Feature by Kevin Holmes – Part One
Comic book adaptations are a more popular genre than ever before. Just over the past year we’ve seen Sin City, Batman Begins, Constantine, Elektra, Fantastic Four and A History of Violence - all adapted from comic books or graphic novels, and the trend isn’t showing any signs of stopping. Coming up in 2006 we’ve got V for Vendetta, Ghost Rider, Sin City 2, X-men 3, Hellboy 2 and the biggie, Superman Returns. Enough, I’ll think you’ll agree, to whet any fan-boy (or girl’s) appetite. “Mmm, mmmm” I hear you salivating, that IS a tasty line-up. And you’d be right, it’s a comic book fans wet dream, we’re living through the Golden Age of comic book adaptations and we’ve got Hollywood to thank for it.
Hollywood, in it’s current state is, it seems, struggling to come up with (or too afraid of) original ideas and, as such, has been looking of late to the past for it’s inspiration; remaking old TV programs (Bewitchedanyone…?) old movies or foreign film’s 
(with a particular penchant for Asian Extreme). Hollywood’s now looking, once again, for ideas in the humble comic book, so what we’re seeing is a resurgence of this age old relationship, and why not? It’s a natural solution for studios who want to make loads of cash but don’t want to take the risk of something untested and, god forbid, different and new (that’s what the indies are for, silly!). This isn’t the 1970’s you know, there’s no young French Nouveau influenced hot shot, hitting the ground running. When a studio wants to spend millions of dollars on its blockbusting, all conquering new movie the last thing it wants is a flop (The Island anyone…?). So the comic book is a god send, it has tried and tested characters with an established and loving fan base. The comics themselves have an endless supply of new stories and ideas, characters and plots and an infinite amount of potential sequels that can help line the pockets of even the most sceptical movie mogul – it’s the proverbial cash cow and Christmas come early all rolled into one. But they need to get it right, Hollywood has made mistakes in the past and the fans are unforgiving; does anyone remember Captain America (1991)? With no theatrical release and a few too many liberties taken with the characters it ventured off into obscurity and vanished in the mire.
Although on the surface the relationship between comic books and Hollywood would seem the typical Hollywood story of appropriation and regurgitation, these mediums actually have a far more reciprocal, symbiotic history. As visual arts both emerging in the early part of the Twentieth Century the cross over between mediums was a mutual relationship of shared exploration and innovation. In the 1930’s before the Golden Age of the comic book, Hollywood had already adapted Alex Raymond’s comic strip Flash Gordonwhich gave the cinema its Saturday matinee serials. While they may not have been made on the biggest budgets, they remained a blueprint for adventure stories and influenced early sci-fi films with their laser guns, anti-gravity belts and spaceships, which in turn influenced future comic book writers and artists.
The comic strips where Flash Gordon had his origins were, however, to change and a more sophisticated art form was to emerge, a form that Will Eisner would go on to call Sequential Art. The comic book’s bastardised birth came from an amalgamation of the wordiness of the pulps (The Shadow et al) and the three or four strung panels of the newspaper comic strip. The early comic books were just collected volumes of these strips; while these were brilliantly drawn and well written they were designed to appear in a daily newspaper – with a weekly cliff-hanger – not collected together in one volume as a comic book. As such they appeared quite static on the page, the stories too contrived and out of place, this new art form was struggling to find its feet, its chance birth had meant it didn’t know which way it was heading. What it needed was some direction, a mould it could use again and again; what it needed was to create its own mythos. This was to come in the form of a hero, but not just any hero, not your bog standard fire-fighter or policeman but a super hero. In June 1938, in Action Comics No. 1 this super hero was born; faster than a speeding bullet! Faster than a locomotive! Is it a bird? It is a plane? Nope, I think you’ll find it’s none other than…Superman. Originally conceived as a newspaper strip character it was in the comic book that he came into his own and begat, nearly 70 years ago, that stalwart of pop culture, the comic book superhero. The creators of this ‘golem’ were two teenage Jewish kids, writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, 17 and 19 respectively. What they brought to the comic book was to transform it and create a multi-million dollar industry along the way. Shuster imbued his panels with a certain cinematic presence, forging three panels into one to show Superman bounding over and around tall buildings (he couldn’t fly in those early days). He used cinematic techniques to convey drama, to tell a story, to not only serve the narrative, but embellish it, enrich it. From its very conception the comic book, as we know it, used cinematic language to convey meaning and action, the beginning, you could say, of a beautiful friendship.
Other early comic book writers and artists would also look to cinema for their inspiration. Bob Kane, creator of Batman, was heavily influenced by the movies – using cinematic vocabulary to frame shots, using close-ups of terrified faces or tracking shots or a zoom-in over panels to create dramatic tension. Jack ‘The King’ Kirby, one of the greatest and most influential comic book creators was a huge movie fan. The Universal horror movies and the early James Cagney, George Raft and John Garfield Warner Brothers gangster flicks were a huge influence on him and he borrowed ideas freely from them. He went on to create or co-create some of the most endearing and familiar comic book characters that we know, The Hulk, X-men, Fantastic Four, Captain America, New Gods, Mister Miracle…practically creating the entire Marvel universe. Comic book artists, like Kirby, experimented with their art, playing around with the spatial frame-work, the lighting, pacing, emanating how cinema used these – framed its shots and sequences, pushing the medium, letting cinematic techniques guide and inspire it, thrashing out its own individual language. Without cinema these modern American myth-makers would have lacked such inspiration.
Under the visionary guise of Orson Welles – the errant and restless son of Hollywood – the comic book was to get, in a sense, its live action equivalent. Welles created the perfect unification of image and narrative when he wrote and directed Citizen Kane (1941). It seemed to epitomise what Will ‘The Daddy’ Eisner, creator of The Spirit, realised in the comic book – the blurring of the line that separates image and narrative (something prevalent in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen), both becoming one synergetic whole. Comic book artists were already experimenting, like Welles, with odd angles, extreme close-ups and quirky juxtapositions of foreground and background, the two forms developing in an unseen, synchronistic bond. The films narrative approaches were also reflected in the pages of comic innovator Eisner. He was the first artist to venture ‘outside’ the panels in his comic books, where characters and sounds would spill over and onto the page. He would break free of the nine panelled layouts and the limitations this brought, creating dislocated, overstretched and circular panels and claim the medium as Art, dragging it away from its pulp and low caste origins – a unique idea at the time, a lone trumpet call over an empty battlefield. In 1978, the year when the first big-budget superhero movie (the one that paved the way for today’s crop), Superman: The Movie was released, he would create and release the world’s first modern Graphic Novel called A Contract With God, helping the form to be realised as legitimate literary art.
Like cinema the comic book has faced and continues to face prejudices, both are modern art forms, both use visual representation (and narrative strategies) to convey meaning and because of this were (and perhaps still are) looked at as less intellectually demanding. Both are born of the same rebellious spirit, they give the finger to high-art while also subverting it, both powerful, imaginative and captivating; it’s no wonder both were used as propaganda, one in Soviet Russia, the other in pre-war USA. This is why cinema and the comic book will always be a couple. They share ideas, a tradition that continues to this day (take, for example, Gareth Ennis’ Tarantino influenced Preacher series) and while they also differ – comic book art however much movement it conveys is still static within and from, panel to panel – they belong together, giving each other a helping hand, in times of crisis, someone to lean on, when they’re not strong.
