What about when comics remake old strories , wholly or at least in part ?
I guess I mean REMAKES , more or less flat-out reworkings/repeats of an old story , not revisting the well of a core concept of the series ( Aunt May is at the brink of death !!!!!!! Captain America becomes disillusioned with Cap-ness/The Shadowy People who are around at present , and quits being Cap/is forced to !!!!!!! Archie accidentally makes a date for the prom...with BOTH Bets and Ronnie !!!!!!!!! Woo hoo !!!!!!! ) , tho at times , as my joke above may suggest , it could , perhaps , be hard to decide which is which .
The most famous example here would be , of course , Mort Wesinger's flat-out remakes of older Superman stories from time to time in his day as boss of the Man Of Tomorrow .
During the Silver Age , all of the Gold Key version and some of the King Comics issues of the Phantom were re-makes of specific newspaper strip stories from Lee Falk's original syndcated strip , and at least some King Mandrake the Magician stories were ditto .
In the immediate aftermath of Crisis , I remember DC toying for a while with flat-out " post-Crisis remakes " of famed DCU stories...I remember redos of " Flash Of Two Earths " and " The Penny Plunderers " ( the story that is the reason for the giant Abe coin in th' 'Cave ) .
Now , bluntly , the " cosmic reset button " approach that recent-years ideas in re-doing established characters has led to has tended to lead to " sorta " re-tellings of older stories for to-day's world...the Fatal Five are back !!!!! Flash Thompson is , um , whatever he is !!!!! And the Legion...
Wanna bet that DCNU will end up running into some more of these ??? Does a bear eliminate in the woods ???
Replies
...A few years ago , a SUPERMAN/BATMAN annual had a story , by Len Wein IIRC , that was stated as being a " reimagining " ( Bllaaahhh ! Dag nasty Hollywood phrase !!!!!!! ) of an old story , but it did not say what it reimagined .
The villian of the story had the looks of the SA villian the Composite Superman - but he was not called that , nor did he have his powers , and the story didn't resemebe any of he CS stories that I recall .
The Mickey Mouse stories serialized in WALT DISNEY'S COMICS AND STORIES of old moved , around about the 1950s?? , from reprinted nMick syndicated stories to remakes for comic-book format of those stories to , later still , some RE-re-makes of those stories by different still artists !
The many TARZAN comic books have , between them , over the years , done different adaptations of ERB's actual canon Lord Greystroke prose stories .
In modern , post-Lee Falk times , the THE PHANTOM newspaper strip sometimes has used storylines also published in the never-published-in-America comic book stories of The Ghost Who Walks produced by Swedish company Egmont , though generall only after an emergency/piece of Dreaded Deadline Doom , I believe !!
In the mid-70s DC experimented with re-making a few?? Golden Age Flash scripts and publishing them in FOUR STAR SPECTACULAR , IIRC .
At Archiefans.Com there's a discussion going down about flat-out remakes of Archie scripts over the years - There seem to be a few examples cited of stories originally done in the " main " Archie titles being redone as LITTLE ARCHIE stories !
Continuing from that , I have read in the past that the 50s SUPERMAN newspaper strip often had stories that were in the strip re-used in the comic books as Super-BOY stories - However , it also appears established that the strip frequently shared stories between the comic book and the strip that were both of Metropilis's defender , not Smallville's - Apparently , there were even some cases-
- where maximum efficiency was reached by a story appearing in the TV show , the comic strip , and the funnybook !!!!!!!!! This may have included the classic " The Girl Who Didn't Believe In Superman " story - whose TV-side author was pretty unhappy to discover , years later , that his story had been used in the comc book as well !!!!!!!!! Those DC cats and their contracts , dude , you should''ve asked Seigel & Shuster...
About the last #110s in THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN , Stan Lee , IIRC , re-used his " mayoral candidate " story from THE SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN #1 four years previous , partially doing a colorized reprint of it and adding some new pages relating to the 616 of the day , just as the original had related to 1968's 616 !!!!!!!!! I read of this in the comic at the time and , though I knew of the 1968 SS-M , I had never read it , and , in 1972 I admired that...New York's mayors ( as with CHicago's and San Francisco's ) are elected in the odd-numbered year AFTER Presidential election years , but..." New York is not America " , I suppose !!!!!!!!! Hah hah . Perhaps Silver Age purists could consider the rre-vamp from '72 a place where the " later " , Bronze Age MU starts to divert from the " classic " , Silver 616...
After ZERO HOUR, DC's totally rebooted LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES from scratch (since the years after CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS had become increasingly chaotic and insane). So, 9 years after SUPERMAN and BATMAN and WONDER WOMAN, we started seeing all-new versions of some old stories. Things actually went quite well, until writer Tom Peyer deliberately began screwing with things, because, it was reported, he got a kick out of PISSING OFF Legion fans. Gee, is this really the kind of guy you want writing a book???
As I said, it was kinda neat at first, because originally, the LEGION's early history was told completely out of order, the odd flashback here and there, etc. After ZERO HOUR, they began from the word go, and moved on from there. It's just a shame things got so chaotic after the first 2 years, to the point that the editor eventually decided to FIRE the entire creative team and do a drastic change of direction. Once they got past LEGION LOST, the new series, called simply THE LEGION, was actually pretty damn good... uintil Marvel hired their hot new artist away for more money (and to do books that weren't half as inspired). Even so, things continued on a decent clip... until someone decided to DUMP the entire "new" continuity in favor of Mark Waid's NEW "new" continuity. 5 months in, I stopped reading, and have not looked back since. (Screw you, DC!!!)
In the late 80's, LEGENDS OF THE DARK KNIGHT was my favorite BAT-book, mainly because it dealt with the early years of the "new" Batman. I thought it was a serious error in judgment to tell a totally redone origin, then JUMP 10 years ahead, so you had no idea what went on in those 10 years, except for hints here and references there. In LOTDK, they slowly filled in those missing years... but totally out of sequence. Honest, wouldn't it have made more sense just to do with Batman what they did with the LEGION 9 years after-the-fact? Star AT the new beginning and move on FROM THERE?
To this day, my all-time favorite Post-CRISIS Bat-story is "PREY", by Moench, Gulacy & Austin, which told the new version of Batman's 1st clash with Professor Hugo Strange. It also introduced the 1st prototype Batmobile (a 1-seater), and an early appearance of Catwoman. (Nobody ever drew her as HHHHHHHOT as Gulacy!!) The whole time, I kept wondering, is this a prequel to Steve Englehart & Marshall Rogers' Hugo Strange story? Well... apparently NOT...
Similarly, I recall when some writer (?) and Craig Russell told the "2ND" Poison Ivy story. Cool story. But I wondered... WHERE the hell was the 1st story??? (And-- did they ever tell it in the new continuity? Or, should I now say, the PREVIOUS new continuity?)
Another of my favorite Post-CRISIS Bat stories was one of the Annuals the year they retold villains' origins. Chuck Dixon told the origin of The Riddler-- and in all my years of reading Batman comics, that became my FAVORITE Riddle comics story of all time!! He started out by retelling the original 1953 story (part of which wound up in the John Astin TV story-- I'm not making this up), but "fleshed it out" wonderfully. Along the way, he became the first writer to ever make me "hear" Frank Gorshin's voice in my head as I read The Riddler's dialogue. You could say, that comic was the origin of the TV Riddler. Gorshin was always the most dangerous of the villains on that show (apart from George Sanders, anyway).
...I was under the impression that LOTDK was " not in continuity " , or , didn't HAVE to be , the idea that it " filled in " the 9 years between " Batman: Year One " and the present time is new to me !!!
I thought that the first Riddler stories were from the post-WWII Forties , two back to back , and then none until the New Look Batman story " The Remerkable Ruse Of The Riddler " , which was the basis of the pilot episode on the ABC 60s series . Am I wrong ?
Have both those 40s?? Riddler stories been reprinted , in either Archives or Chronicles ? What ish/year was this Dix Riddler ???
Okay, I got the year wrong, The Riddler's debut was in DETECTIVE #140 / Oct'48. Elements of that story (specifically, robbing an underground bank vault after it had been flooded) turned up in both the John Astin TV story and the Chuck Dixon origin. Looks like that was in DETECTIVE COMICS ANNUAL #8 / 1995, art by Keiron Dwyer.
Yeah, I've heard that LOTDK were "not necessarily in continuity", but that always offended and annoyed me. Just a very sloppy attitude for anyone to have. I'll tell you what was actually amazing, though. Someone in KLORDNY around 20 years ago put together a timeline for events in the Post-CRISIS DCU, or perhaps it was just Batman stories, and it blew my mind that they had managed (up to a point) to be so consistent, without things contradicting other things all over the place. That must have been a Herculean effort. I always figured that after ZERO HOUR, though, that got thrown right out the window, since so many editors decided to use ZERO HOUR, rather than something to clear up inconsistencies, as an EXCUSE to create more.
Certain stories in LOTDK were clearly meant to be in the new continuity, though I suppose some writers just used it as a casual sort of "Elsewheres" book.
...Thank you . KLORDNY is an acronym for...???
...Speaking of " The Penny Plunders " , a bit back I bought an old copy of LOTDK and in its LOC there was a letter (or more) correcting a false statement the LOC answer-writer in Editorial had made about where the Bat-Penny came from , s/he had not known about " TPP " .
S/he then said , however , that " TPP " wasn't recognized in present-day Batman continuit at that point and they might come up w/a new " Penny-setter " !!!!!!!!!!!
Denny O'Neil did a story arc for Legends of the Dark Knight titled "Venom," and noted in the letters pages that he had done that story twice before, in Richard Dragon, Kung Fu Fighter and in Detective Comics.
I also recall that Michael Fleischer did a Weird Western Tales story in which Jonah Hex was struck blind and traveled in the company of a wandering Shakespearean actor for a week while being chased by two guys out for revenge because Hex killed their brother. Years later, I saw that same idea used in an issue of Conan the Barbarian, written by Fleischer.
I've said a couple of times on this board, that DC's formula for Superman stories in the 90s was to re-do Imaginary Stories, many of which had originally not even taken up a whole comic, in slow-motion as in-continuity stories.
Thus we had months-long versions of the death of Superman, the marriage of Superman, Superman Red and Superman Blue etc etc.
-
1
-
2
of 2 Next