Comic book movies

When you think about it, the success of the recent batch of comic book movies is sort of unexpected, given how poorly this sort of movie usually turned out in the past. One would expect the match of comics to movies would be a natural, given the cinematic nature of comics in the first place. Cross-cutting, close-up, long-shot, you name it, they're common to both, although originally these all came from the movies. To make the static drawn page move, comics artists picked up the language of film. Of course, they could do some things movies couldn't do, at least believably, at least until CGI came along. I think good classic comics appealed the way good classic movies did, to some need for creative fantastical narrative within the little kid inside all of us. Different media, working the same brain muscles.

Nowadays there's nothing a comic can do that a movie can't do. As a result, we get movies like Battleship, an improbable concoction of CGI and commerce that audiences indicate with authority that they're simple not buying it. (One has to hope that numerous heads roll in the producers' offices for this one. What were they thinking? I can't get past the fact that somebody took a game we used to play with pencils and paper and made a plastic game out of it, much less making a movie out of that plastic game. I mean, seriously now.) On the other hand, we get comics that have completely moved away from the slam-bang cinematic into the literary, like Are You My Mother? Movies and comics, the latter spawned out of the former, have moved in whatever direction they wanted. Comics don't need the lexicon of movies anymore, and movies don't need the mythology of comics. Good is good and bad is bad, and that's all you need to know.

But when movies have directed adapted superhero comics, they've taken on a particular burden. These movies need to be slam-bang, which makes them expensive, and to earn back their costs, they have to appeal both to fans of the original comics and the general public. This is no easy feat, but lately Hollywood has been pulling it off, with the latest batch of Marvel films being almost completely successful at it. Shoshana Kessock comes up with what look to me like good reasons for this in Graphic Alchemy: The Evolution of the Comic Book Movie. If, like me, you've been enjoying these films, this article does a good job of explaining why they've been successful, and why some others haven't. (I used the Ghost Rider poster ironically, needless to say. I do sort of want to see that movie, I have to admit, but then again, I'm a fan of Nic Cage going over the top. Isn't everyone?)
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