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Battlestar gets more backstory
Jason
Wednesday
9:32 pm
Comics are all the rage right now as the medium to continue dead television series. It started with Firefly and Serenity, then to Buffy and Angel, then moved on to Pushing Daisies. The latest sitting out there now a backstory on the final five cylons from Battlestar Galatica. io9 has an early preview of the first issue.
You know, I am not sure if this will remain a viable option for the critically acclaimed, but low rated television shows to live on. Eventually the market will be a wasteland of canon television comic series. But where does the tipping point come?
Joss Whedon’s decision to bridge the Firefly television series and the Serenity movie with a three part miniseries, while not revolutionary, was a nice twist at the time. His success with that mini and another shortly thereafter probably led to the decision to greenlight both the Buffy Season 8 series and the Angel Season 6 series. Both broke through the sales blockade that is DC and Marvel.
And now everyone is jumping on board. Even Farscape is coming around with comics. The pool is already diluted, and only getting more crowded. And sadly the comic TV series isn’t going to hold interest. While able to definitely tell a story, the comic approach doesn’t allow the interaction with the cast. Its does not live and breathe. It leaves it to the imagination to play out the action between the panels that goes unseen and unsaid. And people want to be handheld to a small degree. They don’t want to work to figure things out. They want to be entertained. And in the end, it will be just the small loyal legion of fans to try and keep it alive.
Well put me in the column of the unimpressed. I have already canceled both my subs to Buffy and Angel, even with Whedon’s mind behind them. But with regard to the Battlestar Galactica: The Final Five, I am impressed by the art which is always a big draw for me. And to be honest, the non-canon series Dynamite put out while BSG was still on the air was decent enough. Maybe I will throw it a bone.
And well, for all those BSG junkies, here is a bone being thrown to you.
Thanks Amy! 
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Reader Comments
I just can’t do it. As much as I loved Buffy, Angel, BSG, and Farscape, I cannot get myself to read even the first page of these comics. the medium does not interest me.
Even knowing that many of the Farscape comics are prequels for the upcoming Farscape webisodes, I still choose not to read them.
There’s also Direct to DVD as a medium for dead TV series. It has kept SG-1, B5, and Dead Like Me around, among others. But that said, I’ve been disappointed with these movies. Personally, I think when a show ends you just have to let it go. It will never be the same if you try to revive it. Let it go or wait a couple of decades before reimagining it and bringing it back to TV.
But as long as there is an obsessed fan base, TPTB will do everything they can to pocket the cash. The Farscape series is Boom’s bestselling comic series, for example, so they are putting more and more installments out.
I’ll check this out, but I don’t know, I thought that “The Plan” was supposed to expand the Cylon’s back story… And Battlestar will always be better on a screen than on paper.
I don’t know what it is. To me, 99.99% of the time books are better than the movies and TV shows that are made from them. But when books are made from TV shows, the opposite is true: the TV show is better. To me, it isn’t a matter of which you loved first, either: it really is true that the vision is somehow sharper in the original medium. And while I have been known to enjoy many a movie or TV show born of a book or series, I have never yet read a book (or comic, clearly) based on a movie or TV show that I cared for at all.