I’m sure he doesn’t remember, but Damon told me he met Steve Niles at a NY Con and that he was mad cool (it goes without saying he does great work) while BSC was chatting with the awesome people at Simon & Schuster. Cost nothing to be cool, so I’m glad to see that according to Variety, Universal Pictures has acquired Criminal Macabre.
The synopsis in the report reads:
(the) Story centers around a supernatural detective who doubles as hitman, taking out all the vampires, ghosts and other unsavory monsters who live among humans, hiding in the shadows by day and emerging at night.
The stories have the subheading A Cal McDonald Mystery and while not its first appearance, its yet another project that first saw large circulation within Dark Horse Presents, the anthology series by the publisher. Niles always had top talent assisting him, and Cal Mcdonald’s adventures have been drawn by the likes of Ben Templesmith and Kelley Jones. In July, Niles told MTV this, revealing some just missed deals for the project:
“We had it set up at MGM years ago, and it just didn’t quite take,” Niles told MTV News. “['Criminal Macabre'] went through a lot. The first instance, everyone was like, ‘Clean him up, we can’t have a character like this.’ And then they realized I’m not trying to do ‘Cheech and Chong’ here. This is to me, a modern Philip Marlowe. He has all the same problems, but they’re modernized because hard drinking just doesn’t cut it anymore.”
Steve Niles is behind the source material for another film adaptation, 30 Days of Night (which was an interesting experiment by David Slade). I loved his work on Simon Dark for DC and was sad to see it go.
I look forward to seeing this property on the big screen, but I think it would be even cooler as an animated series or series of animated movies (like the two Hellboy Animated movies or the four Futurama movies) with Ben Templesmith style animation.
Yeah, but something tells me the option check for a film doesn’t hurt.