Between 1989 and 1994, Tony Robinson wrote and starred in four series of the hugely popular Children's BBC series Maid Marian and Her Merry Men, reinventing the legend of Robin Hood as a sitcom for children which posited that Marian was the true leader of the outlaws, and the foppish Robin of Kensington was little more than a vain incompetent whose greatest contribution to proceedings was designing the gang's costumes.
Robinson very much did not stop at the small screen, however; eight MMaHMM comic albums, adapting the TV episodes, were published between 1989 and 1992, with two being released simultaneously every year. The first two batches coincided with the broadcast of the first and second series, but after the Autumn 1990 transmission of Series 2 the show took an extended break until January 1993, and the third and fourth sets of books were released in the interim (with the final two books actually being published well before the Series 3 episodes they adapted were broadcast!)
If you were writing a sitcom or a children's television serial around this time, then a novelisation was still pretty common, but Maid Marian (a show slap bang in the middle of that particular Venn diagram, and hence more or less obligatory) might be a unique example of an albumisation. It seems like these adaptations were a real passion project of Robinson's, but it's hard to imagine the show translating so well to text (one other book based on the show was published, which contained the playbook for the stage musical based on the show that Robinson wrote with two of the series' cast members, Mark Billingham -- yes, that Mark Billingham -- and David Lloyd).
The artwork for the albums was provided by Paul Cemmick (also responsible for the show's animated end credits, as well as original illustrations for the musical's programme when it was staged by the Bristol Old Vic in 1996, which you can see at the bottom of this page), who worked from Robinson's original scripts (in the earliest cases before he'd even had the opportunity to see any of the show itself, with the only visual references he had being photos of the cast taken at the initial readthrough). A total of nine episodes from across the first three series were translated to print in total; the first two books adapted the first two episodes, which form a loose two-parter, but after that they go all over the place, with the eighth and final volume, "Driving Ambition and Keeping Mum", adapting two episodes in a single book. There was also a serialisation (with the panels modified or redone totally to fit) in the Daily Telegraph's imaginatively titled supplement for younger readers, the Young Telegraph.
A sitcom written by Tony Robinson, aiming to get demographically inappropriate humour in wherever possible, is a very funny show indeed. But such a sitcom adapted into a format that has no need to worry about what's feasible on a children's television budget is something else entirely. There are at least seven examples on any given page of this, so I decided to narrow things down to one in particular.
The first episode, "How the Band Got Together", features a subplot regarding Marian's pet tadpole Edwina, whom later-Merry-Man Rabies gets stuck up his nose. (If you are not familiar with Maid Marian and Her Merry Men, now might be an excellent time to watch at least one episode.) The conclusion of this plot -- where Rabies sneezes the unfortunate Edwina into a fire -- is perhaps not a great success in the broadcast episode: Rabies sneezes, Howard Lew Lewis ducks out of shot possibly to disguise the fact that nothing comes out of his nose, Marian looks briefly distraught, and the end credits come in a bit suddenly.
There are many embellishments and additions in the comics that might have been in the scripts but proved to be impractical, but could just as easily be ideas Paul Cemmick had once he was left unleashed, or were worked out with Robinson so the stories would translate better. The opening pages of "The Beast of Bolsover" contain a good example of something definitely added specifically for the comics; because Cemmick drew the first few books before he could actually see the show, the outlaws' costumes don't match the TV series, and there's an extra scene at the start of this book where Robin designs some new costumes which bring the comic closer to the show.
The conclusion to "HtBGT", whilst retaining the same dialogue and events, is far more successful in comic form (as is the whole tadpole subplot in general, with some lovely shots of the inside of Rabies' nose) and seems closer to what Robinson might have intended before discovering the budget wouldn't stretch to a CGI tadpole, with Edwina's fiery demise depicted in full:
Apart from these assorted flourishes, the comics are pretty faithful adaptations of the original episodes, with several of the songs preserved (and translating perhaps surprisingly well, with Cemmick giving them a lot of energy), although they are noticeably absent from the final two volumes. One oddity is that the last volume is the only one to include a page introducing the characters, and it refers to Robin as "Robin of Islington", rather than Kensington.
Robinson and Cemmick resurrected the comics when Marian was released on DVD in the noughties, with each series' booklet featuring an original 8-page story, this time very much aimed at adults who remembered the series from their childhood, as these stories didn't so much try and get things under the radar as just switch the radar off entirely; they were nicely supplemented with a short but thorough featurette where Robinson interviewed Cemmick on the Series Four set. (Here Robinson cites Asterix as a major inspiration for the albums; all eight Maid Marian books are 48 pages long, the exact same length as an Asterix book.) Cemmick also provided a comic strip for the extremely short-lived tie-in magazine for the BBC's 2006-09 interpretation of Robin Hood, adopting a similar art style but stepping significantly away from the line in the sand.
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On a related note, whilst researching this piece I happened to find these photos of the original script for the 1993 Christmas special "Maid Marian and Much the Mini-Mart Manager's Son", which corroborate that it was originally recorded in 1992 for broadcast that year, further bridging the long gap between series 2 and 3, but for some reason it was put back a whole year, airing on Christmas Eve in '93 instead. Whilst this has been speculated to be down to issues with the cameras on the location shoot which they were trying to fix but couldn't in time -- some of it certainly looks odd because it was filmed at the wrong shutter speed so there's no motion blur -- I have one other theory.
Issue 11 of the Red Dwarf Smegazine, which covered Marian because both shows featured Danny John-Jules as a main cast member, claims the special was originally going to be postponed to kick Series 3 off in January 1993 if it couldn't be shown in December. A year later, the Smegazine notes the double-length episode may be split in two (such an edit would've been prepared for international sales anyway, and was used for a 2001 repeat run), and BBC continuity and the original Radio Times listing indicate the eventual broadcast wasn't part of the Children's BBC strand at all.
The only plausible alternative to the quality control theory I can think of is that they were having trouble accommodating the 50-minute episode in the schedules and there was simply nowhere they could find for it in 1992, although delaying broadcast by a whole year seems a bit extreme, especially when the start of the episode is quite clearly intended to serve as a reintroduction to the show after the hiatus.
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