Context Is For The Weak

[krinndnz]

Right: these are about a year old, so they feel fresh again. MGK takes a short, hilarious tour of Asterix & Obelix(2,3,4), Matt Fraction does the same with Doom Patrol (2,3,4). When a creator's (or creative team's) productivity on a single project goes long enough, it's pretty much impossible to not notice their personal idiosyncracies. It's

Comments

[ribbin]

This is awesome.

[krinndnz]

Glad you dug the links!

[porsupah]

True, Discworld's very much Ptrerry's creation (has he invited others to play in it much/at all?), but an important difference between him and DNA, I'd say, is that TP's vastly more consistent, for better or for worse - some books are more inspired than others, but they're pretty much always amusing, sometimes outright hilarious. Perhaps DNA was merely being more adventurous, and gods know, that's hardly any bad thing! - but, I will admit, I vastly enjoyed H2H2 and Restaurant (and the radio & LP versions, not to mention the TV adaptation, nicely laying the path for never telling the same story twice, which I do approve of =:), but as the series went on, I was reading them more out of a sense of curiosity, without the complementary satisfaction of A Good Book Was Read and Time Was Spent Wisely

[prickvixen]

In my interpretation, the Hitchhiker's universe was a collaboration between Douglas Adams and John Lloyd, and Adams just happened to be the one who wrote the novelizations of material they'd both devised. You also had Geoffrey Perkins, the producer of the original radio series, helping him wrap up the scriptwriting. And there were others... it wasn't a solo effort. When you get into later books which aren't based on shows, where Adams is generating mostly original material, you can feel the change in tone and density. But the work everyone idolizes so much is not something Adams created on his own, is my point.

An example of posthumous continuation which comes to mind is John Gardner's series of James Bond novels, which are easily as good as anything Ian Fleming wrote (which I'm afraid isn't saying much; Fleming's prose is very awkward and stilted). And then you've got the deceased Frank Herbert putting out an awful lot of books for a man of his state of decomposition.

[krinndnz]

I sense an oncoming point about Tupac Shakur.