Max Allan Collins on movie and TV tie-in comic strips

GOLD: In the past five years we've seen, in terms of the continuity strips, we've seen dozens of tie-in strips, most of them...
COLLINS: If you haven't blinked, you've seen them.
GOLD: Yeah, that's true. Well, most of it seemed to disappear in a couple of years. I mean even highly merchandisable strips like Star Wars Superman and Conan to a certain extent.
COLLINS: There's two reasons for that. They're often poorly done (but not always). Spin-offs are a bad idea. Name one classic strip, with the possible exception of Tarzan, which has not had a history as a popular strip-
GOLD: It's never been in hundreds and hundreds of papers.
COLLINS: Syndicates always make the mistake of trying to take super-stars from other media and transferring them to comics. I mean, who the hell wants to see a kind of mediocre, photo-realistic drawing of Larry Hagman in a little, 1½-inch by 1½-inch box with a balloon floating over his head? When they can turn on their TV and see him in the flesh being a lot nastier than you can get away with in a family newspaper.

[I just find this interesting because later in 1989 Collins would do the Batman movie tie-in strip that lasted for a couple of years]