McFarlane tells MTV News that he'd like to cast DiCaprio in his remake-that's-not-a-remake. Not that DiCaprio would play the undead antihero. "The main character isn't Spawn, per se, it's the guy chasing Spawn," McFarlane told MTV News. That is, DiCaprio would play a detective — but a new character, not fan faves Sam or Twitch. McFarlane said the film would play as a Godfather-like crime drama in which DiCaprio's character would come to discover that something supernatural and diabolical is going on beyond the usual cops-and-robbers stuff.

Why DiCaprio, who McFarlane says was always in the back of his mind for the role? "It's a big wish, but his dad was a big fan of underground comic books and he came from that," McFarlane told MTV. "It's not a big special-effects movie, it's a character movie, so I could shoot it in 40-50 days and you don't have to budget that much time."

No word, of course, on whether DiCaprio is actually interested or available, or whether comic book readers might not prefer to see someone a little more, um, rugged hunting down Spawn. Still, given the shift in focus, we won't be the first to holler, "YARM!" Your mileage, however, may vary.

Spawn creator Todd McFarlane spilled the beans about his hoped-for reboot to MTV's Splash Page blog:

The thing I've had in my head for a long time isn't a big comic-book movie... Everything's real; it's like ‘The Departed,' ‘L.A. Confidential' or something like that - and there's only one thing out of the ordinary in the story I've written, which is the thing people know as Spawn. And only a few people see it.To me, it's more along the lines of ‘Jaws,' where you didn't see [the shark] for half the movie, and then you caught glimpses of him. 'Jaws was somewhat fantastic in that movie, and to keep it low-budget I can't have spaceships and super-villains and all that stuff.

Instead, what you'll see, apparently, is an undead guy in black clothes:

[Y]ou'll never see Spawn in his full regalia, because to me, he's more of a sentinel, like a living shadow. I've shown the artwork [to potential investors] and he's all black; he doesn't look exactly like what people have seen in the comic book.

Call me cynical, but this seems as if McFarlane has forgotten that all of Spawn's fans like the comic because of the art. Storywise, it's a generic mess of "Guy dies, comes back for revenge" with a time-limit built-in for cheap suspense. You lose the over-the-top visuals and try to make it "real," and you lose everything that made the character popular in the first place. But what do you think?

Todd McFarlane Reveals ‘Spawn' Reboot Details, New Character Costume [MTV Splash Page]

McFarlane told Newsarama.com:

He should be creepier than what he was in Spider-Man 3... You don't want to scare the kids, because the kids love the character... But I think you could add a little bit of a creep factor. I mean, it never bugged me to watch Frankenstein as a kid, so you could have a little bit of it, as long as you have a good story backing it up.

But he's also very concerned about what kind of good story backs it up:

I'm thinking about how they want to make anti-heroes nowadays... Those don't work. The reason they're so cool as a bad guy is because they're bad. And as soon as you try to give too much humanity to them, then you go, no! Now they're not as good as a bad guy because you're trying to redeem them.

So, basically, McFarlane wants to see a movie starring a creepy monster who doesn't get redeemed at all. Does someone want to try and explain Sony's idea of an addition to a family-friendly franchise to Todd and see if his head explodes?

Todd McFarlane Weighs in on 'Venom' Movie Spin-off [Newsarama]

Miracleman started life as Marvelman, a hastily-created character that allowed British publisher L. Miller & Son to cash in on Captain Marvel's popularity even after they'd lost the publication rights to the character in the 1950s. When Alan Moore revived the character for the seminal Warrior comic in the early 1980s, it was the first time a formerly "innocent" superhero was revised in "realistic" terms, heralding in a storytelling style that would appear again and again, from books like The Dark Knight Returns to The Ultimates and beyond (The Marvelman/Miracleman name change came when the strip made its American debut, to avoid a potential lawsuit from Marvel Comics). Moore stayed with the character until the early 1990s, when he passed both the writing of the series and what he believed to be his part in the ownership of the character to Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham, who went on to produce another eight issues of the series before the publisher, Eclipse, went bankrupt.

Here's where things get confusing.

Spawn creator Todd McFarlane bought the intellectual property of Eclipse, which he believed to include Miracleman. As part of a deal to regain complete copyright of two Spawn characters created and co-owned by Gaiman, McFarlane promised the return of his share of Miracleman copyright to Gaiman but then changed his mind, and Gaiman (with the assistance of Marvel Comics) sued McFarlane to force him to comply with this agreement. Gaiman won, but that was only the start of the problems; it turned out that McFarlane may never have owned any of Miracleman in the first place.

The current state of the legal ownership of Miracleman is, at best, somewhat uncertain. There are multiple versions of who may own the character: Eclipse's ownership may have been voided when the company went bankrupt, according to former Warrior publisher Dez Skinn. Skinn, Moore and artist Gary Leach may have been accidentally illegally using the character in the first place, claims the character's creator, Mick Anglo, because he owns Marvelman 100% and always has done. Alternatively, L. Miller & Son may have owned the copyright and so, whoever owns their intellectual property owns the character or, finally, the character may be - and always has been - public domain and the only legal ownership that matters is for the stories themselves and not the character at all.

All of which means that the series, one of the most important in Western mainstream comics, has been out of print for years and doesn't seem to be returning anytime soon. Which brings us, at last, to Australia and performers Bruce Woolley and Bernard Caleo.

The duo have taken the story from Moore's run on the series and adapted it for a two-man show currently running in Melbourne's Croft Institute. A show that is, apparently, surprisingly good:

Any fears of a pair of “comic book geeks” making fools of themselves on stage should be immediately dispelled. This production is a deeply performative affair that combines many layers and techniques of open theatricality that renders the piece almost more like a work of experimental theatre or performance art than a conventional play... Woolley and Caleo are equally talented performers, and totally in their element. As both the actors and adaptors, their command of and commitment to the material is evident, and they have a terrific chemistry, pulling off this complex show with astonishing slickness.

Quite how they managed to get the rights to the character/material is open to question, but in a strange way, it's nice to see that Moore's groundbreaking story is getting out there somehow. Here's hoping the show will find someway to come to the States sometime soon.

Miracleman [Australian Stage]

The Mark: Rob Liefeld's near-mythical movie for Will Smith (First announced in 1997) possibly disappeared due to worries over its similarity to Marvel's Star Brand series (which is, itself, a rip-off of DC's Green Lantern): Smith was to play an average joe who would end up with ultimate power that he didn't want, thanks to a mysterious brand that is magically "transferred" to his body from the corpse of a Confederate soldier. The pitch meeting probably went like this: "Picture this, Will. You have this mark on your hand, right? And you're looking at it, wondering what it is, and then it has this laser blast that comes out of it and blasts through a wall in your apartment." "Can I look at the hole in the wall and say 'Awww hell naw'?" "Sure." "I'll do it!"

Warcop: In 1993, Madonna wanted to star in another movie, and thought that she'd make a good superhero. She asked Spawn creator Todd McFarlane to come up with an idea for her, and Todd - wanting nothing to do with it - gave the idea to Grant Morrison, who came up with a pitch involving a Judge Dredd-esque futuristic space cop who traveled in time back to the present day to catch a particular perp. In one of her last good career moves, Madonna decided against the project, but Grant apparently didn't; the title, at least, is about to be used for one of his new comic books.

Iron Fist: Is this adaptation of Marvel Comics' kung-fu fighter anything more than a hopeful dream for The Phantom Menace's Darth Maul, Ray Park? The stuntman-turned-actor has been talking about the perpetually-upcoming movie version of Danny Rand for more than half a decade now, and the movie has had multiple co-stars, directors and screenwriters attached at various points in its history but seems to be getting no closer to actually being made. This can only be a good thing, because it just increases the likelihood of teaming the character up with (the similarly movie-cursed) Luke Cage to give us the Power Man And Iron Fist movie the world needs to see.

Green Lantern: One of the greatest near-misses in cinema history is the fact that fan outcry halting pre-production of Jack Black's comedy movie version of DC's space cop superhero a few years ago. Hearing Jack talk about what we could've seen in an alternate world is enough reason to be grateful:

I was going to be making all kinds of stuff... I was going to be capturing bad guys with green, giant prophylactics. Some funny stuff.

To everyone who complained loudly enough to stop this movie being made: Thank you.

Spider-Man: I know, I know; you're all thinking "Wait, didn't they make Spider-Man? I'm pretty sure I've seen a Spider-Man movie." But I'm not talking about the Sam Raimi version; I'm talking about Jim Cameron's mooted early '90s version that would had a villain that kissed his girlfriends to death, a personality-less Sandman as afterthought thug, and Peter revealing his secret identity at the end of the movie to a surprisingly unimpressed Mary Jane. There's no doubt that it would've made a cool-looking special-effects bonanza, but it had none of the heart or quirkiness of Raimi's version.

Famous names: Keith Giffen, Bill Mantlo, Todd McFarlane, Bart Sears

Crunchy goodness: 3

Story breakthrough: Invasion! was far from the first time aliens attacked the DC Comics Earth,
but it was the first alien attack on such a huge scale. It also introduced the idea of the "metagene," which gave all the DC heroes their super-powers.

Deadliest spoiler: One of the obscurest heroes of all time, the ghostly Deadman, saves the entire world by possessing one of the Dominators.

Who stays dead: A couple of members of the original Doom Patrol meet a final end in this storyline, to make room for Grant Morrison to revamp the title from scratch.

The DC Canon: Invasion Anatomy of the Crossover #7 by Julian Darius