While Marvel and DC have their own cinematic universes to play in, and even Valiant is getting in on the fun in the form of both an upcoming webseries that sounds like it will star just about everybody, and a trio of movies currently in the works, there haven’t been that many movies made based on Image Comics.
That’s surprising, actually, since Image Comics are creator-owned, and optioning the rights is likely a bit cheaper than trying to get somebody like Marvel (Disney) or DC (Warner Bros.) to play ball. Plus, there are a bunch of them that are hugely critically-acclaimed.
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We’re sure you can see where we’re going with this.
We want to see some movies based on Image Comics titles. We’re sure almost everybody out there has some they’d like to see, too.
So read our list, and comment below to let us know what we missed!
LAZARUS
Greg Rucka‘s Lazarus is what you get when you blend Jason Bourne with a dystopian YA future. And in a movie market where there’s increasing pressure to consider the women in your audience when making action and sci-fi tentpoles, Lazarus could be a movie that plays into that narrative very well.
The series centers on Forever Carlyle, a woman bred to be a warrior so that she can protect her family in a near-future dystopia where a handful of wealthy families and their wide-reaching companies have overtaken governments as the dominant authority in the world.
Each family has a Lazarus — the Carlyles’ is Forever — somebody who’s basically born to fight for the cause. Needless to say, that’s not a sustainable status quo. But it’s a book with a lot of intrigue, a cool hook, and some great possibilities for fight scenes. Make it on a Deadpool-style budget and keep expectations low, and everyone should come out of it pretty damn happy when it triples its budget.
INVINCIBLE
This one is on the edge: in our final entry, we’ll provide a list of honorable mentions who missed the list, either because they already have something in development (so why cheerlead for one?), or because they would be better served on TV.
Invincible is damn close to that latter category, since it gets bigger and better as the universe expands and certainly you couldn’t capture everything this book is about in one movie.
Of course, that’s true of pretty much all serialized entertainment to one extent or another, so our big barometer has to be whether you can tell one great, stand-alone story that doesn’t feel like it’s “missing” something for the purporses of the film. That’s why Invincible is here and something like Saga is not.
Bottom line: You can tell a single superhero story set in the world of Invincible and you don’t have to have the past, present, and future of the series represented in order to make that compelling. In fact, there are those who would argue Invincible hasn’t had a story as effective as their first big revelation about Omni-Man. That could be a pretty kickass movie and, since it came so early in Invincible, wouldn’t even need much backstory to make it work.
Oh, and being from Robert Kirkman, the co-creator of The Walking Dead isn’t exactly a bad thing in Hollywood right now.
YOUNGBLOOD
Even though it’s primarily known for other genres, as both Invincible and Youngblood will attest, there have been a fair number of superhero comics at Image Comics.
Youngblood is another brainchild of Rob Liefeld, the creator of Deadpool, and it’s currently about to get a comics reboot, which looks pretty spectacular.
Liefeld also recently released the script he wrote for a potential Youngblood film online, indicating that it wasn’t currently being shopped around to studios — so if this film is in development right now, it won’t be with Liefeld’s script underpinning it.
Heavily inspired by the DC and Marvel Comics of the ’80s, Youngblood was Liefeld’s attempt to take those archetypes and Image-ify them for the early ’90s, and it was a huge success commercially even as it took its lumps critically.
Of course, you could pretty much apply that statement to more or less anything Liefeld has done since New Mutants.
So what makes this a good candidate for a feature film?
Mostly because you can make a movie that dabbles in superhero tropes without being bogged down by them, and a movie where most people watching have no familiarity with the source material, so the danger feels real and the characters can do whatever is best for the film without worrying about alienating too large a chun of the audience.
VELVET
Well, right now we’ve got Invincible, from the creator of The Walking Dead; Youngblood, from the creator of Deadpool; and now Velvet, from the creator of Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
Ed Brubaker‘s Criminal has been in and out of development a few times already in Hollywood, and his Captain America run is underpinning much of the success of Marvel’s cinematic universe. He’s a brand waiting to happen in Hollywood and could easily become the next Robert Kirkman, where everything he touches gets optioned before the second issue hits the stands.
Oh, and Velvet is a great, smart, and sexy spy story. One of the reasons Criminal has been optioned a few times is that, with all due respect to what he accomplished with Gotham Central and Captain America, Brubaker’s best work comes when he’s not doing work-for-hire.
STRAY BULLETS
One of the greatest creator-owned comic book series of all time, David Lapham’s Stray Bullets has often had difficulty finding its audience in the crowded comics direct market, but those who read it — and especially other creators — have nothing but glowing praise for it.
While the comic certainly toes that edge of not being able to really tell “its story” in one movie — it deals with a large cast of characters over a period of decades — each individual Stray Bullets story is a satisfying whole even if you’ve never read the others before.
As one of the best crime comics of all time, Stray Bullets seems like a no-brainer to catch onto the benefits of Robert Kirkman successfully bringing non-superhero comics to the screen with things like The Walking Dead and Outcast.
And on top of that, Lapham has a great ear for character and dialogue. Before it was the “in” thing to do, a lot of Stray Bullets felt very cinematic. Give this movie to somebody like Antoine Fuqua, and it could be a huge franchise.
SAVAGE DRAGON
There are few comics that have told more types of stories under the same creator than Erik Larsen’s Savage Dragon. He’s been crime (with superfreaks), more traditional superhero stuff, family drama, and a lot of science fiction, from alternate realities to the fact that Dragon’s own “origin story” is that he’s an alien conqueror who had his memories wiped.
The version of Savage Dragon that most people are familiar with is the first arc (now being revisited a bit by his son Malcolm), where Dragon came to Chicago inducted into the police department to be their point person battling the supervillain set.
Could we see a great Savage Dragon that’s pretty down to Earth except for the weird-looking characters? Yeah. Could we see an epic sci-fi adventure? Well, that’s less likely but certainly teasing one for a sequel if you made a simpler Savage Dragon film wouldn’t be out of line…!
HONORABLE MENTIONS
We know, we know: these aren’t the five best books Image has ever made. They deserve to be on the list below [insert your favorite title here].
Part of the reason we didn’t include certain things has less to do with quality and more to do with how they would work as a film, or what the current situation is with the property:
Spawn is already in development as a feature film. As are a number of Ed Brubaker’s and Matt Fraction’s books.
Saga would undoubtedly be a great series of films or TV series, but as it stands, the story feels like it would need to give the characters some form of happy ending, and at present the series hasn’t really given us a good stopping point for that. It’s too much to fit into one film and unless the first one succeeded, its audience size isn’t so enormous that studios are likely to commit to multiple pictures. Right now just doesn’t seem like its moment.
There’s plenty more great Image Comics that would translate, but just aren’t as easy to picture as these five for us personally, so drop a comment below and let us know what we aren’t considering!
