News

Variety is reporting that Paramount Pictures and Brad Pitt’s Plan B have acquired the rights to adapt Mark Crilley’s four-volume OEL manga Miki Falls into a movie with Sera Gamble, a producer and writer for “Supernatural”, attached to the project as the scriptwriter. Crilley is best known for his Akiko series of comic books targeted at 9- to 12-year-olds; all four volumes of this latest series are being published on HarperCollins’ HarperTeen label.

Miki Falls‘ beginning plot is that Miki Yoshida is starting her last year of high school when she falls in love with new boy in town Hiro, except that he doesn’t want anything to do with her or her town. She decides to be his friend but she finds out he is a Deliverer, someone who monitors couples about to break up and snatch their before it dies to pass onto another couple. Deliverers are forbidden from falling in love but Miki ignores that rule and acts on her ambitions. The series takes place over the seasons of a year so it would seem natural for the film to start in spring and end in winter.

Greg McElhatton from Read About Comics’ reviewed of the first volume, Spring, last July and described it as “well-rounded” with a “very soft, relaxing art style” that could appeal to readers outside its intended audience. All Ages Reads, whose review crew is a teacher and her grade-school daughters, also liked the series and recommended it for the 10-and-up crowd as the romance is confined to kissing. In September, Brigid at MangaBlog published the full version of an interview she conducted with Crilley in July 2007 for a Publisher’s Weekly article (that’s where I got the story description).