Search This Blog

Friday, August 5, 2011

Harry Potter Producer Ready to Dive Back into Fantasy with ‘NonPlayer’


Hollywood appears to be digging the pitches for some of this year’s hottest comic books, because they sure aren’t basing their most recent purchases on a finished product.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, the latest unfinished comic book to get optioned is NonPlayer, the Nate Simpson opus that received a ton of attention when the Image Comics title was released this April. Simpsons handles every bit of the production on the comic book, which was fully illustrated and colored using Photoshop.

Undying Love may be a vampire story, but not like
the many that have recently littered Hollywood.
NonPlayer is the story of Dana, who prefers the full-immersion multiplayer online game “Warriors of Jarvath” to real life. There she’s a warrior with who dispenses violent justice while traveling around on her flying feline-esque creature. Things go glitchy during an encounter with royalty in the game—but readers aren’t certain how this unfolds because issue #2 has yet to be released.

David Heyman (Harry Potter series) and Roy Lee (The Grudge) are acting as producers on the film which will eventually be released by Warner Bros. The film studio recently optioned another Image Comics release: Undying Love by Tomm Coker and Daniel Freedman. That mini-series has also not finished its run yet—it’s currently four issues into an eight-issue run.

Optioning unfinished works is not new—it just seems to be occurring more frequently. Matthew Vaughn (X-Men: First Class) has expressed interest this February in adapting Jonathan Ross’ as-yet-unpublished The Golden Age. Grant Morrison is currently writing Dominion: Dinosaurs vs. Aliens—which is also being planned as a film by Barry Sonnenfeld. Of course, Mark Millar already has features planned on Superior (which has published four of six issues) and Supercrooks (which isn’t set to begin publishing until next summer).

I’ll say this—NonPlayer and Undying Love are two of the more exciting and inventive new books that Image has published this year, so kudos to the Warners. Now we just need someone to pick up Who is Jake Ellis? by Nathan Edmondson.

No comments: