Gary Spencer Millidge’s Strangehaven comic book series has been optioned for film and television by IDW Entertainment, the company has announced. Strangehaven, a creator-owned comic written and illustrated by Millidge, centers on what is ostensibly a murder mystery set in a small, isolated village in South West England. It goes much deeper and darker than that, though, incorporating elements of, as Millidge describes it, “folk horror and supernatural soap opera with off-beat humour and an impossibly idealised vision of British rural life.” Characters in the series include aliens, witches, ghosts, and talking animals, among many others.
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As you can imagine from that description, the series has drawn comparisons to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks over the years. Strangehaven launched in 1995, and ran for 18 issues until 2005, with new issues serialized in the British anthology Meanwhile… since 2014.
“I’m very excited to have the team at IDW Entertainment working towards bringing Strangehaven to the screen,” Millidge said in a statement.
“A darkly glittering example of the soap opera noir, Gary Spencer Millidge’s Strangehaven is an occasionally-opening portal into a beautifully realised otherworld, a plane all the more intriguing and sinister for its resemblance to our own mundane territories,” Watchmen creator Alan Moore said in 2015. “Perfectly controlled and naturalistic storytelling creates a wraparound illusion of the everyday in which surreal and threatening incidents are studded like unnerving little jewels. Gary Millidge is a consummate craftsman, a watchmaker patiently constructing his own unique universe.”
In addition to writing Strangehaven, Millidge writes and edits scholarly works on comics, including editing a pair of books about Moore himself. He wrote the 2009 book Comic Book Design.
IDW Entertainment’s track record includes Wynonna Earp for the SYFY Channel, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency for BBC America, and Locke & Key for Netflix.
Three self-published volumes of Strangehaven, titled “Arcadia,” “Brotherhood,” and “Conspiracies,” are available via comic shops and direct from Millidge’s website. The fourth volume, Strangehaven: Destiny, continues to be released in Meanwhile…, published by Soaring Penguin Press.
