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Underground > Comic Books >

A Comic Book by any other name...

11:01 / 21.12.06

I'm putting this here, as I think it'll encourage the most discussion on this fora...

I saw, while christmas shopping in Books etc just now, a couple of novels about the DCU - two by Alan Grant and one by Denny O'Neil. I was quite tempted to get one and give it a go, but a quick flick revealed that they weren't seemingly up to much.

Anyone read them?

And now to the main point;

Do comics and the characters and their universes work in any other medium?

You have cinema and animation as the obvious yes box, using the visuals, cartoons are often more able to present powers and the more wonderous elements better than film - but many people have complained that the film's miss the point, that the input of too many cooks spoil the final broths.

There have been books in the past, Superheroics springs to mind, the Wild Card series - which work okay, but aren't great, just seem to be lacking something. Mike Carey has also produced a couple of novels that seem very Hellblazer in their tone - are they stories he couldn't tell in the comic? Has anyone read them?

11:59 / 21.12.06

Some of it does work, especially the older characters. For example, both Batman & Superman owe a lot to the pulps (Doc Savage had a Fortress of Solitude before Supes did). So there's nothing too wrong about prose adaptations.

The place where things fall down are the visuals. Things that work as illustrations fail miserably in live action (it's not limited to comics, either... see various Dr. Seuss adaptations).

Animation is a better medium, as it allows a more direct adaptation. Indeed, quite often it's actually better written than the source material.

The trick, I think, is to keep the elements of the comics that work in the chosen medium, and ditch the rest, as long as the story is strong enough to support it.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

08:34 / 22.12.06

Justice League Unlimited!

For all Alan Moore's claims that he does a lot of his stuff to only work in the comics medium I think that only applies in a few cases, Watchmen and maybe Promethea, I don't think there's anything in From Hell, LoEG or V For Vendetta that stops them being made as films, just the commercial pressures that end up in stopping them being good films.

17:26 / 22.12.06

The same story or portrayal, the same methods of telling/showing/relaying... really don't often work from one medium to another, but the idea that a character or character type is incompatible with any medium, I've come to believe, is simply the notion that we excuse certain eccentricities in certain mediums, and notice them more in others, not that there's any real incapacity of the medium to handle it.

You can't make a film of Joyce's 'Ulysses' and have it do the same things in the same way as the novel. You can't have an orchestral 'Batman Returns' and have it do the same thing as the movie, in the same ways. You can still have a movie about Poldy, though, especially if you have Stephen Rea and you can break out the strings and sharpen the bows to get Bruce swooping about like big bad batfeller. Why not?