Rick Remender’s FEAR Agent – the comic book tales of Heath Huston, hard-drinking alien exterminator in a retro future – is being developed for the screen at Universal. I’ve liked the series, and not only for its occasional homage to Wally Wood (or to Jeff Brewer’s Cool Rockets, for that matter).
Right out of the gate the stories had me going when Heath, in the middle of a pitched battle with aliens, was trying to figure out if they were intelligent enough that he’d get prosecuted for killing them. It’s a difficult future this guy has to contend with.
The series started at Image Comics and then made a slightly unusual sidestep over to Dark Horse. I wondered at the time whether this might have something to do with Dark Horse’s media contacts, and maybe I was right to wonder.
It’s early days, but this film – if it makes it through the gauntlet – could be loads of cliffhanging, drunken fun with Heath and his intelligent spaceship roaming the galaxy and getting into trouble. The news appears at the Risky Biz blog, and my thanks go to to Sci Fi Wire for pointing me that way.
This is a great comic, a dark and gritty science fiction adventure that captures the spirit of the old E.C. comics without feeling retro. But what I’ve always found particularly cool — and here I’ll demonstrate my absolute nerdosity — is that Heath Huston uses a ray gun based very clearly on a vintage toy called the Pyrotomic Disintegrator. It’s a really, really rare ray gun, and I’m astonished that anyone involved in producing the comic actually knows about it. (I recently wrote something about the gun and the gun’s appearance in the comic on my blog.)
So the big question (for me, anyway — doubt anyone else cares) becomes, Will the movie’s prop designer keep the Pyrotomic Disintegrator’s basic look, or will he or she come up with something entirely new? I’d love to see the Pyro being produced as a movie tie-in… It’d be nice to see it back on the toy shelves!
I spotted that on your blog earlier: nice catch!
They clearly did a lot of visual reference. I sort of hinted at the fact that in the first few issues, several of the background rocket ships were drawn from Jeff Brewer’s “Cool Rockets” sculptures.
But I wouldn’t get my hopes up about the gun making it into a film; it might, of course, but Hollywood being Hollywood we also might see the character of Heath Huston retooled for Angelina Jolie. You just never can tell with those guys.