Earlier this week MTV’s Splash Page brought “exclusive” news that novelist S.E. Hinton will be joining the throngs of popular prose writers moving into the hot new medium of comics. Hinton will be working with Bluewater Productions, the company that published some comics based on Ray Harryhausen creations and concepts, but is probably best known for those weird “Female Force” biography comics that seem to generate plenty of mainstream media coverage every time an issue is announced.
Splash Page and Bluewater’s home page both have some covers and details, so head on over there for to take a look (My immediate reaction, you ask? Yuck). It sounds like the relationship will begin with Bluewater adapting some of Hinton’s pre-existing works, before writing “an entirely new title created specifically for Bluewater” in 2010.
I understand why comics publishers are so eager to accept the contributions of proven prose authors, what with their name recognition and their large audience of non-comics readers who would theoretically at least follow them into comic shops, but part of me still thinks there should be some kind of hazing ritual involved. Like Salman Rushdie will be allowed to write an original graphic novel, but first he has to write and draw his own minicomic to be published at a photocopier in a Kinkos, or Stephen King can develop a Vertigo ongoing, but only after a couple issues of Brave and the Bold.
I think I know the perfect title for Hinton’s hazing.
November 6th, 2009 at 10:30 am
Why not – nobody is buying comics anymore anyway. The days for comics are numbered unless new readers are brought in, you can kiss this medium goodbye. In the 90′s , 7 million people picked them up…now you are lucky if 150,000 pick them up…tick tock people.
So good for them. I will pick them up. I was a huge SE Hinton fan.
November 6th, 2009 at 10:52 am
“*Labored fanboy sigh*, After three issues of great characters and action, they just sit in an old church and talk Robert Frost? Who does Hinton think she is, Grant Morrison?”