It’s no secret that the lines between the various forms of popular media have been getting progressively blurred over the last couple of years. All games get made into movies… all comics seem to get made into movies… hell, it seems like all TV shows get made into movies too. The various mediums are getting so blurred now, that you have comic books being created specifically for the purpose of turning it into a movie. Hugh Jackman (Wolverine) is creating a comic book called “Nowhere Man” just for that purpose.
The folks over at Variety give us this:
Hugh Jackman and “Eli Stone” co-creator Marc Guggenheim are teaming with Virgin Comics to create “Nowhere Man,” an original comicbook series that is designed to be transferred to the bigscreen as a Jackman vehicle. Story was being kept under wraps, but Jackson’s Seed Productions partner John Palermo said it features a protagonist reminiscent of the one Will Smith played in “I Am Legend.” The concept is a futuristic world where mankind has traded privacy for safety, a premise that sprouted with Seed, Virgin CEO Sharad Devarajan and chief creative officer Gotham Chopra. “This is our first comic, and we feel the concept is transferable to other arenas, perhaps first as a videogame, and then a movie,” Palermo said.
I have mixed feelings about the whole notion of this. On the one hand it seems like this is a step to remove any purity of a medium. Each medium (game, comic book, movie) has its own strengths, and to produce something in one medium with a pre-existing intention for using it in another seems to compromise the things that could make it work in its native medium. In other words, i fear they’ll neuter some of the things that could make it s great comic book, for the sake of making sure it’s something that could make a good movie.
On the other hand, a step like this seems inevitable. If the final intention of the “story” is to make it into a movie, then it seems logical to develop it with the movie in mind in the first place.
So what do you think? Would you rather read comic book that were created to be comic books – or would you rather read comic books that are designed to be movies?
