Facebook creator to dominate the funnies

With The Social Network, a film written by Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing) and directed by David Fincher (Fight Club) hitting the US multiplexes next month, Zuckerberg has licensed his life away to comic book creator Jerome Maida.

Maida will be at the helm of the dryly-titled ‘Mark Zuckerberg: The Creator of Facebook’, to be published by Bluewater Productions before December.

It remains to be seen whether Maida’s comic book will be received more warmly by Zuckerberg than Fincher’s feature film, which is in turn based on Ben Mezrich’s 2009 book  Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal and will portray Zuckerberg as a socially awkward Harvard student whose experiments in social networking were fuelled by a desire to be accepted by the college’s upper crust.

It will also depict the legal battles that ensued once fellow students accused Zuckerberg of stealing their idea for the website.

Speaking at a technology conference last June, Zuckerberg said: “I just wished that nobody made a movie of me while I was still alive.”

Maida claims that his comic book will be a “fair” portrayal of the site’s founder, bearing in mind that in the legal wrangling that ensued during Facebook’s early days, none of the players involved can be looked at as “innocent”.