Thursday, May 20, 2004

Into the Firestorm: Dan Jolley talks to UnderGroundOnline about the dangers of revamping Firestorm:

"There is indeed a very vocal contingent out there, who have made statements ranging from 'I'm not going to buy this book no matter what' to 'I'm hoping this book fails miserably' to 'Dan Jolley must be the laziest writer on the planet.' But, y'know, I was prepared for this kind of reaction by, of all things, Voltron, one of the books I'm writing for Devil's Due. Encountering the die-hard Voltron fans -- and there are quite a few of them -- made me realize that, if you're working on a property that has been published in the past for any significant length of time, there will be people out there who love it, who are devoted to it, and who don't want it changed under any circumstances. When we announced that we were 're-imagining' Voltron (which we did, basically, by keeping all the cool stuff and jettisoning all the non-cool stuff) the reactions from some of the fans were staunchly negative. 'How dare you change this story?' they demanded. 'Why fix what ain't broken? You're going to screw everything up beyond repair!' But now we're about to have our tenth issue on the stands, and every single one of the vocal naysayers has been completely converted, and loves what we're doing. I don't know if that's going to happen with Firestorm, but I'm anxious to find out."