It’s a glorious age for 20-30 somethings: the moment that the culture starts to realize that it’s not just your adult tastes that it can cater to, but the tastes that you left behind in childhood and might wish to return to. IDW Comics, they of the absurdly best selling My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic have caught a taste of that nostalgia (okay, so the selling power of that comic can’t be placed solely at the feet of nostalgia) and they want more of that sweet, (bitter)sweet memory money.
IDW has just inked a deal with Cartoon Network to produce comics based on their more elderly properties. There’s no hard and complete list, but according to their press release, it includes, at least, The Power Puff Girls, Dexter’s Laboratory, Samurai Jack, Johnny Bravo, Generator Rex, and Ben 10. It’s hard for me to say which of these has the highest potential. Obviously it’s ridiculous to think that The Power Puff Girls is fifteen years old and we haven’t had an action cartoon featuring an all female cast of superheroes in the intervening time. It could be great to see new life breathed into those characters in comics, whether or not it has any relation to the rumored Powerpuff revamp.
But I might even be more excited to see Samurai Jack on this list. That’s a show whose fans have been waiting for closure for quite a while now, sustained only on the slowly rising star of Genndy Tartakovsky and the promise that he’s waiting for a Samurai Jack movie to reveal exactly how Jack gets back to the past and defeats Aku. I’m also dying to know how brave artists will be allowed to be in translating the incredibly creative sound and visual design of the show to the comics medium. I’d love to see some Samurai Jack comics that were made in the spirit of the show, but with entirely different character models and art style.
But I digress. IDW’s CEO Chris Ryall made no bones about whether they were playing to the open wallet of nostalgia:
Many of these Cartoon Network shows have only grown in popularity since they originally aired, and we’re excited to be able to offer new iterations of the characters in comic-book form alongside both our planned reprint material and also some new animated ventures Cartoon Network has planned, too. There’s a wealth of fun properties to play with here, and we’ve already got some unique things in mind for them.
As he says: the company has also secured the rights to reprint previous comic incarnations of Cartoon Network characters.
(via Comic Book Resources.)
