BW Media Spotlight

We’ve finished our fantastic voyage and now it’s time to move on to another book in my library. As much as I hate to mention him, remember Dr. Wertham from last summer and his belief that you can’t read both comics and books? And his loathing of comic adaptations because the book is superior and stuff? Comics adapting novels is nothing new. Novels adapting comics is a bit rarer but I do own two of those, one of which we’ll be reviewing this week. There have been novels using superheroes both comic-born and created for prose, but usually if you want to see a story arc from comics you just get the trade collections and all is good. But before trades watered down the concept of trade collections and padded out storylines because “everything must be EPIC!!!!!!!!!” a novelization could be a new way to tell the story. And with a story this important to comics history I’m not surprised it was made into a novel.

And one of the writers in that multiple issue storyline is the novelist for this book. Will he change things he didn’t like from the other writers like Isaac Asimov did? We can at least assume this isn’t based on early scripts like most other adaptations, so anyone who has seen the entire story of over forty comics can tell us what was changed between the comics and the novel. However, don’t think that Fredric “book rule, comics drool” Wertham would call this revenge, because he’d only like part of this book, considering the superhero he seemed to hate the most. It’s also tied to four comics I’ve already reviewed, only one of which is part of this story. That should be enough hints for the front page. So if you haven’t guessed, the eleventh installment of Chapter By Chapter is…..

Continue reading →