Late last year marvel and Games Workshop announced; that they were going to work together on a new series of comics. But is Marvel the best fit for the Warhammer 40,000 and age of sigmar universes? Marvel after obtaining the rights to the star wars comics, in my opinion saw the quality dip from the previous dark horse comics. From mass action scenes and interesting new characters, to boring dialogue driven stories. With little flow and few new characters. Deciding to focus on the main characters of the films. Even the smaller characters from films who had huge stories in their own comics. Such as Wedge Antilles in his Rogue Squadron series, were thrown to the way side. Then there was the Marvel Halo series, which had an entire story line that removed the focus from the spartans to a boring brother sister pairing; fooling the prophet of truth, ( I think the story is garbage so I have tried to expunge it from memory) a character that wasn't a fool and would have had them killed; rather than listen to their idiotic ramblings. As I believe complaining about problems isn't going to help anyone; I came up with reason why other publishers would be better.
DC Comics
DC comics has a lot of success with third party properties; such as Resistence (writtten by Dan Abnett of Gaunts Ghosts), World of warcraft and Gears of war. The latter two have enjoyed long runs with fantastic artwork. Both can be comparable with games workshop properties.
The world of warcraft series, shows that DC can work with high fantasy and Gears of War an adult and very violent apocalyptic future. With success with third parties, DC have great adult publications with their Vertigo imprint, such as Hellblazer and Swamp thing. Knowing how to sell to a mature audience. Combining great story telling with fantastical stories and engaging artwork. DC also kept the original author of the Gears of war novels, Karen Traviss on to write the comics. Where as Marvel change teams like they change socks. So stories will be more fluid, other than having a higher chance of being disjointed when a new team wishes to add their own influences.
Image
Where to start? Oh yeah Spawn a dark comic that deals with influences of hell upon earth. Once again a publisher that knows how to sell to adults and mature audiences. I will mention that of course Image is independent and focuses on people selling their own stories. Yet this has allowed many great adult and horror comics to come to front, such as The darkness and Witchblade. These properties are both scifi/fantasy in the same genre as 40k. Going back to the point of Image being a independent publisher, this has made story and artwork a labour of love. This shows in many different comics, such as Chew. Where artwork is more than just good, it's amazing even if the style isn't to your liking.
Black Library
couldn't go through a list like this, without mentioning games workshops own publishing house. Th Black Library has already made some fantastic comics and graphic novels. With one of my all time favourites Macragges Honour in the horus heresy series. They already have a huge amount of authors that already know the universe and are constantly adding to it. George Mann who wrote the Dark angels comic series, managed to bring a dark horse era of star wars comics feeling, to the 40k universe and that is a very good thing. Aaron Dembski Bowden's deathwatch showed us that when one of best 40k writers tries his hand at comic books, it only expands on the narrative into a more visual (and visceral) form; while maintaining quality.
These are just some of my thoughts, as incoherent as they are. What do you think?
Comentários