Why So Blu?

‘Haunt’ on Film?

The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman must be at least a little bit of a good salesman, as he was a founding father in getting the black and white zombie comic to a major cable network (AMC). I say “at least a little” because The Walking Dead is so good, it can practically sell itself. Still, when pitching a comic book to non-comic readers, there is a little marketing to be done. This is where Kirkman and Todd McFarlane’s next project comes into play.

Haunt is another Image title that has been running just over a year with issue #13 now out at your local comic book store. It revolves around two brothers, Kurt and Daniel Kilgore. Kurt was special ops merc who was sold out on a mission and was KIA as a result. Daniel, is his distant sibling; a priest who enjoys cigarettes and hookers (art imitating life, eh?), but even as a man of the cloth, Daniel is incessantly doing his own soul-searching in his very unpleasant life. Kurt comes back as a ghost and can only be heard and seen by Daniel, and while most of their conversations start and end about as happily as a failed marriage, the two can combine into one entity, forming the supernatural being known as “Haunt.” In short, the best way to describe it is Spawn meets Venom.

Co-created by Spawn mastermind Todd McFarlane, Haunt delivers one gripping story arc after another with enough gore to make Jason Vorhees stand and applaud. To transfer this fantastic phantasm to television or the big screen is no small feat. After all, the last time an Image superhero went big time, the audiences came out small time. The Spawn movie was poorly received by the public and left fans hungering for something more substantial. The movie just wasn’t very good. Then again, Robert Kirkman wasn’t attached to that project.

McFarlane spilled the beans about a filmed Haunt project in the Post Mortem section of Haunt issue #13 saying, “I was at a few meetings this past week in Hollywood, and was putting Haunt in front of people from both the TV and film worlds. One of the easiest ways to keep this character going a long time is to keep making him more and more popular.” On a personal note, Haunt is my favorite comic book title, and as is the case with most like-minded fans out there, and even those not familiar with the character for that matter, we all want something like a Haunt TV series or movie to unleash a wow factor that can surpass the heights of Mount Everest, just like the way The Walking Dead did on AMC. At last year’s San Diego Comic-Con, one certain artist informed me that Haunt is the best-selling title at Image. This just goes to show Haunt is already solid in the ink and paper medium. If the creative minds at Image can take that formula to a camera, then we’ve got another winner from the third largest comic book company around.