TRON’s Comic Strip Legacy

Back in the early 80s young nerds followed the weekly adventures of Tron… in the comic strip section of their local newspaper.

By Dec. 03, 2010

It’s not unusual for a movie to get a comic book adaptation, a phenomenon that has been around for decades. But comic strip adaptations are much rarer things, and for good reason - they take forever to finish and you can’t adapt with any depth. In effect they’re just semi-lengthy, spoiler-filled ads for the movie.

Take the Tron comic strip Disney did. It ran for 13 weeks in Disney’s regular Sunday strip, Walt Disney’s Treasury of Classic Tales. Running 30 years, the strip adapted Disney classic films, and towards the end began telling new stories featuring classic Disney characters.

And so we ended up with a weird, abrupt, 13 part adaptation of Tron. It’s  not as exciting as the adaptation of The Black Hole, which had art by Jack Kirby. I do like how nobody looks like the movie versions - mainly because the artist probably didn’t have proper references to work from. Also, judging by the collection of strips found at Tron-Sector.com, the adaptation just skipped all the outside the computer stuff (unless they’re missing a week or two, which is quite possible).

Click here to read the 13 part Tron adaptation.

Thanks to Jordan Hoffman for reminding me this exists.

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