Posted in: Comics, Recent Updates | Tagged: aftermath, Comics, doctor who, idw, john byrne, next men, steven moffat
Next Men Aftermath Vs Doctor Who Series 6
As sometimes happens when a story idea percolates for a long time — too long? — my plans for NEXT MEN: AFTERMATH have hit a speedbump. Namely, the recent DOCTOR WHO "finale" played most, if not all, the cards I was planning for my series.
This presents a major problem for me, as a writer. I could simply go ahead with what I'd planned, and assume most people would remember this was stuff that had been floating around in my head since Matt Smith was, like, 10 years old . . . But, of course, on the internet the single biggest mistake you can make is assuming anyone you deal with is going to be intelligent and reasonable.
So what's my option? I want to tell the story, but it seems I cannot tell it in quite the same way I originally planned. So, after much rumination, I have decided to do what I did with the last issues of JBNM. There I scooped out the sidebars that became AFTERMATH (and if I hadn't, I'd have done all the stuff I wanted to do by now, dagnabbit!) and presented a lean and mean version of my originally more meandering tale. Same thing now with AFTERMATH. What I thought would run for 10 or 12 issues, I have decided to pare down to 5, cutting some elements, downplaying others, and pushing what was once a subplot more into the fore. There will still be unavoidable comparisons to DOCTOR WHO, but I would ask all of you, when you see them, to remind those making them that I was there first!
That's the bad news. What's the good?
Well, with AFTERMATH being truncated like this, it means I will be getting to the hinted-at superhero book a whole lot sooner. So you'll probably be seeing it in 2012, rather than 2013.
The cover to Next Men Aftermath #1 above does seem to show all of history coming together at once, rather like The Wedding Of River Song… and of course IDW publish both Next Men and Doctor Who.