Apparently, there’s going to be a 52 novelization. Infinite Crisis novelization author Greg Cox showed up on a message board devoted to the Question, and admitted that he was the writer of this one, too.
Am I the only person who thinks that 52 works because of the weekly format, and that a novelization will just be… weird?
January 11th, 2007 at 10:53 am
Maybe it will be pulished with weekly chapters, similar to what Stephen King did with the Green Mile.
January 11th, 2007 at 11:00 am
I think that any novelization of a comic book is weird. The whole point of the characters is to be in a visual medium IMO. At least with superheroes anyway.
Seems like with 52 in particular, at lot of the clues and storytelling would be lost in the translation. How do you convey the chaos and scattered clues of Rip Hunter’s lab and make it interesting without the great visual.
I guess it is possible, someone had to write it down in the first place
January 11th, 2007 at 11:31 am
I don’t think it’s too wierd. Yes, the crux of the serialization is that it’s week to week and it’s released week-to-week, but it’ll still hold up as 52 chapters of a graphic novel or a fiction novel.
And as to what a poster had said, in some cases a prose adaptation of comics would be awkward but in this case, 52, it’s a story-driven and word heavy comic that doens’t really much on the intricacies of stylized art.
Now, if someone were to try to do a prose adaptation of the recent PLASTIC MAN series, yeah that’d be awkward.
January 11th, 2007 at 11:31 am
The Death and Return of Superman novelization by Roger Stern was great, but I kind of doubt that I’d want to read a novelization of 52.
I think part of why I loved the Superman novel so much was because I couldn’t afford all the comics at the time.
January 11th, 2007 at 11:37 am
Chris – It’s not that I think novelizations of comics per se are bad, but that I think that the enjoyment I get from 52, while all based around the writing, stems from the fact that it’s being written as a weekly comic book – I enjoy it the same way I enjoy Lost, for example… There’s a cliffhanger element, a “what will they do next?” thing, that makes me want to know what happens next, but I’m not sure if it the actual plot(s) is/are enough to satisfy outside of the novelty of the frequency/format. If that makes sense?
January 11th, 2007 at 1:21 pm
I know The God Of Literature will strike me down for even saying this, but I expect it’ll read much like Tale Of Two Cities, or other originally serialized Dickens. It’ll be a book that reads as a juggling act, and will work (or not) primarily on the strength of the plot. Especially as characters get dropped, and you keep reading to get to the next time their plot gets introduced.
(Not as good as Dickens, mind you. I’m not completely addle-pated. Just similar in structure.)
January 11th, 2007 at 2:10 pm
Since I find the pacing and storytelling in 52 to be less like most comics and more like novels, I think this is a natural progression.
January 11th, 2007 at 3:52 pm
The only comic to text translation that works for me was Elliot S. Maggin’s adaptation of “Kingdom Come”.
Elliott didn’t stay bound to giving a “play by play” of what was in the original story (what I felt was the cardinal sin of the “Infinite Crisis” novel), and was free to expand on and add scenes. It also helped that the size of the story didn’t require much of the tale to be abridged (like the “Batman: No Man’s Land” and “Death and Life of Superman” books had to do.
Wolfman’s Crisis on Infinite Earths novel works as a book, as it provides a whole new perspective on the Crisis, but to really enjoy it you MUST have read the original comic. I didn’t think it held up well as a stand alone project for non-comic readers.
52: the Novel is going to distill 1000+ comic pages into less than half as many text pages. It can’t hope but be much more than a “Cliffs Notes” version of the comic.
January 11th, 2007 at 5:51 pm
This isn’t really news to me. I met Greg Cox a few months back in Blue Hen Comics in Newark, Delaware. He was very nice, told me how he got the job, and said that he was having trouble because he only had the scripts to issue thirty something.
He also had a broken arm.
January 14th, 2007 at 12:10 am
I totally agree with Lavasseur’s mention pf Maggin’s Kingdom Come. To hear that book on audio tape (no joke) was a blast.
February 14th, 2007 at 7:05 pm
Thanks for your interest. I’m glad to report that the 52 book is pretty much finished. It ended up being about 10,000 words longer than the INFINITE CRISIS book, but I still had to trim the plot down pretty dramatically!
P.S. to Matthew: my arm is much better now!