Most comic book heroes wait decades for a film deal. D’Orc has managed it in about eight months. Sony Pictures has acquired the live-action film rights to D’Orc, Brett Bean’s bestselling fantasy series from Image Comics, and Bean is attached to adapt it himself, writing the screenplay for the big screen. Not bad for a book whose first issue only arrived in February.
The hero of the piece is half dwarf and half orc, which in the land of Sunderaine is roughly the worst possible combination of passports. Sunderaine is locked in an apparently endless war between light and dark, elves and orcs, and dragons and very nearly everybody else, and as a walking contradiction with a foot in both camps, D’Orc is regarded with suspicion by all of them. He is a lonely orphan with a good heart, a fierce need for friends and a doomsday prophecy announcing that he will end the world, which does tend to put people off at parties. His one constant companion is an enchanted round shield with an eye in the middle, a wisecracking line in commentary and a frank appetite for bloodshed. It is a sword-and-sorcery set-up in which the hero’s most dangerous weapon has opinions, and Image pitched it squarely at fans of I Hate Fairyland and Chew.
Readers clearly took to it. The first issue sold out before it even reached shops and is now on its eighth printing, with later issues also going back to press several times. Bean is no newcomer to strange creatures, either. As well as writing and drawing D’Orc, he is the author of the Zoo Patrol Squad graphic novels and the Muk ‘n’ Honey books, and his design and illustration work takes in puppet designs for Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, the Dungeon Crawler Carl comic and Marvel’s Rocket and Groot.
The eyebrow-raiser is the words “live action”. With its riot of colour, rubbery creature designs and slapstick violence, D’Orc looks on the page as if it were drawn to be animated, and Sony’s animation arm, home of the Spider-Verse films and KPop Demon Hunters, has form with exactly this kind of material. Sony’s live-action record with comic book properties not called Spider-Man has been, let us say, a learning experience. On the other hand, a writer with Henson Creature Shop credits on his CV is not the worst person to have in the room if the studio decides to build some of Sunderaine’s monsters for real, though that is our hope rather than anything anybody has announced.
For now the film’s plot is under wraps, and there is no director, cast or release date. What Sony has bought is a hero destined to bring about the apocalypse, a war with every fantasy race on the shelf, and a shield that never stops talking. The shield, we suspect, has already asked for its own trailer.
Join the conversation (0)