A couple more announcements from Dynamite Entertainment to tell you about before I hightail it to San Diego – not only are they bringing in J. Michael Straczynski to write a new Twilight Zone series, but they’ve also nabbed the rights to make a comic version of the Fox animated series Bob’s Burgers.
“We could not be more pleased to add Bob’s Burgers to the our line of comics,” says Nick Barrucci, CEO of Dynamite. “It’s stylish and hilarious, a feel-good concept that can be both heartwarming and mischievous at the same time. When we told our team that we were approaching Fox for the license, everyone lit up at the opportunity. We look forward to working with our partners at Fox to put out a fantastic product that will appeal to readers of all ages.”
If you don’t know, Bob’s Burgers is about Bob who runs a burger stand with his wacky family. People seem to like that show.
A lot of people also like The Twilight Zone, a legendary series telling strange, dark, and eerie stories with a science fiction bent – so much so that it’s had its share of attempted relaunches over the years, one of which Straczynski actually wrote for previously.
“One of the most deeply satisfying and creatively exciting experiences I’ve had in 25 years of writing for television and film was my stint on the new Twilight Zone television series,” says Straczynski. “I’ve been a fan of the original series since I was tall enough to reach for the TV tuner. So I was profoundly excited when Nick Barrucci came to me with the possibility of doing the new Twilight Zone comic to come out from Dynamite.”
“The immediate creative question to be resolved was: how do you transplant or adapt the TV anthology format into comic form?,” JMS continues. “Individual stand-alone issues don’t give the issue-to-issue continuity you need to consistently bring in modern readers, and if it’s a year long arc, it’s not an anthology. The solution: three four-issue arcs that are connected by theme, character, and location… so that in reading one arc you get one side of the story, with its own supernatural or science-fiction elements, then you turn the character around to another character in that sequence who has his or her own story for the next four issues… and then at the end, you connect all of these individual stories into one overlapping tapestry, so you could literally view the book as individual stories as initially published, or layer the pages to create one big story. It’s a cool structure that I’m not sure has been attempted before, so this will be an awful lot of fun. I’m very excited to be working with Nick and his team on this book, and hope folks will check out the books when they come out.”
Will you check these books out when they arrive?