DC Comics’ Grant Morrison Inks New TV Deal With Universal

Comic book iconoclast Grant Morrison has signed an overall deal with Universal Cable Productions to create content for SYFY, USA, and other channels and streaming platforms, Deadline reports.

Morrison teamed with UCP and SYFY last season for Happy!, an adaptation of the Image Comics miniseries he wrote with artist Darick Robertson. The series stars Christopher Meloni and centers on Nick Sax, a disgraced ex-cop who finds himself recruited by a flying, purple unicorn to help save a little girl.

“I’ve said before, a lot of my peers, they take on maybe an executive producer role and kind of don’t do too much involvement with the actual show, the day-to-day of it. I felt it was important to be in there,” Morrison said of Happy!. “And also, I wanted to learn. After sitting in your room for years 20 years writing comics, in fact 40 years writing comics probably, I was insistent to get out and about into a much more collaborative atmosphere. And that’s what I loved about it. Also, as you see, what is exciting to me is that it’s something that I created. I’m in Los Angeles right now, and at the end of the street there on Sunset, there’s a gigantic Happy! billboard. And it’s a main vendor that I’m looking at. Because this is something that come up in me and Darick’s head all those years ago that is suddenly on Sunset Boulevard. And everyone who’s got their car stopped at the lights there is having to look at Nick Sax breathing down at them. And that is almost psychedelic to me. It’s so amazing that thing has made that journey to see him on a gigantic billboard.”

Morrison also worked with UCP and Amblin Entertainment to develop an adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which he writes and produces. Set 500 years in the future, Brave New World presents a society where happiness is mandatory and forced by drugs, conditioning, entertainment and rigorous promiscuity.

Morrison’s The Green Lantern #1 hit the stands yesterday, marking his return to monthly superhero comics for the first time in years.

Projects in development include an adaptation of Morrison’s The Invisibles, a story about a group of anarchist occult freedom fighters who battle oppressive forces of conformity.