Legion M, the world’s first fan-owned entertainment company who brought you the soon-to-be cult classic film “Mandy,” starring Nicolas Cage and their partners Co-op Entertainment has big plans to expand into the comic Book market with its first Western comic book, “Girl With No Name” (GWNN). The company has scheduled the comic book for release next year and the film project will also commence.

The project will eventually turn into a feature film which is set to be released sometime in 2020.

Introducing 'The Girl With No Name' (GWNN)

Two talented and acclaimed female comic artists will be part of the creative team with Legion M. Tula Lotay ("Supreme: Blue Rose") will be involved with the “Girl With No Name” promotional poster and cover art, and Dani Strips ("2000AD") will be responsible for creating the book’s interiors.

The announcement was made at New York Comic Con (NYCC), and will also premiere at L.A. Comic Con (LACC), later this month. The project is being produced by Co-Op Entertainment’s Laura Ivey and directed by Co-Op’s Tanya Wexler (Hysteria).

The screenplay was written by Alex Ranarivelo ("Dirt, Ride").

The Wild West story is set in 1869 and stars its mysterious, gunslinger heroine, "The Girl With No Name." She will come to life for the first time in a ground-breaking format—an oversized, heavy stock 40-page book called "A1Shot" developed by Dave Elliott at AtomekART. Elliot is also packaging the comic book for Legion M.

Meet Legion M’s COO Terri Lubaroff

I spoke with Legion M’s Chief Operations Officer, (COO) Terri Lubaroff by phone about their newest endeavor, “Girl With No Name.”

“The screenplay for "Girl With No Name" (GWNN) has been around for a little while. Tanya Wexler is attached to direct and Laura Ivey is attached to produce through their company, Co-op Entertainment.

David Baxter—our head of development had a relationship with Tanya and Laura and they said, “Hey, give this script a read--- we’re thinking about doing something a little different with it we would love your ideas,” Lubaroff explained. She continued, “We’ve had a lot of people on Facebook say, “Would you ever do a Western theme?” And, “can you do some more projects that are more female-driven?” When we see comments that pop up like that over and over, we pay attention.”

Co-op Entertainment sent Legion M the script, which happened to be a Western theme with a female lead.

“It happened to be amazing!” Lubaroff said. “We immediately said, “We have an idea on how to make this happen by turning it into a comic book——before we make it into a feature film and we’d love to work with you and they were all for it!”

Lubaroff seemed enthusiastic about more comic book projects for Legion M.

“I hope there will be other comic books——this is a format that’s never really been done before—the format of the book is called "A1Shot" which is a self-contained story. Most comic books are ‘episodic’ so you have to buy several issues to get the entire story——or you buy a graphic novel and you get the entire story."

She added, "In this case, we’re giving you the entire story in one book.” It’s not the entire story of the screenplay, it’s a snippet of the screenplay we felt could use some ‘flushing out’ and some exploration of the universe and the characters—and we were able to within that give a beginning, a middle, and an end.”

Legion M brought Dave Elliot on board who happens to be a seasoned comic book publisher.

Elliot has previously worked with Legion M on their "Stan Lee" book that we did for the Stan Lee celebration in 2017.

"I’ve been in the comic industry for a long time,” said Lubaroff. “I felt very comfortable with a lot of different companies but wanted to do this one differently. Dave had the idea to do the A1Shot. We challenged him and we said, “This is great, can you please help us package this book together with artists that are all female who love Westerns and have never been asked to draw a Western before."

"To his credit, he said, “I know exactly who to reach out to!” and sure enough it was highly-regarded UK comic artist Tula Lotay who said yes! Which we couldn’t believe and then Dani Strips from Greece also said yes and they’re both lovers of the Western genre and had a singular vision to bring this character to life!”

The Legion M COO couldn’t be more pleased about the project.

The artists are all-female and women are increasingly getting involved in the entertainment industry.

“It’s really cool! I love it! Especially a project this masculine as a Western theme!” In this case, our hero is actually a woman and she’s totally ‘bad to the bone!’ Our intention is for it to be a feature film and the comic book will probably be published in February or March of next year, depending on the artists getting their work done."

"We’re currently packaging the feature film for casting and financing and our hope is that we’re in production around this time next year—so it would be seen in probably 2020.”

Legion M will be at LA Comic Con. They have a very big booth and will host a panel.

"We’re bringing in friends and partners to help us out with the booth and we’re hosting workshops all weekend,” Lubaroff said. “We’re teaching DIY Cosplay. It's where people go to Comic Cons and dress up as their favorite characters. Some spend a whole year spending thousands of dollars creating their own costumes and some throw something together at the last minute). There are people who do that professionally and we teach people how to do their own Cosplay."

"One of our writers on our project, “Evermore,” said he was going to come in and teach people how to self-publish a novel so we have a lot of fun things planned.”

The overwhelming success of the Nicolas Cage film, 'Mandy'

Legion M financed the Nicolas Cage film, “Mandy.” Lubaroff had aspirations of the heavy-metal cult-classic horror film, “Mandy” doing well with audiences since its debut in September, but had mixed vibes about it.

“We loved “Mandy” we read the script before it was shot. It’s a different kind of film and Panos Cosmatos the director has a ’very-singular’ vision and we were all on board. As a fan-owned company, we want to support different points of view as well as creativity and originality. So this film really checked all of those boxes."

"But I can’t lie—when I saw it, I said, “Ok, this is not for everyone. There are going to be people in the Legion who absolutely love it——and it will be their favorite movie of all time, and there will be people in the Legion who will say, “Eh, not for me!”

“We decided to be honest about that from the very beginning. We let people know that it’s not for everyone. We started a specialty label called, “Legion Midnight” just for this film because it is truly a midnight film.

It’s one of many on our slate and we’re so gratified by the response that the people have had to it.” It really has far exceeded our expectations."

“We knew it was great——we had no idea that it would have such a high critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes and we had no idea that people would be demanding to see it in theaters even though you can still buy it on iTunes and Amazon.”

Terri said she would definitely work with both Panos Cosmatos and Nicolas Cage again.

“Panos, I would work with again in a heartbeat——and Nic is such an amazing talent! He is so professional and just brings so much to every character!” I can’t imagine not wanting to work with him again he’s amazing."

Legion M is constantly in development with new projects."Girl With No Name" (GWNN) is the most recent one that they announced.

They announced three television projects at WonderCon in March of this year which are “Evermore” which is a sci-fi fantasy-themed television series, “Malice,” which is a drama set in Philadelphia where one family is from the police force and one is white collar and very political.

The third project is called, “Airship Cowboy” which is an adult animated series where archer meets Blazing Saddles!”

They are also still in development of their virtual reality series, “Icon.”

“We hope to have some announcements about that soon,” said Lubaroff.