Since May the 4th was yesterday, and this is a big year for Star Wars with the movie coming out, I should probably say something about my own closest connection to the series, which is Relic Worlds. I did not intend to do much with Relic Worlds until the last half of this year, but it keeps creeping into so many things that I'm doing during these first months because of outside elements over which I have no control. For instance, Wondercon, the Star Wars convention, May the 4th, and all the trailers being released. Plus, I need to get the stories written in advance so that they can come out on a schedule during the latter half of the year.
So Relic Worlds is a mixture of the two biggest media influences of my youth: Indiana Jones and Star Wars. It was, in fact, originally developed without Indy so much involved, as much as I wanted to create my own galaxy far, far away. I invented it first as a science fiction series called Travelers that I pitched to Digital Domain. They were in the process of doing the effects for Titanic, and the top managers there believed the movie would be a flop, so they wanted to prepare their company to go independent of James Cameron as soon as it did. Of course, the movie was a hit, and everyone denied they were planning to jump ship, as it were.
It was then redesigned as a TV series that got overlooked by everyone, including the Sci Fi Channel a number of times. At last it was finding a home in internet channels in 1999 and 2000. The bubble burst, and they ran out of money. But rather than just admitting that, they acted like they had never met me before. It was strange.
When Firefly appeared on TV, the style was so similar to my concept that it was pointless to even pitch it. So I put it on a shelf for a while, only to come down a few times when it seemed relevant to be pitching it.
I wound up doing something similar in comic book form which came close to having some success, but it faltered as well.
That was when I got into independent publishing, and I learned through my first book The Table of Truth, that publishing through Amazon was not only the best bet, but had the best chance at getting noticed by the public. Somehow, book distribution through Amazon got more attention than comic books, even online ones. My belief is that people who read comics fall into two categories: Those who want to see comedy, and those who want to read the same material over and over.
This last is a problem we have in geek culture. Many self-defined "nerds," the people who will read a lot of comic books and graphic novels, have a sort of obsessive compulsion today. They will read anything written about subjects of which they already know, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel or DC superheroes, Firefly; anything that's been shoved down their throats by corporations. But hand them anything that's new, even something similar to their interests like Relic Worlds which is a combination of two series geeks love, and they won't even try it.
And as a result, new graphic novels that are not comedies will not be read by anyone. But there is a pretty strong audience for independent books of all genres.
I guess I didn't get around to talking about Relic Worlds connection to Star Wars per se, but you can read more about that at the Relic Worlds blog: http://relicworldsobservationsandthoughts.blogspot.com/.
No comments:
Post a Comment