Cassandra appeared very briefly in issue one of the Gold Key comics.
One of the DS fans did an M. A.thesis on the Dan/"Marilyn" Ross books back in the Eighties and wrote an article about the paperbacks which I read. (Frankly, I was stunned to think of any academic worthy of the name signing off on such a thing, but since then, we've had cartloads of scholarly books published on the postmodern polsemy of Xena and Gabrielle, etc.). IIRC, Dan only ever received the script for episode 1 of DS. In the very first book, the first few pages are fairly close to some of the narrative of episode 1. I don't think he ever watched the show because he was too busy. The article mentioned him typing the final chapters of one of the books in the back seat of his station wagon while his wife drove them to the publishers because he was so close to the deadline.
To call them "pulp" fiction would be a kindness. One of my friends used to read them on the beach, a convenience because they have those big barrels in which you could toss the completed, sand-encrusted paperbacks once you were done.
They're worth having for the cover photos. The early issues of the comics had some nice photos. Apart from that, I can't imagine anyone wanting to have them around the house.
Some of the other characters did turn up in the Ross books, notably Quentin, of course. The appearance of the characters was often wildly at variance with how they appeared on the show. Quentin, I think, spent a lot of the books as a mendicant hippie adopting various outlandish disguises. Chris Jennings appeared in one book as a cold-blooded, calculating fiend. Angelique showed up as an olive skinned beauty from the West Indies, and Dr. Hoffman had an entertaining cameo in a couple of the very last books. Dan Ross also got the job of writing up the original screenplay of hoDS in novel form (it included several scenes that were deleted prior to filming), and his depictions of Julia and Professor Stokes were influenced, I think, by his work on that.
G.
