‘Kung Fu Panda’ Director Mark Osborne Is Adapting Cult Comic Series ‘Bone’

After the success of Netflix’s The Little Prince, Kung Fu Panda director Mark Osborne is taking on a new adaptation: Jeff Smith’s award-winning comic series about the adventures of little bald humanoid creatures called Bone.

The series is the story of the three Bone cousins — Fone Bone, Phoney Bone, and Smiley Bone, who are run out of their hometown of Boneville (okay, fine, laugh it up) and forced to find their way across the wilderness. They eventually reunite with each other and make friends with a girl named Thorn and her grandmother, only to hear that a dark entity known as the Lord of the Locusts is threatening the peace of their entire world. Long story short, they’ll have to come up with a way to save it.

The Bone series was published from 1991 to 2004 and won countless awards, with one of TIME’s critics calling it “the best all-ages graphic novel yet published.” Plans for a film adaptation have been in place since the late ’90s, and in 2008 Warner Bros. bought the film rights. The project has been in development ever since then, with the studio going through one script draft after another for the past few years.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Osborne will exec produce as well as direct, and Adam Kline will be writing the script. Of the series, Osborne said:

Bone is very special and unconventional because it blends elements together that you don’t necessarily expect — soft, little comic characters and epic high stakes fantasy adventure. To carry this into the cinematic realm presents both an opportunity to represent what readers of all ages have loved about the series, while pushing animated storytelling into exciting and different areas.

Bone does not yet have a release date.