darkSpyro

So... we get all these great looking figures that represent character that - for the most part - we know virtually nothing about. The games can never expand on their individual backstory, since they have to be written in such a way that you can use any character.

I'm an old soul that grew up during the age of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. Those of you who did will know exactly where I'm going with this. The various "He-Men" figures always came packaged with a "mini-comic" - roughly 20 or so pages long. Often, the comic would tell a story about the character in the package (some comics would tell a story about multiple characters and they'd put that one comic in each of those packages). The neat thing is that many of those who worked on these comics went on to do other things - Bruce Timm, for example.

This is what I suggest for Skylanders - except with a bit of a twist. We all know that the fun of Skylanders is the fact that the characters unlock stuff - so how about an app for phones/tablets (and Wii U - just because of the controller) that lets you use characters to unlock "mini-comics" that tell you about the character and how they became a Skylander. Granted, since it's all digital, they could do CGI/Animated things, but then you'd get multiple cost (quick example, voice acting) that you wouldn't have to worry about in comic form - and since we already have 80 or so unique characters, the costs and time of going back and creating stuff for all these characters could get pricey...

I'd love to have some comics. I think they've been telling a bit of backstory for things in the books, but I've never paid much attention to them.
It seems like at one time, there WAS an idea for a Skylanders comic book, but nothing ever came of it.



I think a comic book would be really fantastic. There's a few other video game series that have comic books/tie ins. I'm surprised Activision never jumped on that ball.

Take it one step further. The comic has clues for character specific unlocks that can be achieved in game if you pay attention. And truly have hidden stuff that requires this type of mental processing. You'll get kids to read and apply critical thinking. Win/Win for me. Man, we should get paid for these ideas. It's better than what I'm seeing. This would be more out of the box / game changer that a speaker coming from a portal. You can even sell this from an educational point of view.

They did make a mini comic awhile back. It had Prism Break, Cynder and Jet-Vac at a Sky Stones competition. and the SkyStones came to life. The art for it was pretty bad though. Cynder looks like a deformed Chihuahua Troll. Here it is a little bit of it.

Wasn't that the comic that appeared in one of the annuals?
I personally wouldn't buy comics unless they were cheap, but I can see the appeal and it would be another source of income for activision, so it wouldn't surprise me if they did create a series of comics later in the series - maybe as an extension of Trap Team or Skylanders 5's stories.
Edit: I like the idea of them offering in-game unlocks, but there would be lots of complaints about people needing to spend even more money to unlock things - to some people it would be like paying to unlock what should already be theirs.
Edit: ignore that^

Quote: jckelsall

Wasn't that the comic that appeared in one of the annuals?
I personally wouldn't buy comics unless they were cheap, but I can see the appeal and it would be another source of income for activision, so it wouldn't surprise me if they did create a series of comics later in the series - maybe as an extension of Trap Team or Skylanders 5's stories.

This should simply be content to unlock online as you play the game, and would flow to and from the actual game much better than Hero level attempted to do with SSA and Universe.

Online comics would be great, and could possibly give us an extra use for our character codes - some comics would be unlocked over time for everyone, but other character-specific ones could be unlocked if you owned that character.

I think they should've put the character bio on the back of the packaging, kind of like this:


The in-store kiosks take the place of showing their abilities, but the back is the most boring part of the packaging, it could use a little more individualization other than the tiny screenshot and matching-element "collect them all" area.

Hm. On the back of the Masters of the Universe packaging, they used to have some amazing artwork and a little snippet about the character.

not sure about the masters of universe but when I was growing up ( 31 now ) we had G.I. JOES and every package came with a bio and back story in a file format that you could cut out of the cardboard... but I love the whole mini comic for each one.