Comic book movies -- the other discussion

[newman]

So, over in his LJ my friend Justin raised the question "What comic book(s) do you think would make a good movie? Feel free to assume that it's a competent adaptation, not a hatchet job, but assume that it has to fit into the usual constraints of a movie: about two hours, and has to be able to make enough money to be worth its budget".

In terms of adaptations, novels often make poor source material for films. Even a long movie has trouble fitting in all of the elements that make a novel appealing. Short stories and novellas work pretty well, as do plays, which are already about move-length. Comic books are often serialized novels, taking months or years of issues to complete a story arc. While individual issues (or short collections of issues) might make good films, there are some that just shouldn't be done — either because of reasons of length, or because a good comic book is more than just a storyboard.

Wanted is a prime example of this. It was a fine movie, but it had nothing to do with the comic book. The comic book was a dark, loving, homage to the two great houses in the comic book world, and, if it had been translated to screen accurately, most of America would have said "huh?". Better to have left it on the comic book page — or do what they did, which is the equivalent of never having attempted an adaptation.

There's been a great interest in a Sandman movie or a Watchman movie. I'd happily pass a law declaring these sources off-limits to Hollywood. The adaptation isn't going to to do the inspiration justice.

What comics are simply better as comic books? What comics don't want to be adapted to the big screen? Most of the ones I can think of are comics about comics (Wanted, for example -- but I can think of others). Thoughts?

Comments

[jducoeur]

I'll back Alexx on this one: my original post was *intended* to be about the medium of comics as the starting point. Most people took it as being about the genre of superheroes, but that certainly wasn't my plan.

(Neil Gaiman pointed out in his recent lecture that superheroes aren't really a proper genre either, but that's a separate topic. His definition of "genre" is delightful and insightful, but I don't know if I can do it justice.)

On your main point: honestly, I think you're overgeneralizing a bit. While it's true that the best-known comics tend to be the massively serial ones, the *best* comics are typically bounded, especially nowadays. Sometimes those bounds are large (60 issues for Y, 70-some for Sandman and Lucifer, 100 for 100 Bullets), but I've found that the very best stories are usually conceived of as having a clear beginning, middle and end. They may be originally produced in serial form -- but so was Dickens...

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

(Funny you should bring up Dickens. See, I write...serials. And I've been studying the tell-tale signs of narrative work that was written before its middle or end were conceived, so as to try to avoid them. And Dickens' work definitely shows some of those. Sometimes it's fine; sometimes, it comes off as sloppy -- as in Great Expectations, when events essentially repeat in the middle. Now when I read a novel, I can hear fairly clearly when the author had a direct line of authorial intent beforehand -- or when they just followed a "and then this happened" style, with or without an overall gameplan.)

But that's actually a different issue: as the Futurama episode When Aliens Attack skewered adroitly, when there is an expectation of infinite future issues (even if that never can actually happen), then you get sit-com limbo, with character development severely constrained.

I agree that most of the best stories are bounded; in fact, it was my point: that well-bounded stories are best suited for adaptation.

But I was using a much more restricted definition of comics than, evidently, everyone, causing mass confusion. To me comics are still the monthlies without end with characters that never stay dead, and arcs that at best survive one editor/writer team. This made the rest of my categorization moot. :-/

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

It's worth pointing out here that part of the reason Manga is so successful is (IMAO) that it is all inherently bounded.

An early -- and crucial -- divergence between American and Japanese comics was their attitudes towards creators. Japanese comics got identified with specific creators, and when those creators stopped producing a given title, no one else continued it. By contrast, American comics were very early identified as corporate properties, whose creators were expendable and replaceable. Many of their diverse properties stem from this basic difference.

[jducoeur]

But I was using a much more restricted definition of comics than, evidently, everyone, causing mass confusion. To me comics are still the monthlies without end with characters that never stay dead, and arcs that at best survive one editor/writer team. This made the rest of my categorization moot.

Ah -- yeah, that's certainly the most common definition (and the one the media tend to focus on), but less and less often used by serious comix aficionadoes these days. Indeed, while I still buy a *lot* of Generic Unbounded Fluff, less and less of it is in the "favorites" section of my pile, and it's slowly getting pared down...