Posted in: Comics | Tagged: boom, Brian Stelfreeze, Comics, day men, matt gagnon

How Day Men Sold A Movie Option – And What Hollywood Is Looking For In A Comic

Published Fri, 01 Nov 2013 15:30:37 -0500

I am still going through my NYCC notes and this one suddenly jumped out at me. We know that Day Men, the new horror series from Boom! studios, has sold as a movie option. But why Day Men and not many of the other successful comics of its type?

Well I'm not going into the ins and outs of the people involved, mostly because I'm not sure I've got all the names right. But one thing stands out.

Day Men is a story about the men hired and trained to do the bidding of vampires while they are sleeping. Obviously it's a pulpy noir kind of book with gangs, criminals, all that, and a central vampire menace… But there are lots of books with a similar tone not getting the movie money.

But Day Men sold because… It was a horror story, using a central horror trope. But the protagonists are non supernatural humans. And apparently that makes the property easier to relate to for a larger audience.

So there you go. Horror trope but with ordinary humans at the heart of it. No wonder zombies are big. No wonder they want to revamp Buffy The Vampire Slayer for a modern audience. Okay, she wasn't exactly normal, but she was close.

So, folks. You want movie money? What about people who hunt werewolves for sport? Wildlife curators preserving the native merman of the lake from the public eye? The grave robbers who keep Frankenstein Monsters in trim? The people who do the accounts of vampires?

Or, hmm, actually my own favourite idea, the embalmers who keep a modern day criminal enterprise going, made up of Babylonians thousands of years old, and using a chain of LA plastic surgery outfits as a front and to launder money from their activities? A cross between Nip/Tuck and Breaking Bad I happen to call Mummy's Boys.

I'm serious about that one. Who wants to draw it?

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