In a quiet corner of last weekend’s San Diego Comic Con, hidden under the glare of the blockbusters, the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers handed out their Scribe Awards for the best adaptations and licensed spin-off books linked to media properties. In other words, it was Christa Faust’s novelization of Snakes on a Plane that won an award, not the movie itself. Marv Wolfman also won a prize for rendering Superman Returns into prose, which shouldn’t be too surprising since he was one of the comic book writers who rebooted the Man of Steel in the late 1980s and clearly knows the characters well. Alice Henderson took the YA award for her Buffy novel, while Stephen Niles and Jeff Mariotte won one of the spin-off categories for a novel set in the vampiric 30 Days of Night franchise; Mariotte grabbed another spin-off prize—solo this time—for Las Vegas: High Stakes. (Yes, there are novels set in the world of NBC’s Las Vegas; I didn’t know that, either.) And Donald Bain, the man who actually does the heavy lifting on all those Murder, She Wrote paperback mysteries “written by Jessica Fletcher,” received the Grandmaster title for helping keep that franchise alive more than a decade after the last original episode aired on CBS. (I know, I know, four TV-movies between 1997 and 2003; I was fortunate enough not to own a television for most of that period.)
