David Fincher’s a bigger comic book geek than I am, it turns out. I don’t really know jack shit about Eric Powell’s The Goon except to have noted that I like the guy’s art style (and his lead character’s design); Fincher, on the other hand, digs it so much that he’s optioned the comic to turn it into a CGI movie.

Here’s what Wikipedia tells me The Goon is all about:

The Goon is a comic book series created by Eric Powell in 1999. The story is about the adventures of the Goon, a muscle-bound brawler who claims to be the primary enforcer for the feared mobster Labrazio. The Goon (and his sidekick Franky) often get tied up in other machinations, often in relation to the evil zombie gangs under the command of the Nameless Zombie Priest.

The series has a distinctly paranormal slant, with the average story concerning ghosts, ghouls, skunk-apes with an unnatural hunger for pie, extra-dimensional aliens, and mad scientists.

On more than one occasion, Powell has metafictionally hinted that the context of The Goon is a creation of pure fiction, taking place in a comic reality instead of implying – in the mold of Spider-Man or Superman – that it is occurring in the “real” world. This is best illustrated in two issues, one in which Hellboy – another comic plot “inserted” into reality – meets the Goon after being transported through an issue of The Goon, the other in which a small boy finds and reads a Goon comic book.

It’s interesting that series has crossed over with Hellboy, as that little bit of synopsis does make me think it’s quite Hellboyian (Hellboyish?), but with a 1930s gangster bent.

Fincher seems to be getting into animation: he’s also doing a segment in the new Heavy Metal movie. And he’s doing that with Blur Studios, the same people who will be developing The Goon with him (they’ve also worked together on commercials). CGI seems like an interesting route to take with this property, since it will allow for Powell’s stylized visuals to remain mostly untouched, just made three dimensional.

And with that I head off to Amazon to catch up on my Goon reading…

Thanks to Faisal for the heads up.