We have another new comic to read. How long we’ll be reading it is up for debate. Going over the summaries on Comic Book Plus I already don’t see anything all that exciting. Still, it’s the first issue and I can go in with an open mind. These are the guys giving us the original Captain Marvel so maybe it’ll work out. Let’s start reading and find out, because there’s a lot of comics to go over since they’re mostly around 4-6 pages each.
When the Atari 2600 first released in 1979, games hadn’t reached today’s graphic level, where everything can look somewhere between cartoons and actual people. Bits were a luxury, but they were still fun. However, they didn’t have much of a story to them. The idea of video games as a form of storytelling was still a long ways off, and that even started as a text based game on the computer. Nowadays we have polygons and 3D and 2D drawings out of the 1940s and everything else. We also have stories told within the game itself as you take the role of the hero and follow his life. Saving the princess is a lot harder and more rewarding than simply completing the game.
That’s not to say we haven’t made stories using the plot of a game. Video game “stories” in 1982 were limited to telling you what the goal was. Everything had to be filled in yourself or through existing storytelling media. We ended up getting shows based on video games, and in previous installments of Free Comic Inside we’ve seen comics based on video games either directly, like the Swordquest comics, or indirectly, like Atari Force. Tonight we look at Yars’ Revenge, released for the Atari 2600. So how does one turn this…
…into a full story? Even the manual doesn’t tell you who or what a Yar is or what they want revenge for. It just says you play one, here’s the target, these are the weapons and enemies, now go. If you were one of those kids who didn’t read the manual, you still had no idea which if anything on the screen a Yar was or why they wanted revenge or if that was a good thing or not. I never had the 2600, but cousins did. I didn’t know it came with a comic, Yars’ Revenge: The Qotile Ultimatum! Produced by Atari themselves rather than DC Comics despite still being a Warner property at the time, we have a story…but is it any good? Was I better off NOT knowing?
It’s just the box art. Not sure how I feel about that.
Yars’ Revenge: The Qotile Ultimatum!
Atari (1982)
CARTRIDGE PROGRAMMER: Howard Scott Warshaw
WRITER: Hope Shafer
ARTISTS: Frank Cirocco, Ray Grant, & Hiro Kimura
ART DIRECTIOR: Steve Hendericks
Warshaw is the only notable name here, responsible for so many of Atari’s well received games. Then he was forced to get the famed ET game out in so little time that the end result was a mess. My old Reviewers Unknown colleague Test Zero made a video “defending” the game, but you won’t find many people behind him. It was confusing but I didn’t think it was close to the worst game out for the 2600 at the time. He became a writer after that. However, this game had a lot of praise, and now we can find out what the heck was going on.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy the streaming series only has a second season because they made it while the first season was starting. Otherwise the show is officially done…and nothing of value was lost. There is even questions about Alex Kurtzman’s future in the franchise, having produced failure after failure, the rare success occurring with projects he wasn’t part of, like season three of Picard. Kurtzman himself has said that his mission wasn’t to make Star Trek but to use Star Trek to send a message, meaning being part of the Hollywood-approved sociopolitical viewpoint was more important than making a proper continuation of Star Trek, while still proclaiming that he was following Gene Roddenberry’s vision of Star Trek. The same way Frank Miller treated Wil Eisner’s vision when he ruined The Spirit, maybe.
So what do to with the franchise now, even if Kurtzman does leave? Les Moonves gave him a strong contract as he went out the door because he hated Sherri Redstone for remerging Paramount and CBSViacom, weakening his authority as a result, and he hated Star Trek. Maybe he knew Kurtzman was going to ruin the brand, but I only otherwise know him from the Bayverse Transformers movie and Transformers Prime, where he’s only partly responsible for what happened with the Bay movies and was kept in check by everyone else making Prime. There’s been talk that Kurtzman has damaged the brand, and the best solution would be to disavow Kurtzman Trek and put the franchise on hiatus, burying his shows and hoping reruns of the classic shows and movies (the ones not made by JJ Abrams or called The Final Frontier or Nemesis) will find a new audience like they have since the original series hit syndicated reruns.
I think something a bit more proactive on everyone’s part might be the better option, and it’s something Disney was about to do: let the fans fix the brand. Star Trek fan films are something I’ve posted to this site before. The following video by Trek Vault on YouTube goes over what happened to the Star Trek fan film, and from there I’m going to show that it could be used to bring the brand back to its former glory.
BW Media Spotlight 