With Comic-Con happening this week, there are naturally even more genre projects being touted than normal – and that’s saying something, given how comic books and sci-fi are so dominant at the moment. There are a couple of new ones to report on: 2014’s techno-thriller The Machine is being developed as a TV series and award-wining graphic novel scribe Warren Ellis is adapting Mexican comic El Pantera for Walking Dead producer Gale Anne Hurd.
It’s all part of a big announcement from Universal Cable Productions, which has been rounding up more titles to turn into TV series. The Machine will find the movie’s writer/director Caradog W. James working on turning the film’s concept about a scientist working on artificial intelligence to help injured soldiers and his own daughter that is co-opted by the military in the search for a new type of killing machine into a show that can span seasons. It seems like there would be fertile ground for a Black Mirror-style look at technology and trans-humanism and the plan is for several storylines to weave together.
As for El Pantera, it’s a title that has powered various media through the years, from a 1970s comic book created by writer Daniel Muñoz and artist Juan Alba, though a novel in the 1990s and a TV series that kicked off in 2007 and is still on the air in Mexico. The story, which Ellis will adapt as his first original TV series, is set on the mob-infested US/Mexican border. A young officer is appointed the police chief of a fictional city and demands that his friend, who was framed and imprisoned, is released. Together, they create a vigilante persona known as El Pantera to rid the city of the criminal element. The combination of Ellis and Hurd, who has had such success with The Walking Dead, is certainly a promising one…