Bodies tells the story of four different murder investigations linked across almost two centuries of British history, from the late Victorian era all the way to the near future. Launching a few weeks ago on Netflix to rave reviews, the show is now one of its most-watched programs of the moment—and you’d be hard pressed to realize it’s actually a DC Comics adaptation.
That’s in part because Bodies—which stars Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, Shira Haas, Stephen Graham, and Andor’s Kyle Soller, among others—may be filled with genre twists, but isn’t the sort of high-flying heroic series you’d expect out of the works of DC Comics. The show, created by Paul Tomalin, is based on the DC Black Label (née Vertigo) comic series of the same name by Si Spencer, Tula Lotay, Phil Winslade, Dean Ormston, and Meghan Hetrick. The series ran for just eight issues in 2014, before being collected in trade paperback the year after—and has remained out of print ever since, even digitally.
Popverse reports that now that Bodies has become a smash hit on Netflix, DC has raced to get a new print of the trade paperback out ahead of a planned release later this year to try and capitalize on the attention. However, that new edition has already sold out on storefronts like Amazon—once again making Bodies very difficult to legally read, just as it’s become a huge hit, unless you want to wildly overpay on rare single issues.
In an age where comics of all sorts and stripes are being mined for multimedia adaptations and empires, you’d think DC might have been better prepared to make its material available to intrigued audiences before this particular example become a big hit. Maybe in a book about time travel, it figured it’d have more time?
Bodies is now streaming on Netflix.
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