Anna Daniels
Duncan Jones will complete the trilogy he started with Moon and continued with Mute…in graphic novel form. Co-written with Alex De Campi, Madi follows a “special-ops veteran whose attempt to survive one last mission ends up with her on the run across the world from everyone she’s ever known.” The graphic novel will be out in November, but Jones has given fans a sneak peek at the book via Kickstarter.
Moon, released in 2009, was a great feature debut from Duncan Jones, and signaled him as a promising new filmmaker. He continued that promise with Source Code. And then things started to get questionable. Warcraft has its supporters, but it’s mostly derided. But Warcraft has nothing on Mute, Jones’ Netflix movie which is loosely connected to Moon. To put it bluntly, Mute is bad. Really bad.
But Jones is determined to completing his trilogy, and to do so, he’s turning from the screen to the page. Jones and Alex De Campi have written a graphic novel called Madi, which will close things out. The filmmaker launched a Kickstarter for the project today – and it was almost instantly funded. As the Kickstarter page describes it, Madi is a “260-page road trip graphic novel set in the near future, by film director Duncan Jones and writer Alex de Campi, and drawn by some of comics’ most exciting artists including Glenn Fabry, Simon Bisley, Duncan Fegredo and Pia Guerra. Each artist tackles a 8-30 page section of the story, bringing to life one location.” Here are some story details:
Madi Preston, a veteran of Britain’s elite special operations J-Squad unit, is burnt out and up to her eyeballs in debt. She and the rest of her team have retired from the military but are now trapped having to pay to service and maintain the technology put into them during their years of service. They’re working for British conglomerate Liberty Inc as mercenaries, selling their unique ability to be remote controlled by specialists while in the field, and the debts are only growing as they get injured completing missions. We meet Madi as she decides she’s had enough. She will take an off-the-books job that should earn her enough to pay out her and her sister, but when the piece of tech she’s supposed to steal turns out to be a kid, and she suddenly blacks out… she finds herself on the run from everyone she’s ever known.
When asked by THR why he was finishing the story via a graphic novel and not a movie, Jones gave a succinct answer: “Control and budget.” He went on to add:
“Part of the beauty of comics, and especially graphic novels, is that you can do whatever you need to do to tell the story in your head. You don’t need to pre-sell based on foreign estimates, you don’t need to scale down to hit the designated budget, you don’t need to shave off your edges to fit your story in that round studio four-quad hole … There is an absolute purity to the storytelling in comics that comes down to the writer and the artist meeting minds and then building the final experience together.”
Jones added that he “had a weird experience” with Mute: “I couldn’t let it go. Sixteen years of trying to get it made and after it was done, I felt … well, ‘closure’ to be honest. It was the damndest thing. Now Mute was weirdly therapeutic for a number of extremely personal reasons, but Madi has been the opposite. I love these characters now and this story even more than I did before we made this book.”
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