath).