We’ve all seen a few killer memes, like the one about the guy turning around to check out a girl while the girl he’s holding hands with has an angry look on her face (and, like, it says “me” above his head, “watching Netflix” above the girl he’s looking at, and “getting enough sleep” above the other girl’s head), or the one where the guy ended his friendship with Mudasir and Salman is his new best friend (except it’s altered to say, like, “friendship ended with sleep” and that Netflix is the new best friend), or the one where the lady from Real Housewives is screaming in the first image and the second image is a confused/frustrated cat sitting behind a plate of vegetables (and it says “I need to go to sleep so bad” over the first one and “Netflix” over the second one). But what about a meme that kills?
That’s the premise of Memetic, a horror graphic novel from James Tynion IV and Eryk Donovan that Seth Rogen’s Point Grey production company has just picked up the adaptation rights to. According to The Wrap, The Batman writer Mattson Tomlin is writing this adaptation, with Boom! Studios on board to produce as well. As The Wrap explains it, the story is about a “weaponized meme that turns people insane” and creates an army of “meme-zombies” over the course of a single day. Luckily, “an immune college student and an 11-year-old genius discover an antidote.” So yeah, it seems pretty weird, and it’s going to require some work to come up with a weaponized meme that is so good that people keep sharing it even though it makes them insane. Maybe it’ll have the guys from American Chopper, and they’re arguing about, uhhh, wanting to go to sleep versus wanting to stay up and watch Netflix? Just throwing that out there.