Template:Realworld Bantam Books published a series of twelve Star Trek Fotonovels where word balloons and text were arranged over episode photographic stills to create a comic book formatted story. Such books were in fashion before the advent of home video, such as VCRs and DVDs.
The company which produced the books for Bantam was Mandala Publications. After producing the Star Trek Fotonovels, Mandala decided to form a new paperback company, Fotonovel Publications. Under the new name, they had published photonovels of the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Ralph Bakshi's animated Lord of the Rings, and a number of other movies that didn't necessarily lend themselves well to the format, like Ice Castles and Grease. (During this later period, Pocket Books published "photostories" of Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.) Unfortunately, the photonovel craze only lasted from around 1978, when Mandala and others started adapting movies and TV shows like Trek, Battlestar Galactica, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, to 1982, by which time Fotonovel Publications had disappeared. Increasing paper costs and the growth of the videocassette industry combined to make the photonovel no longer feasible. An effort was made to revive the format in recent years, with titles including The Blair Witch Project, but it didn't seem to catch on.
