Com.x’s Cla$$war Optioned by Mandeville Films

Com.x has just informed Hypergeek that their hit indy title Cla$$war has been acquired by Mandeville Films for development as a feature film, which was announced earlier today at the Long Beach Comic Con during their panel discussion.

Cla$$war is a six-issue comic mini-series (now collected as a Deluxe Hardcover), written by Rob Williams with artwork by Trevor Hairsine and Travel Foreman. Cla$$war has been described as a political thriller with superheroes. The United States Government created a team of super-soldiers, Enola Gay, to be the world’s ultimate weapon. They ended the cold war early, won the first Gulf War in 24 hours; they are the world’s police. They’re also celebrities, dating movie stars, indulging in certain chemicals etc. Then one of them, American, is contacted by an ex-CIA agent, Isaac, who shows him the dirty side of the country – the crimes of the CIA over the years, the secret war on democracy, how the superhumans were created in secret experiments that saw hundreds of innocents die before the process was perfected. American finally sees the blood on his hands over the years, the people he’s killed purely to make the owners of multinational corporations richer, and he goes AWOL. He and Isaac are going to try and destroy America’s secret Government and return the country to its ideals. But of course, the US President can’t allow that, and the rest of the US super-team is sent to stop them.

Rob Williams has summed up the story as “It’s a mix of dynamite action, real-world politics, superheroes, conspiracy theory and Hollywood thriller. It’s Superman meets All The President’s Men.,” and has said that

“Cla$$war was influenced by my love of people like Noam Chomsky – I was reading his Class Warfare when I came up with the idea for the series – and Bill Hicks, my fascination with Nixon and American politics in general. I spend half my time reading books on subjects like the CIA, biographies of people like Martin Luther King. For some reason I’m captivated by US history over the past 50 years – things like Cuba and The Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Watergate etc. It just made perfect sense to me to put all that in a comic. I also love intelligent superhero comics – a legacy from my dysfunctional youth and the effect Alan Moore’s Captain Britain and Marvelman had on me in the early eighties. So I figured I’d combine the two. I wasn’t ever trying to come up with a unique selling point for the book, I was just trying to create something that I’d enjoy reading..

Mandeville Films is the same production company behind the recent Touchstone Pictures release of the Jonathan Mostow directed, comic book based action thriller Surrogates, starring Bruce Willis, and are also behind Paramount Pictures’ upcoming Christian Bale and Mark Wahlberg vehicle, The Fighter.

Rick Alexander (EVP of Fairyland) will produce, alongside Mandeville principles David Hoberman and Todd Lieberman, with Mandeville’s VP of Development, David Manpearl taking the Executive producer’s chair.

The project doesn’t yet have a screenwriter or director attached to it, but discussions are still in the early days, so expect a further announcement soon. Meanwhile, make sure you checkout these sample pages below, and buy your self a copy of the book!