Aaand the next hit TV show based on a comic book? That just might be Black Jack:
Entertainment One has acquired the worldwide rights to a television series based on the popular Japanese manga. The LA/Toronto-based indie studio, that produces ABC’s Rookie Blue and distributes AMC’s The Walking Dead, plans a possible live action series of the classic 1970/80s comic by Osamu Tezuka. Taka Ichise and Doug Davison, who worked together on Western adaptations of the Japanese movies The Ring and The Grudge, will executive produce the series for eOne.
Here’s how Vertical – which publishes the series in the US – summarizes the strip:
Among adult readers in Japan Black Jack is Osamu Tezuka’s most popular achievement, and perhaps the most close to the creator’s heart, as Tezuka considered entering the medical field—majoring in medicine in college—before devoting his life to comics. Black Jack is a genius surgeon who never acquired his license due to his clashes with the medical establishment. He is hired out by anyone willing to pay his exorbitant rates and is perceived as a heartless rogue because of his enigmatic nature and antisocial manner. But as readers will soon discover, that is not the whole story.
If handled properly, this could be massive; the idea of a mercenary doctor with a complex moral code has pretty great crossover appeal, it seems, even if I can see if quickly being shorthanded to “It’s like House, but moreso.”
August 3rd, 2012 at 2:55 pm
This is great news–I remember watching the Black Jack OVAs a few years back when the battle for national health care campaign was heating up, and thinking that a freelance doctor could really nail the spirit of the zeitgeist.
That said, if they’re going to be at all faithful to the material, it would end up more like Supernatural than House and that might be a trickier sell.