Netflix Hit Series ‘Bodies’ Has A Buried Backstory

Bodies, the genre-bending sci-fi murder mystery series that just dropped on Netflix NFLX in late October, has generated a bunch of buzz for its intriguing, circular storyline and fantastic performances from Amaka Okafor, Kyle Soller, Jacob Fortune-Lloyd and Stephen Graham. Written and created for Moonage Pictures by Paul Tomalin, Bodies is actually based on a comics series by Si Spencer for DC’s Vertigo imprint that came out in 2014 and was later collected into a graphic novel. Unfortunately, British-born Spencer died in 2021 at age 60, a year before Netflix greenlit the series. A title card in the first episode dedicates the show to his memory.

At a moment when a lot of critics are wringing their hands at how comics-based media is hitting a wall with audiences, Bodies provides compelling evidence that well-written serialized graphic fiction can still be a source of great film and television.

“Bodies is probably the most respectful adaptation of any project I’ve been involved in,” said Shelly Bond, who worked closely with Spencer developing the book when she was VP Executive Editor at Vertigo. “Si Spencer is not as well known as other British comic writers like Neil Gaiman or Grant Morrison, but I always believed he was the William Blake of comics. He was a passionate collaborator in the way he worked with the artists, and he also came to comics with some experience in television by working on British shows like Eastenders, Grange Hill and Torchwood.”

She said she had followed Spencer’s work in British comics and in several American works for Vertigo like Vinyl Underground in 2008. Bond said he came to her with the idea of a time travelling serial killer and she immediately started thinking of ways to bring the project together. Because the story takes place in London across four historical periods – 1890, 1941, 2013, and 2050 – she got a team of new and established artists including Phil Winslade, Tula Lotay, Meghan Hetrick and Dean Ormson together in collaboration with Spencer so each could use their distinctive styles for the different storylines. She also suggested the title and worked with the art director to come up with the logo.

Bond said the Netflix adaptation captured the soul of the original, while overlaying an original element of the time travelling antagonist Mannix (portrayed by Stephen Graham in the series) to create additional political intrigue. “If I'm not mistaken, I think Si approved the final script before he died, because he knew the show runner and the lead writer who found a way to reach out to DC Comics, to procure the rights,” she said.

Bond said she feels terrible that Spencer did not live to see his masterpiece brought to the screen with such care and attention to quality. “The team at Netflix must have gone through the comics with a fine tooth comb,” she said. “I can’t believe how well the show captured the scenes and characters exactly as I remembered editing them more than a decade ago.”

During our Zoom interview, Bond held up her copy of the original graphic novel, published in 2015, and copies of the individual issues to show the commonalities. That’s a comparison that most interested fans of Bodies can’t make because the first edition is long out of print and DC only published a new edition on October 31, after the series dropped. Most comic stores have been unable to obtain copies because it is backordered at the distributor, even as interest in the series is peaking.

“I think this is another case of a publisher fearing the show will be a flop and not wanting to take a real position on reprinting the book,” said Jenn Haines, president of the comics retailer trade organization ComicsPRO and owner of The Dragon, an award-winning store in Guelph, Ontario. “Since it seems none of us were told it was coming out on Netflix, there was no reason to take notice of a new edition of a title that didn’t sell well the first time.”

Bond confirmed the series had low sales both as a periodical and a trade book. “In the early part of the 2010s, certainly during my tenure as VP executive editor, there wasn't a lot of time or effort spent in marketing at Vertigo. And retailers would stop ordering copies of later numbers because they assumed a trade collection was coming.”

It is unfortunate that comics retailers do not have a popular book to sell to interested customers at a time when the industry could do with anything that gets fans into the store. Even stranger, as of November 17, Bodies is not available digitally, either on Amazon Kindle or through the DC Universe Infinite app, which boasts tens of thousands of the publisher’s back issues. DC did not respond to repeated requests to obtain a review copy for this story.

Still, Bodies is a useful contrary datapoint to the doom-and-gloom narratives about the declining value of comics properties based on the underperformance of Marvel and DC’s big-budget superhero epics. The medium remains full of undiscovered gems in a variety of genres. Some, like Bodies, are just buried a little deeper.