I was 170 pages into the Larry Niven / Jerry Pournelle novel and really beginning to enjoy it, so I decided to pull out my copies of the Innovation comic books. I had fond memories of the two issues (of a proposed 6) that Innovation produced in November and December of 1993. And for once the reality matched the memory. Re-reading those two issues made me wish that I had the money to hire Terry Collins and Roger Vilela to finish the job. After all, what's 23 years amongst friends?
Speaking of Innovation, what a great company that was. It only lasted six years, but they put out some really good, high quality comic books. Case in point, the adaptation of Lucifer's Hammer. Both published issues featured 32 story pages of painted art. And innovative art as well. Instead of the plain white setting for the panels on each page, Roger Vilela did backgrounds which were unique and interesting and which gave context to the panels on that page. On one page of issue one the panels were surrounded by Bible verses, for instance. Kind of like what you saw in Fables, but much more intricate and varied. And about 10 years before Fables came along.
And Terry Collins did a superb job on the adaptation of the novel. I mean, Lucifer's Hammer is pretty freaking massive--640 pages in the edition I'm reading. And to break that down into 192 pages (assuming each of the six projected issues were to be 32 pages long) is no mean feat. But in issues one and two, Terry Collins does a superb job of it. He leaves out the non-essential, but includes the most important stuff--even when it's pretty difficult to adapt. Like the Hot Fudge Sundae discussion, which actually made me laugh out loud when I read it in the novel, and which still worked when it was reduced to just a few panels in the comic book.
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