With every year, it seems less and less likely that John Carpenter will ever make another feature film. But at least he seems to be making the most out of his informal retirement by playing lots of video games, recording albums of sick music in the vein of his iconic film scores, raising money for indigenous rights, touring as a musician, and getting increasingly involved in comics. As ScreenRant reports, the director’s latest foray into sequential storytelling will be Big Trouble In Little China: Old Man Jack, a decades-later sequel to Big Trouble In Little China, his 1986 cult-classic homage to the genre cinema of Hong Kong, made about a decade before such things were considered cool.
Carpenter will be co-writing the new BOOM! Studios series with Anthony Burch, the lead writer of Borderlands 2 and Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!, and before that, the co-creator of the web series Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin’?. Set in 2020, Old Man Jack will find a sixty-something version of Jack Burton, the A-shirt-clad hero played by Carpenter muse Kurt Russell in the film, finally squaring off against Ching Dai, the boss of Big Trouble In Little China villain Lo Pan.
Several comics titles have borne Carpenter’s name over the years, and the director contributed story ideas and received the occasional co-writing credit on Eric Powell’s recent Big Trouble In Little China series, also published by BOOM!. However, this will be the first time he’ll be writing for an ongoing series right off the bat. The first issue of Big Trouble In Little China: Old Man Jack is due in September, with art by Jorge Corona, best known for his work on DC’s We Are Robin and Teen Titans Go.