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Columbia Pictures has optioned the French comics property Barbarella from the Estate of the late creator Jean-Claude Forest for an undisclosed sum. Barbarella was created in 1962 and was the subject of a 1968 film by Roger Vadim starring Jane Fonda. The Estate was represented by the Hollywood Comics agency. Forest’s son, Julien, and Jean-Marc Lofficier are attached as co-executive producers.
Jean-Claude Forest created the character of Barbarella for serialisation in V Magazine in 1962, and in 1964 Éric Losfeld published these strips as a stand-alone book titled Barbarella, about the exploits, often sexual, of a young woman who travels from planet to planet meeting many alien races.. The book caused a scandal on publication and became known as the first “adult” comic book, though others had long predated it. For her creator, the character was meant to embody the modern, emancipated woman in the era of sexual liberation, and as a result, this literary work has come to be associated with the mid-20th century sexual revolution. Barbarella was translated into English by Richard Seaver and published in Evergreen Review #37-39 from 1965 and in Heavy Metal magazine in 1978. The Barbarella film adaptation was made in 1968, and several remakes were considered with Bridget Fonda, Drew Barrymore, Sherilyn Fenn and Rose McGowan, the most recent of which was abandoned in 2009. 1980s British pop band Duran Duran takes its name from a character in the 1968 film. In addition, the band’s first single from 1997’s Medazzaland is entitled “Electric Barbarella.” A Barbarella musical based on the film was produced in 2004. In 2013, a TV series was in development with writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn, and Martha De Laurentiis, widow of the film’s producer Dino De Laurentiis, all involved An updated adaptation was released by Humanoids Publishing by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Barbarella was relaunched as an ongoing series by the American publisher Dynamite Entertainment in 2017. A twelve-issue series written by Mike Carey with art by Kenan Yarar was published by Dynamite during 2017 and 2018, in conjunction with Barbarella’s 55th anniversary.Jean-Marc Lofficier – longtime custodian of the Barbarella character – joined Carey as supervisor on the project. The single-shot Barbarella Holiday Special was published in December 2018, written by Lofficierwith art by José Louis Ruiz Pérez. Barbarella/Dejah Thoris was a four-issue series published in 2019, uniting Barbarella with Edgar Rice Burroughs‘ Princess of Barsoom by Leah Williams and Germán Garcia. In July 2021, Dynamite launched a new ongoing series written by Sarah A. Hoyt with art by Madibek Musabekov.
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