Fairground Distraction

George A Romero’s once-lost film The Amusement Park is now a graphic novel

- STEPHEN JEWELL

HAVING BEEN FRIENDS AND admirers of each other’s oeuvres, John Carpenter and the late George A Romero often discussed working together. A collaboration never came to pass, but Storm King Comics – which Carpenter runs with his wife Sandy King - is now partnering with the George A Romero Foundation to publish a graphic novel of the director's 1973 film The Amusement Park.

Believed lost for decades until its discovery in 2017, it was commissioned as an educational film about the treatment of the elderly, and followed a senior visiting a strange amusement park where he’s variously patronised, ignored and menaced. Writer Jeff Whitehead and artist Ryan Carr have now updated it, adding the framing device of a businessman in his twenties being told about the park by an elderly man.

“After we finished restoring