Image Comics' Fantasy Series "I Kill Giants" to Be Turned into a Movie

"I Kill Giants," a comic book series created by writer Joe Kelly and artist J. M. Ken Niimura, published by Image Comics, will be adapted for film by Treehouse Pictures. Academy Award winner Anders Walter will direct, Chris Columbus will produce and original author Kelly will write the screenplay for the project.

"I Kill Giants," which run from 2008 to 2009, won several awards, including the Gold Award at the Fifth International Manga Awards. It also garnered a spot on the Young Adult Library Services Association's list of top graphic novels. It was named the "Best Indy Book of 2008" by IGN and was voted the second best foreign comic book published in Japan in the Gaiman Award.

Kelly describes the series thus: "It's a story about a girl who's a bit of an outsider - she's smart-assed and funny, but totally in our geekland: she's obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons, she doesn't have a lot of friends, she's a bit of a social misfit. She's taken her fantasy life a little far, and really only talks about giants to people. She's convinced that giants are real and giants are coming, and it's her responsibility to stop them when they show up. This weird little fantasy life that she's going has started seeping into her real life, and as we see things from her point of view, we see that she sees pixies and she sees signs in the clouds and other things that might be telling her that bad things might be coming. There's also something going on in her home where she won't go upstairs in her house, because there seems to be a monster up there that she's deathly afraid of.

"So we can't tell if she's seeing things for real, or if she's just a little nutty. But the balance of her world view gets thrown out of whack when three people descent on her life - she makes a new friend, she becomes the target of a bully, and the school psychologist starts talking to her. The threads of this life that she's got start to unravel, and she becomes a lot more anxious, and thins take off from there. In a weird way, it's Juno meets Pan's Labyrinth."

According to Deadline, Treehouse Pictures is financing the film adaptation and will produce with Columbus' company 1492 Pictures/Ocean Blue Entertainment, along with Man of Action Entertainment and XYZ Films, which will be overseeing the worldwide distribution. Casting is reportedly underway. Production is targeted to begin this year.