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Continuing story lines: Part 1: Stargate

Continuing story lines: Part 1: Stargate published on 1 Comment on Continuing story lines: Part 1: Stargate

For a lot of people their first entry into the world of comic books is through material derived from comic book sources. Be it Batman through the Adam West series of the 1960’s or the X-Men universe through Fox’s Animated series from the 1990’s. But this isn’t a one way street, many TV and movie franchises have expanded their universes, and additional revenue streams, from telling additional stories whether canon or not in this medium.

One of the most famous examples, until recently, was Dark Horses Star Wars Expanded Universe stories. But Star Wars isn’t alone in expanding its universes via the comic book medium. During the 1990’s, the now defunct, Topps company licensed The X-Files from Fox, before DC and now IDW produced parallel and continuing storylines.

The list of televisual and film franchises that have continued on after the series wrapped or have been cancelled has been covered by numerous people across numerous sites all around the web. But what I’d like to do here is cover series that I feel could and should continue in the comic book world.

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First up is the Stargate franchise, considering that the Stargate universe includes the 1994 feature film and three network television shows beginning with SG-1 in 1997, the franchise has been severely lacking in comic book material. Between 1996-97 Entity Comics published a trilogy of stories that follow loosely on from the feature film, and then between 2003 and 2007 Avatar Press published a number of one-shot stories based upon the SG-1 and Atlantis series, and then nothing. Save for an announcement in 2009 from Dynamite Entertainment that they had aquired the rights to publish stories, click here for the story, based upon the Stargate TV universe, the previously mentioned series along with Universe.

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But since then nothing not one story, mini-series, special. Not a single thing. And from a company who still continue, on and off, to produce stories based upon the 1970’s Battlestar Galactica, hell they’ve even squeezed out a few stories that have tied together the Highlander films and TV series, Dynamite haven’t exactly been shy about exploiting their various media licences.

So where the hell are my Stargate comics?

Fine SG-1 was largely tied up, I can live with that. 10 seasons and 2 TV-movies tied the show together and gave the characters some finality and conclusion. But Atlantis and Universe both finished open ended.

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Atlantis was cancelled so that Syfy could pump all the money into Universe and the proposed film Extinction then got binned because of MGM’s financial issues. The scripts out there its ready to go, so why don’t Dynamite do a Dark Horse and adapt the screenplay, it worked pretty well for The Star Wars and best of all it could give the show some narrative conclusion. Plot threads were left hanging and more questions than answers were provided by the final episode.

stargate_universe-tv-31As for Universe, stylistically different from SG-1 and Atlantis and clearly appearing to do its best to catch some of the slipstream provided by the Battlestar Galactica re-imagining the series lasted 2 seasons before ending on a cliff hanger when Syfy decided they weren’t going to pick the series up for a 3rd season. A TV movie was proposed before nothing happened. So like Atlantis surely there is a market out there for fans of the series wanting narrative closure. The potential for the series is immense, unlike the previous two series Universe opted to go fully CGI with the few alien species the crew encountered and the comics medium is the perfect place to design and showcase a variety of alien beings.

Call this an open letter or just a personal wish list but there is no reason for Dynamite Entertainment to not exploit the Stargate franchise and like The X-Files, at IDW, give us a Season 6 of Atlantis and a Season 3 of Universe.

I invite anyone and everyone to continue this thread, are there series that you would like to see continued within the comic book medium?

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