BenderSpink, the production-management company run by Chris Bender and JC Spink (see what they did there?) has just snapped up the rights to Jimmy Palmiotti and Phil Noto's brief indie comic series **The New West{
The story involves disgraced police detective Daniel Wise, in a blasted near-future LA. An electromagnetic pulse bomb has rendered all technology useless, littering the streets with abandoned vehicles and leading to a major crimewave that the cops can only counter on horseback. So when the mayor is kidnapped, our anti-hero, who has some unfortunate previous history with his municipal superior, has to mount up and conduct his rescue mission with a sword...
The project is connected to BenderSpink's recent push to develop original comics that have movie potential, in cahoots with Sean Patrick O'Reilly's Arcana Comics. **The New West **is slightly off to the side of that deal though, since it's an existing property, published by the now-defunct Black Bull Entertainment in 2005.
BenderSpink is the company behind the Ring remakes and the Butterfly Effect movies, but comics aren't a new thing for them. They produced David Cronenberg's A History Of Violence from John Wagner and Vincent Locke's graphic novel, and they're developing Brian K. Vaughan's Y: The Last Man and** Ex Machina**, amongst several other comic-y projects.
There's no word yet on screenwriters or directors for The New West, but Palmiotti himself isn't a stranger to scripting, having written Painkiller Jane for SyFy, and a draft of the as-yet unproduced Dead Space movie. Will he be up for adapting his own work, and can he make it not sound like a cross between Escape From New York and Zatoichi? Watch this space.