So...why aren't there actual comics, again?

I've been barrelling through several episodes of The Letters Page and I love hearing Christopher and Adam's passion for the source material. I've been playing SotM for years, but I guess I never realized how much lore they've truly thought about ahead of time and how much information is rattling in their brains...but it begs the question: Why aren't these real comics?

I can't for the life of me figure out why much of the world doesn't know the awesome story of the Parsons family, or why other comics that I read don't have random Cult of Gloom mooks to punch, or why the majority of comic readers couldn't tell you Lillian Corvus' remarkable transition from Villain to Hero! I think everyone here knows that Christopher and Adam are masterful storytellers and, I mean, Marvel didn't become Marvel in a day, so I'm in awe that these extravagent and intelligent storylines aren't put to ink and pen in significant comic-y ways, yet. Even just a single monthly book. What's the deal =)?

Because there are only so many hours in the day and as yet no one has invented the technology that can clone Adam and Christopher successfully. An attempt was made... but the less said about Adapher now living in the basement of >G HQ, the better.

On nights when the full moon is especially bright, one speaks of sightings, at the northeastern corner of their warehouse block, fingers - all twelve of them - grasping through the drainage grate as if reaching for the moon. And a croaky voice chanting about reading letters to you.

Oh yeah, I mean, Christopher and Adam are super busy gents. I wouldn't expect them to be able to write a million comics, but it's not like Stan Lee writes each Marvel issue, ya know? Would it be odd to have these characters drawn by anyone other than Adam, of course...but that's just the way comics are, really. I'm ready for the new publishing powerhouse to make it's appearance in the real world! =P

IIRC, Christopher and Adam have said that the reason they don't do comics is because it's really hard to be financially viable with comics, and it was much easier to make actual money off stuff like tabletop games.

I'd still love to see something, though. I discovered that Magic: the Gathering puts out free stories about their universes, so, that made me think it'd be kind of cool to see a periodic thing from Christopher and Adam on the web about their universe. I'd love to see minicomics similar to the ones in the Tactics scenario books, maybe once a month or every other month. I wouldn't even mind if they're not free, like if they opened a Patreon or something.

A thing to remember is that we're getting all the stories in abstract form -- we're getting the summaries and after-action reports that don't include the nuts and bolts.

A disclaimer here: The lore is one of my favorite things about SOTM, to the point where my game group is probably a little sick of me gushing about it. I love the world that Christopher and Adam have built and the way they've thought up not only the characters' backstories, but the backstories of the comic company itself. So I don't want anything I say to be taken as a slight against their writing (and drawing) abilities.

Now, let's say someone pitched to us a story about a noble hero, born to save the world with incredible power, but in trying to help the ones he loves, ends up dooming the very people he meant to save.

That sounds like an awesome, badass story, right? It's got all the right elements in the pitch for something that would be fantastically tragic to watch.

But then if you go and film it and call it Star Wars: Episode I, II and III, that's where you run into a problem.

See, we're all imagining idealized versions of the storylines they're describing -- dialog that really works, art that is visually stunning, storylines that are well-plotted and coherent. All things that are easy to describe in a podcast, but execution is much, much trickier.

I admire Christopher and Adam's storytelling ability and what they have shown and told us is fantastic, otherwise I wouldn't be listening to the podcast every week. But as a writer myself, I know that not everything you plot out ends up executing as well as you'd hoped, and sometimes it just plain flops.

So while I would certainly buy and probably enjoy comics with these heroes, I'm also perfectly fine with leaving them to the imagination.

If they did do this, and they have enough cash to open up 3 shops, where would they be? I'd say Indy, London and St. Louis.

This is an excellent point, and something I’ve been thinking about as I listen to The Letters Page. We’re hearing the story beats in condensed and archetypal form, but we’re not getting the dialogue or the expository descriptions that would be written in a book. Your example is wonderful: however compelling the plotlines might be, if the author wrote “I hate sand” too much, a good story becomes cringeworthy.

This isn’t too say that I think Christopher and Adam would write a terrible story. They’ve demonstrated through the flavor text, at least, that they can write good lines. Freedom Five Annual #1 shows they can put things together, but it is a little rough. OblivAeon, and the included comic, will be the real test. I’m confident that Adam and Christopher can rise to the education and will enjoy doing it in the process. I think we’ll have a really fun result, too.

We’ll see!

If there was a print-on-demand service like DriveThruCards or The Game Crafter, except for comics, then they could publish comics without the need to worry about having to print a large batch and hoping it'll sell well, though I'm sure just about everyone here would buy them.

Marvel and DC couldn't remain financially viable selling comics and had to be purchased by Disney and Time Warner, respectively, in order to continue existing. Comics are incredibly expensive to make from a labor standpoint, and too few people buy them.

....touche

And they're still floundering, arguably worse than before. Marvel's best-selling book is at around 60,000 copies. In the 90's when the industry crashed, books were considered a failure if they were selling 80,000 or below. We have talked extensively about comics and how to make and distribute them, and while I wouldn't take it completely off the table, I'd say it likely won't happen soon, and if it does, don't expect it in a traditional fashion. 

Frankly, I'm expecting an experiment with Tactics Scenario-style comics for either Prime War mid-season events, or RPG modules that have some comic intro that is a few pages. The Tactics scenario booklets hit a sweet spot for me with enough of a story, but they are a (mostly) complete arc. If there was a quarterly Tactics scenario booklet with some sort of ongoing story, it would be a neat way to further the timeline. I know I would buy pdf/digital versions, as I can't imagine it's at all cost-effective to produce physical copies until a certain critical mass is reached...

All that to say: non-traditional sounds like a great deal!

Adam, if you ever do make comics, I hope you populate them with dialogue from the Letters Page. I was imagining various scenes in the Chokepoint episode today as comic panels, and it was mar--

(Oh wait, I can't say Marvel...) It was Sentinelsous.

As long as every issue has Christopher and Adam as unreliable narrarators that keep saying "And you'll never see that character again."

Man, this just makes me think how much DC missed out on a great joke by not putting "The Death of Resurrection Man!" on every cover of every issue of Resurrection Man.

In old-timey radio voice, I hope.

Creating 'trade paperback collections' of entire story arcs might be the way to go here. Perhaps as its own KS once every two years? Shorter arcs like Fall of Legacy / Freedom Six / Final Legacy may be a good experiment?

This is me laying it out with crossed fingers 

Thematically this is also a continuation of GtG's role in archiving Sentinels Comics stories which have been told by previous writers over the company's long publication history.

FWIW I personally would be pretty content just getting stuff around the same quantity/quality level as the Tactics scenario books on a semi-regular basis. I'd be equally content with getting it digitally and/or paying for it. (If anything I'd prefer digital, as I just don't have room to store a lot of paper-based stuff any longer.)

Hey, Adam, I’m curious: how have your thoughts changed over the course of working on the OblivAeon comic so far?

I wonder if this might not be more economically feasible than single-issue comics. 

I know I'd be more likely to buy trades than issues.

Surely, at that point, they're just really long issues? :P

Edit: Or they leap from TPB to graphic novel.

Honstely, the line between those is generally fuzzy anyway, as a Trade Paperback isn't comic-specific.

Edit: specifically, Trade Paperback refers to any paperback larger than the standard Mass-Market paperback size.  (See Sam Sykes's works for example)

Good to know. I always assumed TPB was the catchall term for a collection of issues. Thanks for teaching me something.

I would prefer some kind of illustrated overview of the events of Sentinels Comics rather than the actual issues themselves.  GtG's strengths seem to be in plotting out interesting stories and characters but maybe not so much in telling the line-by-line details of those stories.  For example, pg. 5 of FF Annual #1 has Legacy confronting Baron Blade with this awesome dialog:

"I should have known it was you when I received reports of disturbances in the airspace over the center of the Atlantic Ocean.  Though you should know that, no matter what terrible plot you are enacting, I will stop you."

To which Baron Blade replies:

"You seem so certain! As always, you are the greatest obstacle!  Not the limitations of the materials, nor the energy consumption of my inventions, but you, a mere man!"

That kind of stilted dialog is fine when you're describing an encounter between archetypes, but as soon as you imagine those words actually coming out of someone's mouth, you cringe a little.  No offense meant, but I know I couldn't read dozens of comics like that.

Savage

I only even know this because of my book addiction.  (I can quit reading anytime I want.  After this chapter) I had to look it up on Wikipedia to confirm.  (most comic collections qualify as Trades because of the height of the book and the quality of the paper, apparently)

My collection of books is a glory to behold, unless you ask my fiancee, in which case the books have turned into a Paper Ooze that's threatening to eat the rest of the Condo.

Ha, I'm not trying to be mean.  I think the overall arc of the stories are great, and I'd love to learn what happened in each of the issues in Sentinels Comics.  But the dialogue we've seen so far is a little more on the George Lucas end of the spectrum than the Tarantino end so maybe focusing at a slightly higher level would play more to their strengths, is all I'm saying.

Yeah, there's a handful of the flavor text that's a little cringy to read. Legacy's deck in particular comes to mind; some of it I can excuse because, okay, Legacy probably would be that cheesy, but it's hard to imagine the Wraith really saying, "Yeah! Take that!" like on Motivational Charge.

I agree that the Freedom Four Annual #1 was a little lack-luster, with not enough going on in each panel. But I also think their detail-level storytelling has improved since then. The scenario books in Tactics were much better, I thought.

I’d say their wiring has definitely improved since FF #1. Even the snippets of writing we saw during the ARG were a big improvement - and they had to work in all those clues!

Practice makes perfect, as they say.

The F5 Annual writing is about on par with the 60s and 70s Avengers dialogue, I feel.

In turn, the Tactics books are about on par with modern Marvel comics in dialogue.

Makes a weird sort of sense once I think about it that way.

(Petition for giving Argent some personality other than "srs bsns" in the future Prime War scenario books, though...)

When was the FF#1 annual meant to come out? I mean, in universe what time period was it suppose to be written? Is the dialogue appropriate to that age?

That's a good question. It's when the team gets formed, after all, so I get the impression it's pretty early on in things. I think based on some of the stuff in the Bunker and Absolute Zero podcasts, I'd push it forward to the 80s as my own tentative guess, but comics dialogue was still pretty cheesy back then.

The wiki would agree with you. It places it in the 'Modern Age' which started in the mid-1980s.

I love cheese. So if Legacy and Baron Blade ham it up I am happy. I also forgive FF4 #1 because it is trying to cover a lot in one issue. It has to make sure the readers know who each hero is and what they are about.
Most #1 of a team comic are not the best. It was a good jumping off point.

There's often a fine line between cheesy and inspired, and quite often that line is moved one way or the other by the delivery (or, in the case of comics, the art). Context counts for a lot, and flavor text on a card doesn't give a ton of context.

For the dialogue...I think I am willing to forgive it because of the Silver Age...

Even modern comics, you have a lot of dialogue that would be painful to hear out loud. So, yeah, some of the flavor text and the comics was hammy and a bit overdone...

But what can you expect from a character inspired by - DOCTOR DOOM!

As someone who started reading superhero comics in the 00s (always loved superhero A/V media, but never got into the comics before then), I gotta admit that reading anything written before the mid-90s or so could sometimes be really painful to read.

I don't mind SotM because it's deliberately designed as an homage to comics of all eras so I enjoy it as that sort of sometimes intentionally cheesy pastiche, but the actual RL comics just don't age very well.

Hence why I said I'd be pretty happy to get Tactics-style vignettes on a semi-regular basis; I think they're at a great place quality-wise while still having just the right amount of cheese and humor going on.