Wildstorm has announced it will be canceling the World of Warcraft and Starcraft monthly comic books, and replacing them with original graphic novels.
“While WildStorm and Blizzard loved the stories being told in the regular monthly comic-book series, we decided that the graphic novel would be a more suitable medium for the tales we wanted to tell next,” said Hank Kanalz, VP & General Manager of Wildstorm. “The larger format will give our artists and storytellers more room to explore Blizzard’s rich, varied worlds and flesh out the characters that inhabit these places.”
The Warcraft series ended yesterday with the release of the World of Warcraft Special, while Starcraft ends with issue #7, that arrives in January 2010.
This is really interesting news, but one that doesn’t come as a huge surprise. From my reading of the first arc, the story didn’t follow the WoW universe too closely, and seem to throw in WoW references, names, and locations to create the ties between the video game and the comic book. Going the graphic novel route might bring more readers to each series, as gamers might be more likely to read a larger tome than a series of monthly comics. Still, the Wildstorm stories were much better than the manga stuff that came out of Japan.
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IMO, smart move.
Doing a done-in-one graphic novel with the full story will make them more accessible to the non-comic store/non-book store market. I’ve seen manga and such at many video game stores and rental places, and this will probably make them more attractive to those venues.
Personally, I am starting to like the way this OGN trend is turning. Make the single issues as digital downloads, and then collect them as a graphic novel, would work for me.