No Man’s Land, Szymon Kudrański’s well-received Image Comics limited series, is taking a step into big screen territory.
The property is in development as a film from producer Jason Berman’s A/Vantage Pictures, as well as Kudrański and Jon Levin’s Sustainable Imagination.
Producer Berman released Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest last year, while Jon Levin is in the Oscar race with the doc short All the Empty Rooms.
Per the logline: “For three months each year, you can walk from the USA to Russia across an ice bridge—a frozen path known as theIce Curtain. In 1963, when the body of a woman is discovered frozen into this icy no-man’s land, the already fragile geopolitical balance between these two countries threatens to collapse. With nuclear tensions intensifying, a veteran FBI agent and an ambitious new female KGB operative are forced into an uneasy alliance to solve the murder — before the ice melts and a global conflict is triggered.”
The book, published via Image under Kudrański’s One Man Art imprint, completed its four-issue run late last year, and has earned comparisons to David Fincher films such as Zodiac and SE7EN.
The book takes inspiration from the Diomede Islands, a pair of islands in the being straight between Alaska and Siberia.
“When I first learned about the Diomede Islands, one question immediately emerged: What if a body was found in the exact middle of the ice bridge — technically belonging to no one, outside any clear jurisdiction?” noted Kudrański in a statement. “This location demanded a story. Two villages on opposite sides of a frozen strait. From a geopolitical standpoint, two rival nuclear superpowers connected by a thin layer of ice for only three months each year — almost poetic in how truces can be as fragile as ice itself.”
Kudrański, known for Spawn, Action Comics and The Punisher, created, wrote and provided the art for No Man’s Land. He worked with editor Tom Williams and letterer DC Hopkins, with a trade paperback due out in April.
For the book, he looked through more than 100 years of newspaper archives, and discovered “the most disturbing and mysterious activity occurred during the Cold War — reports of missing people, unexplained deaths, and events that were never fully accounted for.”
‘No Man’s Land’ cover.
Szymon Kudrański