Category: Sci-Fi/Fantasy

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A new Angel comic book mini-series (from IDW, rather than Dark Horse), Angel: The Curse, picks up after the end of the TV series.

In this first issue of a new Angel tale, Angel has survived the conclusion of his TV show and finds himself in a mysterious Romanian forest. There, his search for the Gypsy tribe that cursed him years ago takes a turn for the worse.

I suspect we’ll get a “once out of the pit…” explanation (i.e. no explanation at all) and the cliffhanger’s resolution will remain open for Joss to deal with in a movie-of-the-week or something.

But what galls me is that the book is supposed to have four covers. OK, one variant every once in a while is nice, and I can even go for Dark Horse’s early efforts to have one drawn cover and one photo cover to get the newsstand audience (is there such a thing anymore?)… but the only reason to do four covers for one book is to get collectors to buy four copies. It was an insulting gimmick in the early 1990s, and it annoys me that the practice never quite went away. Worse, TV Guide took it mainstream. I guess we’ll know we’re in trouble when Time or National Geographic starts doing multiple collectors’ covers.

*grumble*

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I’ve been meaning to write a review of the movie version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but Real Life says it so much better. In the rant, I mean, not the comic. I don’t think people who didn’t like the movie are stupid, but I do think that people who didn’t like the movie solely or primarily because it wasn’t identical to the book are being short-sighted, given that Douglas Adams himself changed the story every time he moved it to a new medium.

Some things worked, some didn’t, but overall I liked it.

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They gone and done it. They killed off the mainish character they were promising, and somehow they managed to make it someone that most people are only going to mourn for the loss of a cute guy. Heck, I’ve noticed a huge amount of anti-Boone sentiment since the series started, so there’s probably joy in a lot of Mudvilles now.

But that’s not what this post is about.

I’m for calling Claire’s baby D’Argo until we find out what she names him. D’Argo Boone Charles Littleton, because you have to cover all your bases.

But that’s not what this post is about.

I’m all about the preview at the moment, because I think that for once, they might have been showing some real truth. If you’re a believer in the Shore Leave Theory, that is.

We see Locke get shot. This could be a flashback to the long-awaited How I Got My Wheelchair explanation, but I don’t buy that since he had present-day hair (or lack thereof) and it seems more in line with the head-hitting tendencies of the writers to have him get old after whatever-it-is takes him down. I think Continue reading →

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A while back I remarked that the Babylon 5 spinoff Crusade died in part because the Sci-Fi channel had already committed to Farscape.

I was thinking about VR.5 recently. Had it survived into a second or third season, Anthony Stewart Head might not have been available for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Can you imagine anyone else as Giles? Of course, given the nature of the show (they killed off a regular about five episodes in, and pulled an “everything you know is wrong” moment near the end of the season), it’s entirely possible that Oliver wouldn’t have made it through season 2 anyway, and he still would have gotten the role as Giles.

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[Cover]Also in comics news, the nine-part adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere begins in June.

The basic premise is this: In urban areas, we tend to tune out the homeless to the point where we don’t even see them. What if we really don’t see them? What if there’s another world, just slightly out of sync with this one, where the rules are all different. (JMS used a similar springboard for Midnight Nation, but took it in a completely different direction.) There’s poverty, and scavenging… but there’s also magic, and honor, and a society with its own strange codes. The story follows everyman Richard Mayhew as, through a simple act of kindness, he slips through the cracks from London Above to London Below. In order to get back, he has to help a mysterious girl named Door on her quest to find her family’s killers and honor their legacy…and escape the assassins tracking them both!

It’s hard to guess how well this will work. Neil Gaiman’s comics and prose are both fantastic (in every sense of the word). Comic book adaptations of his prose, though, haven’t been nearly as good. The writers have a tendency to preserve too much of the text, and it gets bogged down in narration. It happened with “Murder Mysteries,” with “Only the End of the World Again”, and with “The Price.”

Neverwhere has two advantages, though. It started life as a TV script (he only wrote the novel because he realized that budget limitations and producer interference would prevent them from doing the story “right”), and TV, like comics, is a visual medium. And with nine issues, there should be plenty of room to show, not tell, the story.

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