BATTLING BOY-- THE DESCENT

I'm excited to report that Paramount Pictures has acquired the film rights to my forthcoming graphic novel Battling Boy, to be produced by Brad Pitt's company, Plan B. We are now developing the story for film adaptation. Above is one of the key sequence paintings my friend--the incredible painter-- Feroze has done for the project. Here, we see an early scene in the story in which Battling Boy and his wargod-like father descend to the mountaintops outside Monstropolis through a UFO-cloud portal. Below is the same scene as it appears in the book.


Battling Boy is to be published by First Second, and is set to launch in the spring of 2010.

BATTLING BOY

Battling Boy's father fighting the "Dragosaur".

In Batman Year 100, I had room for a couple of long fight sequences, but I felt cramped even with 200 pages. This fight scene from BATTLING BOY alone is about 50 pages. It's liberating to have no page restrictions. I wish Kirby could've had 50 pages for one fight scene, imagine what he would've done.

The extended cinematic sequence is one of the best gifts we've inherited from manga.

PIN-UPS

Above is my take on Monique St. Pierre's pin-up from the original 1978 November issue, deemed too racy to be included in the box as a special insert, so I am sharing it here (minus shag carpet). As for the figure, she really looks and feels like something out of an old issue of the retrofuturisitc Heavy Metal magazine. Of all the covers in the entire history of Playboy magazine (Playboy gave me the entire run of covers to chose my design from), it was this cover that really stood out to me as unusual. Miss November 1978 was attractive and mysterious in a way that defies the usual idea of a Playboy pin-up girl. I found her pose and attitude somehow defiant and enticing--a very modern woman with universal sex appeal. Her boots reminded me of something out of Barbarella or Flash Gordon.