Alex Proyas Returns to Comics with ‘Joe Golem And The Drowning City’

Though it’s been years since he turned the ‘The Crow’ into a movie Alex Proyas is returning to the form by adapting and directing Mike Mignola’s graphic novel ‘Joe Golem And The Drowning City’ for the big screen. No surprise this was announced during Comic-Con 2012 week.

Proyas’s career has been notoriously rocky. His big break was directing ‘The Crow,’ which was a success stained by the tragedy of Brandon Lee’s on-set death. He moved on to ‘Dark City,’ which Roger Ebert declared a masterpiece, but his was an opinion shared by few and the film flopped at the box office. He made an indie film, then returned to the mainstream with ‘I, Robot,’ which was a troubled production. But his last film, 2009′s ‘Knowing,’ was a surprise hit.

As Deadline tells us, ‘Joe Golem And The Drowning City’ is set up at Constantine films, and the synopsis is as such:

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.

Sounds a bit like ‘Dark City.’ Now all Proyas has to do is adapt it, and perhaps we’ll see the film in a couple of years.