"Comics are one step in the digestive process of Hollywood eating itself"

So says Alan Moore, concerning V for Vendetta, in this article...

'$1m a minute to film? No problem'

Which is mainly about Neil Gaimen's forays into the film world.

But let's turn back to Mr Moore, for a possible debating point...

And... go read a comic.

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Virtual Reality chatter on a movie site? Got endless amounts of it here. Reviews over here

I read one just yesterday, and a damn good one.

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Comics are for geeks. This could be a good thing (for the creative processes and not having to conform to mainstream stereotypes and yada yada yada) or a bad thing (geeks are not cool, who wants to be caught dead in a comic book shop? Who has actually ever seen a comic book shop?).

Comic book movies usually don't please the geeks because they 'sell out'. But spiderman and stuff is pretty popular.

Remind me never to type when I have been drinking cos I forget my point.......

Funny, people used to say that about computers. They were wrong, too.

Were they really? Surely the people who spend most time on the computers are geeks like you and me?

Haven't read a comic in a few years. I'm not one that thinks movies and comics are interchangable though. Very few comic adaptations are worth the film their printed on

What's the difference between comics adapted into films and books adapted into films, really?

Ok, comics have a definite concrete vision of what everything should look like, but there's no reason films can't be true to that e.g. sin city.

The Sin City trick (shot-for-frame recreation and stylised/'inky' presentation etc) might get a bit old though. And didn't the film suffer a bit in its overall arc - being three stories etc? (I haven't seen it).

The visual element does seem to add an extra challenge to those doing the adapting, compared to books. The pitfalls of transfering the story are pretty much the same tho (like you say).

Alan Moore just likes to complain.

Sin City was interesting to see, but the comics and story itself are just juvenile violence. Frank Miller is totally overrated. "The Dark Night Returns" was good only because we saw Batman as older and more cynical than ever. It shaped what Batman is today. But the storyline with the mutants and Robin and everything else was pretty bad. The sequel was laughably awful.

Nothing, and that's what people, especially comic book geeks, forget. The ratio of good and great films adapted from novels and plays and biographies is the same as those adapted from comics. It is rare that a great movie is made no matter what the source mateiral. That there have been relatively few comic adaptations to date makes it feel like there are more stinkers made from comic properties, but there are dozens of novels turned into movies every year, year after year, and only a very small handful of those are great movies.

So...yeah.

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"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream it takes over as the number one hormone. It bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to Film is more Film." - Frank Capra

Not to mention the fact that some of these writers own the rights to their books, so they could always just not sell them to the movie studios.

I think if you ranked the talent level of writers, you'd probably put novelists first, then screenwriters and then further down the list, comic book writers. Yet comic writers and fans are the pickiest bunch when it comes to having their material adapted to the big screen. The way I see it, books are books and movies are movies. Comparing them at anything other than the writing is pointless.

And the really exceptional ones, like Road to Perdition and Ghost World, tend to get overlooked by viewers and comic book fans because they're not mainstream licenses.

Don't forget "A History Of Violence".

Ah, yes. I haven't seen it, so I wouldn't have mentioned it anyway, but I hear it's excellent.

As much as I love both mediums, I agree with both Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore on this one. Production companies are just going and buying up comic book licenses like they're cheap hookers. Buy 'em, use 'em for a little while, get a little more for your buck, and then chuck 'em back out onto the street...

You know, I read the other day that some studios are buying licenses before the work is even published?

And I'm sorry, but as faithful as Sin City was to the source material (kudos to Robert Rodriguez for doing more for comic films than most other screenwriters/filmmakers would), it was the wrong book to adapt. It's just too stylized and too awkwardly paced for the live-action screen. It was a quality film, but I've said before that the story is just too far removed from reality. The end result feels like an extremely well-made fan film.

The point is, to really adapt a comic book to film in a worthwhile manner, more than a little care should be taken. It's not just about getting the dialogue and the look right, and it's not just about cool costumes and spectacular special effects. It's about translating the essence of the book to the screen by putting it through the live-action filter, so that at the end of the day, you have two things: a living comic book, and a solid motion picture.

Note: As far as mainstream comic book films go, I think Sam Raimi has done the most impressive job with the first Spiderman film. He took the story concept, molded it for the silver screen (so that he had an actual film, and not just a formula), and made it accessible by just about any viewer out there. Good human character issues, intense adventure-action, and an overall feel-good "comic book" quality. (I was disappointed with Spiderman 2 in that regard: it was more Sam Raimi than Spiderman: The Movie).

Did you feel Spidey2 was the better movie tho, overall? I dug that one a lot more than the first, as a piece of fluid film-o-rama.

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I'm thinking one aspect that will always be missing from film versions is the prolonged character-development. Even trilogies like X-Men/Spidey can't dish out the same kind of life-spread that serialised comics provide. So maybe they're always destined to fail on that front? In the comic-conversion world, films can't deliver in installments, they can only deliver in lumps

No, honestly. The writing was much more solid and cohesive in the first one, I thought. The pacing was perfect, and they kept on task without dwelling. In the sequel, there was too much "I love you, I don't love you" between Mary Jane and Peter, and not enough Doctor Octopus. They could have really fleshed his character out, as there were some deep psychological issues there. I liked the dichotomy between Otto being someone who knew who he was and what he was doing, and Peter not - in relation to which one was the hero, and which became the villain.

I loved the scene in which Peter tells Aunt Mae what really happened to Uncle Ben (her reaction, particularly); but the next time Peter sees her, she gets preachy about being a hero that's so overly "put the costume back on" rhetoric. Subtlety is better, and there was much more in the first film. (Speaking of subtlety, the scene with the girl who brings him chocolate cake was excellent). And although I like Raimi's previous body of work, I don't need him showing through too much in the Spidey flicks. Some of the shots were "pseudo-horror" stylish, but completely improper for the film.

Yep, overall, the attempt was still quite good, but many things were squandered. When you cast Alfred Molina, you make him a major player. And who cares about Harry Osbourne, really? His dad is dead, and the actor sucks: I don't think they need to be beating such a melodramatic, dead horse.

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Interesting take on Frank Miller. I've tried to get into comics and graphic novels for a while. Frank Miller, Alan Moore, Aronofsky, Gaiman, you name it. Thus far I have been woefully bored. Some of the artwork is tremendous, but the stories seem so juvenile and simple.

I think I've reached a point in my life about which forms of art I want to take in. I've all but abadoned anything non Jon Stewart/Sports on TV and I've had it with comics and Graphic novels. Most music doesn't fancy my interest.

After playing Shadow of the Colossus I'm convinced videogames can have more artistic quality than all three of those mediums combined.

With literature, followed by movies, being far out in front, videogames are the next big artistic movement.

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So you think these callous, money-grubbing executives treat novelists and playwrites and screenwriters with due reverence, but when it comes to the creators of comic books all of the sudden they become pricks? Boy, are you naive. A schmuck in a suit is a schmuck in a suit whether he's dealing with a work by Garbriel Garica Marquez, Charlie Kaufman or Todd MacFarlane. They try to dumb everything down for what they believe will target as big an audience as possible no matter what the origin of the material in front of them.


But this happens with novels too, all the time. Do you think studios wait and see if the next John Grisham book is a best seller or even bother to read the frippin' thing before they negotiate for the screen rights? It's nothing new, this is how business is done out there in Hollywood.


Again, the exact same thing applies to anything being adapted. That's why so few movies are anywhere near as good as the books they come from, because the essence of the piece wasn't captured.

What in the Hell are you on about? So by this logic you'd say Danielle Steel and Joel Schumacher are more talented than Craig Thompson and Joe Sacco? There are hacks and idiots in all forms of writing, and there are geniuses in all forms too. Try reading comics beyond Archie and Batman before you dismiss the entire artform. Remember, somebody wrote Battlefield Earth and White Chicks, and it wasn't anybody involved in comics.

Talk about fostering ignorance. But Hollywood is the problem, right?