Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Comics, crash landing, entertainment, noel clarke, tony lee

Crash Landing – Optioned By Twitter?

Published Mon, 16 Dec 2013 12:00:33 -0600

So Sunday night, cold-ridden comic writer Tony Lee made some comments about Crash Landing, the comic that he's creating with Spanish artist Stefano Martino.

blocked nose means I've woken up at 5am every morning this weekend for 30 mins. Plus note? It's allowed me to block out CRASH LANDING #1.

— Tony Lee (@mrtonylee) December 15, 2013

It's very much FLASH GORDON meets DRACULA by way of STARGATE. Complete and utter explodo fun. — Tony Lee (@mrtonylee) December 15, 2013

Producers… Going on what I've just written in CRASH LANDING #1 alone, you can form an orderly queue over there to fight for the option. — Tony Lee (@mrtonylee) December 15, 2013

The last of which had an unexpected reply two minutes later.

@mrtonylee Bring it here sir. bring it here. — Noel Clarke (@NoelClarke) December 15, 2013

It's well known that Noel Clarke has a love of comics and has been involved in creating several projects over the last few years, including the aborted comic The Troop a few years ago with Lee and the upcoming Girl 1 from Titan Comics. He also has a close Twitter friendship with Mark Millar, who's made a healthy living out of turning his own comics into successful movie franchises. However. is Clarke looking to produce, direct or star in Crash Landing? And with only a comment spoken about the pitch, what's the story about? So I did some digging.

Back in 2009 Lee and Martino entered the DC/Zuda monthly webcomic competition with Where Evils Dare, a 'Dirty Dozen meets Van Helsing' mash up, where the grandson of Jonathan and Mina Harker fights SS Officer Dracule in WW2 Europe. We interviewed him about it here. It came second, wasn't picked up because of this, and shortly after Tony announced that he was going to create a second series with Martino for Zuda, Crash Landing. But then Zuda closed, and nothing happened.

Lee went on to write more of the Doctor Who ongoing and adapt Pride And Prejudice And Zombies among others. Martino went to Soleil in Europe, working on another Vampire story, Nosfertarubefore returning to work for Dynamite and DC comics, working on pages of Ravagers before it was cancelled. But nothing more was heard about Crash Landing. Then in August, Tony revisited old pitches, showing a pin up that was taken from the project.

After Where Evils Dare, Stefano Martino & I wanted to do a series about a guy named CRASH LANDING… http://t.co/7kxppnOkhG #ForgottenPitch

— Tony Lee (@mrtonylee) August 9, 2013

A week or so later, Comic Book Resources talked about the project and Stefano replied in the comments saying 'never say never. I really loved work with him and I hope that we meet again soon.'

Then in November 2013, Stefano posted this video on his Facebook page titled 'Crash Landing: a comic book project. — with Tony Lee.'

And finally, during our own interview with Tony for Battlestar Galactica: Starbuck #2 only last week. when talking about future projects he comments

'Crash Landing is with Stefano Martino who I did Where Evils Dare for DC / Zuda with and who saved our asses when we did Doctor Who: The Forgotten all those years back – and it's basically a pulp sci / fi horror with an Edwardian Monster hunter being sucked through a vortex into an alien world where all the creatures like Vampires and Werewolves come from. And, with the technologically advanced survivors from Atlantis (who are also there) he must strap on a jetpack and fight the King of the Vampires in a floating Rocket Base.

It's Flash Gordon meets Warlord Of Mars via Doc Savage and Dracula. It's insane and brilliant and has robotic Frankenstein werewolves and clone mutant muscled Dracs in loincloths. Currently both of these don't have a publisher yet as we want to be quite far along before we pitch, but we're looking at 2014…'

Bleeding Cool has since learned that in the last week this has again changed, with the titular hero Crash Landing now renamed to Crash Morrison (although the title stays the same), and is no longer Edwardian but set in the early twenties, where Crash, the illegitimate American son of Quincey Morris (who died in Dracula) – hunts the Count that killed his father with the help his sidekick FitzLachlan, is thrown into a nightmare universe that Dracula is Emperor of, fighting against him with the survivors of the lost world of Atlantis. FitzLachlan learns his own family connection to Dracula, and there's a lot of action in the air – in fact, one of the quotes was that Crash Landing was very much 'Jet Pack Dracula'. But that's it.

With only two pin ups and a smattering of information on the book, Lee and Martino have already hooked their first interested producer in a vague, Twitter post of Millaresque proportions. We're interested to see who else will throw their hat into the ring by the time the first issue is announced. Lee has already made headway into screenwriting in America – perhaps the film is already being written?

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