With ratings tanking and ad revenue drying up, risk-averse TV execs are increasingly keen to poach pre-existing print sources.

In the wake of Dexter and Gossip Girl, HBO hired Six Feet Under’s Alan Ball to helm True Blood, based on the bestselling Southern Vampire Mysteries, and joined the BBC in adapting the Botswana-set No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency starring soul singer Jill Scott and directed by Oscar-winner Anthony Minghella. In November, Spider-man director — and former Xena: Warrior Princess producer —?Sam Raimi launches Legend of the Seeker, an adaptation of Terry Goodkind’s 12-volume Sword of Truth fantasy epic.

Plot-based books might make better movies, but print series reliant on characters and settings — especially serialized comics — are best served on small screens. Brian K. Vaughn’s post-cataclysmic comic Y: The Last Man — about Yorick, the lone male survivor of a plague that kills everything with a Y chromosome — recently wrapped its 60-issue run and plans are afoot to turn it into a Shia LaBeouf flick. Alas, poor Yorick: the film’s producers admit that length constraints will stop their story at issue 14.

So, here are a few as-yet-unadapted franchises just begging for more breathing space in televised form.

Fables: Bill Willingham’s brilliant meta-comic posits that not only are fairy tales and fables real, but war in their homelands has forced most of our favourite legends into exile. These folkloric refugees have set up a camp in a secret Manhattan community called Fabletown, where the reformed Big Bad Wolf is sheriff, Snow White is deputy mayor, Prince Charming is a lothario and Goldilocks is an animal rights revolutionary. The story arcs — especially the eventual reveal of the Fables’ “Adversary” — are jaw-dropping.

Childhood familiarity aside, this is an adult tale with sex, violence and a controversial subtext regarding Israel and the Jewish Diaspora.

Ambient: Cyberpunk satirist Jack Womack created a speculative fiction masterwork with his six-volume Ambient series. Rooted in time travel and alternate realities, the books non-chronologically track the dissolution of the American empire thanks to climate change and malevolent multinationals. The most emotionally gripping is Random Acts of Senseless Violence, a first-person Anne Frank riff about a disintegrating near-future New York from the perspective of an adolescent diarist.

Womack’s other books depict a past where there was never a US Civil War and a future where Elvis is the messiah — with cameos by Bobby Kennedy, Robert Johnson and Nikola Tesla.

Oz: Sure, we all know the one with the wizard, written by L. Frank Baum, but that was merely the first in a lengthy, world-building series of 40 canonical tomes (with only the first 14 written by Baum). Kansas is actually a minor plot-point in his girl-powered and often dark history of a magical, munchkin-filled continent. Wicked witches rage, gnome kings plot and the land is ruled by benevolent princesses Dorothy and Ozma who keep the peace between the Flatheads and the Skeezers while rebuffing invading armies from across the deadly desert.

DMZ: Jericho’s second season was pretty hardcore, but it doesn’t come close to Brian Wood’s Second Civil War comic. The demilitarized zone which we know as Manhattan becomes the border between the USA and the “Free States” — a Midwestern block of anti-“preemptive war” rebels who revolted while the military and National Guard were mired overseas.

Populated by the poor, rife with insurgents and plagued by bombing runs from both sides — Wood describes it as “equal parts Escape from New York, Fallujah and New Orleans right after Katrina” — the DMZ is abandoned by the media until a photo intern accompanies a war correspondent inside the zone.

After the news crew is killed by sniper fire, the intern must survive this under-siege society while broadcasting its plight.