A Look At Kevin Smith's Green Hornet Film-Turned-Comic

Below the break you can see four alternative covers for the first issue of Kevin Smith's new Green Hornet comics. He has adapted his unproduced Green Hornet movie screenplay into a ten chapter miniseries, illustrated by Jonathan Lau. The series has reportedly been fully completed before even the first issue hits the shops, so we at least won't get some caught in some sort of Cerebus/Big Numbers/Kick-Ass quicksand waiting for each installment.

Peter reported on the series back in May, even before an artist had been appointed. At that time, Smith gave a statement on how faithfully the comics would follow his screenplay:

It's not a straight-up adaptation of the Green Hornet movie script I wrote some years back, it's definitely gonna take its cues from that script – just as that script took its cues from all the source material available (radio, TV, comics). So this is about as close as I'll get to making that Green Hornet flick I walked away from directing all those years ago.

The only plot details Smith shared are that this "story covers the passing of the torch from Britt Reid to his son Britt Jr" and that "another creative team will do a series that covers the 'golden age', aka the Green Hornet and Kato most folks are familiar with". Okay – does that explain why Smith's Kato is a lady? Didn't think so. Maybe he just wanted to do screen tests with all the young women in Hollywood dressed in some kind of 'sexy' leather outfit.

I suspect this is Mishi Kato, in fact, a character who has appeared in previous Hornet comics but that I've never come across personally myself.

Here are the covers by John Cassaday, J Scott Campbell, Alex Ross and Stephen Segovia. Bleeding Cool report that "incentive black & white & green variants" will follow. Is Kevin Smith's name not enough to sell a pile of copies?

I'd have been very interested to see Kevin Smith's Green Hornet film, so I'll definitely be checking these comics out. On the other hand, I'm over the moon that Michel Gondry got to direct the Hornet picture, so if it could only go one way, it probably went the way that I'd prefer.