BOOM! Studios and The Jim Henson Company have announced that creator Rockne S. O’Bannon will write Boom!’s recently announced Farscape comic book series.
“This is a dream opportunity for me—to get to continue the Farscape saga,” O’Bannon said. “The comic book series starts off directly where the Peacekeeper Wars mini-series left us. It’s like we’re finally getting to experience Season Five of Farscape. Not only that, but the stories in the ongoing comic series will completely tie into the upcoming Farscape webisodes. Farscape lives!”
Boom!’s Editor-in-Chief Mark Waid said “I can’t tell you how incredibly excited I am that Rockne will be part of the comic-book team. I’m a fan, and he’s one of the best writers around. I’m doubly pleased that both Rockne and The Jim Henson Company folks have responded to the idea of making this series a direct continuation of the tv series, rather than an out-of-continuity tie-in. For fans of Farscape, and with the show’s creator involved, the comic series will fill that outer-space-sized void the show once occupied. In short, it’s going to be frelling awesome!”
Talking about new freedoms he’ll enjoy, O’Bannon said “Farscape the television series was a huge production, but we still had to tailor our storytelling to conform to the inevitable television limitations of story length and logistics and budget. The great thing about the comic book medium is that the scope and scale of the Farscape world is no longer restricted. In terms of where we can go, what we can show—these new stories will be Farscape Unrestrained.” Giving some teasers, he said “One of the places that we always wanted to explore in the television series was Rygel’s home world of Hyneria. No matter how passionate we were about telling that story, we simply couldn’t do it. But now one of the massive-scale arcs in our first four-issue comic series has us off to Hyneria!”
Boom! has posted a 76-second clip of O’Bannon talking about the new project on YouTube, viewable at this link.
Farscape, which debuted on the Sci-Fi Channel in 1998, followed the adventures of Astronaut John Crichton, who had a freak accident during an experimental space mission that catapulted him across a thousand galaxies to an alien battlefield. Suddenly, he was trapped among alien creatures wielding deadly technology—a battle that 20th century sci-fi pop culture never prepared him for. Hunted by a merciless military race, Crichton quested for home from a distant galaxy.
Sounds like their following Joss Whedon’s lead about turning a TV series into a comicbook. The Buffy comic works well because Joss is deeply involved in it, and has some excellent writers working on it as well (unfortunatly this can’t be said for the Angel comic which I gave up on after 2 issues). From this article it sounds like same framework (the creater being deeply involved)is being applied to the Farscape comic. The thing about turning a TV show into a comic is that it won’t be restrained by budget concerns. The Buffy comic has more expansive, intricate, action packed storylines than the show did, and I’m looking forward to see what they do with Farscape. Of course there is one thing that could wreck the comic: the art. Since it’s based on a TV show it’s important they have an artist who draws the characters so they look like they did on the show, and that readers can recognize. The Southland Tales Prequel comic didn’t work because the art was so sketchy it was hard to keep track of who the characters were.