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[WWPhilly] MARVEL ANNOUNCES ADAPTATION OF STEPHEN KING'S 'THE STAND'
| | Taps Roberto Aquire-Sacasa, Mike Perkins for series of minis bringing end-of-the-world epic to comic life | | | By Andy Serwin | | Posted 06/01/08 | |  | | ![[WWPhilly] MARVEL ANNOUNCES ADAPTATION OF STEPHEN KING'S 'THE STAND'](http://ep.yimg.com/ip/I/wizarduniverse_2059_1205562502) The end of the world hits the Marvel Universe this fall, but don't expect the usual array of costumed characters to be involved—Stephen King's hosting this particular apocalypse.
Marvel Comics announced Saturday that its publishing partnership would continue with a a serialized adaptation of his best-selling novel, The Stand, which follows a group of disparate survivors as they battle a supernatural menace in the wake of a super-plague that wipes out 99 percent of the world's population.
Marvel has tapped creators Roberto Aquire-Sacasa (Marvel Knights 4, Secret Invasion: Fantastic Four) and Mike Perkins (Union Jack, Captain America) to adapt the massive unabridged version of the novel in a series of six five-issue miniseries, the first of which is scheduled to launch in September. We caught up with series Executive Editor Ralph Macchio to get his take on how this project came together, the challenges of adapting such a well-known, well-loved novel and what other King novels he'd like to see Marvel tackle!
 WIZARDUNIVERSE.COM: So Ralph, what are your thoughts about The Stand as a novel?
MACCHIO: I'm very familiar with it. When I knew that we were going to be doing it, I did go back and reread it, and the other people in the office who are going to be working on it with me have also gotten down to rereading it. It is a wonderful piece of fiction, and when you get down to actually just getting back into it, the size is not daunting at all because the amazing thing about Stephen King, any of his incredibly long novels, whatever they may be, whether it's It or The Stand or even any of the volumes of Dark Tower, he's just so compulsively readable that you just don't notice the hundreds of pages going by. So I was very happy to have an opportunity and excuse to go back and reread it, especially going back to the unexpurgated version of it.
The unexpurgated version, of course, has a lot more material in it, and we plan to work from that one. That's the one that Roberto had read prior to even doing the outlines. So it has so many good things in it. There's no way we'd work from the trimmed version.
Roberto, when he actually sits down to write a plot or a script, he may find that there's something that he wants to expand or characterization he really wants to get into or something that just didn't appear to him when he was doing the initial outline, so that may extend it an issue here or there. So we could very well wind up with an arc that has more than five issues, but right now we're planning to do six five-issue arcs.
When Marvel first acquired the Dark Tower books, was there any discussion of continuing the relationship with Stephen King at that point, or was that the proving ground for additional adaptations?
MACCHIO: Exactly the latter. When Marvel and Stephen King had begun their talks, it was strictly about doing Dark Tower. What was interesting about it was that when Stephen King came up to New York for the convention last year, I remember being in the green room for a few minutes before we went out onto the panel, and at that point he said to me, "How about we do The Stand?" And I said, "I would certainly not say 'no' to something like that, even though I'm not the guy that's in the position to give the 'yay' or 'nay' on it." But he certainly seemed to be very pleased with his relationship with Marvel and with what we had done with his work, and so it was a terrific boost for us to hear that he was interested in doing more with us and that he was intrigued and was willing to offer up, you know, possibly the seminal work of his career...or one of them if you can have more than one seminal work. So it was really quite nice and very flattering.
How would you categorize the working relationship with King so far?
MACCHIO: We have had a fantastic relationship with him. As I've mentioned to a number of people, both Stephen and his right hand man—his top literary agent, Chuck Veril—are the nicest people in the world you could ever want to work with. You know, Stephen King is, in literary circles, the guy's an 800-pound gorilla in popular culture. There's very few names that rise up to his level and, because he has complete control over everything, he could make your life very miserable if he wanted to. But I have to tell you, he is the easiest and nicest guy to work with. And, again, I also want to include Chuck Veril in that, who is a terrific guy. The relationship we have is we send everything to both of them for approval.
What kind of challenges does the creative team face in adapting a pre-existing prose novel, especially one that's so well known?
MACCHIO: Well, you said it right there. You have the audience built in already. You are well aware that there is an audience out there that needs to be satisfied. Most importantly, though, if you're familiar with the material, you need to satisfy yourself because if you've satisfied yourself creatively, you are hopeful that you will have satisfied the audience. But it's not just when you're working on something like this. You've seen that even recently [with the new] Indiana Jones film. Even though they are the creators of the whole thing, they have an audience that's looking over their shoulder to make sure that they're gonna be faithful to their own material. And when we're doing something like this, we're aware that we're sort of the second shift on this. Stephen King is the creator, and we're picking up on his work. Luckily, you know, we're all such huge fans of his material and of him that everybody went into it going, "We wanna be as faithful to this as possible," and you do your best work when you're doing something like that, when you're working on something of this caliber, work of this caliber, because you try to rise to the material.
And also [with] the creative people on it, on both Dark Tower and this, from Jae Lee, Richard Isanove, Robin Furth, who's out there in England and overseeing everything, and Peter David, who's managed to find a voice for all those characters in Dark Tower to the creative people we're dealing with here, I have the easiest job. They have the burden of putting it all together, and I'm just the guy that kind of looks at it and goes, "Hey, this is really coming together very nice." You've got people of that caliber.
Speaking of the creative team on The Stand, what do Roberto and Mike bring to the table; what makes them the guys to bring this project to fruition?
MACCHIO: Artistically, we did want a very different look than we were getting from Dark Tower. We didn't want that to sort of be the template for any adaptation we were doing. The Stand is a very different book than any of the Dark Tower books. The Dark Tower is much more fantasy-oriented. The Stand is still kind of rooted in our world, and we wanted somebody that would give us the nuts and bolts of everything, you know? And that's one of the things Mike specializes in. He's also very good with people and with creating characters that have very definable faces and features, so he was gonna give us a world that was very solidified and in the sunlight.
As far as the writer goes, Roberto was somebody that we felt [had] a literary quality to his writing. There are writers who are sparse and spare, and then there are writers who seem to embroider a bit. We felt that would be something that would be good for The Stand, that he would give it a literary quality. Also, Roberto is very, very good on plotting. If you've read any of his stories on Spider-Man or even the Fantastic Four series that he had done, he's got a great story sense. And also, he's a huge Stephen King fan, so he knew the material cold.
So, are there any other King novels you could see Marvel adapting? Any personal favorites of your own?
MACCHIO: As far as work that I would like to see us adapt, I am a big, big fan of It. I love those huge, endless Stephen King novels. Even though, you know, some people tend to go for the tighter ones, like Misery, you know, I'm a big fan of the huge, 800- 1,000-page novels 'cause once you get into the world, you just don't want to come out. So I would love us to do the It book. I think that would be fantastic. Great visuals in there all the way through. Again, I have no say so on it, but at some point when we get The Stand done, if he's willing, I would love to do that.
Read more about Marvel's adaptation of The Stand! | | | | | | | | |
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