Believe it or not, but there are still much-loved comics out there that haven’t been made into movies! I know, with all flick Hollywood makes based on comics and graphic novel, you’d scarcely believe it’s possible there are any left, but there are. One of those comics is Matt Wagner’s seminal 80s series, Mage.
Now Variety reports that Watchmen and Hellboy producer Lloyd Levin has decided he wants to do something about that, snapping up the rights to the 15-book series that makes up ‘The Hero Discovered’ story arc, which was first published between 1985 and 1986. Mage is a reinterpretation and modernisation of the legends of Camelot (so this joins the 3,000 other movies based on King Arthut that are in the works right now), about alienated young man Kevin Matchstick, who meets a wizard, discovers he has superhuman abilities, gains a magic baseball bat and must defeat the nefarious plans of a being called the Umbra Sprite.
It’s all a bit post-modern and Joseph Campbell’s Man With A 1,000 Faces, as Kevin realises that he is not only Arthur, but equally represents numerous other heroes over the years, all of whom are archetypes used by humanity in storytelling over the millennia (this was more fully explored in the later story arc, ‘The Hero Defined’).
Zach Snyder was attached to a Mage movie back in 2003, but depite Levin working on Watchmen, the 300 director doesn’t appear to be involved this time around. The producer plans to finance development himself – he’s just in the process of finding a writer – before taking it to a studio for distribution.