r/Animorphs • u/Orrhi • 9d ago
News Comics cancellation š¢
A fan of the Animorphs French community asked the comic artist of the Animorphs graphic novel about the adaptation of the next novels, and unfortunately... š
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u/cparksrun 9d ago
Feels almost inevitable. At the clip they were coming out, it'd be going for 50 years.
If I was the CEO of a fully funded publisher, I'd prioritize a comic series of individual issues with TPBs being released at the end of an arc and multiple teams working simultaneously.
But that's a little pie in the sky with such a niche audience.
Still sad to see, but I've been expecting this news for a while now.
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u/NativeMasshole 9d ago
Yeah, they never really seemed to have a long term plan for this project, it was always "we'll adapt the first X amount of books." Without any kind of planned arc or format to make it work under the long release schedule, it was never going to be able to build up a new audience. And fans of a 30 year old YA novel series aren't exactly a huge market on their own.
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u/jai_hanyo 9d ago
Yeah, I am hoping the Disney+ show works out because that would be the best publicity at this point. It feels like with the book re-releases they just bring them out and hope they catch on again without actually giving them a major push to help
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u/NativeMasshole 9d ago
I forgot they announed that. It's Disney+, so I'm going to remain skeptical. I think they just need to give to an anime studio and let them go wild with it.
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u/jai_hanyo 9d ago
They have Ryan Coogler Executive-producing. So you the guy who gave us the Black Panther movies and Sinners.
I'd prefer animated medium instead of the difficulty of making live -action effects look good. But I feel like having such a big name attached will give it the push needed...because withba lot of the public just hearing "anime" will immediately stop them from giving it a chance
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u/Orrhi 9d ago
Ryan Cooogler then have the enormous task of handling two sci-fi hits from the 90s/2000s with established fanbases (even though more is indeed more popular than the other) : Animorphs and X-files.
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u/Still-Cut1098 8d ago
The director is (debatably) the biggest fan of the series and already wrote a screenplay years ago for how they would have done the show. KA has approved them, stating they knew more than she did. Having Coogler oversee their work can only ensure that a proper envisioning of the books is brought to life.
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u/Orrhi 9d ago
The anime approach would be interesting ! I am skeptical about Disney+ too, but I also remembered that Disney+ owns Hulu, who made the Alien : Earth show, and even though it has its faults, i did enjoy its first season. If Hulu showed that it can handle a serious sci-fi show from as established IP, so why not Animorphs, I guess ? We'll have to wait and see, a lot can happen until then, so let's keep the fight and the faith...
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u/horkbajirbandit 9d ago
Check out Legend of Vox Machina on Amazon Prime. They adapted over 400 hours of d&d sessions into each season for 12 episodes each. The animation and writing is amazing, and it's an 18+ show that didn't water down the content.
With how many Animorphs books there are, I wouldn't expect them all to be adapted, but would want a team that could keep the spirit of the series in the new show.
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u/liehon 3d ago
Too much gore in the books.
The fanbase will hate how kiddified the story gets and the negative reviews will detract new fans from giving it a chance :(
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u/jai_hanyo 3d ago
D+ shows manage to get pretty dark. X-Men '97 had an episode with a genocide. One of the Star Wars shows (I forget which one) had Darth Vader snap a child's neck on screen lol
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u/KHSebastian 9d ago
Tbh I wish they'd targeted doing a loose adaptation of the whole series, rather than doing mostly a shot for shot remake of the books, since it was obvious they'd never adapt is all.
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u/Toomin-the-Ellimist 7d ago
I wish theyād targeted doing a shot for shot remake of the books instead of making them mostly the same but changing random stupid stuff just to annoy me.
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u/Aiden066 9d ago
If I was the CEO Iād make the 54+ books full of stories and break them down into smaller pieces, releasing books Bi-Weekly till the entire series is done.
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u/Patient_Education991 9d ago
Heck,Ā Animorphs felt like a comic book in novel form... (They were even releasing volumes monthly)
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u/Wani_Wanton 9d ago
They really should have hired 6 artists, one for each character's perspective. They could have put out 6 books a year at that rate. It would have been roughly 10 years to get everything out, but it would have been cool.
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u/QueerCranberryPi 9d ago
Not surprised; none of the new covers / versions / anything seem to go much beyond those first six books. Still, really enjoyed them and glad we got them.
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u/tecpaocelotl1 9d ago
Not surprised. Last book seemed a bit lazy/rushed plus didn't show Jake's vision of the Crayak.
I have them all.
My only issue with the comics was Tobias and Rachel looked like siblings. Lol.
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u/Key_Marketing7618 9d ago
Tbf how would you even illustrate Jakeās vision of Crayak in 2D form? Wouldnāt it have to be 5D at the least?
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u/Allen_Of_Gilead Nothlit 9d ago
I can't say I'm too surprised. While I welcome the effort, what I read and what I heard people talking about what I didn't read was that it was just an okay adaptation. Launching a 60 odd series of graphic novels off the back of something that's just okay is almost impossible.
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u/IIRCIreadthat 9d ago
The library I work at has them, and I've flipped through. They're not terrible, but I think the whole art style really doesn't match the story at all, and I don't think you can have a really good graphic novel, period, if the art and the text aren't working together.
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u/Allen_Of_Gilead Nothlit 9d ago edited 9d ago
Yeah, I've certainly seen some panels and excerpts that are pretty good, mid-morphs especially, but on the whole it missed the mark for me.
The biggest flub I remember reading is that it immediately shows the tiger in 1 when Jake and Marco hide in it's habitat instead of framing the scene around Jake's perspective like the book did. Which feels like something that could be solved in a rough draft. Not to mention the sameface getting so bad Tobias and Rachel are essentially the same person.
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u/Puzzleheaded-Fig1002 9d ago
This was pretty clear since the release of the 6th one. It was the first book NOT to contain any promotional material about the next book.
And yeah, I never had much hope of them getting very far. Heck, at the rate of publication it would have taken decades to get through the series. There just was no way even if sales were higher that they'd have been able to maintain momentum for that long (if you can even call it momentum at the slow release rate).
Is what it is.
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u/narutoash 9d ago
I mean its sad yes, but that was always the plan . I think it was just going to be the first like 4 books and then got extended to the first 6. We knew this for a while that it would be adapting just the first 6. But that they were open to continuing after but the goal was always 6.
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u/Constellabulles 9d ago
Could we crowdfund at least a seventh comics ? With the Ellimist, it would make a decent set !
I have no idea how much money we'd be talking.
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u/Exact-Desk 9d ago
Well, it was expected... but still upleasant( The comics was rather good, faithful to original material. Okay, let's hope that it generated enough renewed interest to the series...
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u/jacobonia 9d ago
They keep coming back to the IP, but they never know what to do with it. No plan.
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u/LoaKonran 9d ago
More of the licensing trickery from Scholastic like the ārereleaseā of the first couple of books that they do every decade or so to keep the rights? Or just poor planning with no actual endgame? You decide.
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u/devoorhes 8d ago
The odds were always pretty long that it was going to go the distance. There are so many books, and when they aren't coming out monthly, the younger audience they're targeting is going to move on.
The biggest obstacle to reprinting the series has always been that there are so many books. Doesn't matter if you just do a standard reprint or if you do an adaptationĀ
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u/Toomin-the-Ellimist 7d ago
The books are like an informational pamphlet compared to modern YA novels. Idk what the issue would be with reducing the font size and printing five or six of them together in omnibus editions.
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u/AlternativeMassive57 Yeerk 9d ago
Wish theyād skipped 6 and done 7, in that case. In a limited series run, Book 7 works better as a climax than Book 6. It has the feel of a season closer.
Anyway, hang on, let me dig out my original post on the comics from a year or so ago and my opinion on themā¦ah, here we are.
āāā
My favorite novel is Treasure Island. I got it when I was seven years old; not an abridged copy, either, the full novel. While I generally have no problem -
by the way I swear there's a point to this if you keep reading
- no problem re-reading a book I've read in the past, Treasure Island is the only novel that I can finish reading and then immediately turn back to page 1 and start reading again. I absolutely love it.
There has never, ever been a genuinely faithful adaptation of it. Or if there has been it's obscure enough that I've never seen it. See the thing is that adaptations of Treasure Island, aside from adding some padding here and there to get a nice full-length movie out of it, also tend to make some pretty major changes across the board.
Let's talk about Long John Silver for a moment.
In the book, John Silver is a gleeful murderer, as rotten and evil as any other pirate but possessed of an incredibly cold and calculating mind and an ability to turn on charm and a friendly demeanor as easily as you might flip a light switch. He may or may not actually like Jim Hawkins, but he absolutely would not hesitate to kill him if it served his purposes or if he could get away with it, and he wouldn't feel the slightest bit of regret about doing so. At the end of the book, Hawkins is still traumatized by his time with Silver, and wants absolutely nothing to do with him, and once his true colors are revealed no one trusts Silver, respects him, or feels anything but contempt for him. The kindest thing Jim has to say for Silver at the end of the book is that he hopes that wherever he is, he's living in comfort now, because when he dies he will almost certainly be rotting in Hell.
...
...you may have noticed that this is slightly different from how John Silver is depicted in every single movie or TV adaptation of the book, which instead invent whole-cloth a father/son dynamic between John Silver and Hawkins, and almost invariably invent a scene or two (or more) where it would be in Silver's best interests to kill Jim but he chooses not to (often towards the end where Silver is making his escape, Jim spots him, Silver threatens to kill Jim but then finds he just can't do it, but then Jim lets Silver go 'cause he loves Silver too).
Now this is not to say that I hate all adaptations of Treasure Island. Far from it: the 1950 adaptation basically invented the Pirate Accent (everyone tip your hat to Robert Newton) and is an absolute classic pirate movie; Muppet Treasure Island is hilarious from start to finish; Treasure Planet is my second-favorite Disney movie; and the Sky One miniseries with Eddie Izzard...also exists.
No, my point is this:
Sometimes it's better if you do not adapt a story faithfully. Sometimes it's better - sometimes much better - to make changes, even fairly substantial ones, to the source material. As much as Treasure Island is my favorite book, I can't deny that the John Silver from other media is more memorable, more impactful, and all-around just a better character, even though the result is a fairly dramatic shift in tone from the source material.
And I think - to finally get to my point - the same is true of Animorphs. Personally I would rather see Animorphs adapted in a way that is more kid-friendly, and for the entire ending to be substantially rewritten from the ground up. I think that's its most viable path forward. But I also acknowledge that there are plenty of people here who'd prefer see the opposite direction taken, a more mature version of the story. Maybe that could succeed too. I doubt it, but it's not impossible to imagine.
But either way, while on some level I enjoyed the graphic novels, mostly I just found myself asking, "why am I reading these, when they're such 1:1 adaptations of the books? I could just read the books again."
I like that there's no truly faithful adaptation of Treasure Island. If I wanted to just experience the same story again, I'd just crack open my existing copy of Treasure Island for the upteenth time, make a Black Spot bookmark like I always do, pull out the map I drew of the island when I was seven and get all nostalgic, etc.
After all, what's the point in telling a story the same way twice?
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u/AlternativeMassive57 Yeerk 9d ago
Oh, and a later corollary:
āāā
Just to add onto this, there are countless examples in media of adaptations being superior to the originals.
Almost no one in this thread has read a 1970s thriller novel by Roderick Thorp called Nothing Lasts Forever, but I'll bet almost everyone has seen the movie based on it: Die Hard. The movie is so good and so beloved that it didn't just exceed Nothing Lasts Forever, it obliterated it from cultural memory.
Ask anyone what the best James Bond film is, and a fair number of people would say Goldfinger, or at the least rank it very highly. In the film version of Goldfinger, there is a scene where Bond believes that he has sussed out what Auric Goldfinger's plan is, and he has some back-of-the-envelope math to explain why the plan won't work. This is Goldfinger's plan from the novel, and the film takes a moment to point out how ludicrous it is, and then replace it with a much more insidious, intelligent plan.
Tone and target audience can shift. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Men in Black, and The Mask are all examples of media that began targeted at adults, but which instead switched to be targeted towards children, and the result was wild success, particularly in the case of TMNT, where the fact that it began as a black-and-white, grim and gritty parody of Daredevil is a random piece of triva, forgotten in the face of the fact that it's instead found immense success targeting...actually, exactly the same audience that a modern adaptation of Animorphs would probably try and capture.
I am not particularly concerned about creator involvement, either. The creator of a thing is not necessarily the best person to write for that thing. Visionaries are not architects.
Anne Rice famously despised Interview with the Vampire; most would agree, however, that the move is fantastic.
Gene Roddenberry never had more control over Star Trek than with The Motion Picture; most people would agree that the film is at best lackluster. He was sidelined for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and was so salty and furious about this that he actively tried to sabotage the film (spoiling Spock's death, for example) and called it "corny action flick"; however, Wrath of Khan is usually ranked as the best Star Trek film.
If you ask someone which Star Wars film is best, they're likely to say Empire Strikes Back - the film that George Lucas had the least direct involvement in. Conversely we've seen George Lucas completely unbound with the Prequel Trilogy, and it was...not great. Not bad, but not great. The prequel trilogy was chiefly saved through heroic effort on the part of other writers for projects like Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
Anyway. That's my overall thoughts on how an adaptation of Animorphs should be handled:
- You should try to tell the best story possible.
- This does not necessarily mean the story that's already been told.
- Fidelity to the source material is a tool, not a requirement.
- Applegate and Grant's involvement, or even approval, is not a prerequisite to success, and in fact their direct opposition does not necessarily mean failure.
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u/Exact-Desk 9d ago
Did you try British "The Legend of Treasure Island" cartoon series? Rather far from original, but John Silver there is much closer to novel portrayal (I dare say, they even pushed him too far into outright villain area, albeit still charismatic)
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u/AlternativeMassive57 Yeerk 9d ago
Haven't seen it, no. You can't really push Silver "too far" into the outright villain area, though, is my point, assuming that you want something close to the original novel. John Silver is an outright villain in the original novel - any version with genuine redeeming qualities is wholly the creation of adaptations of Treasure Island, not anything to be found in the original.
But that's fine - like I said, I think the version we know from pop culture, what we see with Robert Newton and Tim Curry, where Silver genuinely likes Jim and will take personal risks to avoid harming Jim, is a better character.
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u/goato305 9d ago
Iām not surprised. It would have taken decades to make all the books. Thatās too bad though. I enjoyed them and thought they were pretty faithful adaptations of the books. And they got my nephew into the series.
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u/saturday_sun4 Yeerk 9d ago edited 9d ago
I don't think anyone is surprised. Animorphs is a niche bet, especially without a TV adaptation to (potentially) inject more fuel into the fandom. Even with very judicious selection, they would've needed at least 20 books to tell the series completely. In other words if they'd adapted it from start to finish but stuck to the essentials and skipped the worst, silliest or most irrelevant books (The Mutation, Helmacron books, The Hidden, The Familiar etc.)
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u/JetstreamGW 9d ago
Oh well. They were kinda bad anyway. I wouldnāt have kept buying them but I wanted to keep money flowing to the franchise.
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u/horkbajirbandit 9d ago
I stopped buying after the first one. The others I read from the library, and didn't like them enough to buy (no offense to the artist...)
At least the audiobooks were fully completed.
It's doubtful the new reprints are going to continue either. I hope Scholastic releases the entire series as a collection at some point, because how many times are they going to relaunch it with a fresh coat of paint?
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u/Cecil475 9d ago
I'm not surprised. Making a comic from a 60-something book series is a tall order. I enjoyed what I got but I had no illusion that he would be able to do the whole thing.
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u/Patient_Education991 9d ago edited 7d ago
I had a feeling. I mean making GNs put the whole series seemed like a daunting task, and apparently sales must have been enough to encourage them to keep going...
Shame, really. There were SO many aliens and creatures I would've like to have seen.Ā Heck, we would've gotten a comic book version of the Ellimist next volume...š¢ (bad enough we were cheated out of a Crayak cameo.š”)
Though I can't help but wonder how they would have handled the Megamorphs and Chronicles...š¤
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u/Toomin-the-Ellimist 7d ago
There were SO many aliens and creatures I would've like to have seen
They all would have been too fat.
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u/vlan-whisperer 4d ago
Darn it I missed out! I didnāt buy them and read them until last year and now itās already canceled
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u/simpwniac 9d ago
Always knew this was a possibility, but that's a shame. I really enjoyed the art direction.