Watchmen producer Lloyd Levin is going back to the 80s for another comic-book adaptation.  This time, he's adapting Matt Wagner's Mage.  Per Variety, the books are a reinterpretation of the legend of Camelot and "centers on Kevin Matchstick, an alienated young man who discovers he has superhuman abilities, gains a magic baseball bat and defeats the nefarious plans of a being called the Umbra Sprite."  There are three volumes of Mage and each one is 15-issues long.  Levin has acquired the rights to the arc, "The Hero Discovered".

Mage was at one point in development at Spyglass Entertainment with Zack Snyder attached to direct.  Said Levin of the property, "It's one of the great untapped comic books from the '80s renaissance that also spawned Watchmen and Batman: Dark Knight."  Levin should have added, "Also: magic baseball bat."  Hit the jump for what Wagner had to see about the planned adaptation of his comics. [Update: Russ over at /Film has informed me that there are three arcs, but only two volumes. The third arc has never has never been published as a volume.]

Here's what Wagner said regarding the adaptation of Mage:

"It's a great that Lloyd is taking on this material because his approach (to comicbooks) is to capture the essence of the original source material. The timing is good, too, because in the past, (filmmakers) tried to fix the material. Now they try to adhere to the material."

However, there are those who would argue that one of the primary problems with Watchmen is that it adhered too closely to the source material.

Wagner also wrote the comic book series Grendel, which has been running since March 1983. [Thanks to Wikipedia for that bit of knowledge].

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