cast party

This week we're turning to Astro City, the superhero meta-epic created by Kurt Busiek with artists Alex Ross and Brent Anderson. It originally launched at Image Comics way back in 1995, and now lives on at Vertigo. Astro City would work best as a big budget semi-anthology TV series. The superheroes would have recurring roles, but each episode would focus on a different character, whether it's one of them or one of the regular citizens. With that in mind, I've focused on a few of the earliest stories, with room to cast more down the road.

This week we're looking at another show that's actually in production, and imagining what it could look like. It's been a while since there was an update about the television series based on Dwayne McDuffie and Ernie Colon's Damage Control, but the three original miniseries just recently showed up on Marvel Unlimited, providing easy access to revisit one of my favorite concepts from my early comics-reading days.

This week, as I occasionally do, I’m shifting focus to a project that’s actually happening. After years of talk about a movie, the announcement has come that the Inhumans are getting a television series on ABC, with a premiere in IMAX theaters for some reason. The show, to the relief of fans, will focus on the Inhuman Royal Family, aka the original Inhuman characters created by Jack Kirby. And to the surprise of nobody, Vin Diesel, long-rumored for the role of Black Bolt, is probably not on board. So what does an Inhumans TV show look like?

This week, in a departure from the usual format, we're adapting a classic video game, Nintendo's flagship franchise Super Mario Bros. This adaptation looks primarily at the premise of the first game. Mario and Luigi are NYC plumbers who happen upon a portal into the Mushroom Kingdom, and then join the fight against Bowser and his Koopas.

It's Halloween, and I'm celebrating with a special Cast Party featuring Marvel's spooky supergroup, the Legion of Monsters. While the original team was created in the '70s by Bill Mantlo, Frank Robbins, and Steve Gan, I'm mainly drawing inspiration from the more recent Franken-Castle story written by Rick Remender, with art by Tony Moore, Dan Brereton, and more.

It's Fantasy Week, which seems like the perfect time to look at one of DC's classic fantasy properties: Amethyst: Princess of Gemworld. Created by Dan Mishkin, Gary Cohn, and Ernie Colon, Amethyst stars Amy Winston, a young girl from Earth who learns that she's actually a princess from a fantasy kingdom, where she's already grown up because time moves differently.

Welcome to Cast Party, the feature that imagines a world with even more live action comic book adaptations than we currently have, and comes up with arguably the best casting suggestions you’re ever going to find for the movies and shows we wish could exist. With Halloween drawing ever-closer, I really wanted to cast a movie about Dracula. And since I covered Marvel's Dracula last year, I thought it would be fun to do a DC Comics Dracula this time around. That led me to 1991's Batman & Dracula: Red Rain, a well-remembered Elseworlds graphic novel by Doug Moench and Kelley Jones, in which the Caped Crusader fights the Lord of the Vampires, and becomes a vampire himself along the way.

The spooky season marches on, and I've been looking for comic book monsters to build movies around. And of course my favorite Marvel monster (at least of the superheroic variety) is Hank McCoy, the Beast. So today I'm imagining a movie based on his solo run in Amazing Adventures back in the early '70s, which was written by Gerry Conway and Steve Englehart, with art by Tom Sutton. This is the story in which he goes from a bouncy human-looking guy with big hands and feet to an actual furry monster.

It's October now, and everything's getting spookier. So this is the perfect time to imagine a movie based on Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, the Archie horror comic by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Robert Hack. Chilling Adventures takes the characters and premise of Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and recontextualizes it from silly comedy to gruesome supernatural horror.

Sci-Fi Week is ending on ComicsAlliance, but I couldn't resist doing one more special Cast Party. This time I'm focusing on one of DC's all-time greatest sci-fi comics, Jack Kirby's OMAC.