Moviereview 101.com - Three decades after Walter Hill’s cult-classic film “The Warriors” first hit theaters, the Warriors are once again poised to–as one of its most popular lines of dialogue suggests–”come out and plaaaaaay.” This time around, however, the adventures of the New York City gang and its rivals will be unfolding not on the screen, but in the pages of a new comic book series.

As we first reported back in July 2008 (when we debuted the first piece of promo art for “The Warriors”), the 30th anniversary of the film’s release will include the debut of publisher Dabel Brothers’ adaptation of the film, with an eye toward spinning off new stories based on the world of “The Warriors” down the road.

MTV News spoke with “The Warriors” writer David Atchison about translating the original film into comic book form, and received an exclusive preview of the first 10 pages of “The Warriors” #1, which debuts at New York Comic-Con next week.

“You know how they ‘digitally remaster’ certain films? Well, instead of digitally remastering ‘The Warriors,’ we’re ‘comic book remastering’ it,” Atchison told MTV.

According to Atchison, before the publisher developed new stories based on The Warriors and the cast of characters that inhabit their world, it was important to introduce that world with a straight-up adaptation of the film.

“There will be other books, but what we wanted to do first was to establish ‘The Warriors’ in a comic book continuity,” explained Atchison. “What we want to do is to use the strengths of the comic book medium–the things that you can do in comics that you can’t necessarily do in film–but also find ways to keep it really true to what [Hill] did.”

Among those strengths of the comic book medium, said Atchison, is an ability to make the parallel storylines of the film a bit more digestible.

“The movie jumps around so much . . . and at one point you have three different groups with storylines to follow,” said Atchison. “You have Swan by himself with Mercy, you’ve got Rembrandt and the guys in there with the Lizzies, and you’ve got Snow on his own with Cowboy and Ajax. When you have that in comic book format, it becomes easier to follow, because you can flip between pages and jump back and forth in the story however you feel comfortable.”

Atchison also acknowledged that the adaptation would indeed contain some new material–or rather, a new take on some of the original material.

“We’re tweaking the pace a little bit, and accentuating the action,” said Atchison. “I think when we hit a lot of the big emotional points in the film–like Fox or Cleon dying–we can add a certain level of emphasis there in the comic book.”