The George A. Romero Archival Collection contains literally hundreds of drafts from unproduced projects, including at least 80 that seem to be unique projects begun by Romero himself or in collaboration with another writer. There are other projects that began as a script by someone else, or which seem to be screenplays that Romero acquired or was sent but never worked on (including a screenplay written by Let's Scare Jessica to Death writer Lee Kalcheim adapting his acclaimed play, Friends, and a draft of Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Phillippa Boyens' Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring).

One of the most intriguing, exciting projects was a film to be co-produced by Marvel Comics that Romero conceived with the legendary Jim Shooter (a fellow Pittsburgher!) called, variously, Copperhead, Mongrel: The Legend of Copperhead, or Copperhead Conquers the Warhawks. We have several drafts in the archive from the early 1980s, including an "illustrated story" that summarizes the action with illustrations for each scene. It's a science fiction epic, set in a world of space travel and robots and hyper-advanced military technology in which rebels are fighting against a rigidly militaristic, fascist system. "Copperhead" is the hero, a soldier transformed into a Robocop-like fighting machine (several years BEFORE Robocop, to be clear) and sent to seek out and eradicate the rebel "terrorists" who supposedly destroyed his home city. The scope of the story expands as it progresses, climaxing with Copperhead fighting alongside the rebels as various sides attempt to gain control of a massive stockpile of nuclear weapons. The story is wild and fun and, like all of Romero's projects, fundamentally political.

Romero and Shooter worked on the project over the course of several years (our materials are dated between 1982 and 1984), with the project evolving in each iteration. Alongside the drafts we have a collection of slides, color illustrations of character designs and action set-pieces.

This wasn't the last time Romero and Shooter would work together. In the late 1990s, as Romero was pondering a return to zombies with a Resident Evil adaptation, a Night of the Living Dead television series, and a script first called "Dead Reckoning" that would be filmed and released as Land of the Dead, he would also be working on big screen adapation of the Shooter-created Shadowman. For anyone familiar with the characters and the mythology that Shooter and his fellow Valiant Comics creators developed, this would have been a particularly intriguing project for the director of Night of the Living Dead, as it would have melded Romero's own approach to the undead with the traditions of Haitian Vodoun.