Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev’s comic book series Scarlet is in development at Cinemax.  The eponymous heroine of the series, Scarlet Rue, has been compared with the Punisher in the way she dishes out violence as she leads a “second American revolution” against a corrupt political establishment that is supported by crooked cops.  The politically edgy and hyper violent Scarlet comic book series debuted in 2010, and has been published irregularly with five issues were coming out in 2010-2011, with two more in 2013, and three planned for 2016 (see “Preview: Scarlet #8).

Deadline reports that Bendis “let the news (of Scarlet’s development) slip” at the ATX Television in Austin.  Bendis noted that the project is at “its earliest stages” of development at “HBO: (though Deadline reports that it has confirmed that the series is actually set up at HBO sister company Cinemax).

Bendis’ characterization of the property to the ATX audience doesn’t make it sound like typical network TV fare: “Scarlet is a list of things you can’t get made. Here’s a female lead who is killing cops because her world is broken.  But, when it was sold, it was sold to people who were actively looking for that, so that put us in a good place. So stay tuned.”

Cinemax, which has scored a recent success with the debut of another comic book-based property, Robert Kirkman’s Outcast (see “Robert Kirkman’s Outcast: The NYCC Trailer”), while Bendis’ Jessica Jones has done well for Netflix averaging 4.8 million viewers per episode (see “Punisher Series in Development”) and his Powers series was adapted by Sony for its PlayStation network.  Both Jessica Jones and Powers have been renewed for second seasons (see “Geek TV News Round-Up”), so Bendis’ track record was strong enough that HBO and Cinemax wanted to take a chance on Scarlet.