Dick Wolf to make 'Dynamite' TV

"Law & Order" guru Dick Wolf is looking to mount a "300"-style greenscreen drama series based on the 1950s comics character Johnny Dynamite. "Disturbia" director and writer J.H. Wyman have signed on to the projet, which will see the ex-cop travel to Vegas looking for his missing girlfriend only to find Satan has set up shop buying and selling souls. Skein would feature Dynamite getting involved in the lives of those whose souls Satan touches. Plans are for the show to be shot almost entirely against greenscreens, much as the Frank Miller-inspired pics "Sin City" and "300."

While this take on the character is a big digression for Wolf, who's built an empire on the procedural crime genre, it's also an interesting take on the character that appears to be based mostly on Collins' revival.  Collins has a pretty good track record with such material, having scripted for years the Dick Tracy comic strip and writing comicbooks ranging from issues of Batman to his own creations Ms. Tree and the graphic novel "Road to Perdition," which was turned into a successful film starring Tom Hanks and Paul Newman. As a novelist, he's best known for his Nathan Heller series.

The character has quite a long and convoluted history. According to this entry at Don Markstein's Toonopedia, the character first appeared in 1953's Dynamite #3, created by writer Ken Fitch (under the pen name William Waugh) and artist Pete Morisi. The publisher, Comic Media, soon folded and the rights to the character were bought by Charlton Comics and they reintroduced Dynamite in 1955. Again, his publishing stint was short-lived, but the character was a favorite of fans of hard-nosed 1950s private eyes. One such fan, novelists and comics scripter Max Allan Collins, picked up the rights to the character in 1987, and has published a handful of new adventures since then and are available from AiT-PlanetLar.