The Librarians Coming to Comics

The Librarians is what I think of as an old-fashioned basic cable show. Nothing particularly memorable or outstanding, but fun popcorn entertainment.

Four quirky personalities (Rebecca Romijn, Christian Kane, Lindy Booth, John Harlan Kim), aided by an immortal John Laroquette, team up to rescue magical artifacts and stop those who want to misuse them. It’s a caper series with plenty of mythological and literary allusions, spun off from a series of three TV movies starring Noah Wyle (who also occasionally appears on the TV show). The Librarians has had three seasons of ten episodes each so far, with another coming later this year.

Now it will also have a comic book from Dynamite Entertainment. No specifics are yet available, so we don’t know timeframe, format, or creative team, but the company was careful to say it would be a “canonical comic book series”. I hope they get the feel and voices of the characters right — that’s so important to capture the flavor — plus, big magical effects are nicely cheaper to do on the page than on the screen.

The Librarians was developed for TV by John Rogers, who previously created Leverage, which had a similar “group righting wrongs” feel. Rogers also has some comic-book cred, writing a run on the Blue Beetle series as well as developing the Global Frequency TV pilot and co-writing the Catwoman movie.

Update: Information about the first issue is now available. The Librarians #1 is due out in comic shops on September 13 at $3.99 for 32 pages. It’s written by Will Pfeifer (Teen Titans, Catwoman) and illustrated by Rodney Buchemi (X-Men Forever). The plot involves a cheesy movie producer being murdered at a film festival with a piece of Noah’s Ark. It can be preordered with Diamond code JUL17 1689.