I’ll admit it: Marvel publishing a tie-in to ABC’s Castle feels like a masterstroke of Corporate Synergy to me, even if I’m not convinced that Brian Michael Bendis will be able to capture the tone or speed that we’ve been led to expect from a Richard Castle literary “joint” by the three seasons of the show so far (That said, I can see Kelly Sue DeConnick getting that just right, so maybe I should trust in the co-writing team as a whole). But it does make me wonder whether this is just the start of possible bleed between ABC shows and Marvel product.
Over the last few months, we’ve started seeing Disney product pop up in Marvel releases, whether it’s Tron-themed covers (or Tron comics, for that matter) or the Pixar books jumping from Boom! to Marvel so quickly that they’ve not had any new material to fill them with, so this latest instance of transmedia tie-in feels less like a special event in and of itself than the latest in a series of Mouse-inspired favors, and makes me wonder what’s next. Admittedly, I think it’ll be sometime before we see a press release promising Matt Fraction’s Desperate Housewives, but there are more than a few shows on the alphabet network that could have enough of a fanbase within the comic market to gamble an OGN or two. For example, the just-canceled V (The original version of which had its own DC-published comic back in the ’80s) or last year’s uncompleted FlashForward… or even Lost, if someone at the House of Ideas could come up with a way to follow that up without ruining the show’s legacy (Maybe a DHARMA Initiative-centric series? Calling Jonathan Hickman…)? We’ve not really seen Marvel buy into the “continuation of canceled television series” thing yet, but maybe it was merely because no-one at ABC had realized they had a comic book publisher sibling before now…
