Now Indie film making isn’t exactly all that interesting to most people, that is, not until the next Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind comes out and blows people away. Most people are content to simply ignore Indie films until the bandwagon no longer allows them to. Suffering a similar, if even more ignominious fate is Indie publishing, specifically comic book publishing. The mainstream couldn’t care less what the virginal, pimple-faced nerds are reading. So it comes as little of a surprise that barely anyone is covering the announcement that Top Shelf Productions, arguably the best Indie comic publisher currently in operation, has made a deal with the Indie film company Likely Story for partial interest in Top Shelf Productions. The reason for this? To start putting Top Shelf comics into film production.

Top Shelf co-founders Chris Staros and Brett Warnock still have controlling interest in the company, but now entrepreneur John S. Johnson and independent film producer Anthony Bregman (owners of Likely Story) now have the option to hand select which Top Shelf products they’d like to produce for film or television, essentially granting them exclusive rights to hand select from the Top Shelf catalog, whereas before Top Shelf simply allowed Hollywood to come to them for adaptations like Surrogates.

And word has it that the first project has already been selected, a film adaptation of Alex Robinson’s Too Cool To Be Forgotten (recently named one of Amazon.com’s Top Ten Graphic Novels of the Year), a story of a man who tries to battle his cigarette addiction by traveling back in time to the first time he ever smoked, High School. Its a great comic and one that should translate rather easily to the silver screen which only excites me at the possibilities of Top Shelf finally getting the mainstream recognition and acclaim that it so richly deserves.

Original Press Release
Alex Robinson’s Website