Mike Fleming

EXCLUSIVE: Constantin Film has acquired Joe Golem And The Drowning City, a graphic novel by Hellboy creator Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden. Alex Proyas is set to adapt and direct the live-action feature, which will be shot in his native Australia. The book was published in March by St. Martin’s Press and is the second collaboration by Mignola and Golden, who also teamed on Baltimore.

The title is a supernatural-steampunk illustrated novel that 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.

The Gotham Group’s Ellen Goldsmith-Vein and Eric Robinson are producing with Mystery Clock’s Proyas and Peter Donaldson. Mignola and Golden are exec producing. CAA reps Proyas.