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Home ¦ Features ¦The Great Comic Book Swindle

Amongst these are Sam Raimi’s sequel to Spider Man, Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, yet another X-Men sequel, Preacher, Catwoman, David Cronenberg’s adaptation of A History of Violence and Watchmen by X-Men scribe David Hayter, as well as increasingly less likely updates of Judge Dredd and Superman.

This must seem like a particularly booming time for film adaptations of comics. Yet the comic industry itself is still recovering from the boom of the 1980’s and following bust of the 1990’s, while most film versions of comics are almost always notoriously dire. So how does even a fun film franchise like Tim Burton’s Batman eventually become Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin?

With Spider-man opening bigger than Harry Potter, and Spider-man 2 soon to follow, a Hulk sequel and an Elektra spin-off in the pipeline, comic-book adaptations may well be more popular, and crucially, more financially successful than any other point in the history of either medium. Yet the last twenty-odd years have seen vast changes sweep across both the comic and film industries, altering both the way they that they do business and the way that their product is made. Both have faced difficulty in attempting to adapt to a modern, more media literate audience. Inevitably this has created some friction.

The past relationship between comics and films is a long and dense one. It all begins in and around the 1940’s, during the limited skirmish known popularly as the Second World War. Comics originated from a murky background mixture of pulp magazines, paperbacks, newspaper strips, and radio and film serials. Most of these, outside of children’s stories, seemed to involve hard-bitten detectives trawling murky back-streets and violent alleyways. However in 1938, the superhero was born. In this year Action Comics first published a story featuring an unknown character called Superman and the rest, as they say, was history.

At around the same time as the superhero was being born, post-war cinema was receiving the highest audience numbers that it had ever achieved. Yet once the war finished, cinema attendance already began to drop, and so it seemed natural to try and exploit the newfound popularity of superhero comics, much in the same way the radio had used pulp stories such as The Shadow to boost ratings. Initially they tried to portray comic books in Flash Gordon style serials, which made sense at the time. After all, comic books were also produced as ‘serials’, with people having to wait to buy next month’s instalment to find out what happened next in the storyline. Therefore, many of the early comic adaptations in the late 1940’s/early 1950’s were serials, designed to make the audience come back week after week after week. The most notable of these early serials was the Superman adaptations starring the coincidentally moniker of George Reeve.

Yet by the time television began to replace cinema as the medium of mass communication during the 1950’s, the notion of serials was on the wane. Instead the idea was transferred to television, where many comic books, such as Batman, Wonder Woman and The Hulk appeared in long running series during the 1960’s/1970’s. Yet despite the popularity of many of these programmes, they only really served to highlight the problem of adapting comics for the television stage. In comics you can use whatever size or scale you want. You have only to write and draw something and it is there. Therefore a lot of authors, particularly in superhero fiction, have tended to attempt to evoke a scale of epic proportion. This was a factor that was particularly hard to replicate given the budgetary restraints of television, and so eventually comic books returned to the medium of film, with spectacular style, in the film version of Superman, starring Christopher Reeve, in 1978.

Whenever a successful comic appears on the market, one of the first questions asked is not “How good is the book?”, or even “How much money has it made?” but instead “Who holds the film rights?” Studios and producers buy the rights to comic book properties like they would buy paperclips for office stationary. But virtually none of the books that originally get optioned ever make it as far as having shot a single frame of film. After all, so the logic goes, it’s better to own the rights to a film that you never make than to let a competitor buy the rights and potentially create a hit.

The world of comics has always appeared a natural area for film adaptation. After all, there is no need for lengthy years of pre-production, trying to work out characters and situations, as everything is ready made to adapt to your needs. You have a character that already has an established fanbase who will almost certainly go and see the movie, as well as instant and, in some cases even global, product recognition. After all, there are few people these days who’ve never heard of Superman. All your characters, heroes, villains, situations and storylines already exist. All you need to do is choose which elements of the comic you want to keep, and which you want to change, effectively you can mixing and matching different components of the original book.

The episodic nature of comic books has also transferred well to cinema, where the sequel is king. This is one of the key factors looked for by film executives today, and comic adaptations, particularly superhero comics, have sequels in abundance. The general movie rule is one of depreciating quality and value, in that most sequels won’t do as well as the originals. So generally it’s a matter of scraping as much excess cash from the unwitting public as possible. However, what is most sought after in Hollywood is a franchise, and comic books are a definite dead cert for this kind of thing. There is already one successful ongoing franchise in the Batman films, whilst the X-Men series was developed specifically developed to produce sequels, and Sam Rami is all ready to release Spider Man 2.

The moral certainties of comic books play very well in the Middle America of Hollywood. Even today, most comics deal with a relatively simple black and white world of good and evil, of “absolute values, where what was good was never in the slightest doubt and where what was evil inevitably suffered some fitting judgement”, to quote Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ seminal Watchmen. They don’t really like moral ambiguities in mainstream Hollywood. The simpler it is made to understand a particular moral or theme of a film, the easier it is to sell to a larger share of the audience. Comics always had a set of strict moral values, which most of the largest publishers kept to, espousing good clean Christian values, and were generally reactionary in nature, like most of the pulps from which they originated.

Yet there had always been an irreverent seam threaded intrinsically to the fabric of the comics world; be it the ‘Tijuana bibles’ in the thirties and forties, the work produced by EC comics, the irreverent work of people like Harvey Kurtzman on title such as MAD magazine, or the later emergence of ‘Underground Comix’ with the likes of Robert Crumb’s Zap! and Gilbert Shelton’s Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers in the late sixties. In the 1980’s, mainstream comics began to mature with titles like Swamp Thing, and the difference between the ‘outsider’ element and the mainstream became less distinct as the core moral certainties of the average superhero comic became blurred. Comics weren’t just about abstract concepts like good and evil, but actually dealt with issues that occurred in real life.

For the most part these changes were only found in the ‘For Mature Readers’ section, effectively ghettoised from the rest of the comics world. Yet comics in general have certainly grown up. Batman, for example, is still Batman, but in the wake of popular media like The Sopranos, he now battles against organised crime as well as men in tights. Characters such as The Punisher and Hitman have existed in the same world as Spider Man or Superman, and are much more ruthless, shady and violent characters, yet they are filled with the same essential moral precepts as their super heroic brethren. Essentially comics are still in their puberty, not yet fully grown.

Of course characters and plot of an adaptation may well need to be changed for a film audience: despite the similarities, they are very different mediums, and work in very different ways. For example, the recent League of Extraordinary Gentlemen added in the character of Tom Sawyer to gain an added American and teenage audience, although they failed to explain why Sawyer wasn’t a feeble, aged man. Yet LXG, as the marketers wanted it known, is a good example of where Hollywood so often goes wrong. Clearly changes needed to be made in order to transfer the book to the screen, but it seemed that it was such a strong central concept that you could do almost anything and it would be good. Yet through the need to make these big budget extravaganzas appeal to the largest possible audience and assuming that they actually know what the audience wants, they subtly remove all the original attraction, any concept of controversy or originality are ripped out by a studios knife.

So we’ve reached the present.

Film adaptations of comic books are even more common today. We have seen the likes of From Hell, Hulk, Ghost World and American Splendour come and go, as well as comic-inspired films like Unbreakable, all of which have garnered either critical or commercial success, and more importantly for some, have been big box office. One of the reasons may be due to comics having attracted wider recognition as an important media in its own right. As comics became ‘mature’ in the 1980’s, DC decided to create its own ‘adult’ line, Vertigo, producing titles like The Sandman or Enigma, largely to try to respond to the growing adult audiences that were now reading comics, as well as attracting younger readers with the promise of sex and violence: the “fill of tits and innards” period, to quote Alan Moore. Industry luminaries such as Moore and Frank Miller were getting articles written about them in the broadsheets, whilst strips such as Moore’s Watchmen and V For Vendetta and 2000 AD’s Judge Dredd passed over into the national consciousness, through pop songs, newspaper review, even slang and graffiti.

After the mid nineties, however, things began to change again. In the late 1980’s, speculators began to get involved in the comics market, and this involvement became massive when those who traded in baseball cards moved in after a strike by baseball players in America. This began a period where many collected comics purely for their financial value. Prices were driven up, and far too much time was spent devising gimmicks to make more readers buy more comics, to feed the collecting market with alternate covers, and rare special editions. Prices might have skyrocketed, but then there was an inevitable slump. Many of the collectors left the market, and many people were either dissatisfied with the poor quality of many of the stories or were unprepared to continue to pay the kind of prices they had been. Sales dropped on one particular title from 300,000 to 50,000 in the space of three months. The comics companies now found that they had a very selective audience, since they had done nothing in the previous decade to attract any new types of customer. The realisation slowly seemed to dawn that perhaps people were looking for well drawn, well written comics.

The comic industry never really made as much of itself as it might have done. It is still not considered by society at large to be an important artistic or communicative medium. Yet they are still read by millions of people. Creator’s rights, if not amazing, have certainly improved from their sweatshop beginnings, and the larger companies are probably the most stable that they have been: DC, for example, is one part of the multi-tentacled AOL Time Warner conglomerate giant. Comics are slowly being accepted into a society that still considers them, to a large degree, to be a joke. Comics may still be seen reviewed in broadsheets, The Sandman won a Hugo award, Acme Novelty Library was awarded the Guardian prize and Maus won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992. Film has certainly helped in raising awareness of the maturing of comics. After all many more people will see the film version of From Hell than will ever read the book, even if it is arguably the inferior version.

Of course it can be claimed that this is as much the problem as the answer. The argument runs roughly thus: ‘By adapting the comic for a film audience, you lessen the impact and thus inevitably dumb down the story, so that fans of the book will be put off, whilst general viewers won’t be interested anyway’.

Perhaps the problem may lie in the fact that both these trains of thought might be right: cinematic adaptations of comic-books may introduce new people to the world of comics, while at the same time giving a false impression of what comics are about. After all, there are good films and there are bad films, like comics, but there are also independent and art films, whilst comics have the undergrounds and the indie publishers. The problem of a battle of the arts is that neither can ever really win – they are both as legitimate art forms as each other. Cinema may legitimise comics in the eyes of some, but it also diminishes their scope. Perhaps it is better that these two forms remain to cross-pollinate. The cinema has given comics concepts such as juxtaposition and flashbacks, even the very language of comics, the scripts themselves, are derived from the language of film. At the same time, film franchises such as James Bond or Star Wars could easily be part of comics territory, and have in fact faced multiple adaptations in the pages of various comics, whilst films such as Independence Day are as much influenced by comics as by the works of H.G. Wells (and by this I mean that they rip them off disgracefully).

Before the release of Spider Man, the internet was aflame with protests from fans of the comic complaining about Sam Raimi’s tweaking of the characters origin: bitten by a genetically engineered spider rather than a radioactive one, due to the fact that all a radioactive spider would provide Peter Parker with would be leukaemia. Personally, if I were a Spider Man fan, I would be more worried about the film turning into Dawson’s Creek with super powers, as Toby Maguire has to deal with tricky teenage issues like bullying at school. There again, if you’re a Spider Man reader, that’s probably what you read it for in the first place.

The central problem of comic to film adaptations is that they are both different mediums, even though both share many of the same techniques, as evidenced by David Hayter, nominal director of the Watchmen film. He says: “One of the greatest aspects of Watchmen is the relationship between what’s being said and what’s being seen. The films I love do the same thing”. This is to miss the point entirely. A comic is not like a book. Watchmen does indeed use many techniques borrowed from the cinema, yet it also works best as a comment about the comics industry itself. It works best when read with the knowledge that you are reading a comic. The relationship between words and images in comics is unique and cannot be found in any other form of art to degree that cinema cannot, and should not try to compete with. There may be many similarities between comics and film, but there are at least as many differences.

I’m not saying that there shouldn’t be any films based on comics. There have been many over the past few years that I have personally enjoyed. Adaptations of comics have certainly improved: they aren’t Adam West dancing unconvincingly to pop music, now it's computer generated carnage from the director of Eat Drink Man Woman. Yet if comics are still in their stroppy teenage years, comic-based films are still stuck in puberty. They are more sophisticated, sure, but most are still not allowed to compete with other films that actually deal with the illusion of real life, or often even with the original comics themselves. Still, with the market expectantly awaiting sequels to the likes of Spider Man, X-Men and Batman, the current popularity of comic to film adaptations won’t be changing for a while.

Personally, I have to say that I actually find that I don’t really mind. Just as long as it’s a case of Batman Returns rather than Superman IV: The Quest for Peace.

Now, where’s that popcorn?