Alex Proyas (Knowing) is set to adapt the graphic novel Joe Golem and the Drowning City by Hellboy creator Mike Mingola and Christopher Golden.  Per Deadline, the "supernatural-steampunk illustrated novel follows an orphaned teenage girl, an aging magician, a lunatic scientist, a Victorian occult detective, and the stalwart sidekick, Joe Golem—a man whose strange dreams hint of a history he has forgotten–as they struggle for the fate of an alternate 1970s lower Manhattan. In this vision, lower Manhattan sank into the water during a catastrophic earthquake in 1925, leaving those unwilling or unable to abandon it to make a new life in streets turned to canals."  I never in a million years would have guessed that this story came from the mind of Mike Mingola.

The last time Mingola's work landed on screen, we got Hellboy and Hellboy II: The Golden Army, but Proyas is no Guillermo Del Toro.  The Australian director plans to shoot Joe Golem in his native land, but Deadline doesn't mention if Proyas plans to make this his next movie.  He's also attached to direct The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag and Gods of Egypt.  Hit the jump for a synopsis of Mingola and Golden's novel.

Here's the synopsis for Mike Mingola and Christopher Golden's Joe Golem and the Drowning City:

In 1925, earthquakes and a rising sea level left Lower Manhattan submerged under more than thirty feet of water, so that its residents began to call it the Drowning City. Those unwilling to abandon their homes created a new life on streets turned to canals and in buildings whose first three stories were underwater. Fifty years have passed since then, and the Drowning City is full of scavengers and water rats, poor people trying to eke out an existence, and those too proud or stubborn to be defeated by circumstance.

Among them are fourteen-year-old Molly McHugh and her friend and employer, Felix Orlov. Once upon a time Orlov the Conjuror was a celebrated stage magician, but now he is an old man, a psychic medium, contacting the spirits of the departed for the grieving loved ones left behind. When a seance goes horribly wrong, Felix Orlov is abducted by strange men wearing gas masks and rubber suits, and Molly soon finds herself on the run.

Her flight will lead her into the company of a mysterious man, and his stalwart sidekick, Joe Golem, whose own past is a mystery to him, but who walks his own dreams as a man of stone and clay, brought to life for the sole purpose of hunting witches. [Amazon]