Little updates here and there.

Added one new picture to the Fan Art gallery, for starters.

Also, I've been informed that my submission to the next Gold Digger annual has been accepted! Yay! So I added that to my profile page. I may also have some pieces going into Radio's next "Hit the Beach" anthology, but I don't know for certain.

Lastly, I updated the links page with a link to Studio Udon, the team responsible for the new Street Fighter comic, which is -phenomenally- cool.

Which brings up an interesting trend that I've been noticing lately.

In the past, comics, videogames, and even more accepted mainstream concepts like films and books have always had difficulties jumping media lines. A great film harkens horrible game adaptations and terrible comics. An awesome game makes a terrible movie. Comic movies have been horrible, Novels based on videogames have been immature tripe, and a single pervading attitude that has always followed these things is that the creator of the offshoot media has absolutely no knowledge or respect for the source material. That's the way it's been for years. YEARS. Most of my life, in fact, and it's always struck me as an obviously stupid concept.

Sure, if you make a crappy comic book or videogame tie-in with a popular film, you'll probably sell some of those crappy comics and videogames to hard core fans of the film. You'll have barely risked anything and made some money out of the deal. But at the same time, you're crippling the perception of your license and denying yourself an awesome chance for cross promotion.

How many people do you think walked out of the live-action "Captain America" film and said "Wow! Rubber ears! I gotta get that comic!" Or played "Transformers: Beast Wars" for Nintendo 64 and decided to start watching the show? I'll tell you right now. Zero. Because Captain America was a waste of cellulose and TF: BW was a waste of LIVES.

People spent time developing that turd that they could've spent hugging their children. Damn you, Takara. Damn you and your evil schemes.

But make a good product, that can sell on it's own merit...And hell, it's not like getting word out is a problem. You've got a popular license, that's better then all the advertising in the world. Make a good product to go with that license, and you're bound to turn a good profit, and people who might not normally have picked it up grab it for it's quality.

If Timothy Zahn's Star Wars books had been anything less then exceptional, do you think they would have sold nearly as well, even with the popular brand? Would the resurgence of Star Wars merchandise been nearly as effective?

It seems like common sense, to me. You don't WANT to squander a popular license. It's a waste of money.

The thing I find interesting is that it seems to be happening less. 10 years ago, Malibu got the license to the Street Fighter characters, and they squandered it on a little POS of a comic that set up Ryu and Chun Li as love interests, and had Ken get scalped (literally!) at the end of the first issue by Sagat.

Because Thai kickboxers are well known for their cultural scalpings.

It was horrible. It was so horrible that even back -then- I could tell it was bad. And this was back when I was reading X-Force.

The new comic, tho, is fantastic. The art is incredible, the story is well told, on top of which; and this is key; The writers know the source material. They know how the characters are related, and they know the character's personalities. It doesn't follow game canon exactly, but the -characters- are right, and that's the important thing in this kind of adaptation.

And it's not just comics that are showing improvement in this area, but games, film adaptation of games and comics,and various other offshoots are showing notable improvement. EA's handling of the Lord of the Rings License has been mostly stellar, and Treyarch's Spiderman 2 boasts some truly fun and unique Spidey-esque gameplay.

Respect for the source material is very important when adapting something to a different media. I wish more people would grasp this concept, but hey, you win some, you lose some.