Welcome back to We Want Comics, a column exploring various intellectual properties — whether they’re movies, TV shows, novels, video games, or whatever else — that we would like to see adapted into comic books. Today, we’re looking back at some of our favorite stories outside comics from 2022. However, before you ask: yes, we’d love to see Benoit Blanc in a comic book. No, we have no idea what that would look like at the time of writing, especially if Rian Johnson didn’t write it. Moving on…
God of War Ragnarok & Horizon Forbidden West
2022 was a pretty great year for PlayStation owners, with the release of two long-awaited sequels, Horizon Forbidden West, and God of War Ragnarok. Ragnarok proved to be a moving conclusion to the Norse era of Kratos’s tale, and now that we’ve seen its version of Odin, Thor, Freyr, Heimdall, and the other Germanic gods, as well as Atreus’s mother Faye, the unspoken embargo on exploring their backstories (in case they contradicted the games) has effectively been lifted.
We’ve written at length about the opportunities the Horizon series offers, and still does, especially with the major revelations Forbidden West features about the Old Ones, including Aloy’s progenitor Elisabet Sobeck. Doubtless there will probably be more twists to come in Horizon 3 (whenever that’s released), that will once again drastically reshape our perception of the post-apocalyptic world’s backstory, but the bloody history of the Tenakth clans might be currently safe to explore at least.
Just… please don’t show what happened to Ted Faro – the mental image alone was nightmarish enough.
House of the Dragon & The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power
It was a good year for fans of fantasy TV, between The Sandman, Willow, and the prequels to two of the biggest book series of all time. The Lord of the Rings was one of the first properties we discussed on this column, and while any comic would technically be its own take on the original source material, there’s a lot of characters and concepts invented for the Prime Video series that could form the basis of its own tie-in material, eg. Adar, Arondir, the Mystics, the depiction of the Harfoots, and more – the ball is in the Tolkien Estate’s court.
The first season of House of the Dragon, HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel, had several time jumps that could be explored by a comic, especially the three years between the second and third episodes, and the decade between parts five and six. The War for the Stepstones takes place mostly during the former, providing the perfect excuse to explore the initial stage of deterioration in Rhaenyra and Alicent’s friendship, when the latter became her stepmother. There’s much that could be explored in the second time jump, like Rhaenyra’s affair with Harwin Strong, and Daemon’s marriage to Laena, although it might not be very commercial given the lack of conflict during that period.
The Matrix Resurrections
So the fourth Matrix film technically came out at the end of 2021, but let’s count it since many people (including myself) didn’t see it in theaters, OK? It was disappointing but unsurprising that a new installment of “The Matrix Comics” didn’t follow in the movie’s wake, given it underperformed at the box office, but The Matrix remains one of the most iconic and influential films of all time, and it’d be a real shame if a new generation of comics creators didn’t get to explore its world (especially during the 20th anniversary of the initial wave of comics, short films, games and sequels.)
1899
Readers may or may not know Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese’s first Netflix series, Dark, is one of the best TV shows I’ve ever seen. Therefore it came as a crushing blow that their follow-up, 1899, was canceled by the streaming service after only one season. Like its predecessor, it was an oppressively gloomy and complex mindbender, where answers to questions only raised more questions, including its utterly jawdropping cliffhanger of an ending. So, yes, if a kind publisher could bribe Netflix and allow Odar and Friese to finish their story with an excellent artist, that’d be lovely please.
Continued belowNope
Spoilers for those who haven’t seen Nope after the jump.
Jordan Peele’s Nope, aka the movie that should’ve been nominated for the Best Film Oscar instead of Top Gun: Scientologist, introduced the world to its latest giant movie star, Jean Jacket, a large, carnivorous alien that could pass itself off as a cloud and a flying saucer. Since watching the movie, I’ve been disturbed by the sheer inhumanity of Jean Jacket’s nature, and fascinated by its resemblance to a Biblical angel when angered: coupled with its otherwise saucer-like appearance, it (or other members of its kind) was probably the basis of both images. Suffice to say, a comic imagining past human encounters with Jean Jacket (and Peele’s involvement) would be hard to say “nope” to.
