Thursday, August 27, 2009

The Sword of Shannara






BEST SELLER SHOWCASE was a short-lived comic strip from the late 1970's that was designed to have different creators adapt different current and recent bestselling books into comic strip form. The problem, in hindsight, was that if you start out with a sci-fi/fantasy book like THE SWORD OF SHANNARA, Terry Brooks' first big claim to fame, and then follow it up with a soap-style romance or a mystery or anything else OTHER than a sci-fi fantasy, tehn you have to rebuild your audience with each new story. Also, that audience will very likely be quite different between different types of stories. I don't recall exactly what the other strips were that followed but I dutifully clipped this one out. Gray Morrow's art is perfectly suited to the material even if it isn't served at all well by the shrinking newspaper comic size. The Sunday strips were gorgeous. Here's the initial week. If there's any interest and/or demand, I will happily scan the rest of this rare newspaper fantasy strip.

7 comments:

  1. The NY Daily News ran this, iirc, but only on Sundays so I hadn't seen the dailies. There was also a strip of Clive Cussler's Raise the Titanic. I'd like to see more.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'd never heard of this strip. I do recall Morrow's work on Barbara Courtlands Romances. I'd love to see more.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Steven, Was what you showed us the whole thing? Shannara that is.
    Regards, Bear

    ReplyDelete
  4. Check out my later posts. I plan on scanning and posting a week's worth every day or two. Posted week two earlier today.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Interesting. Never heard of this strip. Wonder why no one has reprinted it. You'd think someone would, since Brooks is still pretty popular, as is Cussler.

    ReplyDelete
  6. i'll be waiting for the other scans =)
    thank you that

    ReplyDelete
  7. Here's the whole set--
    http://booksteveslibrary.blogspot.com/search?q=shannara

    ReplyDelete