Freejack

In 2009, the super-wealthy achieve immortality by hiring "bonejackers", mercenaries equipped with time travel devices, to snatch people from the past, just prior to the moment of their deaths, for use as substitute bodies. Those who escape are known as "freejacks" and are considered less than human under the law. In this dystopian future, most people suffer from poor physical health as a result of rampant drug use and environmental pollution, making them unattractive as replacement bodies.

Freejack

Story by Chuck Dixon and Clint McElroy. Art by Ernie Stiner and Tony DeZuniga. Cover by Max Siebel. One of the many adaptations of movies and TV shows from Now Comics. Based on the 1992 science fiction thriller starring Emilio Estevez, Mick Jagger and Anthony Hopkins. Escaping his futuristic captors, Alex becomes a freejack, or rogue time-traveler, and goes in search of the one person who might help him: the woman who loved him 20 years before. 32 pages, Full Color.Cover price $1.95.

As 1990s sci-fi thrillers go, "Freejack" is not terribly well remembered, nor was it an overwhelming hit (it made a mere $17 million at the domestic box office). The premise, however, is clever, and Murphy ("The Quiet Earth," "Young Guns II," "Under Siege 2: Dark Territory") brings a great deal of B-movie enthusiasm to the material. Additionally, the cast is notable. The hot Emilio Estevez plays the titular freejack, a race car driver who was chrono-kidnapped from a disastrous car crash in 1991, while Anthony Hopkins plays the rich tycoon who aims to inhabit his body. Rene Russo plays Estevez's former fiancée, but as the evil, gun-toting, bounty-hunting bonejacker Victor Vacendak, Murphy cast Mick Jagger.

He was quick, however, to point out that "villains" are rarely villains to themselves, and that finding their humanity was key. Evil was fun, but not "unsympathetic." He said that "the character has to have some redeeming features" before he took him on. In a way, Vacendak was a sci-fi version of Javert, so the Laughton comparison is more apt than at first glance. Vacendak will stop at nothing to find and apprehend a freejack. It was the character's determination that Jagger latched onto. He said: 041b061a72