Spider-man books
- Thread starter garoo1980
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Here's a piece about KRAD's contribution.
http://www.sff.net/people/krad/down.htm
And Jim Butcher did a good one too.
http://www.jim-butcher.com/books/darkest-hours
http://www.sff.net/people/krad/down.htm
And Jim Butcher did a good one too.
http://www.jim-butcher.com/books/darkest-hours
Yeah, Keith put together a very comprehensive list of Marvel novels a few years back. You can find a link to it in the page above.
I imagine someone must have done a version for Batman somewhere . . . .
http://www.sff.net/people/krad/marvel.htm#list
I've read Christopher's and Keith's Spider-Man novels, and while I liked Keith's more, Christopher's isn't bad either (full reviews here and here).
I did this listing a few years ago for the post-2000 DC and Marvel superhero novels:
http://therinofandor.blogspot.com/2007/06/holy-word-power-batman-recent-superhero.html
Pocket's license with Marvel expired with its last novel, "Fantastic Four: Doomgate" by Jeffrey Lang (Dec 08). Their last "Spider-Man" was "Requiem" by Jeff Marriott (Nov 08).
And to be honest I don't know if I want novels following the current One More Day/Brand New Day plots....
We're well past OMD now, and the BND-era storylines have actually been quite good. And I'm saying that as someone who loathed OMD. It would easily be possible to write novels that are set in the current version of the continuity but make no mention of the debacle that was OMD.
For that matter, the BND branding has ended as well. The current arc is called "Big Time," I believe.
*comics geek mode*
I have a very hard time putting aside OMD, since it forms the groundwork for all of BND and Big Time. And to be honest the whole idea of Peter making a deal with the devil is just SO OOC it's not funny.
But that's me.
*comics geek mode ends*
I have a very hard time putting aside OMD, since it forms the groundwork for all of BND and Big Time. And to be honest the whole idea of Peter making a deal with the devil is just SO OOC it's not funny.
But that's me.
*comics geek mode ends*
Wikipedia has an exhaustive list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_novels_based_on_comics
I keep on meaning to go through and hit up some of the DC novels that sound appealing. Maybe someday.
I keep on meaning to go through and hit up some of the DC novels that sound appealing. Maybe someday.
But that's just it -- I don't really think it did. It's not so much that OMD formed the groundwork for BND as that it erased the groundwork for what had come before and left a blank slate. BND was a fresh start with a new creative team and a new direction, and really had very little to do with OMD. It told its own stories that had nothing whatsoever to do with deals with the devil, and that were quite entertaining, fresh, and effective Spider-Man stories in their own right.
Yes, OMD was awful and wrong and offensive and profoundly out of character. It was a terrible story and it was a mistake to write it. No denying that. But that doesn't mean everything after it is going to be equally bad. It's the nature of serial fiction that it has its ups and downs. Sometimes something really bad will come along and leave a bad scent on the series, but the series will go on, it will recover, it will get better. Spider-Man has had embarrassingly awful storylines before, like the Clone Saga and "Maximum Carnage" and the abortive Byrne reboot of the origin, but it's gotten over them and redeemed itself. Just as Star Trek has survived bad moments like "And the Children Shall Lead" and The Final Frontier and much of TNG season 1 and "Threshold" and so forth.
And it's not like the novels are all that tied into whatever the current continuity of the comics is. When I wrote my FF novel, things were in a state of flux in the actual comics, with various characters losing or switching their powers, but I ignored all that and just wrote a "classic" FF novel with Reed, Sue, Johnny, and Ben going through the usual motions. I figured that whatever big developments were going on in the comics would be old news by the time my novel saw print--which turned out to be the case!
Aside from acknowledging that Reed and Sue now had two kids (whom I quickly shuffled offstage), my book could have taken place at almost any point in the continuity.
Aside from acknowledging that Reed and Sue now had two kids (whom I quickly shuffled offstage), my book could have taken place at almost any point in the continuity.
Well, it depends. My X-Men novel was set in an approximation of the continuity as it stood c. 2000, but with a couple of deliberate inconsistencies (such as Cyclops still being alive at a point when he was temporarily dead in the comics) and some elements more reflective of the later Grant Morrison run and the movies (Xavier's school having a large number of students). My priority was to get to use the characters I wanted, and I only picked that period because it was the best time for having (approximately) that particular team composition. So it wasn't solidly tied to any part of the comics continuity. However, all three Pocket Spidey novels that I'm aware of -- mine, Keith's, and Jim Butcher's -- were all pretty closely integrated into the then-current J. Michael Straczynski continuity on Amazing Spider-Man, and all at pretty much the same point within that continuity, just after Mary Jane began her theater career and just before Spidey joined the Avengers. (And I incorporated elements from what Paul Jenkins was doing over in The Spectacular Spider-Man at the same time.) Indeed, Jim's book was a direct sequel to JMS's first storyline in Amazing. And mine was loosely a sequel to a 2001 Paul Jenkins story in Peter Parker: Spider-Man.
Although I should add I deliberately chose to keep my book at a point in the continuity a year or two before what was coming out while I was writing, before Spidey's Avengers membership and all the rapid continuity changes that followed (like the brief flirtation with organic webbing, the Civil War stuff, etc. So I was trying to balance keeping it "timeless" and keeping it integrated with the continuity. I suspect Keith and Jim were striving for a similar balance, since we all independently chose the same narrow window for our books.
Whereas I was keeping one eye quite deliberately on the movie audience. Although my book was technically set in the continuity of the comics, not the films, I very much wanted the book to be accessible to readers who might have only seen the FF movies or cartoons . . . .
Yeah, that was the brief I got, and that I assume we all got. Marco told me to approach it like a movie, to tell a standalone story that wasn't dependent on continuity and could play fast and loose with it. Still, I tried to do that while still being as consistent with the comics continuity as I could, and evidently I wasn't the only one. Kinda the same way we'd approach a standalone Trek novel: not dependent on continuity that may be unfamiliar to the audience, but not contradicting anything in the canon. (Although in this case, we were allowed to contradict specific bits of continuity so long as we were true to the fundamentals of the characters.)
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