The comic series (or “graphic novel” as Hollywood still insists on calling them, despite “comic book movies” making billions of dollars), from Marvel’s creator-owned imprint, comes from writer Ed Brubaker and artist Sean Phillips.
The pulpy superhero noir follows Zack Overkill, an-ex supervillain who turned in crimelord The Black Death and is doomed to a mundane existence thanks to Witness Protection. When he figures out a way around the drugs inhibiting his superpowers, he relieves his boredom as a masked vigilante and discovers he gets a strange sense of satisfaction from it. Until his activities draw the attention of The Black Death…
As Brubaker tells Deadline, “Zack was raised to be his world’s equivalent of a supervillain. We’ve all seen the story of a good person who goes undercover and gets corrupted. This is a bad person forced to live among regular people, and how he’s affected by that. He once ran around with a mask, but now he’s got the fake name and the fake job. My goal was to have you rooting for him as he grows a conscience.”
Fox has playwright, actor and screenwriter Robert Schenkkan (who recently wrote episodes of HBO’s “The Pacific”) on the project.