These Cancelled TV Shows Need to Come Back as Comic Books ASAP

This is a topic we’ve covered before, and some of the same ground will be covered because, let’s be honest, a lot of this stuff hasn’t changed.

That said, we’ve had a ton of TV shows revived in the recent past, so it seemed like as good a time as any to evaluate which one of them might be fits for comics. Veronica Mars, The X-Files, Gilmore Girls, Arrested Development, MacGyver and more have all made their way back to your screens, with Miami Vice, Knight Rider, and more passing through comic shops at that same time.

Licensed properties have always had sporadic success at best from DC and Marvel, but it can be argued that they haven’t been top sellers in part because they’re not a priority for the companies, marketing-wise. Titles like The Lone Ranger, Ghostbusters and True Blood have not only performed well for smaller publishers, but helped to elevate their company’s profile in the mainstream bookstore market, which may not be watched by comic book fans as closely as direct market sales but which has more potential upside in many ways.

Series like Smallville and Buffy the Vampire Slayer have been big success stories in comic books, and The X-Files is one of the best licensed books…ever.

But for every one of those, there are botched and aborted adaptations that make readers wonder why they were ever made in the first place…or digital-exclusive comics marketed only to fans of the show, without regard for the comics market (we’re looking at you, Burn Notice). There’s also the questions of whether a canceled show would really even work as a comic (the fast-moving, scene-changing nature of shows like Arrested Development and Community make imagining how they would keep their tone in another medium a hard thing to do), or whether its fan base would buy into comics as a way to tell the story (I can’t see fans of Men of a Certain Age or Memphis Beat taking in large numbers to their local comic shops).

And, let’s face it: Marvel did a good enough job with the books, but at this point Castle has more or less worn out its welcome.

So…what do we want to see more of? Read on.

And, of course, chime in to tell us what we’ve missed!

Chuck

This one (and one or two others on the list) have already been comics, but the story–produced in the waning days of WildStorm and given priority as a freebie on the NBC website, not really as a product in its own right–wasn’t treated seriously and while it started with a lot of promise it descended into a mess by the end of its six-issue life.

The TV show never had any sustained problems with its quality, although it had been ratings-challenged almost from the word go. The biggest challenge facing a feature film (which fans are still begging for) is the way they ended the series–it would really require more serialized storytelling to “fix” or to do justice to, which makes it difficult for a movie to handle.

But it would both be fertile ground for new stories in any potential comic series–and there’s almost nothing that doesn’t make sense about an action-comedy featuring a Joss Whedon alumnus and a hacker who has DC Comics posters on his walls becoming a comic series itself.

The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.

Bruce Campbell has something of a following in comics quarters his beloved and hilarious (but short-lived) series could make a go of it as a comic. Sprinkle in participation on some level by Campbell and his rabid fan base wouldn’t be able to get enough of it.

In the series, Brisco County is a Harvard-educated lawyer who leaves it all behind to be a bounty hunter.

Set in 1893, Brisco also hunts his father’s murderer along with his sidekick Lord Bowler and trusty horse Comet.

Psych

The ending of Psych was set up so that if the network could get the stars to come back for a miniseries or TV movie, they would.

At least that’s the official line fans got at the time. You never know whether that was ever going to happen or not. Either way, the series finale gave (most of) the characters a clean start in a new city — one that even teased the prospect of a crossover with USA’s other long-running series about an eccentric detective, Monk.

The cast of this show really made it, so it’s difficult to know just how well a lot of the material would work without them…but it’s worth a try. Hey, if Oni Press was seriously considering a My Name is Earl comic at one point…!

(And yeah, we still want that. The series ended on a cliffhanger!)

Gunsmoke

One of the longest-running and most successful TV series of all time, why do we need more Gunsmoke?

Well, the same reason we need more Superman. Because a new generation will have a new take on the characters and concepts, and because it doesn’t make sense for the rights-holders to just let something this valuable (and frankly cool) languish.

Western comics have been an interesting beast in the recent past; Dynamite has had some luck with licensed properties like Zorro and The Lone Ranger, while different iterations of Jonah Hex have struggled to hit the kind of numbers DC wants even while they’ve been some of the best books on the market. Gunsmoke, then, could find a home with a mid-level publishing like IDW and probably really flourish.

Plus, imagine the initial burst of enthusiasm. It would be like when Dynamite did The Man With No Name.

Heroes

OK, so both the TV show and the online/collected comics that went with it fell apart in a big way after the first season and have been largely disparaged as a directionless mess — and then an attempt at reviving the franchise last season was equally disappointing.

Still, the premise was strong and the showrunners’ original idea to trade off sets of main characters once a season could work well as a series of interconnected miniseries that could well turn out to shine a light on the Heroes universe without spending too much time dwelling on the rather preposterous threads created to accommodate keeping characters around who were written as one-trick ponies.

The problem, of course, is convincing people who have relationships with the characters from TV that they want to experiment with a Rogue One-style experiment of meeting characters you don’t know in a world you do. But it can be done. Look at…well, Rogue One.

Quantum Leap

This one probably should have been a comic book already, and with fellow ’80s genre icon MacGyver getting an Image Comics miniseries and a new TV life, it will almost be surprising if Quantum Leap doesn’t get similar treatment soon.

I’d love to see Dan Jurgens on this, considering the way he ably handled the time travel aspects of Booster Gold‘s second volume. Perhaps Mark Russell, who is currently doing a Booster Gold/The Flintstones crossover, is a more realistic choice…!

Agent Carter

This one’s really freaking obvious, right?

There are already comics — even if they’re mostly not very well-promoted — that take place in Marvel’s Cinematic Universe. Why not add a miniseries or ongoing series filling in some of the holes between where Peggy Carter’s adventures ended on TV and where they picked up when we saw her decades later in the movies?

Agent Carter was always a weird animal. Its audience was fiercely devoted and those who like it, LOVED IT and thought it was the best show on TV. Converting some of that audience to try a comic shouldn’t be too hard — especially if the showrunners were around to write it (like they did for Marvel’s recent Captain Marvel series).

Twin Peaks

Matt Haley once had what looks like a pretty promising start on a Twin Peaks: Season 3 graphic novel, meant to be included in the deluxe “Gold Box” edition of the home video release a few years back. We’re left with a small handful of sketches that hint at what might have been, and a couple of seasons that compose one of the most enduring and creative shows ever to hit commercial airwaves.

As the first in a series of hour-long dramas like The X-Files and Lost which created massive genre buzz, a cult following and created a once-every-ten-years success cycle that still hasn’t found its next member.

Now, twenty-five years later, the show is coming back…but once this season on Showtime is over there’s no promise about a future. And there is centuries of implied backstory gathered in co-creator Mark Frost’s The Secret History of Twin Peaks. Let’s get some of that fleshed out!