Campfire Tales and the IDW comics: My thoughts

So.... I've been behind on watching season 7 by several episodes, due to the fact that I still hadn't gotten around to watching To Where and Back Again. Yeah. But I did get to that, and I've been catching up, and I did just recently finish Campfire Tales, and I wanted to share some quick thoughts about it and other related subjects.

I'd heard about the premise of Campfire Tales before I saw it, and I was fascinated. For those that watched it, you know that AJ, Rarity, and Rainbow all told a favorite legend to the CMC. But what interests me, and what some of you may be unaware of, is that those characters all came from IDW.

Rockhoof, Mistmane, and Flash Magnus are all characters from IDW's MLP comic line. Specifically, they were from Legends of Magic, the new ongoing series that replaced Friends Forever, issues 2, 3, and 4 respectively.

If you don't know the premise of the series, here it is: Sunburst is doing research into the history of Equestria, and Princess Celestia gives him access to Stwarswirl's private study, where he'd done research of his own. Among the books is a section titled Legends of Magic, of figures from all over history. Each issue features a new story.

The legends in the episode compliment each comic story. Each is an origin tale. In the comics, each of these characters had already become legends for something, and the issue was what happened afterwards. What they were famous for was only a few sentences, and not really gone into detail. So that's where the episode came in.

I rather liked the episode overall. Though personally, Rockhoof was probably the worst. I mean, he just suddenly becomes muscular in an instant with no explanation? It was pretty weak, but I guess the writers were in too much of a rush, like with A Hearthswarming Tail. The other two stories definitely held together better.

I also also find this crossover fascinating. I remember seeing a video by DRWolf001 where he mentioned it would be difficult to sync comic and show continuity because of the difference in schedules for the two. Though as of late, they're overlapping a lot. Several issues of the main MLP book have been directly connected to a season 7 episode (like an issue of what happened when Angel was watching all the animals while Fluttershy was busy in Fluttershy Leans in, a follow up to Not Asking for Trouble, and a follow up to Discordant Harmony).

And in turn, it looks like the show has managed to promote the new Legends of Magic book through their episodes. On top of this episode, there's also Daring Done. I haven't gotten around to it yet, but I did accidentally see a spoiler that told me it featured a pony named Somnambula.

Why is that important? Well the latest issue of Legends of Magic, issue five, is all about her. Just from glancing at it, I can tell you that it's a follow up to whatever story was told in Daring Done. It's also worth knowing that Legends of Magic came out in April, and had been on time with monthly release, except for issue five. It was originally slated for August release naturally, but then it suddenly changed to September 6th. Of course it makes sense now because this way it was closer to when Daring Done aired.

So yeah, the comic material actually managed to cross into the show for once, and it looks like Hasbro is doing some promotion. I think that's awesome. And that also means we should be on the lookout for Mage Meadowbrook, who is the star of issue 6 (set to come out September 27th, guess they want to fix the scheduling hiccup).