The Star Trek Photonovels from the 1970s handled the material quite well, and did not pull images from say, City on the Edge of Forever from Day of the Dove.
The Making of Star Trek (Whitfield)
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The Star Trek Photonovels from the 1970s handled the material quite well, and did not pull images from say, City on the Edge of Forever from Day of the Dove.
Not really. The 1970s Photonovels were pretty obviously not put together by people versed in the language of comic books. They make some pretty rudimentary mistakes like bad word balloon placement, panels that overlap awkwardly or lead your eye in the wrong direction, and clunky additional dialogue, mostly in thought balloons. I just pulled my copy of the COTEOF Photonovel off the shelf, and on one page, the pointer of Mr. Spock's word balloon crosses over in front of Kirk's head. That's an amateurish mistake that any comic book editor worth their salt would change immediately. Byrne's been writing & drawing comic books for over 40 years, so he's not going to make dumb mistakes with the form like that.
Is Byrne's Photoshop work flawless? No. But as I said in my review that I linked to above, if you can forgive a bad matte line on a spaceship FX shot, you should be able to tolerate this. It's about the story being told, not about fooling you into thinking it's a long-lost episode.
And criticizing Byrne for sourcing images from a variety of episodes is really unfair. Outside of recap/flashback sequences and his full-length adaptation of "The Cage," Byrne was creating original stories in New Visions. That's a very different thing than just doing a straight translation of a preexisting movie or episode. If you're creating a new story from existing material, of course you're going to arrange things in a different way. And when he did do a straight adaptation of "The Cage," the only real changes he made were to make it read more smoothly as a comic book. And you'll notice that he didn't use shots from any other episodes in that one.
John Byrne is a lot of things, but a bad comic book storyteller is not one of them.
Agreed. And further: he deserves credit for trying something new with Trek comics. Perhaps it didn't work as well as it might have in the eyes of some, but let's respect the effort if nothing else.
Not at all. He's dealing with one of the most recognized, scrutinized entertainment properties ever created. Anyone this would appeal to knows the changes in actor hair, weight, costume (even within individual seasons) as well as they know their own family members, so Byrne had to have been aware of that, and if so, then why slap that together when it would be something so glaring to any TOS fan? Really, its like pasting together a TNG book but you're using season 2 Riker in the same story as season 6 Riker, when Frakes' weight and costume were noticeably different. That applies here.
Oh, come on. He didn't do anything remotely that bad. You're just exaggerating the perceived errors because you think he did a sloppy job.
Visible continuity errors like that really didn't happen as often as you're implying. Byrne mostly avoided the S3 episodes for that exact reason - the different uniform fabric and the slightly shaggier hair of the cast made them look noticeably different than they did in seasons 1 & 2. (The other reason is that Byrne largely dislikes the third season and thus doesn't know the episodes nearly as well, making it tougher for him to find appropriate stills from those shows.)
Tell you what, TG. If you think that Byrne did such a substandard job on New Visions, why don't you take two months (NV was a bimonthly book, so that was his standard time to produce an issue) and create your own original 42-page Trek comic just using stills from TrekCore and whatever your Photoshop skills can muster? Show us how it's done. Maybe then you'll realize how tough it is to do what Byrne did.
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I don't need to--the 70s Photonovels already did it better than Byrne.
Just regarding methodology:
The Star Trek "Fotonovel" authors had a quality still of everything they needed, and always from the stated episode. I think they must have acquired a 16mm film print of each episode, and cut it up for frames. Or they might have had a special projector that enabled them to stop the film and photograph any frame, so no chopping up would be needed. (The Fotonovels came out years before TOS was available on VHS tape, and VHS screen caps would have been much less sharp in any case.) So just having the whole show on film, in their hands, was a huge advantage.
Off topic, I've always wondered how MAD magazine created such accurate and detailed parodies of movies that were currently in theaters. They must have rented or borrowed a print of the film and photographed frames using a similar machine. Then the detailed artwork, as well as knowing the whole story, would be a snap.
Ostensibly, the thread is about the Whitfield book. But the digression into the discussion about John Byrne's New Visions is just proof that Star Trek gets made in a lot of different ways.
They didn't, because they were an entirely different animal than the work Byrne did. I struggled with "New Visions" but it was an interesting try at doing something different.
As far as I know, they just used publicity stills, pressbooks, etc., at least in the first few decades When they did Alien, they had no photos and portayed the title monster as a three eyed octopus like creature.
https://cinefex.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Giger6.jpg
Are you sure that's MAD's version? That doesn't look like Drucker's art.
That is absolutely, 100%, Mort Drucker's art.
https://thenostromofilesblog.files.wordpress.com/2017/10/sc_63_01_aliensplash_900x_low.jpg
Having every frame is one thing, but knowing how to tell a story with it--and in comic panel form--was the key ingredient, and I believe the Fotonovels did a strong job translating the episodes into comic panels, not allowing the lack of delivered dialogue, music, etc., stop them from presenting a unique and entertaining version of the episodes.
Not sure. Perhaps studios supplied them with the large number of stills usually shot for productions. Regarding the timing of the satires, usually, MAD's version was published long after a film left theatres. For example, MAD's "The Empire Strikes Out" had a 1/1981 cover date, and while the work was likely illustrated sometime earlier, it was still long after The Empire Strikes Back's 5/1980 premiere.
Drucker was a master at caricature and settings in his satires; I collected vintage MAD and not once did I ever see Drucker miss the mark on capturing the heart of a film or TV series, which is why I was usually disappointed when Davis, Clarke or anyone else illustrated the TV/movie satires...well, Angelo Torres probably ran second place after Drucker in terms of great satire art.
The first image you posted must be blown up way out of proportion. The inking doesn't look right, and that's probably why. It's too close to have as much detail as the larger images get across. Odd.
It's not unheard of to get the script and production photos well in advance of a film's release. A publisher I wrote for had the option of doing the official one-shot magazine for the (terrible) film Cool World and I got the script waaay before the movie came out. The script was a lot better than the film as delivered, though conceptually still a dumpster fire.
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