A Gritty, Portland-Based Comic Series Is Being Adapted into a Television Pilot for ABC

The pilot will star How I Met Your Mother's Cobie Smulders as a private eye named Dex Parios.

Cobie Smulders. IMAGE: vagueonthehow / Wiki Commons.
By Matthew Singer

Portlanders naturally get a bit anxious whenever a new show set in our backyard gets announced. But if the newest proposed series to use the city as a backdrop adheres to the source material, it'll be the direct antithesis of Portlandia.

Various entertainment outlets reported yesterday that Stumptown, the gritty graphic novel series by award-winning author Greg Rucka, is being adapted for television by ABC Studios. The pilot will star Cobie Smulders—best known to TV audiences for playing Robin "Sparkles"  Scherbatsky on the CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother—as a private eye named Dex Parios.

The character is described by The Hollywood Reporter as "a strong, complicated, unapologetically sharp-witted Army veteran" who "solves other people's messes with a blind eye toward her own."

According to reports, the pilot was shot in Portland and Vancouver.

Stumptown, the comic the show is based on, was first published in 2009 by Portland's Oni Press. Willamette Week reviewed the third collected volume of the series, which centered around a violent attack outside a Timbers game, calling it "an ode to the very real darkness that's always getting swept under the PDX carpet."

Related: Greg Rucka and Justin Greenwood, Stumptown, Vol. 3.

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