Sonic the Comic (The UK version not the Archie Comic) has been continued Online in a Unofficially Official Capacity for years.....

Also, it would have to be in a digital format and be extremely, extremely cheap and also very short. Maybe the Pilot redone as a short novella or a screenplay sold in ePub and PDF. Paradoxically, it would have to be written by a big name writer willing to take a low advance on a brilliant project in the hope of returns down the line.

So, instead of me writing it -- we'd approach JK Rowling or Neil Gaiman or Stephen King or Suzanne Collins or Veronica Roth -- someone huge, prepared to give the series a massive start, and then you'd have me, Informant, Slider_Quinn21, Mike Truman, Temporal Flux and Nigel Mitchell write short novellas with our big name opener returning every 3 - 4 volumes.

This proposal, paradoxically, operates on having a very low budget and yet requires hugely expensive writers to provide their services for pennies on their usual rate to start.

Out of the gate, it would be very hard to get 5k. Maybe you can get 500 to 1000 readers if you are very lucky. So as a property, it's not really providing any initial return, making it less attractive.

That said, I would encourage folks to email comics@lionforge.com and suggest to them Sliders. I think they would be the best bet. They've done a number of old tv franchises (not sure how its turned out), and they have the benefit of a little more access to capital then most startup comic shops would.

The founder, Dave Steward, would have to be a fan of Sliders, and I am not sure that's the case given it wasn't among the properties they originally brought back.

THE X-FILES: SEASON 10 was what inspired my own SLIDERS stuff. SEASON 10 was very much a for-the-fans product that would be incomprehensible to anyone but the die-hards -- and yet, there was a sufficient readership to make the comic a massive financial success (albeit one that was wholly ignored by the TV show making an unexpected return). However, THE X-FILES was an international success, as was BUFFY. FIREFLY less so, but, like THE X-FILES, there were enough die-hards to make a comic profitable.

I'd be curious to read these more obscure comics of ancient TV shows someday -- but I admit, I'm probably not going to watch SIX MiLLION DOLLAR MAN or KOLCHAK anytime soon.

I imagine obtaining the rights could be an issue, but it's likely a Sliders comic could have a larger waiting audience than many titles currently being published at those outlets.  Even a couple one-shot graphic novels could work well.

                                                                                                                                        Rantin' and Ravin' as Usual,
   
                                                                                                                                                                           Arturo6

I kind of like the Tapes unexplained Nature and outstanding Mystery it's just that I would keep the Mystery a Mystery.

Never explain the Reunion/Reboot of the Awesome Foursome and just leave it to Fan Speculation wherein your Reboot/Multiversal Retcon fits.... But so do other theories.

I DO ignore post Season 3 and even half of that I live in denial of so I get where you are coming from.

New Viewers NEED everything fresh and new and us Old Fans need references, gags, parody and returning Characters that are also New Characters to those New Viewers while allowing a New Fan who seeks out any Original Sliders eps to get in on said Jokes and Tips of the Hat.

Adressing all the inconsistencies is not the goal as you say so a balance is needed to avoid excluding any Fans with more familiarity to the parts we dislike while ensuring it does not become Series Six continued.

It is the rewriting of reality/multiverse I have issues with as I pointed out at an earlier point. Any Change Quinn makes to the Multiverse would essentially create a Split leading to Two Multiverses. One with the Rewriting Mguffin and One without as per established Canon. In effect we just end up with a magnified Reality Divergence event.... Except it is now a Mulriversal Divergence Event by Title and Scope.

Well. The simplest explanation that comes to mind is that Quinn commandeered a Kromagg reality warping weapon and made his own modifications. I'm sure Kromagg arsenals have lots of perceptual conceptual armaments. So Quinn found one -- and changed it. The weapon would alter universal constants, change the very nature of reality itself, and do so retroactively, making it so that the changed reality would have always been so.

The nature of the change: originally, Quinn unlocked the gateway to parallel universes by accessing the fundamental interactions within gravity fields. The weapon would switch this so that sliding is now unlocked by tapping into electromagnetic interactions, and retroactively, this has always been the case.

As a result, Quinn's experiments in anti-gravity in 1994 are altered; they never opened a gateway. This is the case for all Quinns in all realities. The Kromaggs, too, experience the same: I'm suggesting with this theory that they discovered sliding when creating their gravity negating aircraft; they succeed, but they don't discover sliding and their civilization remains bound to their own Earth.

The only remnants: the videotape journals and Smarter-Quinn, a paradoxical fragment of the previous multiverse, one preserved deliberately by suspending the tapes between dimensions, the other preserved accidentally by the same means.

I don't think any of this really *matters*, however -- because none of this is why I suggest it. I suggest it because the sliders are superheroes. And superheroes always come back. The sliders' superpower: they have the power to cheat the narrative and side-step the natural and normal consequences of other genres and structures.

For the sliders, death is but a door and the sliding concept and storytelling engine is an avenue to evading any kind of narrative collapse and in turn must allow the sliders to be saved from being detonated, deleted, cyberneticized or getting their TV show cancelled -- or having to be revived in one of those god-awful Season 6 plots in the other thread.

What I'm trying to say: the idea that Seasons 1 - 5 were erased is a metaphor. SLIDERS was cancelled. The idea that Quinn erased sliding from all realities is a metaphor for the fallout of the cancellation: everything good and meaningful and special about SLIDERS was taken away.

To be fair, this is probably silly fanboy psychodrama stuff and I wouldn't fault anyone for thinking it best to do the older doubles route without this multiversal retcon element. I mean, SLIDERS REBORN explicitly declares that the 2000 cancellation of SLIDERS destroyed our world and doomed us all, so -- I'm kind of nuts.

The idea that Quinn, having forgotten sliding, rediscovers it in 2016, is a representation of my faith in the SLIDERS format -- it'll come back. They'll always come back.

I have always liked this aspect of the premise.

It is the rewriting of reality/multiverse I have issues with as I pointed out at an earlier point.

Any Change Quinn makes to the Multiverse would essentially create a Split leading to Two Multiverses.

One with the Rewriting Mguffin and One without as per established Canon.

In effect we just end up with a magnified Reality Divergence event.... Except it is now a Mulriversal Divergence Event by Title and Scope.

Or, go with Matt's approach -- give up on doing a Pilot Redux and do the Pilot in 2015, being reimagined but with the same actors at their current ages. That's cool too. I mean -- looking at my above bullet points, they're all to hit emotional points about SLIDERS for SLIDERS fans. The desire to see Quinn at age 40 in his basement, thinking all of it worthless and pointless, only to see the VHS tape footage and change his mind -- that's my personal psychodrama and perhaps not the right intro for a new audience.

You definitely come up with some rather grand and clever concepts, ones that are easily enjoyable and ultimately memorable, however, it does feel like you tend to forget (or like you mentioned, directly ignore in favour of emotional sense) those stray story strands at the other end of the scale, and don't necessarily follow each development thread all the way through to their natural progressions or conclusions. There's nothing wrong with hyperbole or tv-style editing in measured doses - but just don't forget that a well constructed story and solid rules are just as important as the emotional side of character development and fan service.

You've certainly got a talent though, and this is just from the outlines you've spinned - I haven't even had a chance to actually read your work yet. I freelance as a proofreader and trust me, you're definitely headed in the right direction. Just don't forget those dangly threads.

I could really see this concept working as a kickstarter movie or even an audio drama with the original cast.

A lot of the confusion/plot density is coming from having a situation where everything is in place from the original series EXCEPT the part where they slide. Easy way to simplify this? None of that stuff is there: Quinn is living a regular if unremarkable life and has to come home to help make sense of his house after his mother dies. He cleans out the basement, but finds a tape marked video diary. He scavenges an old VCR, puts it in. It's the same footage we're familiar with, but he has no idea what he's looking at. Why is his younger self talking about Wade and Arturo and why is there a wormhole in the background? Where did this come from?

Now there's the mystery of the origin of the tape - are we watching events on a parallel universe or is this a twist on our own home earth. Why doesn't Quinn know about sliding? And then Quinn decides to try and recreate what he's seeing on the tape - going so far as to enlist Arturo's help. And how does he get the equipment? Wade's career gives him that connection.

So you're actually witnessing the birth of sliding. The three of them have some level of agency in its creation. And when they slide, there's mystery surrounding it all. They don't even have to become lost. They just have to make sense of the fragments left behind in the basement as to where this all began.

Gives you a recurring set (the house), gives you danger (surviving until the timer brings them back), and offers a way to incorporate a Rembrandt if they find a clue that he was a part of all this in the first place.

---

And that is the last you will hear from me on this subject.

However, Matt and Nigel, when reviewing my stuff, have constantly raised the issue that my plots are confusing and try to cram too many maneuvers or plot mechanisms to possibly work -- and I frequently hit that point in scripts and end up using TV-style editing or hyperbole or humour or I simply alter the story on the spot. So, when I find Slide Override and pilight making precisely the same criticisms that two other editors have made, I'm inclined to give it due consideration.

The truth is that a lot of these plot holes are in some ways deliberate. I want the SLIDERS reboot to have a fortysomething Quinn exploring the abandoned laboratory of his youth, wondering if maybe, despite his complete and total failure, there was something worthwhile in husks and fragments of the world of science he left behind. I want the post-2000 events to be vague, unknowable and cosmically indescribable. These are all metaphors for how I feel about SLIDERS.

This may be why they don't make logical sense in the plot and require awkward half-measures -- the basement still has all the equipment and a working VCR! Sliding was erased in a way that Kromaggs can't rebuild it but our Quinn can?! How can Smarter-Quinn still exist?! I keep choosing emotional sense over logical sense. Slide Override and pilight have fair points. Would either of you care to be retained as my script editor?

Hmm. Well, the whole "Quinn kills sliding to reset reality" was a suggestion from Matt Hutaff for SLIDERS REBORN. So, as with REBORN, the explanation would have been that Smarter-Quinn was in an interdimensional tunnel when reality was rewritten and therefore his timeline and his effect on Earth Prime survived the revision. However, his parallel universe did not survive the revision.

In this Pilot Redux, I imagine Smarter-Quinn then found himself stranded on a parallel Earth and his attempts to rebuild sliding failed. I probably wouldn't ever, ever, ever deal with this onscreen... but I would address it in a web comic.

Works for me!

--Chaser9