The Comic Side of Things

Comic books rule Hollywood. Avengers: Endgame is the highest grossing film of all time, selling well over a billion dollars of tickets on just the opening weekend; in the U.S. tickets for Avengers: Endgame accounted for 80% of all movie tickets sold that weekend. More Americans know who Thanos is than know who Xi Jinping is. Avengers: Endgame is an extreme case, but less extreme than one might think. 2019 is not so very exceptional for the past decade. In 2018 six of the top ten grossing movies were comic book adaptations; all the rest were sequels or remakes. In 2017 five of the top ten were comic book movies; all the rest were sequels or remakes.

There is nothing new about Hollywood raiding comic books for movie plots. The comic book characters Buck Rogers (first appearing in print in 1928) and Flash Gordon (1934) were made into movie serials in the 1930s. Captain Marvel, Batman, the Green Hornet, and Superman were adapted to movie serials in the 1940s. What is new is the way comic book characters bestride cinema. Instead of being minor sideshows, comic book movies today are front and center. They are crucial to the studios’ bottom lines.

Not everyone is happy about this. Jodie Foster, speaking to Radio Times Magazine of superhero movies in particular, complained, “It’s ruining the viewing habits of the American population and then ultimately the rest of the world.” Martin Scorsese said the Marvel movies are “not cinema.” An article in Liev Arts [sic] contends that the popularity of these films is a sign of childishness in modern culture: “The idea that we are now in a childish society is hard to be argued against: everything has become extremely infantile: from politics, where everything is black and white, to relationships and sexuality … almost every facet of today’s culture is defined by high immaturity.” This, I think, is a little harsh – not the assessment of the culture, which I think is spot on, but the assessment of the movies. Some of them anyway. Joker, currently doing a solid box office, shows that it is possible to have an adult and grittily realistic R-Rated movie even with a comic book for a source. Nonetheless, it must be admitted that Joker is an exception. The typical comic book blockbuster (or wannabe blockbuster) is a special-effects rich but otherwise simplistic popcorn movie.

Some of the original comic books on which the movies are based are surprisingly sophisticated: not most but some. The days are long gone when comic books were overwhelmingly aimed at kids and written accordingly. Nonetheless, the more complex comics are almost always simplified for the screen – and made less edgy to boot. Few moviegoers notice this since few read the original comics. Curiously, for all the success of comic book movies, sales of actual comic books continue to decline. Mainstream Marvel and DC titles (including those in digital format) sell a tenth of what they did in the 1960s and 1970s. This is part of the general collapse in recreational reading. (Young Adult fiction seems to be a minor bright spot in sales until one notices that older adults make up most of the readership; YA has drained readers from the adult shelves, but total fiction sales continue to drop.) It is not at all uncommon for movies that sell millions of tickets to be based on comic books with sales in the several thousands. Comics therefore are no longer the core business of comic book companies. Comic books, from a money-making viewpoint, are mostly just test beds for possible screenplays. (Marvel is owned by Disney and DC by Warner Brothers; Dark Horse is still independent though it does have working arrangements with production companies.)

The transition from page to screen can be gentle or jarring. Changes can be minor or can reverse the entire thrust of the original. Unlike in the movie, in Kick-Ass the comic, for example, (minor *Spoiler*) Dave doesn’t get the girl; instead, Katie’s new boyfriend beats him up. Big Daddy also has a major twist that was omitted from the movie. Considering that it condensed six volumes into one movie, Scott Pilgrim vs the World, while it shifts things around, isn’t so very different from the “all the world's a video game and all the men and women merely avatars”-themed Scott Pilgrim books. Quite a bit of the dialogue in the film is verbatim from the books. The 2007 TV series Painkiller Jane, on the other hand, bears almost no relation to the comics but for the character's self-healing abilities. Even the issue with Kristanna Loken on the cover has no connection to the show’s storyline. Jane is a Fed on the show but in the comics is a vigilante who would make Paul Kersey blush. Kingsman went the other direction: Kingsman is a private organization in the movie but a part of the UK government in the comic. Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel How to Talk to Girls at Parties ends when Enn (Henry) and his friends flee a party hosted by alien women. (There is a metaphor here.) This event happens only 20 minutes into the movie version, which then becomes a scifi romcom. The movie Wanted balks at the full cynical brutal nihilism of the comic, which even mocks the reader as a sucker for buying it. The assassins in the movie serve some higher cosmic purpose; they don’t in the comic.

Is there a pattern? Yes. Sharp corners are sanded down. Some of the comics (e.g. Mark Millar’s Wanted and Kick-Ass) are deliberately offensive, apparently out of a conviction that overly sensitive readers deserve to be offended, and should learn to just get over it. Studios trying to fill theater seats with millions of butts excise most of that for obvious business reasons. Movies that are modified less have printed originals (e.g. Scott Pilgrim) with fewer of those issues at the outset. Even a very violent movie (e.g. Kick-Ass 2) is likely to pull punches compared to the source. Anti-heroes in the movies gain more sympathetic backstories and contexts while their enemies lose all nuance, so the protagonists are just barely “anti.” Romances that go badly in the comics tend to go well in the movies. The central conflict almost always becomes vastly simpler on screen so the audience doesn’t have to think about for whom to root. So, there is some basis for the complaints of Jodie and Liev Arts.

One comic I’ll mention just for contrast is Buffy the Vampire Slayer Omnibus Vol. 1, which is a case of screen to page instead of the other way around. Joss Whedon, who wrote the script for the 1992 movie but did not direct or have creative control, was famously unhappy with the result – and with Donald Sutherland who made up his own dialogue and changed the death scene. Joss did have control over the subsequent TV series, which was a critical success, but that movie still nagged at him. The comic is a prequel to the TV series that finally corrects the movie by covering the events of that time period the way Joss wanted; the result is more layered than the film – and better.

Since it doesn’t seem likely movie audiences will develop more sophisticated tastes anytime soon, comic book movies will fill theater screens for at least the next several years even as comic book sales drop further. Arguably this trend is no sillier than the Western genre that filled so many screens in the 1950s – though a few of those films (e.g. High Noon) had something to say. There are more important concerns in the world than questionable taste in movies. Still, sometimes it is rewarding to pass on the latest superhero bash-em-up and instead walk down the multiplex hall to the screen with an indie flick and only three or four people in the seats. The movie might be lousy or it might be a gem, but the odds aren’t any worse just because the actors don’t wear spandex.

  

Trailer for Painkiller Jane: amazingly unlike the source material