Gotham Central is the comics equivalent of a cult hit. And apparently Ed Brubaker is expecting it to become a TV series sooner rather than later.
Brubaker, the writer of Gotham Central, is doing promotion for his new series Velvet and had some pretty interesting things to say about his beloved series. Especially if you’re wondering how it’s been selling since it was wrapped up.
The book is actually more popular now than when we were doing it. There’s been talk of Gotham Central on TV since when we were doing the comic even (in the mid-2000s). Everyone at Warner Bros. really loved it. Chris Nolan after they did Birds of Prey had asked them to just please not do any Batman-related stuff until he was done with his trilogy — looking at Birds of Prey, you can see why. It was not the world’s greatest pilot.
It’s that first part of the quote that’s the most interesting. Canceled series don’t quite live on in comics the way they do in other media; it can be painfully hard to find a series after it goes out of print, although DC has done a good job of keeping Gotham Central available; the trades are still in print and you can buy the whole series on Comixology. Still, once a series is out of print, it tends to slip out of mind, except for hardcore fans. So this raises the question of what, exactly, older comics are doing, especially digitally.
Brubaker goes on to admit he’s a bit out of the loop as to whether a series is really happening, but considering DC’s recent success and future TV plans, it seems a bit more likely than we might have thought at first. Hey, DC, make sure it’s more The Wire than NCIS, OK?