Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I found myself chatting to Rhianna Pratchett yesterday about her just released comics spin-off of Mirror’s Edge. Well – the first part of six anyway (First pages here). It’s been interesting for her. As she tells to CBR, it’s her first work in the medium, and she had to do some serious thinking about its strengths and limitations before doing so. Which got me casually thinking a little more on the topic, but from the other way around – as in, what’s the specific strengths and weaknesses of bringing a game to a comic. And while there’s been a deluge of games-to-comics work in the last few years, what games would I pursue were I a comics editor interested in putting out entertaining comics. Which is, of course, a different thing from a comic that does the business.
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While I completely failed to pay any more attention to Stargate Worlds than reading the advert on a bus which rolled past the convention, when I was at San Diego, this did catch my eye. Wildstorm produced a short preview comic of the forthcoming Mirror’s Edge (Which has been scanned by Silicon Era). Words by the games’ writer Rhianna Pratchett and art by Matthew Dow Smith, I’m always interested by the comics/games interface. On one hand you have comics like this, which are pure promotional items mainly of use for swiftly introducing a games’ concept (And are harder to write than you may think). On the other, you have the licensed tie-in, which are hard in almost the exact opposite way. The former are pre-game-exposition, so demanding a lot to be crammed into scant pages. The latter, generally speaking, are post-game-exposition, so while people will abstractly care and know the world, you’re limited to doodling in the margins of the universe. Because, of course, you’re an auxiliary creative exercise and anything genuinely meaningful will be saved for the central games.

Not that would stop me jumping at a chance to do a Thief comic if anyone wanted to pay me to do so. Anyone else got something they’d like to see?