DC has finally released information about the forthcoming comics adaptation of the animated favorite The Jetsons, due in stores starting November 1.
Per a new episode of DC All Access, seen above, the book will feature “family man George, his wife, Jane (a NASA scientist), daughter Judy, a social butterfly, Elroy, who loves robot tech, Astro the family pooch, and Rosie the Robot, who is now programmed with the consciousness of George’s mother.”
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That last bit was seen in the backup feature from The Flintstones/Booster Gold a few months ago.
“We looked at where we are in the world now and where we will be in a couple of hundred years,” Pamiotti told ComicBook.com. “Where technology’s going to take us, where the planet’s going to throw us for a loop — and also the idea of George’s mother and what happens when people are faced with the end of life, and what they might be able to do. Nothing in the book is too abstract; everything in there is talked about now, and I do love science and I love the idea of tomorrow, what tomorrow’s going to bring. So the upgrade from being grandma to becoming Rosie just seems like such a natural thing. We were laughing when we came up with the idea, becuase what a hell that is, that your mother never leaves you, she becomes your robot maid, but also it’s sweet.”
The series will be written by Jimmy Palmiotti and drawn by Peter Brio, marking that rare occasion when Palmiotti works without his most regular writing partner, his wife Amanda Conner. Palmiotti and Conner worked on the prelude in The Flintsones/Booster Gold together, and Conner was responsible for redesigning the characters, who were of course created in the ’60s to be the first 21st Century family. She will still provide covers for the series.
“The Jetsons grapple with a threat from the darkest corners of the galaxy,” the All Access special tells readers in one of the only pieces of information yet known about the plot of the series.
Certainly from the promo art (seen in the video and also in the attached image gallery) it seems clear that Jane in her capacity as a scientist finds something disturbing out there in space. It also looks like the world of The Jetsons will be built on the ruins of modern-day Earth — not entirely a surprising concept, given that the original depicted buildings on stilts, seemingly miles in the sky.
“The joke was, which we didn’t do, that The Flintstones are below the Earth and Jetsons are above in the same timeframe,” Palmiotti admitted around the time The Flintstones was ending. “The things that fall off the buildings above fall on the Flintstones, but they didn’t like that idea. If we did ten years of Jetsons comics, I think the last issue would be everything colliding, falling from the sky, and we just see ground come up and all of a sudden the Flintstones theme would come on. It would just be Earth starting over again.”
Palmiotti admitted that they were originally approached about The Jetsons when DC first started licensing Hanna Barbera properties over a year ago, but that they could not make it work with their busy schedule, which includes Harley Quinn and at the time also included Harley’s Little Black Book and Starfire.
In spite of the success of The Flintstones, a darkly satirical take on the property, Palmiotti told ComicBook.com that the plans for The Jetsons are a little more straightforward.
“We’re going to focus on what makes them tick as a family and what makes them unique, but the world setting around them gives us tons of stories,” he said. “Hopefully people like what we set up.”
