The Comic Book Film Adaptation: Exploring Modern Hollywood's Leading Genre

By Liam Burke

In the summer of 2000 X-Men surpassed all box office expectations and ushered in an era of unprecedented production of comic book film adaptations. This trend, now in its second decade, has blossomed into Hollywood's leading genre. From superheroes to Spartan warriors, The Comic Book Film Adaptation offers the first dedicated study to examine how comic books moved from the fringes of popular culture to the center of mainstream film production.

Through in-depth analysis, industry interviews, and audience research, this book charts the cause-and-effect of this influential trend. It considers the cultural traumas, business demands, and digital possibilities that Hollywood faced at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The industry managed to meet these challenges by exploiting comics and their existing audiences. However, studios were caught off-guard when these comic book fans, empowered by digital media, began to influence the success of these adaptations. Nonetheless, filmmakers soon developed strategies to take advantage of this intense fanbase, while codifying the trend into a more lucrative genre, the comic book movie, which appealed to an even wider audience. Central to this vibrant trend is a comic aesthetic in which filmmakers utilize digital filmmaking technologies to engage with the language and conventions of comics like never before.

The Comic Book Film Adaptation explores this unique moment in which cinema is stimulated, challenged, and enriched by the once-dismissed medium of comics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Mar 31, 2015
• ISBN: 9781626745155

Liam Burke

Liam Burke is associate professor of screen studies at Swinburne University of Technology. His publications include the Pocket Essential Superhero Movies and the edited collections Fan Phenomena: Batman and The Superhero Symbol: Media, Culture, and Politics. He is also author of The Comic Book Film Adaptation: Exploring Modern Hollywood’s Leading Genre, published by University Press of Mississippi.

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THE COMIC BOOK FILM ADAPTATION

THE COMIC BOOK FILM ADAPTATION

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Exploring Modern Hollywood’s Leading Genre

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LIAM BURKE

University Press of Mississippi / Jackson

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses.

Copyright © 2015 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2015

∞

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Burke, Liam (Liam P.)

The comic book film adaptation : exploring modern

Hollywood’s leading genre / Liam Burke.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-62846-203-6 (hardback) — ISBN 978-1-62674-515-5 (ebook)

1. Film adaptations—History and criticism. 2. Motion pictures and comic books. 3. Superhero films. 4. Comic strip characters in motion pictures. 5. Motion picture production and direction—United States. 6. Motion picture industry—United States. I. Title.

PN1997.85B87 2015

791.43’6—dc23                                             2014042191

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

The Golden Age of Comic Book Filmmaking

CHAPTER TWO

The Comic Book Movie Genre

CHAPTER THREE

Fans, Fidelity, and the Grammar of Value

CHAPTER FOUR

A Comic Aesthetic

CHAPTER FIVE

How to Adapt Comics the Marvel Way

CONCLUSION

The Future of the Comic Book Movie

APPENDIX

North American Box-Office Totals for Comic Book Film Adaptations

Notes

Works Cited

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

With many solitary evenings spent pursuing an ever-receding goal, there are more than a few parallels between researching a book and the exploits of comic book loners. However, in compiling these acknowledgments I was reminded of the hero’s epiphany in the final panels of Grant Morrison’s The Return of Bruce Wayne, The first truth of Batman … I was never alone. I had help. I would like to recognize the contributions of the many groups and individuals who guided this book to publication.

Firstly, I want to thank Leila Salisbury and the team at the University Press of Mississippi for taking on this project, and all the care and patience they demonstrated. Much of this research was carried out during my time at the Huston School of Film & Digital Media at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and I would like to acknowledge my former colleagues Seán Crosson, Sean Ryder, Tony Tracy, Dee Quinn, Conn Holohan, and Rod Stoneman for their advice and support. Equally, I must recognize my colleagues at Swinburne University of Technology, in particular Carolyn Beasley for her diligent proofreading and Jason Bainbridge for applying the keen eye of a fan and a scholar. I was fortunate to be funded by the Irish Research Council during the earliest stages of this research, support for which I am very grateful.

I would like to thank the industry professionals who took the time to discuss their work, including Evan Goldberg, Kevin Grevioux, Joe Kelly, Paul Levitz, Steve Niles, Dennis O’Neil, Scott Mitchell Rosenberg, Michael E. Uslan, and Mark Waid. These interviews provided insights that greatly enriched this study. Special thanks must go to Will Sliney, whose dynamic cover leaves little doubt as to why he is quickly becoming one of Marvel Comics most popular artists.

Over the course of my research, this book has consistently been reworked. Much of this refinement can be attributed to the scholars I have met on the long road to publication. Firstly, I would like to thank Will Brooker for his detailed feedback and guidance. I want to recognize Peter Coogan, Randy Duncan, and Kathleen McClancy of the Comics Arts Conference, and Imelda Whelehan and Deborah Cartmell of the Association of Adaptation Studies for the many opportunities to present my research and receive crucial advice. I would also like to thank Martin Barker for important pointers, as well as the opportunity to publish early findings in Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies. Furthermore, I must acknowledge the anonymous readers who provided essential feedback.

A sincere thank-you to Neasa Glynn and the staff of the Eye Cinema, Galway, for allowing me to carry out important audience research, as well as the many filmgoers who graciously filled out surveys. I would like to acknowledge my friends who lent their support and expertise. From helping out with surveys to proofreading drafts, I am indebted to Dave Coyne, Veronica Johnson, Gar O’Brien, Siobhan O’Gorman, Barry Ryan, Adam Scott, and Maura Stewart. Graph-Man Andrew Rea deserves particular credit for his enthusiasm and essential design skills. I would, of course, like to thank my family for their unwavering encouragement. Finally, and most importantly, I need to express my heartfelt appreciation to my wife, Helen, who has endured too many hours of comics and films, incalculable dog-eared drafts, and holidays annexed by conferences. Her support is unconditional, and it is to Helen that I dedicate this book.

THE COMIC BOOK FILM ADAPTATION

INTRODUCTION

A gardener is innocently watering flowers when a mischievous young boy steps on the hose. When the man inspects the nozzle, the boy releases the flow, soaking him. Not to be outdone, the gardener catches the boy, and, after ensuring they are both in frame, reprimands him with a few vigorous slaps across the backside. This is the basic, but effective, setup of Louis Lumière’s L’Arroseur Arrosé (1895). The staged comedy, a novelty in an era of slice-of-life actualités, is often celebrated as the first narrative film. However, what is often overlooked is that L’Arroseur Arrosé is also cinema’s first adaptation of a comic.¹

Throughout the early days of cinema, this emerging entertainment looked to other media to confer artistic credibility and narrative stability. Although novels and plays were the most adapted materials, films based on comics maintained an important presence. Georges Sadoul argues that L’Arroseur Arrosé borrowed its premise from a nine-image comic, L’Arroseur, by artist Hermann Vogle (1887), while Lance Rickman identifies variants on this gag in a number of comics in the years leading up to Lumière’s innovation.² More explicit examples of comic book adaptations during this time included G. A. Smith’s film version of British comic Ally Sloper (1898), eleven Happy Hooligan short films (J. Stuart Blackton 1900–1903), and, in 1906, Edwin S. Porter’s live-action adaptation of Winsor McCay’s Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend.³ Today, it is impossible to ignore cinema’s heavy reliance on comics. From superheroes to Spartan warriors, comics have moved from the fringes of pop culture to the center of mainstream film production.

FIG. I.1 A panel from Un Arroseur Public (A Public Waterer) by Christophe (3 August 1889), one of the many widely available comics that used the waterer premise in the years before cinema’s first narrative film L’Arroseur Arrosé (Lumière 1895).

Prior to this modern trend, comic book adaptations received little attention from scholars publishing in the English language.⁴ Nonetheless, even with the high number of films produced since 2000, this area remains relatively underexplored. Most analyses appear as contributions to anthologies (e.g., Brooker Batman; Ecke; Loucks), journal articles (Becker; Ioannidou; Jones), or as chapters in monographs meeting wider remits (Lichtenfeld, Bukatman Poetics of Slumberland), with the collection Film and Comic Books edited by Ian Gordon, Mark Jancovich, and Matthew P. McAllister perhaps the only dedicated book.

Comics scholars are among those that one might expect to give this area sustained academic attention. Yet, motivated by a desire to maintain the boundaries of their nascent field, these academics have largely ignored the topic, with Greg M. Smith explaining: Dealing with comics alone is hard enough without compounding the difficulty by studying two different objects (Studying Comics 111).⁵ Similarly, adaptations studies, which recently widened its view beyond the novel-to-film debate, has only made tentative steps in this area, with Thomas Leitch suggesting this reluctance may stem from a belief that adapting texts that are largely visual to begin with seems so easy, simple, or natural that the process has limited theoretical interest (Film Adaptation 180). However, the study of the modern comic book film adaptation does raise important questions about production in an era of filmmaking characterized by conglomerate strategies, transmedia ties, and seemingly limitless technological possibilities. This study is pitched as an opening salvo in that overdue debate.

To be specific, the book’s five chapters each take a different perspective on the comic book film adaptation. The study begins, logically, by asking why. Why, after more than a century of coexistence, have comics and cinema recently become so entwined? It will argue that at the start of the twenty-first century Hollywood faced certain cultural, technological, and industrial challenges that comics were uniquely equipped to surmount, thereby facilitating their ascendency from subculture to mainstream fodder. However, modern comic book film adaptations were not merely symptomatic of these filmmaking practices, but proved influential in their development.

After considering the cause, the book next turns to the effect that this trend has had on film production. Chapter Two will chart how the success of comic book adaptations saw the films channeled through production, promotion, and reception into a group that displayed the shared attributes of a single genre, the comic book movie. Focusing on the fan audience, Chapter Three will first examine how the participatory practices of comic book fans found them ideally positioned at the start of the twenty-first century to take advantage of the Web, before considering the impact that this newly empowered group had on film production. Whether motivated by generic expectations or fidelity, many adaptations have strived for a comic aesthetic. The strategies filmmakers have used to engage with the language of comics will be the focus of Chapter Four. Expanding on that topic, the final chapter, Chapter Five, will explore how cinema’s storytelling devices have been tailored to evoke comic book conventions in adaptations and related films. Through these various approaches, a rounded picture of this important and under-analyzed trend in Hollywood filmmaking will emerge.

The remaining sections in this introduction will outline the scope of this research, establish key terms, and describe where this project fits in the field of adaptation studies. Any reader eager to delve straight into the topic might be better served by moving directly to Chapter One.

Scope of Research

It is prudent at this early stage to outline the study’s scope, boundaries, and key terms. When X-Men (Singer) opened to a $54 million weekend in the summer of 2000, it ushered in an era of unprecedented comic book adaptation production by Hollywood studios.⁶ This post-2000 trend, which continues to dominate Hollywood cinema, will be the focus of this study. This should not suggest that comic book adaptations were not produced in other countries and at other times. Important examples from early cinema have already been identified, and adaptations produced by international filmmakers such as Oldboy (Park 2003), Persepolis (Satrapi and Paronnaud 2008), and Blue Is the Warmest Color (Kechiche 2013) have enjoyed wide acclaim. Rather, by narrowing the scope to modern Hollywood productions, the analysis will be more focused, reaching conclusions that should prove relevant to the study of films from other periods and national cinemas.

Additionally, while the adaptation of comics to television will be discussed as part of wider trends, they are not the focus of this research. With the success of Smallville (Gough and Miller 2001), The Walking Dead (Darabont 2010), Arrow (Berlanti, Guggenheim, and Kreisberg 2012), and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D (Whedon, Whedon, and Tancharoen 2013), I anticipate and look forward to a detailed study of this stream of adaptation, particularly as television’s serialized narratives are arguably better suited to most mainstream comics.

Occasionally, comics will make their way to the screen via another medium. For instance, the promotional material for the Adam West-starring feature-length film Batman (Martinson 1966) made many references to the popular television series, but there was no mention of the comics—Soon, very soon, Batman and I will be Bat-apulting right out of your TV sets and on to your theatre screens. Similarly, the urtext for the musical Annie (Huston 1982) may have been Harold Gray’s comic strip Little Orphan Annie, which was first published in 1924, but the film is essentially an adaptation of the 1977 stage musical. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Barron 1990) might also be considered another example of a comic book adaptation that is more greatly indebted to an intermediary version, with the film’s poster promising "Hey Dude, this is no cartoon" in an overt reference to the successful animated series. Thus, as these films are more beholden to another form, they tend to garner less attention in this study than more direct adaptations.

Although the term comic book film adaptation seems self-explanatory, it requires clarification as the comic book has many sister forms and antecedents. The Spirit creator Will Eisner adopted the term sequential art to describe an art and literary form that deals with the arrangement of pictures or images and words to narrate a story or dramatize an idea (Comics & Sequential Art 5). Historical examples of this form include Paleolithic cave paintings, as well as the military campaigns chronicled on Trajan’s Column and the Bayeux Tapestry.

With the advent of printing, sequential art could be reproduced, and in formats more mobile than lengthy scrolls or cave walls. Roger Sabin describes how in the seventeenth and eighteenth century sequential art, produced using woodcuts and later copperplate engravings, became a mass medium in Britain (11). Improvements in printing during the mid-1800s found an ever-increasing number of publications eager for material to fill their pages. While in Britain, sequential art more often appeared in satirical magazines like Punch (1841) and factual publications like the Illustrated London News (1842), in the United States graphic narratives were more commonly found in newspapers where they pandered to the country’s growing immigrant population. Newspaper magnates William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, quickly realizing the potential of graphic narratives to boost circulation, began vying for the most popular comics. Pulitzer had the earliest success when he printed Hogan’s Alley (Outcault 1894), a satire of slum life in the big city that was quickly dominated by its most popular character, the Yellow Kid. Hogan’s Alley is widely cited as the first strip to include all the elements synonymous with modern comics (speech balloons, encapsulation, recurring characters, et cetera), an orthodoxy Duncan and Smith term the Yellow Kid thesis (14).

Commentators writing on the relationship between comics and cinema often subscribe to the Yellow Kid thesis as it suggests the forms were twinned from birth (Bukatman Poetics of Slumberland 2). However, such a stance would relegate earlier examples, including L’Arroseur and its variants, to the status of proto-comics. In a section of The System of Comics titled The Impossible Definition, comics scholar Thierry Groensteen criticizes the US-centric Yellow Kid thesis as an arbitrary slice of history (13) summarizing that it is almost impossible to retain any definitive criteria that is universally held to be true (14). Thus, while an agreed definition (and therefore first example) of comics is elusive, this study is content to recognize the Yellow Kid as an important step in codifying the medium’s language.

Another watershed moment came in 1933 when comics finally made the move from the pages of newspapers and magazines to their own format with the publication of Famous Funnies: A Carnival of Comics—a repackaging of popular newspaper strips (Goulart 4). The success and proliferation of this format soon necessitated the production of original material, a demand that was met by collections such as the appropriately titled New Comics (1935). Other genres soon followed, including in 1938 the industry mainstay, the superhero adventure.⁷

Providing a more specific umbrella term than sequential art, cartoonist and comics theorist Scott McCloud defines comics as the medium itself, and not a specific object such as comic book or comic strip (Understanding Comics 4). This study will use the term comics as McCloud suggests, to describe the medium, whereas comic book will be used as it was understood in 1938—a serialized publication reliant on the language of comics. Comic strips and their adaptations (e.g., Dick Tracy, Garfield: The Movie, and Marmaduke) will be acknowledged as part of wider discussions, such as Chapter Four’s semiotic analysis. However, the focus will remain on comic books, as, despite the parallels, there are a number of qualities that distinguish comic books from strips, including: length, layout, mode of presentation, and readership. Similarly, satirical cartoons are outside the scope of this research, as they do not contain the deliberate sequence that many consider fundamental to comics (Saraceni 5). Equally, adaptations of illustrated books such as The Grinch (Howard 2000), The Polar Express (Zemeckis 2004), and Alice in Wonderland (Burton 2010) will not be considered.

Graphic novels, however, are central to this study. Although the graphic novel as a concept has a long history (Harvey 106), from the late 1970s the term was used to describe a comic that contains a complete story, has a comparatively realistic tone, is printed on higher quality material, and is longer than the average comic book. Will Eisner’s 1978 portmanteau account of life in a Bronx tenement, A Contract with God, is often cited as the first modern graphic novel. This term was frequently used throughout the 1980s and 1990s to confer credibility on works such as Watchmen (Moore and Gibbons 1987), Our Cancer Year (Brabner, Pekar, and Stack 1994), and Ghost World (Clowes 1997). As Art Spiegelman, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus (1986) was part of the graphic novel boom, noted in his introduction to City of Glass (Karasik, Mazzucchelli, and Auster 2004) the new label stuck in my craw as a mere cosmetic bid for respectability. Since ‘graphics’ were respectable and ‘novels’ were respectable … surely ‘graphic novels’ must be doubly respectable!

The term graphic novel was diluted over time as the major publishers, realizing the esteem it implied, began collecting their periodicals in anthologies that, on the surface at least, mirrored the books being produced.⁸ Many comics scholars agree that the graphic novel is today, and perhaps always was, a marketing strategy (McCloud Reinventing Comics 28; Saraceni 4; Hatfield 30; Sabin 165; Duncan and Smith 70), with Frank Miller concluding, I think ‘graphic novel’ is a very pretentious term to describe something that has no good name (Miller on Miller). The boundaries between the graphic novel and comic book are now so unclear that the greatest, and perhaps only, difference between them is the creator’s intentions. Comic book creators tend to be interested in serialized, high-concept storytelling, while the graphic novelist aspires to produce a work that has a greater depth and permanency. This book will recognize those distinctions and apply the terms accordingly.

Implicit in any discussion of the graphic novel’s relationship to comic books is the distinction between mainstream and alternative comics. When a redesigned Flash sped across the cover of Showcase #4 in 1956, the spandex-clad hero ushered in the so-called Silver Age of Comic Books. Following that early success, the Big Two publishers (Marvel and DC Comics) increasingly focused on superhero titles to the point that any books that did not feature a mask or a cape were branded alternative. As Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons noted in 2000, superheroes are a genre that has overtaken a medium (Comics and Superheroes). This ready association continued into cinema with the term comic book adaptation becoming synonymous with superhero movie. However, as will be more fully explored in Chapter Two, in recent years the traditional boundaries between alternative and mainstream comics have become more diffuse with a number of alternative creators (e.g., Brian Michael Bendis, Robert Kirkman, and Matt Fraction) moving into mainstream comics, and non-superhero titles such as The Walking Dead, Saga, and Fables becoming bestselling books.

Similarly, it is the contention of this study that superhero movies have been subsumed into a larger genre that is most often termed the comic book movie. This genre includes films based on alternative titles such as Sin City (Rodriguez 2005), 30 Days of Night (Slade 2007), and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Wright 2010). How the industry and audience corralled these films into a more cohesive genre will be explored in Chapter Two. Furthermore, it will be argued that the genre’s boundaries have widened to include films with no recognized source text, but which have adopted characteristics of the comic book form and its film adaptations (e.g., Creepshow, The Matrix, and Hancock). Accordingly, this study is concerned with the larger comic book movie genre, which includes, but is not limited to, the superhero movie.

A final term that should be established before moving forward is creator. There are many skills (writing, drawing, inking, coloring, and lettering) required to produce a comic book. These various roles can be filled by one skilled person, which Duncan and Smith, citing Mark Rogers, categorize as the artisan process (88), or, as is more commonly found, the tasks will be carried out by a number of professionals—the industrial process. In recognition of these various tasks, and the differing number of professionals involved, Joseph Witek puts forward the wider term creator (Genre to Medium 75). This is often a more appropriate term than artist or writer to describe the producer of a comic, and hence creator will also be used here.

Research Subjects

The films, and the comics that inspired them, will be this study’s main focus. However, these primary sources will be supported by an examination of industrial relays and paratextual materials. A number of interviews with industry professionals have also been carried out, including those with screenwriter Evan Goldberg (Green Hornet); former president of DC Comics, Paul Levitz; the executive producer of Batman, Michael E. Uslan; Marvel Comics senior vice president of publishing, Tom Brevoort; celebrated comic creator Mark Waid (Kingdom Come); and writer Steve Niles (30 Days of Night). Interviews were also carried out with creators who have played an active role in the adaptation of their own comics, such as Kevin Grevioux (I, Frankenstein); Scott Mitchell Rosenberg (Cowboys & Aliens); and Joe Kelly (What’s So Funny About Truth, Justice & the American Way?/Superman vs. The Elite). Following correspondence with former Batman writer Dennis O’Neil, this study also gained access to the Bat-bible—a guide introduced by O’Neil in 1986 to ensure continuity when he became editor of DC Comics’ Batman titles. O’Neil’s guide is a fascinating and as yet unpublished document that offers a rare insight into the editorial process.

Nonetheless, the films, comics, and even their creators could not address every question posed by this study, and thus it was essential to engage with the audience. While the ready availability of online comments allows one to scour discussion boards and Twitter feeds for evidence to support any number of arguments, a more targeted engagement with the wider comic book adaptation audience was needed. Accordingly, I carried out paper surveys at cinema screenings of the high-profile comic book adaptations Thor (Branagh 2011), Green Lantern (Campbell 2011), and The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn (Spielberg 2011). Some findings and conclusions from the Thor and Green Lantern screenings have been published in Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies (Superman in Green). This article also contains a detailed methodology, but it is important to briefly summarize my approach here.

Studies of comic book adaptation audiences have been carried out in the past, but most have tended to focus on the enthusiastic, readily available fan. For instance, Bacon-Smith and Yarbrough observed cinema screenings of Batman (Burton 1989), while Barker and Brooks attempted to interview filmgoers leaving Judge Dredd (Canon 1995). However, they were only able to make general conclusions—the batmobile drew a favorable response, but the batwing did not (Bacon-Smith and Yarborough 98)—or grab single respondents exiting via the foyer (Barker and Brooks 21). Ultimately both studies found more respondents via fan forums such as comic stores and conventions.

More recent fan studies have taken advantage of the Web—a methodology recently termed netnography (Kozinets). For instance, in his latest work on Batman’s most dedicated audience, Hunting the Dark Knight, Will Brooker surveyed "75 individuals … using an online questionnaire that [he] promoted through Batman on Film: The Dark Knight Fansite" (Dark Knight 35). Brooker employed a similar approach for his earlier study of Star Wars fans, Using the Force. In 2012, William Proctor, citing Brooker, used the same methodology to gauge fan response to Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm, distributing 100 questionnaires to visitors of the fan site TheForce.net. It transpired that one of Proctor’s respondents had participated in Brooker’s study a decade earlier. Despite the potential reach of the Web, this repetition of respondent points to an inherent risk in relying on fan forums, as these studies tend to draw enthusiasts, resulting in a more homogenized response—a limitation Proctor acknowledged.⁹ Accordingly, this audience research strived to gain a more balanced understanding of the comic book adaptation audience by including those with no particular devotion to the source.

Identifying a similar space in such studies, Neil Rae and Jonathan Gray adopted a dualistic strategy to answer a question that is often overlooked in reception studies focusing solely on fans: how do viewers read and make sense of comic book movies differently when they have and have not read the original material being adapted? (86). Rae and Gray used qualitative interviews with different combinations of readers and non-readers, but as their central research question was posed in relation to adaptation it seemed destined to fall under the yoke of fidelity, with non-readers considered intertextually poor because they watch the films as films, and largely as distinct texts while readers, predictably looked at any adaptation as part of an episodic text (99). However, as will be discussed in Chapter Two, these non-readers are not textually poor, but often compare these films to other entries in the comic book movie genre.

Like Rae and Gray, this study also sought to engage the non-readers ignored in most studies of comic book adaptation audiences. The methodology was adapted from the international research project to explore responses to The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Jackson 2003). The project, and its methodology, is explained in detail in the edited collection Watching The Lord of the Rings. Building on this earlier study a quali-quantitative approach was applied. Furthermore, Internet sampling was avoided, as it tends to favor younger enthusiasts (Barker, Mathijs, and Trobia 222–23). The study took place at regularly scheduled screenings of Thor, Green Lantern, and The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn (hereafter abbreviated to The Adventures of Tintin) at the Eye Cinema in Galway, Ireland.

Filmgoers were asked to complete a three-page questionnaire, two pages before the screening and one after. The quali-quantitative approach included multiple-choice responses and self-allocation scales, with follow-on spaces to allow participants to qualify their responses. In all, participants were asked to respond to fifteen questions before the screening and to eight after. To avoid influencing the participants, questions started generally—Q1. List (1–3) the top three sources from which you find out about upcoming films—and became more specific—Q11. Did you know Thor was based on a comic book?"

Unlike the difficulties Barker and Brooks recount, because this survey was distributed in the screening theatre (as opposed to the foyer) it had a more captive audience. However, despite the benefits of the cinema setting, it did not ensure a balanced mass audience. Surveys were distributed as audience members took their seats. As the cinema did not operate allocated seating, enthusiasts were likely to attend earlier, which may have skewed the number of fans that responded at a given screening.¹⁰ Nonetheless, wide representation was sought where possible. In total, nine screenings were surveyed, and, after spoiled surveys were discounted, there were 113 respondents. The screenings included the first scheduled showing, and then a later 2D and 3D screening.¹¹

By eschewing fan forums, this survey encountered a more diverse group of respondents than similar studies. For instance, Brooker found that of the seventy-five individuals who responded to the online questionnaire he distributed through Batman on Film: The Dark Knight Fansite, sixty-eight per cent of respondents were aged between 20 and 30, while 93 per cent were male … one-hundred per cent identified themselves as Batman fans (Dark Knight 35). Contrastingly, in this study only 47 percent of participants were aged between twenty-one and thirty, with respondents in all age sectors represented.¹² Furthermore, only 34 percent of participants identified themselves as fans, and while men still dominated, women made up 38 percent of total respondents.

Despite the balance this survey achieved, its scale was modest, especially when compared to the 25,000-plus respondents Barker et al. describe (19). Nonetheless, the results provided this study with an outline of the wider comic book film adaptation audience, which was further developed through an analysis of paratextual materials and industrial relays. By triangulating these methods, a more rounded understanding of the comic book film adaptation and its audience(s) emerged.

Adaptation Studies and the Comic Book Movie

While this study will apply a number of approaches to better understand the comic book film adaptation, this research is framed within adaptation studies. This methodology might seem so obvious that it does not warrant further explanation, but adaptation studies has traditionally lacked a clear methodological center. This vacuum most likely stems from the field’s transdisciplinary position, which has given rise to a certain amount of redundancy and opportunism, with new procedures regularly suggested by scholars who ignore earlier approaches or hope to correct them. This condition has prompted leading scholars Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan to recently suggest that the correctives have gone as far as they can for the time being; maybe it would be useful to declare a moratorium on some features of key debates, or curb the will to taxonomize just for long enough to observe what taxonomies give us (Screen Adaptation 10–11). Following on from Cartmell and Whelehan’s sensible proposition, this study will reapply the terms and taxonomies of earlier scholarship to this exciting area.

Many theorists have attempted to categorize adaptation. One of the first was Geoffrey Wagner who suggested three modes of adaptation in 1975: Analogy, where elements of the original are used while the majority of the source is significantly altered to have no specific resemblance to the original; Commentary, the original is altered, sometimes intentionally, but in a self-reflexive way; and Transposition, where no overt attempt is made to alter the original (219–31).¹³ A number of other scholars have put forward similar frameworks, including Michael Klein and Gillian Parker, John M. Desmond and Peter Hawkes, Linda Costanzo Cahir, Kamilla Elliott, and Thomas Leitch.¹⁴

These categories have proven useful as they delineate the nature of film adaptation, and suggest the approach a critic should adopt when analyzing a text. This study will make use of perhaps the most cited taxonomy, Dudley Andrew’s three categories from Concepts in Film Theory. Andrew, with no reference to Wagner’s earlier work, proposed his own modes of relation between the film and the text … borrowing, intersection, and fidelity of transformation (98), which closely correspond to Wagner’s categories. Applying Andrew’s terminology we can see how comic book adaptations might be separated into these three spheres, categorizations that will prove useful in later discussions.

Andrew contends that borrowing is the largest category of film adaptation, adding that the main concern is the generality of the original, its potential for wide and varied appeal—in short, its existence as a continuing form or archetype in culture. This is especially true of that adapted material which, because of its frequent reappearance, claims the status of myth (98). Traditionally, most comic book adaptations by Hollywood studios could be categorized as borrowings. Mythic characters such as Batman and Superman have enjoyed non-stop publication since the late 1930s, undergoing a series of tonal shifts and story additions that have become character mainstays. Consequently, the choice to borrow only the characters and setup, and not a particular story, allows for a more all-encompassing adaptation, as former president of DC Comics Paul Levitz explained when interviewed for this study:

If you make the decision that you want to do a Batman movie, OK, but there are 4,000 Batman stories: which one, or ones, am I going to do? Which are going to be my ideal version? Is this going to be more Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams, more Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale, more Frank Miller, more Bill Finger and Dick Spring? What do I want to do here? By virtue of there being 4,000 stories, I am implicitly given greater license to come up with brand new ones, for better or worse.

As Levitz suggests, if one were to faithfully adapt an early Batman comic it might contain the hero’s familiar vigilantism, but it would not include recognized elements such as Alfred, the Batcave, or costumed villains.¹⁵ Consequently, in adapting the myth of Batman rather than one specific comic book, borrowings such as Tim Burton’s Batman maintain those staples that have reappeared in the character’s many incarnations and have become his most identifiable traits.¹⁶

As will be more fully explored in Chapter Three, many comic book adaptations today could still be considered borrowings, particularly films such as The Amazing Spider-Man (Webb 2012), The Dark Knight Rises (Nolan 2012), and The Avengers (Whedon 2012) that rely on the mythic status that their characters have accrued through decades of adaptation. However, it will be argued that even within these borrowings greater fidelity can be detected. Furthermore, in the post-X-Men boom, there was a discernible shift from generalized interpretations to more faithful films, with an increasing number of adaptations that could be categorized as intersections and transformations.

Andrew defines intersection as when the uniqueness of the original text is preserved to such an extent that it is intentionally left unassimilated in adaptation (99). These films maintain the otherness of the original, thereby allowing one text to comment on the other.¹⁷ Although entries to this category are limited, examples might include American Splendor (Springer Berman and Pulcini 2003), which was adapted from Harvey Pekar’s autobiographical comic book series. The film is littered with self-reflexive moments, most notably in the narration by the real-life Pekar. Typically self-aware observations include: Here’s me. Well, the guy playin’ me anyway. Even though he don’t look nothin’ like me. But, whatever and If you think reading comics about your life seems strange, try watching a play about it. God only knows how I’ll feel when I see this movie. These moments critique the adaptation process from casting through to its effect on the creator, thereby placing American Splendor firmly in the mode of adaptation that Andrew calls intersection and Wagner labels commentary.

While intersections often interrogate the source, transformations hold the original material up as the ultimate goal of the adaptation. Films in this category endeavor to make the smallest number of changes necessary to bring the source to the screen in an attempt to present it in a new form. Andrew describes this mode: Here it is assumed that the task of adaptation is the reproduction in cinema of something essential about an original text (100).

Many adaptations of novels could be categorized as transformations. Such fidelity was made possible, in part, because of the inherent ambiguities of the written text, which allowed adapters a degree of latitude in faithfully recreating the world of the original. Traditionally, such freedom was not afforded to those adapting comic books, where, in order to make a film that could be considered a transformation, the often unachievable images of the comic would need to be recreated. However, as will be illustrated throughout this study, many adaptations have recently attempted to recreate more than just the source’s characters, but also its aesthetic tropes. Among these transformations one might include Sin City, 300 (Snyder 2007), Watchmen (Snyder 2009), Kick-Ass (Vaughn 2010), The Losers (White 2010), Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (hereafter abbreviated to Scott Pilgrim), and The Adventures of Tintin. This expanding mode of comic book adaptation demonstrates the increased importance of the source material in film production, a development that will be explored in Chapter Three.

Although a useful system for exploring adaptation, these categories are not concrete. Neither Andrew nor Wagner address how these three modes often coalesce in the same film. For instance, although the original Spider-Man trilogy, like most traditional superhero adaptations, would fall within the sphere of borrowing, it does contain overt moments of intersection, with the comic’s co-creator Stan Lee making a cameo in all three films, and even stopping in the trilogy-closer to utter the line, I guess one person can make a difference, nuff said.¹⁸ Furthermore, while the script for Spider-Man 2 (Raimi 2004) is original, it is indebted to the storyline Spider-Man No More! from The Amazing Spider-Man #50, including a shot designed to mirror the oft-cited panel in which the hero dumps his costume in a trashcan. Scenes such as this move the film from the mode of borrowing and into transformation. The shortcomings of Wagner and Andrew’s taxonomies have been pointed out in the past, with Deborah Cartmell noting that films such as Schindler’s List (Spielberg 1993) avoid convenient categorization (24). Nonetheless, these categories provide an effective critical shorthand that will be relied on across this study.

FIG. I.2 A regularly cited panel from The Amazing Spider-Man #50 (July 1967), Spider-Man No More, alongside its transformation in Spider-Man 2.

This research will also make use of Brian McFarlane’s narratological approach to adaptation. McFarlane prefaces his 1996 book Novel to Film by stating: I shall set up procedures for distinguishing between that which can be transferred from one medium to another (essentially, narrative) and that which, being dependent on different signifying systems, cannot be transferred (essentially, enunciation) (vii). Citing Barthes, McFarlane divides narrative functions into distributional and integrational functions (14). Within distributional functions McFarlane describes cardinal functions or nuclei and catalyzers. Cardinal functions are the hinge-points of a story; deletion or augmentation of these functions in an adaptation is likely to evoke reader discontent, such as the amended ending of Watchmen. Catalyzers modify the nuclei and are more susceptible to change, such as the murder of the Waynes following the opera in Batman Begins (Nolan 2005), as opposed to the cinema in comics like Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. Within integrational functions, McFarlane discusses informants (e.g., names, jobs, et cetera) and indices proper. With the exception of indices proper, McFarlane believes that all other functions can be transferred from novel to film, but as indices proper are tied to enunciation (i.e., a medium’s unique means of expression), they cannot be easily transferred to other media. McFarlane argues that indices proper require the identification of medium specific equivalents, a process he terms adaptation proper (26). Here, McFarlane furnishes this study with a useful concept. Adaptation proper is a creative way of distinguishing between the source’s transferable elements (narrative) and those necessitating equivalents (signifying systems). In particular, Chapter Four considers the medium specificities of comics and cinema, and how filmmakers often strive to achieve a comic aesthetic.

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These useful concepts notwithstanding, scholarly analysis of adaptation has traditionally been quite rigid, prompting Dudley Andrew to suggest in 1984 that frequently the most narrow and provincial area of film theory, discourse about adaptation, is potentially as far-reaching as you like (Film Theory 96). More recent assessments have been equally damning, with James Naremore opening his 2000 collection, Film Adaptation, by describing the subject of adaptation as one of the most jejune areas of scholarly writing about the cinema (1). Encouragingly, the research quagmires of the past have been identified and there has been a concerted effort by those working within the field to surmount these obstacles.¹⁹ A study of the comic book film adaptation is well positioned to traverse these pitfalls and move debate onto new and more productive ground.

(A) An Overemphasis on Literature

An oft-criticized feature of traditional adaptation studies is the disproportionate attention literary adaptation has received. It is an issue that pervades academia, with Naremore pointing out that in universities, the theme of adaptation is often used as a way of teaching celebrated literature by another means (Introduction 1). A more inclusive approach to adaptation was suggested as far back as 1948 when André Bazin noted that the problem of digests and adaptations is usually posed within the framework of literature. Yet literature only partakes of a phenomenon whose amplitude is much larger (Cinema as Digest 19). Nonetheless, decades later much of adaptation theory is still viewed from the perspective of literature.

However, more recent theorists have begun to consider a wide variety of sources and a plethora of possibilities under the banner of adaptation. This transition was heralded by critics such as Imelda Whelehan, who called for an extension of the debate … [to] move from a consideration of ‘literary’ adaptations … to a focus on adaptation more broadly (3–4). Whelehan’s proposal was echoed in Linda Hutcheon’s argument that adaptation has run amok. That’s why we can’t understand its appeal and even its nature if we only consider novels and films (xi), with Hutcheon suggesting cover songs, video games, theme park rides, and museum exhibits as possible examples in her book A Theory of Adaptation.²⁰

This in-depth study of the comic book adaptation is in keeping with the goals of contemporary adaptation studies. As discussed, in the past, comic book film adaptations garnered little scholarly attention within adaptation studies, or beyond. Now, as theorists are shifting their gaze beyond the once dominant novel to film debate, the comic book film adaptation emerges as one of the next logical steps, as it allows for considerations that a study of text-based sources often precludes. For instance, Timothy Corrigan, who identified comic book adaptations as one of the most distinctive trends in modern film adaptations during his keynote address at the 2009 Association of Adaptation Studies Conference, suggested these films have become "repositories themselves for adaptations that respond to the unique representational overlap between source and adaptation, as they recycle both visual images and graphic mise-en-scènes (Burke Adaptation Studies Conference" 55). This fertile area will be the focus of Chapters Four and Five, testifying to the importance of this research within adaptation studies.

(B) A Line of Inquiry Mired in Fidelity

Fidelity criticism is regularly cited as the greatest impediment to the analysis of adaptation, with McFarlane concluding that the insistence on fidelity has led to a suppression of potentially more rewarding approaches to the phenomenon of adaptation (Novel to Film 10). Many other prominent scholars have also criticized this orthodoxy and suggested a move away from fidelity criticism (Andrew Film Theory 100; Griffith 73–74; Stam Beyond Fidelity 76; Sadlier 190; Cardwell 19; Hutcheon 85).

While an analysis that slips into a game of anecdotal semblance between distinguishing features (Eisenstein 437) should be avoided, there is a greater risk that by consciously sidestepping fidelity criticism, theorists are failing to pursue rewarding lines of inquiry. Colin MacCabe opened his recent collection, True to the Spirit, by arguing that if the academy chooses to ignore the grammar of value … those colloquial forms that are used to discuss books and films, it is sealing itself hermetically off from the general culture (9). Although this collection was criticized by established scholars