October will see the release of Earthdivers #1, writer Stephen Graham Jones, artist Davide Gianfelice, and colorist Joana Lafuente’s new IDW ongoing series. The book follows a Native American time traveler from a dystopian future who goes back in time to kill Christopher Columbus and prevent that future from ever happening. Ahead of the series launch, The Beat has learned that 20th Century Television is developing Earthdivers as a TV series.
The news came straight from writer Stephen Graham Jones’s mouth, in an interview with The Beat late last week. Graham Jones described why he chose the medium of comics in which to tell Earthdivers before mentioning the TV deal (emphasis added below):
I think the reason I did this as comic book instead of doing it as prose fiction is that it didn’t make sense for it not to be a comic. In fact, pitching it as prose would’ve been an entirely different process, which is perhaps a bit more akin to selling it as a scripted show or movie. It’s already been sold to 20th Century Television, by the way, and it’ll be interesting to see how it transfers over into that medium.
Earthdivers joins the recently-announced slate of five projects from IDW and its Top Shelf Productions imprint that are also in development for television. That slate includes another IDW Originals series, Scott Snyder & Hayden Sherman‘s Dark Spaces: Wildfire.
Obviously it’s early days on a television adaptation of Earthdivers, but this one feels like it might have legs given Graham Jones’s established fiction fanbase and pop culture’s general love of time-travel, dystopian futures, and alternate histories. It’ll be interesting to see how far this one gets and, as Graham Jones said himself, how the story transfers from comics to television.
In the meantime, look for Earthdivers #1 to arrive in stores and digitally on Wednesday, October 5th.
