Archaia’s forthcoming graphic novel, Rust: Visitor in the Field, has been acquired by 20th Century Fox to be adapted into a film.
The book, set to be released this September, was written and illustrated by Royden Lepp. From Archaia: “Rust is a high-octane adventure set in the prairie lands of an unknown time. Life on the Taylor family farm was difficult enough before Jet Jones crashes into the barn, chased by a giant decommissioned war robot! Oldest son Roman Taylor struggles to keep his family’s small farm afloat as the area heals from a devastating world war. While the rest of his family may not trust the mysterious boy with the jetpack, Roman believes the secrets of Jet’s past may be the key to their survival.”
Deadline reports writer Aline Brosh McKenna (The Devil Wears Prada) will handle script duties while Simon Kinberg (X-Men: First Class) and Archaia’s own Editor-In-Chief Stephen Christy will produce. Some very nice news for Archaia to walk into San Diego Comic-Con with next week to be sure. Congrats to them!
LA-based publisher Archaia has made their name with high quality hardcover graphic novels like the multiple-Eisner-nominee Return of the Dapper Men, so getting into actual book books seems like a pretty natural move. And that’s exactly what they’re doing with Conspiracy of the Planet of the Apes, the publisher’s first “illustrated prose novel.” It’s scheduled for release on July 25, less than two weeks before the similarly preposition-heavy Rise of the Planet of the Apes hits theaters. Andrew E.C. Gaska is writing the book — which takes place “between the scenes” of the 1968 original — and is joined by illustrators including Joe Jusko and Mark Texeira. The (awesome) cover is by certified legend Jim Steranko.
Following this news, Archaia announced that they’re partnering with Publishers Group West, a distribution company that already counts Jeff Smith’s Cartoon Books (and dozens of others) among their clients. BOOM! Studios launched an ongoing Planet of the Apes comic book series last month, serving as a prequel to the original film.
Full cover and accompanying Conspiracy of the Planet of the Apes press release after the jump.
Before we know it we’ll be seeing Henry Cavill in his Superman costume but until then you can either go back and watch The Tudors to see him in action or check out the first trailer for his new film, Immortals.
I actually spoke with the cast and creators at WonderCon last month for Newsarama. Here’s what director Tarsem Singh had to say about the film, “It’s basically about immortality to put it in a nutshell. The hero [Cavill as Theseus], whose story we follow, is basically a nobody who, through his deeds, will be known forever. So his immortality is through means,” said Singh. “And then there’s Mickey [Rourke] who has the Attila the Hun policy, which is knock everything up that you can, you have many, many children and twenty generations down you might recognize your eyes and you’re immortal. The Gods by definition are immortal but they fight with each other, they can lose that too. So I just thought, the Gods were the ones that most can’t relate with but the other two I think is what natures’ fight is all about.”
Relativity Media has teamed with Archaia for an Immortals graphic novel. Archaia says it will expand upon the film’s key characters and events through a series of original tales written and illustrated by recognizable comic names like David Mack, Ron Marz, Dennis Calero and Ben Templesmith. The graphic novel will be published through Archaia’s Black Label division.
Producer of the film, Marc Canton, said he feels smart for sticking with Cavill for the role of Theseus, especially now that he’s been cast as Superman. “The truth is, we cast the sh*t out of 300 and they all emerged and now Gerry [Gerard Butler] and [Michael] Fassbender and Lena Heady, and it’s happening again here. Both Henry and Luke and Kellan Lutz and all these guys and Freida [Pinto], I mean, they’re going to explode. It’s true that when Henry, someone asked me, did I yell when I heard Henry got Superman and I went, ‘Well, I was actually the one that told Zack about him,’ so I guess I had a plan in mind.”
The Immortals trailer should be attached to Thor, opening this weekend, while the film itself debuts November 11.
“Realism,” quotation marks and all, can be a strange thing to demand from any form of fiction, and it can be a strange thing to decry the lack of.
This seems especially true when the fiction under discussion comes in the form of comics, probably because the form has been dominated by genre works for so long that straight comics literature divorced from easy genre classifications (horror, romance, superhero, crime, etc) are still (relatively) new.
Of course that fiction’s not real—it’s fiction. Someone is making it up. How realistic do you want it to be? The easy answer is that it should be realistic enough that you can forget that people are behind the scenes inventing it long enough to lose yourself in the story and the drama enough to enjoy it, or be affected by it.
I think comics struggles with this a bit more than other media like, say, prose or film, simply because it is easier for them to achieve different types of verisimilitude. A film looks like the real world, the written word is the way we communicate a lot of information—a novel might look or read the same way a letter or email or news article might.
But comics? Someone had to draw all those little lines making up those people, and the little bubbles surrounding all the words, whether they hand-lettered those words or had a computer program do it for them. (more…)
Entertainment Weekly reports that teen-themed network The CW is pursuing a new zombie show to ride the success of AMC’s “The Walking Dead.” The show will feature “two sisters who face off…right as the zombie apocalypse” begins.
The interesting thing to us comic book fans, though, is the title of this zombie story, “The Awakening.”
That’s interesting, as “The Awakening” is already the title of a zombie story, the two-volume comic book from Archaia [read the first issue here]. There is no mention of the comic in EW’s news blurb, and the two don’t appear to share any story similarities aside from the presence of zombies, but this still seems odd; you’d think the first thing a studio would do before announcing the name of a new show would be a simple google search of “The Awakening zombies”.
So, will Archaia be pursuing a name-change from The CW? We’ve asked, and we’ll fill you in as soon as we get any response.
Jim McCann was once a mild-mannered Marvel Comics marketing whiz, but now he’s giving it a go as a full-time freelance writer. He’s writing the ongoing Hawkeye and Mockingbird for Marvel, but also writing something completely different for Archaia: Return of the Dapper Men, a fairy tale about a world with only children that sees 314 dapper men fall from the sky to set the world right. It sports unconventional decoupage art from Janet Lee, and the publisher released the cover art today:
Did we mentioned this cover is designed by multiple-time Eisner-winner letter and designer Todd Klein? Yep.
Watch our video interview with Lee on her process here; our interview with Archaia editor-in-chief Stephen Christy is here.
