iZombie From Roberson and Allred Being Developed at The CW

The CW Network announced today that they're developing iZombie, the Vertigo Comics title by Chris Roberson and Michael Allred, as a television series. The series, which ran for 28 issues through DC's creator-owned imprint, will reportedly be written by Veronica Mars's Rob Thomas and Diane Ruggiero, according to a report at Deadline. Thomas has wrapped production on the Veronica Mars film, which was funded via over $5 million in Kickstarter donations, and is overseeing a series of novels set in the world of those characters and picking up from the events of the film.

The story "centers on a med student-turned-zombie who takes a job in the coroner's office to gain access to the brains she must reluctantly eat to maintain her humanity," says Deadline (readers will know this, but their elevator pitch for the book is better than mine). "But with each brain she consumes, she inherits the corpse's memories, and with the help of her medical examiner boss and a police detective, she solves homicide cases in order to quiet the disturbing voices in her head." Bringing together zombies, supernatural soap opera and police procedurals, it always kind of seemed like a fit for network TV. Roberson told ComicBook.com back in 2012 that he would have liked to have written iZombie as a series of miniseries rather than a single ongoing. "I find that creatively, it's a little easier to get my head around because it's almost like seasons of a British television show where you have a beginning, a middle and an end with the clear understanding that with any luck you'll come back and do more but that you get to a comfortable stopping place every time because it's never really clear how long it will take until the next one comes out," Roberson said, adding, "Certainly the longest-form thing I've done is iZombie, which is an ongoing, and I found pretty early on that it was something of a stumbling block not knowing how many issues there were going to be. While i had a big, overarching story that I wanted to tell, the fact that I didn't know how many issues or how many years I had with which to tell that story meant that I was always second-guessing myself in terms of pacing. So I ended up throwing out many scripts because I felt that they were either moving too fast or weren't moving fast enough." So...there may be some untold iZombie tales from Roberson and Allred, in case the TV series goes on longer than the TV show? Hmm...! Vertigo's "creator-owned" stories are actually more creator-participation, as Roberson explained to us in that same podcast interview. He and Allred don't take full ownership of the property until a certain period of time after the publication of the final issue, so it seems as though he's back in bed with DC Comics again on the series, whether he (who famously stormed out of the publisher and formed Monkeybrain Comics) likes the idea or not.