Old Dungeons & Dragons cartoon show revisited in new IDW comic

Polygon says there's a new comic produced of recent that's supposed to draw from the 1983-85 Saturday morning cartoon TV series based on Dungeons & Dragons being reprinted in archives, and yes, this appears to be published by none other than IDW, which has been circling the woke drain for nearly a decade now:

The Dungeons & Dragons Saturday morning cartoon aired from 1983 to 1985, and the weird tale of a group of six kids who ride a roller coaster into the fantasy tabletop role-playing game is still inspiring writers and game designers. The characters popped up in the 2023 film Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, and Wizards of the Coast created an adventure based on the show to introduce the 2024 rules. The series was a big influence on Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans’ dark comic book series Die, and got its own comic adaptation from IDW in 2022, which will be collected into a deluxe hardcover edition releasing this summer.

Dungeons & Dragons: Animated Adventures Library Edition contains IDW’s three Saturday Morning Adventures four-issue miniseries, which are meant to represent lost episodes of the cartoon. The comics are written by David M. Booher (Ghostbusters) and Sam Maggs (Critical Role) and illustrated by George Kambadais (Gargoyles) and Jack Lawrence (Transformers). While the show was set in a generic fantasy world, the comics take place within D&D’s Forgotten Realms campaign setting.

I seem to remember this Maggs as a sex-negative feminist who ruined a Spider-Man video game co-starring the Black Cat. Even the Ghostbusters comic could very likely have been subject to similar wokeness. With these kind of people now employed by IDW, no wonder it's bad they still have a license to publish anything D&D related. The compilation is said to be nearly $50, so that's a lot of money best saved for better things. It's also not very encouraging when they mention the writer who made a mess of Iron Man as somebody who allegedly drew inspiration from D&D.

Since the subject of IDW comes up, Gizmodo wrote another fawning article about their Star Trek comics, and it looks like they made sure to provide woke pandering in them as well:

...Two new celebratory one-shots will also release in May and September. The first coming in May, Star Trek: Celebrations 2026, sees the return of IDW’s pride anthology, celebrating LGBTQIA+ characters from across the franchise with stories from queer creatives. [...]

With this kind of marketing, can they be trusted to deliver a decent D&D comic that's not filled to the brim with leftist ideologies anymore? Far from it. Nor can they be trusted to take a respectable approach to the characters from the 1980s cartoon series, which, IIRC, was produced by Marvel Productions, the 1980-97 animation studio managed by a business invested in Marvel at the time (the name was changed to New World Animation in its last few years). And the credited writers, of course, are also discouraging. I sure hope anybody who already has or may be making deals to publish creator-owned comics with IDW will rethink their arrangements. They lost the license to publish comics based on GI Joe and Transformers. But even D&D will have to be taken elsewhere with such awful wokesters at the helm.

In the end though, the owners of the IPs that were turned into a mess have to shoulder some blame for letting things go south. In the past, Hasbro may have put plenty of oversight on how much creative control and/or autonomy was allowed for licensees. If they own Wizards of the Coast, then whether it's the affiliate or the main managing company, they've failed the D&D franchise at this point, by allowing IDW's writers and editors to turn it into a disaster, and as I'm aware, WOTC has been alienating D&D fans for years already.