Adaptation

Okay, this is the last thing I’m going to post about comics, I promise. So anyway, over the past 5 years or so, we’ve seen a rash of comic book film adaptation being produced by major Hollywood studios. Most of them have been superhero related (i.e. Superman Returns, Batman Begins, and the X-men series), but other comics have been adapted as well (i.e. Ghost World, V for Vendetta). So I was thinking about why in this historical moment are comic book adaptations all the rage, and also, what makes a good adaptation?

As for the first question, I’m not really sure. In the case of more superhero oriented movies, perhaps it’s like a relatively safe way to capitalize on the action movie market. Characters like Batman and Spiderman have been around for a long time and have established a strong fanbase. Most fans will go see the movies at least once, whether the adaptation is good or not, and the name recognition and hype may be enough to get non-fans into the theaters.

But what makes a good adaptation? Although film and comics are similar in that they combine words and images, they are very different mediums and there’s a lot that can be lost in translation, such as visual style, mood/feeling, and content. This gets even more complicated by economic practices in Hollywood. There have been cases where the original writers of a comic have been forced to give up creative control and aspects of their work are butchered and simplified in the film adaptation because a studio deems this as more profitable. Thinking about the adaptations I’ve seen and enjoyed, most of them retain a good amount of the style, mood, and content of the comic they were adapted from. They also (unsurprisingly) tend to have more input from the creator(s) of the comic. Good examples of this would be Sin City (which to me, visually looks more like a comic book than any adaptation I’ve seen) and American Splendor. If you lose too much of the source material, you’ve lost the heart of the story. Then you’re left with an empty, special effects driven waste of 2 hours (Fantastic Four anyone?).