Twilight Zone Ongoing Comic Book Series Announced

Doo-doo-DOO-doo, Doo-doo-DOO-doo... You are traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of imagination. Next stop, the Twilight Zone! That's right, Rod Serling's classic science-fiction television show has had numerous comic book incarnations and now Dynamite Entertainment has signed writer J. Michael Straczynski (Babylon 5) to take on an ongoing Twilight Zone series. J. Michael Straczynski is not a newcomer to the Twilight Zone series: "One of the most deeply satisfying and creatively exciting experiences I've had in 25 years of writing for television and film was my stint on the new Twilight Zone television series... I've been a fan of the original series since I was tall enough to reach for the TV tuner. So I was profoundly excited when Nick Barrucci came to me with the possibility of doing the new Twilight Zone comic to come out from Dynamite."

 When asked about the format of the series, Straczynski confided that the Twilight Zone will not have a conventional layout: "The immediate creative question to be resolved was: how do you transplant or adapt the TV anthology format into comic form? Individual stand-alone issues don't give the issue-to-issue continuity you need to consistently bring in modern readers, and if it's a year long arc, it's not an anthology. The solution: three four-issue arcs that are connected by theme, character, and location... so that in reading one arc you get one side of the story, with its own supernatural or science-fiction elements, then you turn the character around to another character in that sequence who has his or her own story for the next four issues... and then at the end, you connect all of these individual stories into one overlapping tapestry, so you could literally view the book as individual stories as initially published, or layer the pages to create one big story. It's a cool structure that I'm not sure has been attempted before, so this will be an awful lot of fun. I'm very excited to be working with Nick and his team on this book, and hope folks will check out the books when they come out." Straczynski's not the only one who hasn't heard of this type of structure before... though Stephen King's series of books about Castle Rock and Clive Barker's "Book of the Arts" trilogy seem similar. There's technically no "new" concept, but execution varies and hopefully Straczynski's Twilight Zone will be well-executed. However, I'm not thrilled about the idea of stories that connect to each other. Something I loved about the Twilight Zone was that every episode was stand-alone and you didn't have to watch any episode to enjoy others. But the idea of one issue stories in comics seems to be an almost extinct concept that I wish they'd bring back, if not for this series, than for other comic book series. I also wouldn't mind this series in black-and-white. I don't always see the point of putting some comics in black-and-white, but here it would make perfect sense since it would be an homage to the original series it was based off of. Instead it will be in color. But Straczynski definitely has the credentials to suggest this series could still be done well. He's written over 300 various television episodes, six TV movies and he's made five movies in six years including Changeling, Ninja Assassin, Thor, Underworld Awakening and World War Z. His comic book credentials don't end with the Thor movie. Straczynski has written close to 400 comics for the likes of Marvel, DC Comics and Image Comics. He wrote The Amazing Spider-Man for seven years and then moved on to Thor, The Fantastic Four, Before Watchmen and more. So, will this land of imagination be as creative and unique in this new ongoing comic book series as the television series of the same name? We'll only know when we enter... the Twilight Zone!