Galactica Comic Revives 1978
Javier Grillo-Marxuach, who wrote the upcoming comic-book miniseries Battlestar Galactica: Cylon Apocalypse for Dynamite Entertainment, told Sci Fi Wire that he approached the story as if he were writing an episode of the classic 1978 TV series on which the comic is based. "It really was like writing for a series, except the series went off the air in 1979," Grillo-Marxuach said in an interview. "And that was the great creative challenge of it. Here's a show that aired almost 30 years ago, and you have to write a great episode of the show. How do you do it? And that's what I tried to do. In a way, it's sort of like, if I ever travel back in time and have to find a job in 1979, it would be my spec Galactica."
Grillo-Marxuach is best known as a television writer and producer, having written for shows such as ABC's Lost and The WB's Charmed. This year, he joined the writing staff of NBC's Medium. Marxuach previous work in the comic field includes his own independent title, The Middleman, and Marvel's Super-Skrull series, which he'll be returning to in the coming year.
For the Galactica comic, Marxuach said he tried to reinvent the classic series without covering the same territory as the new Battlestar Galactica, which currently airs on SCI FI Channel. "I think it's sort of inevitable that you deal with certain issues," he said. "It's interesting. The new series has done really well picking up things from the original series and reinventing them. And in a way, this comic book, while dealing with some subject matter that has some similarity to stuff that's going on in the new series, is really about sort of how do you continue the old series and where it would go from there, from where they left off. ... I sort of tried to put myself in the mindframe of, OK, it's 1978, and I've just been hired as a staff writer on Battlestar Galactica. What do I pitch?"
The comic finds the crew of Galactica making progress in the search for Earth and gaining an advantage in the war with the Cylons. "They didn't really get a chance to exploit all the possibilities of the universe," Marxuach said of the original series. "There's sort of twin things that are happening in this story. One of them is that the crew of the Galatica finds a very clear signal pointing them in the direction of Earth. And at the same time, they also find, through a series of very strange circumstances, a weapon that they could use against the Cylons in a very divisive way that could turn the tide of their conflict. So the story is really about what seems to be like a stroke of good luck for Galactica [that] really turns out to be a much thornier kind of situation for them." Battlestar Galactica: Cylon Apocalypse will be released in February 2007.
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"Battlestar Galactica will never happen again the way that it was." – Laurette Spang
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