Comic Books & Film

Very good question! I'll think about this. Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics is a good place to start in defining how comics relate to other media, what their unique properties are, etc.

One of my worst named bands was: "The Understanding Comics".

wah wah.

From McCloud:

http://www.newhatstories.com/svaclass/mccloudChap3/images/chap03_06_jpg.gif

i think many films are storyboarded too, which is an essential panel by panel process.

also, i'm thinking of chris marker's la jetee which is pretty much a panel/storyboard type film that could work equally in comic form.

I think McCloud's trying to have his cake and eat it in contending that filmic/tevevisual closure is on par with closure in comics (closure meaning the audience connecting two sometimes disparate static images to create continuity)(after all, one could carry the conceit further and say that what we see in reality requires closure to make sense of things because we blink and stuff!). However, there may be some more applicable parallels between comic book closure and cutting between scenes.

That said, there's been a recent (though it may have happened long before, or in a different country altogether)(in fact, Lone Wolf and Cub, published in the 70s, had tons of cinematic elements: establishing shots that slowly "track" in to the main character by incrementally "closer" panels (interesting side note: the writer of LWC actually wrote the screenplays for the serialized film versions)) trend to overtly cinematize mainstream American comics, mostly with the new breed of crime comics writers, Brian Michael Bendis being the prime instigator, in which panels are simply a stack of long rectangles (approximating a strip of film).

What's lost in comics to film translations is similar to what's lost in book-to-film xlations -- textual texture. There's a lot of interior monologue in comics, which doesn't carry over well to films. Fight scenes, though they're oftentimes shambling in comics, are even worse in films (recent) that rely heavily on CGI. As with books, pacing can suffer, but in an additional aspect -- the splash page (a page that is a single panel), when done right, gives an immensity and heaviness to a scene especially if contrasted against pages divided into smaller panels.

As to the final question, sort of but not (in US films anyway). There's that fanboy/mainstream familiarity issue so most film adaptations usually cover the first few issues that detail the hero's origins.

Anyway I don't really know that much about comics or films.

Thanks for the great answers! would anyone care to name some films based on comic books that they think are particularly great exampes of the genre?

Ghost Town (though the comic was better)

American Splendor

Batman Returns

Tank Girl (which was more mainstream than the comic, obviously, but I think it captured some of it's essence)

Maxx (not a film but a TV series; however, it's one of the few examples where the filmed version actually improves on the comic)

Corto Maltese (which was a noble try, even though it couldn't possibly have reached the same level of the original, one of the greatest comics ever)

Most comic book adaptations suck, because comics, being more cost-effective, don't have to gather massive audiences like films, and therefore they can afford to be less populist. American Splendor is the only example I can think of where the movie is actually more experimental than the film.