Mike Fleming

Green Lantern co-writer Marc Guggenheim is at Comic-Con today. He’s launching Collider Entertainment, a partnership with Alisa Tager that is designed to create properties that start out as comics and then springboard onto other  media platforms. Guggenheim and Tager have experience in everything from TV to films, video games and comic books. Their company gets off the ground with a deal with Image Comics that begins with two titles.

Guggenheim has written the first title, Utopian, with his screenwriter wife Tara Butters. The first installment of the five-comic series will be published in November. It takes place in a world where superheroes are rendered obsolete when war, famine and crime disappear. One hero investigates the source of the new-found tranquility but his colleagues oppose his efforts to return the world to its normal chaos.

Jon Hoeber and Erich Hoeber, the scripters of Red and Battleship, are generating the second title, and is a few shades darker. The Mission is a supernatural thriller about a man who receives instructions from the angel Gabriel to commit murders. Is he crazy or answering a divine call?

Aside from teaming with Greg Berlanti and Michael Green to write Green Lantern, Guggenheim is currently a consulting producer on the ABC Michael Chiklis series No Ordinary Family and has had a long career writing and producing series. He has earned his fanboy cred writing nearly 100 comics, including Amazing Spider-Man, Wolverine, Superman/Batman, Blade and Young X-Men. He even adapted the Stephen King short story N into a 25-part Mobisode series. Tager’s producing credits include the Guillermo Arriaga-directed The Burning Plain, Serenity and Enemy at the Gates. Guggenheim said they saw an opportunity to lead other writers into areas like comic book writing, where, he said, you can make a pretty good buck, even if the properties don’t lead to film and other platforms.

“We’ve been talking about ways the industry can improve, and questions always come up,” he said. “Where is the original content? Who is generating new material. Adaptations and reboots are all well and good, but how is the next generation of story, character and mythology going to come about if nobody is incentivized to create it? A lot of writers we knew felt the same way, they were dying to generate their own material and be more proactive. And a lot of them have great ideas that will work as comics, but don’t know how to get in there, or in video games. We want to be the chaperone who removed these entry barriers. And our hope is to follow the stories of these characters to TV, movies and video games.”