"Khan: Ruling in Hell" Sound Familiar?
- Thread starter RookieBatman
- Start date
I dunno, I thought I was just matching your "I kinda think it's just a bit rude to do a retread". Calling IDW's editor and writer "rude" seems an overreaction to me.
Are you personal friends with the people at IDW? Did I offend somebody you know?
No.
Your attitude in your post did annoy me, though. And it seems the feeling is mutual.
Err, you mean Joachim and Joaquin, right? Joachim is a French, German, and Polish version of the name of a saint in an apocryphal Gospel. Joaquin is the Spanish form of the same name.
Us writer/editor types tend to rally to protect our own! We're like cops that way.
"The Thin Ink-Stained Line."
Seriously, I find I tend to get indignant on the behalf on behalf of writers I've never met when people on line (not you, specifically) imply that writers had evil motives, or didn't bother to do their homework, or deliberately wanted to slap fans in the face, or whatever.
Attacking someone's work is one thing. That's fair game. I have no problem with someone saying my writing sucks. The only reviews that stick in my craw are the ones that attack me as a person--or call my motives into question.
"Cox obviously dashed this one out for the money," "Cox obviously hates Kirk," etc.
Just the writer's perspective.
I can understand that. If it helps, I was speaking more of the "big, bad, faceless, soul-sucking corporation" (speaking facetiously, of course). My impression was that some corporate-type might have come up with this idea and assigned it to someone (but I could be completely wrong about that). So my intention wasn't so much to blame the writer himself, since I figure he's probably just a pawn in this, trying to make a decent living.
I don't see any reason for blame here, because nobody's done anything wrong. It's hardly unprecedented for there to be two different versions of the same event in Trek history; for instance, Mike Barr and Vonda McIntyre both did their own versions of Kirk's first mission as captain of the Enterprise, one for comics, one for prose. There are also separate prose and comics versions of things like Chekov's first days on the Enterprise, the events that got Ro Laren thrown in jail, etc.
Heck, if IDW were to do a series about, say, Picard's missing years between the Stargazer and the Enterprise, I'd be intrigued to see how their version would differ from what I did in The Buried Age. After all, there are many possible ways of filling in that gap.
Heck, if IDW were to do a series about, say, Picard's missing years between the Stargazer and the Enterprise, I'd be intrigued to see how their version would differ from what I did in The Buried Age. After all, there are many possible ways of filling in that gap.
And for that matter, I borrowed some stuff from Vonda McIntyre's novelization of THE WRATH OF KHAN, but quietly ignored the parts that contradicted the story I wanted to tell . . . .
(Have I mentioned that Vonda was one of my Clarion West instructors way back 1984? It's a small world . . .)
(Have I mentioned that Vonda was one of my Clarion West instructors way back 1984? It's a small world . . .)
I assumed it was a perfectly understandable extension of IDW finally creating the ST II movie adaptation a few months ago - and that it seemed to sell well, even after a gap of decades! (How crazy was it that perhaps the most popular, and critically-acclaimed, TOS era ST movies was the only one without a comic adaptation?)
Whether it was an IDW editor clamouring for one of the IDW teams to write/draw a Khan prequel, or whether it was a struggling writer busting all over to get a fantastic story idea through, hardly matters. But how deflating to be told, about your one big ST story: "Sorry, there's already an old novel that covers this ground, so we cant buy your comic story..."
So? As we know from here, the crossover of people who read both all the comics and all the novels is quite small.
Khan is a hugely popular character. Greg Cox has managed to cover almost every extrapolated aspect of his career. But those books may well be out of print by now, and not everyone might have agreed with how he chose to tell Khan's story; indeed, there have been some loud critics who have told us here that he could have chosen differently. IDW can't make Pocket Books decide to reprint "To Reign in Hell" and comic readers like... comics, not necessarily novels. Comic readers who are enthused about Khan due to the comic adaptation of ST II may be asking IDW to do a Khan prequel.
So many possibilities, none of them "rude".
Inanimate carbon rods have a deep heroic tradition, dating back to at least the late 20th century.
Some have even won Oscars or Emmys.
IIRC, it has happened the other way around, though. I think I recall reading somewhere that a "Mirror Universe" pitch to Pocket was rejected because DC had just recently done their Mirror Universe Saga storyline. Anyone else recall this, or is my feeble memory just making it up?
At any rate, your point still stands. Personally, I would have enjoyed seeing the Pocket MU story too...
Wasn't it that Jerome Bixby had unsuccessfully pitched a MU story to TNG, the TV series?
There's no mention of a lost MU novel on
http://www.well.com/~sjroby/lostbooks.html
DC Comics and Pocket Books (and FASA) worked together quite often, although it was quite an informal arrangement, as sometimes mentioned in the DC Comics lettercol. The odd sharing of a ship design, or a comic mentioning a Sulu & Chekov misadventure with the Orions that was in "The Lost Years" saga novels, or comic appearances by Naraht the horta. And sometimes that sharing wasn't possible: eg DC and Pocket both came out with "first mission" tales to celebrate the 20th anniversary, but which were not compatible with each other.
We eventually got Diane Duane's "Dark Mirror", for a long time the only exploration of the MU with TNG characters. And it was a very popular book.
Bixby did pitch a proposal he called "Broken Mirror," which didn't go through. But it wasn't rejected due to any prior work, so I don't know if it could be the thing AA is remembering.
In A.C. Crispin's introduction to the original DC Comics collection of The Mirror Universe Saga, she relates how in 1986, when she was writing her second Trek novel (Time For Yesterday?), she proposed a giant Star Trek novel bringing back the Mirror Universe characters to menace the Enterprise crew. When she was pitching the idea to David Stern, he pointed out that something similiar had already been done in the comics by Mike W. Barr & company. Crispin writes that she read the comics and then "meekly turned my attention to thinking up another magnum opus."
I wonder what Crispin's proposed version was like. Was it coincidentally similiar to Barr's story in plot, or just in the general concept?
^ Thanks JonnyQuest037, that must be where I read that info. Although it looks like my use of the word "rejected" was a little stronger than what the actual anecdote indicates.
