Image Comics has a lot of great books that fans should check out, and one of its best is an often-overlooked fantasy series. When Image Comics formed, it was meant to give creators the ownership of their work, and this allowed them to create new comics and worlds that they could control. Rob Liefeld, Todd McFarlane, Jim Lee, Erik Larsen, Jim Valentino, Whilce Portacio, and Marc Silvestri formed the company, and the rest is history. Titles like Youngblood, Spawn, The Savage Dragon, and The Walking Dead resulted from the merger of these creators, but some smaller Image Comics titles also deserve a lot of love.
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One of these titles was a fantasy comic book by the team of Joshua Williamson and Andrei Bressan called Birthright. The series deserves to have more people talking about it, and it needs to finally get adapted as a movie or TV show, after several years of development.
Birthright Is a Perfect Image Comics Fantasy Series About Family
Birthright debuted in 2014, produced by Skybound Entertainment and published by Image Comics. The series kicked off with a bang, as a man and his son, Mikey, were playing ball in the park while the boy’s mother was preparing his birthday party. However, Mikey ran into the woods, chasing the ball, and never returned. Authorities believed the father killed his son, and even the boy’s mother started to doubt him, ruining their marriage. However, one year later, the boy returned as a grown man and said he had to save the world from an oncoming evil.
Birthright was a comic book series that flashed back and forth from the boy’s time as he was raised in a very different world to be a warrior to his return to Earth, where he had to convince his parents of who he is and stop the oncoming evil. However, the series also had a lot of twists and turns that revealed Mikey wasn’t being completely honest, and the apocalypse might be closer than anyone might have expected.
The Image Comics series ran for 50 issues, running from 2014 to 2021, and built an incredible world with Mikey joined by his parents, his brother, and several warriors from the other world. The themes ingrained in the story were a sense of what fate and destiny mean, and the question of what happens if a person has to choose between their predetermined destiny and doing the right thing to save the people they love. It is a big story, and while the middle section slogged a little bit, it has a tight narrative that leads to a logical conclusion. It also has some beautiful artwork and deserves all the praise it receives.
Birthright Is Perfect for a Movie or TV Streaming Adaptation
Interestingly, Birthright has been in development in Hollywood since 2018, three years before the comic’s story ended. Skybound Entertainment reached a deal with Universal Pictures to work on a movie adaptation, but there has been no word since then on the project moving forward. Birthright was the third project in the Universal deal, following Invinicble and Kill the Minotaur. Only Invincible ended up getting made, and while that was a massive success, there is no movement on the other two projects.
That is disappointing since Birthright is perfectly made for a television franchise. While it was supposed to be a movie deal, the comic book might be better suited to go in the direction of Invincible and become a television series. However, the production costs might be prohibitive, and that could cause it to end up canceled unfinished if audiences don’t latch onto it quickly. It might be best to be just like Invincible and be made into an animated streaming series.
Recreating the war-torn world of Terrenos would likely cost too much for a live-action fantasy series without much name value heading in. However, bringing the world to life in animation could be a perfect way to present the story to an audience who might not be familiar with the Image Comics series. Birthright is a story of a broken family fighting together to regain what they lost, while also saving the world. This is a perfect theme for any streaming series, and the Joshua Williamson and Andrei Bressan series deserves to finally see it adapted for the world to see.
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