Welcome back to We Want Comics, our column discussing various intellectual properties — whether they’re movies, TV shows, novels, video games, or whatever else — that we’d like to see get adapted into comic books. Today marks — amazingly — ten years since the release of The LEGO Movie, Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s fantastic take on the Danish brick-building toys that was cruelly denied an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature (yeah, the Oscars stink, so so much.)
Now, a few years ago, Skybound acquired the license for LEGO comics, and so far they’ve only released Tri Vuong’s “LEGO Ninjago: Garmadon,” plus a prequel on the way. I love LEGO, you love LEGO, we all love LEGO, so why aren’t there more LEGO comics? I think the problems are twofold: with the exception of the movies, which did become subject to diminishing returns, LEGO’s audience are still 99 percent kids, and they generally find it easier to read picture books, watch the animated specials, or play video games.
Meanwhile, I don’t think the owners of Star Wars, Batman, and other popular licensed LEGO brands are particularly enthusiastic about clearing or buying the rights for the minifigure versions of their characters. Regardless, let’s pretend we’re in a perfect world where LEGO Spidey and friends don’t exist in a weird, legal gray area between the owners of their progenitors, the comics’ license holders, and the LEGO Group, and imagine the comics we could be getting.
LEGO Movie Spin-Offs:
The LEGO Batman Movie director Chris McKay has boasted the unproduced sequel would’ve been a time-spanning epic to rival The Godfather Part II, following the Caped Crusader and the Justice League as they faced off against Lex Luthor and OMAC this time, while flashbacks would reveal why Batman and Superman became estranged. (“And there was going to be a crossover with a major franchise that can only happen in a LEGO movie,” which we imagine would’ve been Marvel.) Ever since seeing The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part, I’ve also been intrigued by the possibility of a prequel exploring Lucy/Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks’s character)’s past as part of A Popular Band, and how she met Batman – it would be funny to see her fight Catwoman or Talia al Ghul over him.
Marvel and DC:
I spoke a fair bit about the LEGO Marvel and DC games while going off-topic in our last columns, and with the gap between LEGO games greatly increasing, rendering new titles not based on Warner Bros. IPs unlikely, LEGO comics might be an even better idea for the Big Two. I’m not saying they should do a LEGO take on “The Infinity Gauntlet” or “Crisis on Infinite Earths” like the next games would’ve been by the way; maybe just start with something cute and featuring a kid-friendly lead, like a “LEGO Marvel Team-Up” or “Brave and the Bold” miniseries. DC and Scholastic could also publish graphic novels starring the minifigure versions of several popular characters.
LEGO Dimensions, Continued:
2015’s LEGO Dimensions was a fun game that brought together various brands in a multiversal adventure, in which Batman, Wyldstyle, and more teamed up to stop the evil Lord Vortech (voiced by Gary Oldman) from remaking reality in his image. The game teased a sequel that never materialized, thanks to the death of the toys-to-game fad — Skylanders, Disney Infinity etc. — it was a part of, so it might be a perfect choice for a continuation in print. I know we’re fantasizing about a world without legal issues here, but this could happen if a publisher stuck solely to the properties they know they unambiguously have, eg. LEGO’s own, non-licensed brands like Ninjago, Bionicle, Legends of Chima, Monster Fighters, and so on.
Themes That Would Never Be Animated
There have been LEGO sets based on properties like Stranger Things, James Bond (specifically his Aston Martin DB5), PlayStation’s Horizon, and Dune, that would likely never receive a cartoon or game tie-in because of concerns over how age appropriate they would be, despite their source material being PG-13, TV-14, or T. (Come to think of it, it’s amazing we have LEGO Jurassic Park/World media.) Comics could be less controversial though: it’s not like some of the Big Two characters LEGO have licensed haven’t starred in some incredibly adult-aimed material, and it can’t be worse than the upcoming Little Golden Books release A is for Alien: An ABC Book, right? So c’mon, let us have a Dracula or Jekyll and Hyde parody at least, yeah?
Continued belowHellboy and Other Non-LEGO Properties:
Hellboy naturally came to mind as a character who’s borderline when it comes to a possible LEGO treatment (as my colleague Mark Tweedale said a while ago, “If [Mike Mignola] wanted to make a marketable character, he wouldn’t have named him Hellboy.”) It led me to ponder more stories not adapted into LEGO, from other creator-owned comics, to Golden Age Hollywood movies, and public domain works. Sometimes, it blows my mind we have LEGO based on The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, because they’re classic works of literature as well as movies, and I would love similarly fun takes on Shakespeare, Dickens or even Victor Hugo, as well as King Kong, Citizen Kane, or Casablanca et al.
Funnily enough, I couldn’t think of more creator-owned comics that could receive a LEGO take: they’re either too adult, or stylistically already very cartoonish, to the point an official LEGO comic would be pointless. So onto the other works: I could be wrong, but a series of retellings of the Bard’s plays, or Ancient Greek mythology (tragic endings minimized, clearly) could be the biggest thing to hit publishing since “Dog Man,” even without the support of a toy line and animation. (Heck, the books could encourage kids to build their own versions of these stories with what they have.) I can imagine Disney or Universal (via Skybound) being interested in classic movie spoofs: just a shame then, that Warner Bros. gave up the movie rights, as they could’ve easily published books like “LEGO Wizard of Oz” off the backs of the cameos in those films.
Before we go, I want to say LEGO comics have as much potential artistically as they do comedically: you could do more than ink and color drawings, even ones as phenomenally lit as the movies. You could create comics portraying the original LEGO characters as real people; photograph minifigures and sets; or create photoreal renderings. Think about Preston Mutanga (LEGOMe_the OG), the teenage animator hired to create the LEGO sequence in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse – he creates fantastic imagery like this regularly without a major studio’s backing, and his work should be an inspiration to anyone telling stories in LEGO form.
To any comics creators or publishers reading this who might still feel doubtful, I want to quote a certain 2014 classic for you: “You are capable of amazing things. Because you are the Special. And so am I. And so is everyone. The prophecy is made up, but it’s also true. It’s about all of us. Right now, it’s about you. And you… still… can change everything.”
