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Reviews
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| Photo: Sidereel.com | Les Wiseman
Movie Entertainment
January 2010
For readers of graphic novels the question was, how could Watchmen possibly be turned into a movie?
Though Time Magazine controversially added that graphic novel to its list of the Top 100 Novels since 1923, it is an amorphous rambling book, full of unfamiliar, dated noir characters and pages of documents interwoven with the graphic narrative. Its plot – pretty much written on the fly by superstar graphic novelist Alan Moore – is complex and multifaceted, almost into incomprehensibility.
Yet by stripping away the subplots, director Zack Snyder created a much clearer story and a movie that was ultimately as satisfying as the paper version. Snyder had previously taken the opposite tack by expanding a graphic novel with little dialogue, 300, into a successful feature length film. While there had been other film adaptations of graphic novels such as V for Vendetta, Hellboy, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Watchmen was the first real blockbuster, the benchmark that showed the public a glimmer of the differences that exist between a comic book and a graphic novel, and gave Hollywood a better idea of the potential that existed in adapting the latter from page to screen.
The differences between what constitutes a comic book and a graphic novel are readily understood, but often hard to define. The key contrast is that the graphic novel is aimed at adult readers. This distinction is not lost on filmmakers who are looking to draw adult audiences with a proven property that can be quite directly adapted, rather than having to reinterpret scenes from more juvenile stories.
Another difference, and a benefit of targeting an older audience, is that the graphic novel can take on more mature subject matter than the comic book can. This convention was established with the first graphic novel. Written by Will Eisner in 1978, A Contract with God was a thick, large-format book about being an aging Jew in New York – not exactly the Bam! Bang! Kapow! stuff of the early Superman and Batman tales. Eisner called his parables of street life “sequential art” and departed from the funny animals and superheroes traditionally depicted in comic books.
Weightier subject matter followed, including Art Spiegelman’s Maus, a story of the Holocaust with mice as Jews and cats as Nazis. Maus, which took 13 years to complete, won a 1992 Pulitzer Prize Special Award in the letters category.
In subsequent years, while some graphic novels were stretching the limits of readers’ taste for the cerebral, others ran with the licence conferred by a more mature audience, amping up the sex and violence. Bloodshed, which had been tempered in the comics by the Comics Code Authority since 1954, was a popular theme and jetted off the pages of graphic novels in a sanguinary tsunami, whether it was in the gangland snuffs of Frank Miller’s Sin City or the blade and spear hand-to-hand combat of 300.
More sensitive issues were also tackled in the graphic novel. For example, the 2003 graphic novel Persepolis told the story of growing up female in Iran. It was adapted for the screen in 2007 and went on to win the Jury Prize at Cannes and an Academy Award nomination for best animated feature.
But regardless of the subject matter, in these graphic novels, and the movies made from them, nobody runs around in tights, with a super power to solve every problem. For the most part, the graphic novel is populated with noirish everyday people in desperate situations – with a lot of blood, sex, swearing and explosions – and that has a certain appeal to filmmakers and audiences alike.
Yet for all of the effort to define what’s a graphic novel and what’s a comic book, the adaptations on screen are further confusing the issue. In the coming film version of The Mighty Thor comic by Shakespearean director Kenneth Branagh, audiences will see the border between the graphic novel and the comic book blur. Early reports say that a more adult-gritty version of the Thunder God comic is set to hit theatres in 2011.
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