My first piece as comic book columnist for the literary site Bookslut is now online. It’s about the successful adaptation of prose into sequential art, and you can read it over here. (It’s kind of long. I’ll wait. Pack sandwiches.)
I begin with a mention of Slate’s Sarah Boxer and her fury over an adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 – one she found to be an “extended, ironic, illustrated joke.” While I happily admit that many adaptations are god-awful, I say that:
“…her hilarious complaint that ‘…the text is almost always shortened to make way for pictures’ suggests that she either doesn’t understand the difference between an illustrated book and sequential art, or doesn’t understand the concept of ‘redundancy’.”
It turns out, however, that there’s a title being released that will make her day: a new adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? by Boom! Studios. The art is solid, the story well-deserved of its status as a sci-fi classic, and its first collected edition has already been listed as essential reading. Inside, it proudly announces that it is the “complete text” of the novel, just “presented in graphic form”.
What does that mean? It means, bizarrely, you’ll see panels like this one from issue #3:
We see Rachael examine her wristwatch, next to narration explaining that she examined her wristwatch. We see that it’s Eldon Rosen who says “Half an hour”, but the speech balloon with its little attributive tail is supplanted by more narration explaining that, yes, he’s the one who said it, all right.
I have no idea what’s gained in this strange hybrid, except for the right to boast that nothing’s been cut from the book. Why not just publish a version of the novel with handsome illustrations on every second page? If you really want to be redundant, why not print all the dialogue twice: once in a text box, and once in a word balloon?
Fidelity can go too far.
Ask Zack Snyder. The fact that he was so visually faithful to the source material when adapting Frank Miller’s 300 won him many fans – but his determination to keep the comics’ narration left the film with an often pointless voiceover, explaining things we could already see. Much of the pre-film hype around his next movie, Watchmen, was pitched to placate fans of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s comic with the fact that it ‘looked’ just the same as it did on the page.
If you find yourself eavesdropping online on a superhero-casting discussion – you know, which actor should play who – you’ll find that most fans seem to be basing their choices on who looks right, and acting ability be damned. (This is why these casting discussions always seem to have a lot of professional wrestlers in the mix.) Do we really want nothing more than to see movies that are comic books forced into motion?
Say what you will about the Watchmen film, but it delivered that in spades. Its blu-ray release features Snyder giving a guided tour of every last detail he embedded in each frame. Maybe Vanity Fair was right, and Snyder “love[d] Watchmen too much” to make a truly successful movie.
Any adaptation requires massive change. One medium is astonishingly different from the next. Too much fidelity to the source material can result in weird redundancy at worst, but even the best case tends to be a dreary, paint-plot-points-by-numbers slog. (I’m looking at you, Chris Columbus’ Harry Potter films!)
If you really crave an adaptation that’s exactly the same as the source material, you know what’s perfectly faithful to the book?
The book.
#1 by Derek Kompare on September 17th, 2009
I find it amazing that so many critics still — STILL! — don’t get how comics work. Or, apparently, that so many comics writers still don’t get how comics work, sadly.
Filmmakers (including not only directors, but producers, designers, DPs, and even actors) I’m sort of willing to let slide on this count, at least for now. Comics-based films (at least of well-known properties) cost a bazillion dollars to make, and are meant to be tentpoles for the studio/media corporation/licensing machine. So high anxiety is to be expected, especially when Joe Fanboy is ready to eviscerate Joe Director online because Joe Superhero’s tights are a slightly wrong shade of red.
Still, if we’re to plot the big superhero films of the decade on a spectrum of slavish faith to the source material, with Watchmen on one extreme and Dark Knight on the other, I think by now there’s at least a range of options studios could go with. The Spider-Man films have generally hewed to the Watchmen side of the scale, but I’d like to think by now that SM4 could pull away from that a bit.
But you’re right: if you want to be absolutely faithful to the book, read the book. To the comic, read the comic.
#2 by Matt on September 17th, 2009
I think that’s a good point. Snyder continually went ‘look’, ‘look’. doesn’t it ‘look’ like the comic? yeah? see? ‘look’ there’s the comedian! …and lost the idea behind the comic.
Perhaps by working with Gibbons, Snyder adopted his draftmanship and insane attention to detail, forgetting all about the rest…?
#3 by Martyn on September 18th, 2009
Yeah, I definitely think that Hollywood’s never quite gotten over its initial “Hey! Comic books look just like storyboards!” impulse.
That said, there is an element of fandom that seems like it’d prefer a ‘correct’ film to a ‘good’ film; that the right colour-of-tights and origin-story-details are more important than plotting or pacing or acting.
What’s really strange, though, is that superhero comic books themselves don’t provide these ‘correct’ versions. Kelly Jones’ Batman looks completely different to Scott McDaniels’, and Frank Miller’s current Batman acts differently to, uh, everyone’s, including his own.
It’s when auteur theory works: I’d much rather see different directors with idiosyncratic takes on superheroes than a generic version of same. These characters have been around for decades, and they’re big enough to take it.
(My favourite adaptations are always things like, say, David Lynch’s WILD AT HEART – radically different to the book, but somehow capturing its spirit.)
#4 by Matt on September 18th, 2009
I think Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox has potential.
#5 by Martyn on September 22nd, 2009
I have my fingers crossed for Fantastic Mr. Fox, too. And of course can’t wait for Where The Wild Things Are; as the original book is only a handful of sentences, they’ve obviously had to invent and extrapolate the story… so no over-faithful concerns. (Other than visually, of course.) God, I hope they pull it off…
#6 by Matt on October 8th, 2009
Here’s a good point (in the comments) I never thought about. The decision to ‘remove’ the squid is actually heightened by the rest of the movie’s fidelity.
http://graphic-engine.swarthmore.edu/?p=239#comments