Oscar winner Colin Firth is in talks to star in The Secret Service, director Matthew Vaughn's adaptation of the comic book by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons, Latino Review reports.

Published under Marvel's Icon imprint, the six-issue miniseries follows super-spy Jack London, who takes his working-class nephew Gary under his tutelage to train in espionage and covert-ops (you can read the entire first issue at Comic Book Resources). Firth would of course play the uncle; Kick-Ass star Aaron Taylor-Johnson was reportedly pursued for the role of Gary but was unavailable.

"Spies and the conceits of the spy genre are so well known that you can mess around with that," Millar told CBR last year. "And we haven't seen that much in films. Most spy movies play it pretty straight – Mission: Impossible, James Bond, Jason Bourne and so on. They are quite linear and straightforward. So to mess around with that and do a post-modern spy thing, it could almost write itself. I wish it had written itself, actually, because this was honestly quite hard to do. But it's worked out well. It feels unlike anything else, which is quite nice. In the same way that Kick-Ass felt very unlike Spider-Man, this has a similar relationship to James Bond."

A co-creator of the comic, Vaughn wrote the screenplay with frequent collaborator Jane Goldman. Fox will distribute The Secret Service, which is scheduled to begin production in August for a 2014 release.