Set Description:
It was the dawn of the third age of mankind. Ten years after the Earth–Minbari war. The Babylon project was dream giving form. It's goal to prevent another war by creating a place where humans and aliens could work out their differences peacefully. It's a port of call. Home away from home for diplomas, hustlers, entrepreneurs, and wanders. Humans and aliens wrapped in two million five hundred thousand tons of spinning metal, all alone in the night. It can be a dangerous place, but it's our last best hope for peace. This is the story of last of the Babylon stations. The year is 2258. The name of the place is Babylon 5.
Bablyon 5, the television series, was a groundbreaking science fiction space opera. When it originally aired, the idea of a "novel for television", where each episode advanced an ongoing plotline, was considered a revolutionary gamble. Now, years later, that's become the norm for genre shows. Additionally, series creator J. Michael Straczynski allowed novels, comics, and short stories to canonically expand the universe beyond what was seen on the screen. The comic book part of that plan, one of Straczynski's earliest forays into the world of comics, was this DC-published title. Between seasons two and three of the television series, Straczynski wrote the first issue himself and then created rough outlines for other writers to expand into a sequence of four-issue story cycles. All told, 24 issues were planned.
That ... didn't happen. The title suffered from a range of issues, including paper quality, shifting art styles, creative differences between Straczynski and the other writers, and so forth. In all, 11 issues were released, all in 1995. Scripts had already been prepared for another four-issue arc (which would have been #12-15) and an outline existed for the four-issue arc following that. However, DC's editor refused to approve the script for issue #12 as written; Straczynski refused to accept the edits. DC management declared the issue at an impasse. Normally, outside writers do not have creative control over scripting, but in this case, Straczynski was both writer and rights-holder. Ultimately, he opted to cancel the series rather than compromise on the story. Babylon 5 returned to comics in 1998 for the three-issue miniseries In Valen's Name; to avoid the problems of the original title, Straczynski scripted all three issues personally and published them in serialized form in the UK edition of the Babylon 5 Magazine. He then licensed reprint rights to DC, ensuring that he retained editorial control.
All 14 DC comics were released to both the comic shop direct market and to traditional "newsstand" retailers (who, by 1991, were mostly bookstores). Although CGC has refined its policy regarding newsstand editions, currently the best approach is still to have them displayed in separate sets. This set -- The Zocalo Collection, named for Babylon 5's on-station marketplace -- contains direct-market books. My newsstand copies can be found in its companion set, The IGN Collection, named for the primary in-universe media outlet.
Almost a decade after the last Babylon 5 book was published by DC, another comic was created for the franchise. Released alongside the spinoff anthology film The Lost Tales, this 8-page mini-comic is a farewell story for G'Kar and Dr. Franklin, whose respective actors had already passed away. A few copies (most of which are signed by Straczynski) were handed out at an SDCC panel announcing the film, and the comic was distributed in limited quantities as a pack-in inside limited-edition DVD cases at Best Buy. Because of this, it is markedly more scarce than the any of the other issues.
In September 2021, Straczynski announced plans to reboot the series on The CW. Plans for the reboot have apparently been delayed by the Warner Bros.–Discovery merger, but with any luck, Babylon 5 will return to the small screen... and perhaps to comic book pages as well. |