We’ve been recommending Grant Morrison’s Happy! repeatedly around here, and now a movie is in development just one month after the comic’s premiere. Morrison is also writing the screenplay. Taking the helm is mogul and former Wu-Tang Clan frontman RZA, whose directorial debut, The Man With the Iron Fists, is releasing soon. Grant Morrison, RZA, and a blue unicorn in a noir satire? Have they been reading my dream journal?
Happy! follows the life of Nick Sax, a cop-turned-hitman who survives a nearly-fatal injury with the newfound ability to see and hear a blue cartoon unicorn named Happy who wants Sax’s help to find someone named Hailey. THR compares the tone and setting to It’s a Wonderful Life, Sin City, and Care Bears. Of course Grant Morrison would create something which invokes all three of those at once. Dan made an especially good argument for how awesome this is:
Morrison’s satire of the gritty, hard-boiled detective story is note perfect, but where this book really shines is the humor. Part of this is Darick Robertson’s art: Happy is the cheesiest thing you’ll ever see, slapped smack in the middle of a line-perfect satire of noir comics. But another part is the writing. Many other writers would either make Happy painfully naive and cheerful, or a drunken cigar-smoking lout. Happy is neither.
If you would have told me back in the mid-’90s that one of the guys in the Gravediggaz song I was spinning would someday direct a movie about a hardboiled detective and a blue unicorn, I’d ask you if the bowl we were smoking had been laced with something. Let’s just hope this bonkers project isn’t 1-800-CareerSuicide.