Modern Days: Comics and Movies #1.
Thoughts on comics inspired by events in daily life.

I'm back in goddamned High Wycombe again. Lucky me. The hotel room is cold and cramped and on the whole, I'd rather be, well, anywhere. And just to put the cap on my day, all I've got for dinner is Pot Noodle and all that there is on telly is the Judge Dredd movie. I'm not sure which pisses me off most.

And this coffee is shit. I need a better hotel. One with cable TV and good coffee.

So, I got to thinking about the relationship between comics and movies. I have a friend who makes movies using the graphics engine from the computer game Quake or similar types of game - the artform is called machinima. He's pretty much at the top of this young field, a clever and talented man. Yet oddly enough he finds comics intimidating - he's tried his hand at writing them and finds them very hard to work with. This surprises me somewhat, as they're a very natural thing to me, the most obvious medium to write for. This leads me to wonder if they're not slightly opposed artforms. One deals with motion, and time generally passes at the rate of one second per second, within a given scene. The other is a series of static images, time being frozen, passing only though the interaction between the reader and the page. Very different writing styles, very different modes of thinking.

And of course, the key difference between comics and cinema: money. There's lot of money in cinema, and not enough in comics. I find it ironic (in the Alanis Morisette sense of the word, which is to say, not ironic in the slightest) that the Wachowskis have said that what they really wanted to do was make comics, but they couldn't break in, so they made The Matrix. Now they're probably massively wealthy, and no doubt lead fabulous jet set lifestyles, or something. It's what I would do if I were extremely wealthy. Note: I have no idea how much they made from The Matrix, but I'm damn sure it's a damn site more than many comic writers do for a year's work.

Given this, why don't more comics writers get involved in movie adaptations of their work? Probably because of the lack of freedom - however much of a bad reputation the X-office may have for interfering with the work of its writers, Hollywood has an even worse one. Comics may not pay as well, but at least all you need to worry about in many cases is being told "you can't say that!" or "no! You can't actually show someone fellating a stoat on panel!", not discovering that the scene you view as utterly critical to the entire movie, the one that establishes your take on the character and sets the tone for the whole film isn't going to be in there because the marketing boys don't like it, or because the film is 5 minutes too long, and the test screening said that the audience thought that it was a bit boring.

It's noteworthy that very few comic writers (compared to the total number out there) have done movies, or movie writers have done comics, with the possible exception of Kevin Smith. But even with Smith, it sometimes seems that the comic form is not as natural to him as it is to others - his comics frequently draw criticism for being overly wordy, of not having the balance between words and pictures quite right, although I've heard people say more or less the same thing about his films. In film, however, it's easier to get away with this, as the amount of space that dialogue takes up on the page is hardly a consideration.

And those comics writers that have been involved with movies to date have often produced lamentable rubbish. We all remember the Spawn movie, don't we? The one that starred the cloak and nothing else? I remember watching that and thinking that the writers had desperately tried to make the narrative caption work within the film, and had in fact only succeeded in adding a guide for the terminally stupid. By the end, I found myself mentally re-writing the captions to something along the lines of "And for all you retarded monkeys in the audience, here's a quick plot recap. And in case you're still having difficulty, here's a quick precis of what's going to happen in this scene." Appalling drivel.

Still, I'm firmly of the belief that a good writer is a good writer, whatever the medium (although the less said about the later Robocop films, the better), so perhaps the answer is that when a film is being made from a comic, the comic companies need to grow a bit of backbone and support their talent, be prepared to say "no" to the big and frightening film studios if they start to fuck about with the property. What's the worst that can happen? No more shit films made out of comics, reinforcing the notion that comics are sad things for geeks. And at best, we might get to see something good on the screen. But the whole argument about how comic companies work with film adaptations is for another time,when I'm in a better mood.

So what's the lesson here? It may well be nothing more that "Todd McFarlane should never be allowed to write anything again, ever", but true as it is, that's strangely unsatisfying. I suspect it's something along the lines of "Sylvester Stallone makes an appalling Judge Dredd, and that movie was a fucking travesty" which is much more satisfying to me right now.

But sod all this, I'm going to bed. Next time, I'll look at the massive cock-ups that comics companies make when they get films made...

Alasdair Watson, High Wycombe, January '00

Alasdair Watson is Technical Editor of PopImage.

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