I'm surprised, especially after the death of Christopher with the estate being handled by younger generations that no comics set in Middle Earth have been made. There was the one adaptation of the Hobbit by Dixon and Wentzel in the 90s by Eclipse that has essentially been kept in print as a trade since the LOTR movies were released, and the one attempt at a photocomic using stills from the Bakshi animated movie done by Warren, but no proper adaptations of Frodo, Aragorn and such, and no tales told form other ages of Middle Earth.

Also surprised there hasn't been a proper adaptation done of The Prydain chronicles aside from the one half-assed attempt to adapt the Disney film as part of the merch for that film. With so much acclaim (Newberry Awards etc.) as a series for young readers, I think someone would have given it a shot at some point. The Shanara stuff is another stuff I am surprised hasn't been adapted. But then the answer may be that fantasy as a genre didn't have much popularity even in the book market outside of Tolkien and established pulp characters until Lester Del Rey bought Shanara from Terry Brooks and published it (debuting with an excerpt in an early issue of Heavy Metal) opened up the book market for fantasy (and began to impose the artificial structure of the trilogy on the genre), and by the time it did, there wasn't a lot being done by Marvel/DC outside super-heroes and the small market publishers often didn't have the capital to license well known properties due to additional costs of the licenses, and what fantasy was succeeding in the comic market were things like Elfquest being self-published with no licensing costs, and when we see comics try to cash in on the fantasy surge of the 70s and 80s, they often developed their own characters relying on the popular tropes rather than license pre-existing properties to adapt (think like Elflord, Adventurers, etc. that became staples of the B&W boom/bust of the 80s), with Innovation Comics being the lone outlier in the late 80s/90s who built their business model on adaptations (the Anne Rice stuff, Beaty & the Beast TV show etc.).

But as for stuff that's never appeared in comics in any form, there are some kids series that were popular when I was young I am surprised someone didn't try to license, like the Danny Dunn books. Harry Potter is the modern equivalent to that. Not sure if attempts were made and rebuffed, but that was money left on the table.

I'm a little surprised that some popular franchises never got adaptations/comics in their big merchandising pushes, so characters like Robert Langdon (Dan Brown's main character for Da Vinci Code and his other books) and Katniss Everdeen (Hunger Games) haven't appeared in something in comic form (other than Mad parodies). They pushed just about every other type of merch possible for those.

I think part of it is that some of these dropped in the era where super-hero comics were the dominant product in the direct market so there was little sales potential for them there as the audience wasn't there (as attempts like the Game of Throne, Dresden Files, and Wheel of Time comics showed) but before the explosion of the YA OGN market in the book trade happened opening up new audiences and customers for comics outside of direct market super-heroes. Even Twilight, when it tried to exploit the comic market during that period, did so as manga not traditional comics, knowing they had to find an audience outside the traditional comic book buyer who only bought super-hero comics in the direct market.

This was less the case in the 60s and 70s, for properties like Danny Dunn, but then there was a pervasive attitude that comics were "slumming it" and some didn't want their properties associated with the medium, even if they were already targeted at a kids market.

But I think that we may find in many cases where we haven't seen characters in comics that at the core it may be that either potential licensees thought the license would be too expensive to make a profit with potential sales available, or the licensor didn't think the revenue from comics would be enough to overcome the perceived negative stigma of comics in the culture of the time. And those that did had licensors/licensees who were willing to grab anything to throw at the wall and see what stuck.

-M

Definitely agree about the Prydain Chronicles, and also the Danny Dunn books (which I absolutely loved when I was in 3rd and 4th grade).

And although I didn't really like either the Jirel of Joiry or Northwest Smith stories - I found them excessively dark and bleak - I'm also a bit surprised that they were never adapted to comics, esp. by Warren for Creepy or Eerie, with someone like Esteban Maroto or Gonzalo Mayo doing the art.

New Edge Sword & Sorcery is typically a prose magazine (and I have mixed feelings about their long term ability to live up to their promises and the quality of the stuff they have put out). It seems it's a prose revival not comics unless I misread something my quick skim through the article.

So far New Sword & Sorcery has been a crowdfunded digital only prose anthology magazine with limited (and expensive it seems to me) print on demand options (they also seem to be paying less per word than Howard made in the 30s for most of their contributors). Nothing I have seen has them set up to produce comic material.

-M

A full Prydain adaptation would be amazing.

I wonder how many people are familiar with the original Mary Poppins, and how well a direct adaptation of the book series might do. And maybe further original stories? Talented enough creators are certainly out there.

I think a lot of the ones mentioned so far would be hard to pull off - at least to my individual taste. So much of Wodehouse's charm is in the language, the narrative voice - the same goes for Chandler, for that matter. Much of that would be lost in a translation to a more visual medium.

Then there's the matter of getting the characters to look right - every reader will have their own ideas, naturally, but I find movie adaptations often don't even bother to try. Comics should be better able to come up with a version that bears some resemblance to the writer's description but even with the best intentions the artist might not meet the reader's personal image of how the character should look (I don't like how cover artist Ionicus does Jeeves for the Penguin paperbacks, for example).

So I don't feel much desire to see adaptations of favourite characters from one medium to another: the odds are always against the new version capturing whatever made me a fan of the original. But there'll always be some curiosity whenever something along these lines is done and I'll usually give them a look anyway - so I'll be trying to see Dune part 2 in the next week or so, even though I had ambivalent feelings towards part 1.