It was announced earlier this week that Stephen Colbert, late night talk show host and well-known Tolkien expert, will be writing a new Lord of the Rings movie for Peter Jackson, this one based around several chapters of Fellowship of the Ring that were not included in Jackson’s 2001 film adaptation.
Colbert said in the video with Jackson that the film will adapt six early chapters — “Three is company” through “Fog on the Barrow-downs” — from The Fellowship of the Ring, the first book of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. These chapters were not part of the first film.
“I thought, ‘Oh wait, maybe that could be its own story that could fit into the larger story,'” Colbert said. “‘Could we make something that was completely faithful to the books while also being completely faithful to the movies that you guys had already made?'”
Colbert said he and his son, McGee, worked out what they thought might be a framing device for the story.
“It took me a few years for me to scrape my courage into a pile to give you a call,” joked Colbert to Jackson.
Warner Bros. sent the film’s synopsis in a release: “Fourteen years after the passing of Frodo – Sam, Merry, and Pippin set out to retrace the first steps of their adventure. Meanwhile, Sam’s daughter, Elanor, has discovered a long-buried secret and is determined to uncover why the War of the Ring was very nearly lost before it even began.” (Source: NPR)
In other words, this new film, Shadow of the Past, will take place between the escape of the Hobbits from the Black Riders at Buckleberry Ferry and their arrival at Bree on the fateful dark and rainy night where they meet Strider, and their adventure takes on a new urgency.
To be completely frank, when the news dropped early in the week, I wasn’t sure it it were serious or a bit of Colbertian whimsey for his show. I’m still not sure! But I’m intrigued.
One person who is not intrigued? The comic book writer Chuck Dixon.
In the 1980s, a comic book publsiher (Eclipse, maybe?) published a comic book adaptation of The Hobbit, illustrated by David Wenzel. It was collected as a graphic novel, and has been republished many times. We offered it often when I was at Diamond Comic Distributors, including a new edition (hardcover, maybe?) a more or two before I was laid off. I remember looking at it at Waldenbooks in West Virginia when I was in high school. I finally bought a copy myself with a reissue around the time of the release of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. It is absolutely lovely, and I recommend it.
Chuck Dixon, the writer of many comics — just off the top of my head, Batman (co-creator of Bane!), Robin, Nightwing, Birds of Prey, The Punisher, and that doesn’t even scratch the surface of the man’s career — wrote the script for the graphic novel adaptation.
While that’s an interesting factoid, it is also something that I have never considered important to the Hobbit graphic novel. Despite having hundreds of Dixon comics in my collection, I wouldn’t necessarily count The Hobbit as one. He’s a mere footnote here.
Thus, Fandom Pulse calling Dixon “The Hobbit graphic novel writer” feels like a bit absurd. It’s true in a techincal sense. But no one is buying The Hobbit graphic novel for Chuck Dixon’s byline. They buy it because it’s JRR Tolkien’s novel. They buy it for David Wenzel’s art.
Framing Chuck Dixon’s involvement in the graphic novel in such a way to make an “argument from authority” criticism against Colbert’s new Lord of the Rings project really stretches the truth, imho, especially when his criticism is based more in personal and political animus than anything concrete.