Available rights:
- Print Publishing – worldwide
- Digital Publishing – worldwide
Publishing information:
- Comics legend Roy Thomas to write adaptation
- An internationally famous classic
- Adaptation of a book which has sold millions worldwide
- An iconic inspiration to fashion and interior design
Based on the book by Osa Johnson
Grand Design Communications, working with the Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum in Canute, Kansas, is pleased to offer graphic novel adaptation rights for the classic autobiography, I Married Adventure. Johnson fan and Safari Museum board member Roy Thomas is a consultant to the project. Thomas is one of the great living comic book writer/editors and also a former English teacher with experience adapting a wide range of works to comics.
This is the autobiography of Osa Johnson who, with her husband Martin, brought home stunning movies of Africa and the South Seas to eager Americans. Together they spent more than 25 years crossing the country and the world with their cameras. Osa’s colorful biography is also a wonderful love story.
The cover of the original 1940 edition, with it’s bold zebra stripe design, has become one of the most iconic book covers of the 20th century, strongly influencing styles from fashion to interior design. In recent years, I Married Adventure and Martin and Osa Johnson have inspired fashion from Australian clothing brand Aja, Woolrich in the U.S. and Colenimo in the U.K. Okapi, a U.K.-based luxury handbag label has cited the Johnsons as inspiration. In the past, the Johnsons have been the inspiration for the retail store chain Martin + Osa and an I Married Adventure-cover-inspired handbag by Kate Spade.
About Martin and Osa Johnson
In the first half of the 20th century an American couple from Kansas named Martin and Osa Johnson captured the public’s imagination through their films and books of adventure in exotic, far-away lands. Photographers, explorers, naturalists and authors, Martin and Osa studied the wildlife and peoples of East and Central Africa, the South Pacific Islands, and British North Borneo. They explored then unknown lands and, through their films, writings, and lectures, brought back knowledge of cultures thousands of miles away.
From 1917 to 1936, the Johnsons set up camp in some of the most remote areas of the world and provided an unmatched photographic record of the wildernesses of Kenya, the Congo, British North Borneo and the Solomon and New Hebrides Islands. Their equipment was the most advanced motion picture apparatus of the day, some of it designed by Martin Johnson himself. When the young adventurers left their home in Kansas to explore and photograph these lands, little did they realize that they would provide the world with a photographic record of the African game of unimagined magnitude and beauty.
The Johnsons gave the filmmakers and researchers of today an important source of ethnological and zoological material which would otherwise have been lost. Their photographs represent one of the great contributions to the pictorial history of the world. Their films serve to document a wilderness that has long since vanished and tribal cultures and customs that have ceased to exist. Through popular movies such as “Simba” (1928) and “Baboona” (1935) and best-selling books still in print such as I Married Adventure (1940), Martin and Osa popularized camera safaris and an interest in African wildlife conservation for generations of Americans. Their legacy is a record of the animals and cultures of many remote areas of the world which have undergone significant change.
About Roy Thomas
Roy Thomas has been a comics writer and editor since 1965. He is noted for his writing on Robert E. Howard’s Conan character, as well as his experience writing and editing every major character for Marvel and DC. He has adapted several literary classics throughout his long career, including The Ring of Nibelung with Gil Kane, Dracula with Dick Giordano, and several for the Marvel Illustrated line including The Last of the Mohicans, The Odyssey, The Picture of Dorian Grey, and The Three Musketeers. Thomas was also responsible for adapting Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian into comics, and wrote the highly praised adaptation of Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, which was illustrated by Mike Mignola. Thomas has co-created many characters that have gone on to be featured in movies and television, including Carol Danvers (Captain Marvel), Wolverine, Iron Fist, Luke Cage, the Vision, Ultron, much of the cast of Stargirl and Red Sonja. Roy Thomas serves on the board of the Safari Museum. Thomas has been the recipient of many of the art form’s highest honors and was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2011.
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