A Movie Called Blood

The news you didn't know you'd been waiting to hear: in 2012, a movie will be released called "Blood," and I'm the Executive Producer. You can find all kinds of information all over the place: the website is here, and there are also pages and channels for Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, among others.

Obviously I'll be talking about this a lot from now on, after months of strict silence. So let's start with how and why.

The how, of course, is that writer/director Marc Rosenbush may claim it's his project, but really it's all because of me. (Me! Me! Me!) Because I've read comics off and on since I was a kid, in fact I learned to read with comic books. And after giving them up for a while during high school, shortly after college a friend showed me a copy of "Watchmen" and said "Things have changed."

Boy had they ever. Soon there was Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison and a whole crowd of really gifted writers doing things with comics that no one had ever even really thought about before. And in short order, I discovered my own personal favorite graphic novel of all time: "Moonshadow," by J.M. DeMatteis and Jon J. Muth.

It's basically "Candide" in outer space, but it's also filled with poetry and whimsy and, despite the fact that none of the events in it are remotely like anything in my life, it still felt, while I read it, as if it was my own biography somehow. An emotional biography, perhaps. So I started reading DeMatteis's other work, and he turned out to be an interesting guy: a musician at one time who moves easily between straight-up comics work on Superman, Batman, Spider-Man and so forth (his Spidey storyline "Kraven's Last Hunt" may be his standout), and very adult, very deep, very emotional works like "Moonshadow," "Mercy," "Seekers Into the Mystery" and "Blood: A Tale," done with the fabulous painter Kent Williams.

And at some point, as one does with works one loves, I said to my friend Marc, "You've absolutely got to read "Moonshadow." So he did, and he loved it, and then he started looking for more stuff by that DeMatteis guy. Before too long, he got to "Blood."

And here's where he did what I didn't: he read it and he said "Jesus, this would make a fantastic movie."

So here we are. With a script written, and the deals being put together, and the website and the Twitter feed and all the rest of it, with a team being rapidly assembled and contracts signed and a lot of people getting very excited indeed.

Yep. All because of me. (And maybe a little bit because of the brilliance of J.M. DeMatteis.)

More to come, fer shure.