No, probably not going to happen, but worth shooting for.
]]>And, speaking of C J Cheryh, if Dune counts, then the Gene Wars series does too, particularly Hammerfall, which has your classic fantasy writing style on top of the (initially) well hidden eco-sci-fi worldbuilding.
]]>Seconded. My google-fu is weak.
]]>"I suggest you go into a bookstore and look at the dust jacket author photos"...
I'm not buying this. Dustjacket photos? In 2015? The market split between ebook and paper is, what, close on 50/50 these days? (Yes, wild variance depending on genre/author/other, but overall around there). No dustjackets on electrons.
And of those buying paper, how many buy hardback, which often have a picture, vs paper back, which usually don't? 10% hardback? 5%?
And of those buying hardback, how many of those are looking at an author they've never seen before, compared to those who are buying hardback because they know the author, love them, and want the new one now, dammit, now!, and are prepared to pay the premium for that?
No, I can buy readers making unconscious (or sometimes even conscious) decisions based on gender inferred from author's names. And I can certainly buy the publishing industry making judgements based on an author's age/attractiveness, because at some point they're going to meet them. But the vast, vast majority of readers aren't going to make that kind of judgement, not because they're nice, non-sexist, non-ageist people, even unconsciously, but because they simply won't know.
]]>Granted, the site is trying to sell stuff. But given that the stuff its trying to sell is using the name Bob Howard attached to plots about combating Cthulu, this would appear to be walking a fine line on the whole selling fanfic question, an aspect that may be of interest here.
]]>Hmm. Filing under Short Film #5. I've been wanting to do something a little more political."
Been done, at least in one variation: Eat the Rich
]]>Most of my favourites have already been mentioned (Schlock Mercenary, Order of the Stick and Erfworld in particular are fantastic, and Freefall is also very good, and hasn't gotten enough love this thread), and Ctrl-Alt-Del doesn't need any pushing from me, given the dude just got more than half a million dollars from a kickstarter to print the back catalog.
But I can't believe we're this many comments in without someone mentioning Sluggy Freelance, another fantastic and long running one (15 years and counting), that I've been following for well over a decade. I have absolutely no idea how to describe it, though. Started out a simple gag-a-day comic and morphed into a series of really good plot arcs interspersed with smaller humour focused arcs and parody arcs. Its moderately odd, and very funny.
Oh, and its also worth mentioning something a little different that I really enjoyed, a couple of screencap comics based on the Lord of the Rings and the Star Wars series respectively. From the first page of DM of the Rings:
"Lord of the Rings is more or less the foundation of modern D&D. The latter rose from the former, although the two are now so estranged that to reunite them would be an act of savage madness. Imagine a gaggle of modern hack-n-slash roleplayers who had somehow never been exposed to the original Tolkien mythos, and then imagine taking those players and trying to introduce them to Tolkien via a D&D campaign."
Darths and Droids was inspired by DM of the Rings, and is the same sort of idea, but applied to the Star Wars films (currently working its way through Return of the Jedi, having started with the prequels).
]]>And yet, a lot of the time they don't. Another thing that, looking for the outside, seems crazy to me. You'd think that releasing in one market first (typically the US, though not always - sometime we get it first over here), particularly after marketing it like crazy over web, global by definition (language issues notwithstanding), is a huge incentive to piracy for people who are now desperate to see it and pissed that they can't, whilst the bloody americans (or whoever) get it first again. (Boy, that was a long sentence. I need to invest in more full stops).
Yeah, its probably a tough logistics issue, but surely the reduction in incentive to piracy would be worth it. Don't they realise that one of the the biggest piracy drivers is people being pissed off with you being unfair? Or do they figure its going to get pirated anyway, so what the hell? I guess they have people to run the numbers on that, and I don't, so maybe they have and the numbers don't support it.
]]>Possibly. 2 sequentially maybe, and 3 sequentially definitely, would break the movie series, but the TV series ought to be able to soldier on, and provide a core viewership for 5 years down the line when the memory of the flops had faded and they could try again. On the other hand, a flop followed by another success or 2, followed by another flop, would just be shrugged off as "that's holywood". Might take the shine off, but eminently recoverable.
Losing the creative vision would, too.
This, I think, would be the greater threat. The central creative vision is what's been driving this, largely down to Joe Quesada and the Marvel Creative Committee. If Joe fell under a bus tomorrow, things could get sticky, but they seem to have done a good job of getting everyone on board with the basic concepts (letting story drive everything else, making it all interconnected, etc), so hopefully someone would step up.
What could really kill it is someone at Disney deciding they can do it better and taking over. The reason this seems to be going so well is that when Disney took over Marvel, they basically gave them a bunch of money and a long leash and let them at it (and put out some buckets to collect the money that rained down).
Actually, and this goes to what Hugh was saying @53 I think that is probably the big difference between Disney/Marvel and DC/Warner Bros. DC have some input, but WB is in the driving seat and are calling the shots, so they're being typical studio execs and focusing on individual films and film series and farming out the other stuff to other people who are going off and doing their own thing. There's no single creative vision and the film side is being handled by film guys who are trying to copy the Marvel playbook without really understanding it.
So you get stuff like the TV series being explicitly a different universe to the films, and film scripts being decided by competitive tender and then tinkered with by the studio right up to and during production depending on what Marvel's been doing this week, and every other mistake that anyone on the outside can look at say how crazy it is.
If you're interested in this sort of stuff, I can thoroughly recommend Kevin Smith's "Fatman on Batman" recent podcasts, particularly the ones where he interviews Joe Quesada (there's 3 of those), there's a lot of fascinating behind the scenes stuff about how Marvel works in there, and the recent Utility Belt episodes about general comic book related TV and Film news.
]]>Marvel's strategy of multiple individual character movie series, coming together for occasional team-up mega movies, has been firehosing money at them since Iron Man back in 2008, and there doesn't seem to be any prospect for it slackening off this decade. They've got no end of material to mine, and they seem to have the writers and directors to pull it off time and again. DC/WB looks to be trying the same thing with their IP, and if they manage it, you can bet the rest of hollywood is going to be trying to get in on the formula.
Its also worth noting the relationship between TV and film that Marvel have been developing. Their TV series and films explicitly share the same universe, with actions on film being referenced and used in the series and vice versa. TV series graduating to film is nothing new, of course, and even a TV series doing a film then more TV has been done, but no-one has really taken multiple parallel series and multiple parallel films and inter-related them this way before. This allows them to, for example, do deep character stuff on TV, then use those established characters to blow stuff up in the features, then examine the results in the series, and so on. Crucially, it gives them a built in audience for the features who want to follow the story that has been built in the series. Its seriously addictive, and that means seriously lucrative.
]]>Depends how often you want to replace it, after its been stolen/broken (by sitting on it and flexing the card enough to eventually break the chip).
So, no, I don't. My wife did for a while, but around the 8th replacement she stopped.
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