As Comic Con drew to a close, Marvel released news that they would be publishing Tron: The Betrayal, designed to ‘bridge the gap’ between the original film and the new Tron:Legacy.
Now like any child of the Eighties, I am really looking forward to the new movie, even as averse to Disney I usually am. After several really enjoyble offerings, Disney is slowly winning me back after my teenage rejection of all things Mickey.
Still, I find it really ironic that this series is entitled The Betrayal. No one can deny that Disney is big business. Marvel also, especially with it’s recent movie successes, is big business. The relationship between the two of them is natural, right?
But does anyone remember two small series from SLG (Slave Labor Graphics)? Simply entitled Tron, they were good reads. These were only two years ago, in 2008.
Admittedly, I only ever found a few issues of these, but I really enjoyed what parts of the series I did find. Despite the shaky lettering that many smaller companies suffer from, the series had an implied depth that if it were to have continued, could have reached the dizzy heights of say John Ostrander’s Suicide Squad or Firestorm to say the least.
I suppose I can understand why Disney has now opted to issue the license to Marvel rather than SLG, as certainly distribution could be an issue., as evidenced by the last two minis. I can’t help but wonder what a boon for SLG keeping the Disney license would have been.
My advice? Dig these issues out of the back issue bins. Give SLG a reason to reprint if their license allows. These series had a lot of potential, and yet again the smaller companies have been thrown under the bus.
My advice would be to look at the SLG comics before buying them.
The art is in some parts so terrible that one can discern characters only by their names said in speech, there are instances where characters age or deage about 50 years between two adjacent panels.
But maybe that was intentional, as the story is primary a bunch of pseudo-blabla, taking for to most part place in Jet’s deranged mind, only occasionally showing a connection to the world of Tron. But maybe I’m jaded because I disliked the whiny little nit in Tron 2.0, too.
At least Tron: The Betrayal will actually have an appearance of Tron, in contrast to Tron 2.0 (Square Enix gave us a better Tron experience with Kingdom Hearts II) and the SLG comic.
That being said, I remain skeptical about the new movie, because the last Tron media containing a mopey, computer whiz kid having lost a parent to the computer world was rather bland, uninspiring and not very Trony. And the designs look like somebody got design happy instead of looking at what would make sense in a computer world evolved from Tron.