STORYBOARD #7

STORYBOARD #9

STORYBOARD #8

STORYBOARD #25

The Romero Film Project that was

Killed by Zombies!

In 1984, Jackson (Butch) Guice and I were approached by editor-in-chief Jim Shooter to create 48 pages of storyboards for a movie collaboration between Marvel Comics and legendary, independent film director, George A. Romero ("Night of the Living Dead", Day of the Dead").

The working title of the film was "COPPERHEAD" and it was to be Romero's foray into mainstream filmmaking. 

Jim and George, who were fellow hometown Pittsburgh, PA boys,  put their heads together and came up with an ambitious story of love, betrayal and war set in a post-apocalyptic future. The title, "COPPERHEAD", was derived from the color of the cyborg's metal skull.

Although my recollections of the actual storyline is sketchy (no script or plot synopsis has survived), the basic concept was about a soldier, transformed into a high-tech killer cyborg, who rebels from his fascist creators and leads a underground rebellion against them. This was basically RoboCop (with a little Deathlok thrown in) and the Terminator--before either of them ever existed.

As you will see from the pages, as I present them over the next few months, this was a very ambitious project, with huge, sweeping visuals and massive SPX. It was to be Romero's "Star Wars".

(On a side note: as a result of this labor-intensive project, I was pulled off of the project I was developing for Marvel at the time--a reboot of Power Man and Iron Fist to create the storyboards for COPPERHEAD. Ironically, neither project would ever see the light of day.)

Jim and George had the notion to have Jackson and I create the storyboards as comic book pages, so that when the time came to produce the comic adaptation, we could utilize the actual storyboards from the film for the book's contents.

But, alas--it was not to be.

Making a film of this magnitude would require massive funding. 

But--as the saying goes in Hollywood, "You're only as good as your last film."

In 1985, Romero's "Day of the Dead" premiered to lukewarm reviews and disappointing box office receipts.

The powers-that-be determined that George would find that raising millions of dollars for a risky and ambitious project like COPPERHEAD would be next to impossible, given that his last film tanked.

As a result, the project died and the forty-some pages of COPPERHEAD art went into the Marvel art vaults, never to be seen again---until now.