“We all know that comics are the most dominant form of entertainment in the world. The only problem is that the world doesn’t know it yet.”
-Tom Katers
Alan Moore, prior to the release of Warner Bros’. and Zack Snyder’s adaptation of ‘Watchmen’, said time and time again that the book was unfilmable. He argued that Watchmen did things which could only be done in comic books, and that it would fail to translate effectively to the big-screen. Watchmen was released in 2009, the latest of several comic-to-film adaptations of Alan Moore’s works like ‘From Hell’ and ‘V for Vendetta, and it didn’t do particularly well at the Box Office or in the eyes of many critics. Whether Watchmen was a faithful or effective adaptation is entirely subjective, as is the case for all films or even all entertainment media. But that’s not what I want to talk about. With the comic-to-film adaptation becoming more and more prevalent, and with the ‘Marvel Cinematic Universe’ building up to an almighty crescendo in 2012 with ‘The Avengers’, I want to look at whether Alan Moore is right-can the comic book do things differently to other types of medium, like ordinary novels or films? In a sense, I am asking whether the comic book (or its irritatingly grown-up moniker, ‘graphic novel’) has inherent value when compared with the more traditional modes of entertaining us with stories.
First, let’s look at what a comic book is. Like a novel or a film, it usually tells us a story. But that story is conveyed with images, usually though not necessarily accompanied by dialogue and/or narration, which are located within separate panels on a page. And also like novels or films, they vary tremendously in style and quality. A comic book I’d recommend is ’99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style’ by Matt Madden, which takes a very simplistic one-page story and tells it in, you guessed it, 99 different ways. What Madden does is both very clever and very simple; I remember in an A-level English Language class we were tasked with rewriting a short extract in first-person, third-person, as narration, as a film script, and so on. That’s exactly what Madden does in his book, and by doing so he demonstrates the huge flexibility of comics. In many ways, it is a more flexible medium than literature, because it can use both words and images to completely alter the tone and style of the story being told.
There are several problems with comic books, however. Or rather, there are problems with comic books that prevent them from becoming completely accepted in mainstream culture in the same way as novels and films. Obviously, there is the perception that comic books are for kids; after all, we all grew up with the Dandy and the Beano. But this is simply to blur our perceptions and ignore the reality in front of our eyes. There are thousands of films and books aimed at audiences that aren’t adults; it’s a (and I’m just guesstimating here) multi-billion pound industry. There are books for kids, books for young adults, books for lonely housewives craving a bit of erotica (oo er). And the same thing goes for films. And yet, we do not associate the entirety of cinema or literature exclusively with those particular genres. So why do people do it with comic books?
It may have something to do with the origins and history of comic books. They developed as the ‘funny pages’ in newspapers in the United States; short comic strips that still exist today in our newspapers with things like Garfield and Calvin and Hobbes. This soon evolved into what became the most iconic and most widespread (and profitable) comic book genre: the superhero comic. Needless to say, the superhero comic genre created an entire geek culture made up almost exclusively of male teenagers that continues to this day, albeit being now somewhat more diverse for various reasons which I won’t go into today (arguably, the rise of Japanese manga in the West, and other such comics that weren’t aimed exclusively at girls in a patronising way but catered to the needs of both genders).
While superhero comics are fantastic in their own way, most of them have little of the artistic or narrative value of many fabled films and pieces of literature. There are gems within the traditional superhero genre, like Spider-Man’s ‘Kraven’s Last Hunt’, but mostly it’s harmless, escapist fun. More importantly, very few superhero comics make use of the unique qualities of comic books in order to differentiate themselves from films or literature. It’s difficult to say with a straight face, for instance, that Superman is an ‘unfilmable’ comic book series, because it’s not. The influence, in particular, of Will Eisner in injecting cinematic qualities into comic books means many comics are inherently filmable. After all, comics are very much like film storyboards in their look, and so most comic books are very easy to effectively transfer to the big-screen. That’s why no-one complains about them making Iron Man, Spider-Man, or The Avengers films.
But in the past 30 years or so, there has been something of a revolution in the comics medium. The rise of the ‘graphic novel’, a sort of comic book for grown-ups, has shaken common perceptions of comics. Probably the best example is the aforementioned Watchmen. Arguably the finest of all comic books, it has a level of complexity that is simply staggering. Not only is it something of a deconstruction of the superhero genre as a whole, featuring retired ex-superheroes caught up in a Cold War conspiracy, but it is also complex in its structure and style. It features several clever and subtle story-telling techniques that can only be achieved through the unique combination of the written word and striking visuals that form the basis of comic books. It frequently delves into a book within a book style, which acts to add character development, enrich the backstory of the setting, and also allude to the main plot. Such an approach could not work effectively in film because comics, like books, allow the reader to take things at their own pace. Watchmen slowly builds up a rich and fascinating world of Earth on the brink of armageddon. It places visual motifs, like the smiley face of the Comedian, throughout, that require repeat readings to fully appreciate. One chapter, named Fearful Symmetry, even utilises the panelled structure of comics in a unique way by having each half of the chapter a mirror image of the other. And these aspects are not even the best bits of the book-it is also impeccably written, completely changing the reader’s perceptions of masked crime fighters and even making a complete sociopath and murderer the most likeable character in the book.
Another graphic novel which is important in very different ways is Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. An eleven part epic, The Sandman delves into the lives of the Endless, a family of impossibly powerful beings that are anthropomorphised representations of human emotions and events, like Death, Dream, and Desire. Again, it is a masterpiece of fiction that borrows from and then subverts mythology and literature and crafts a well thought-out universe that is at once both familiar and terrifyingly unfamiliar. But what The Sandman achieves that could not be achieved in another medium is its emphasis on visuals. The Dreaming, the ‘place’ where we all go to dream, is impossibly amorphous and constantly changing. The entire series has this dreamlike quality that makes for some of the most stunning artworks in the history of the medium, that certainly could not be effectively created by modern CGI, nor could they be effectively described in a novel without losing some of the beauty and terror along the way. While, obviously, films or books could be made of this series, they would be unable to truly capture the magic, just as one cannot describe the beauty of the Sistine Chapel over the telephone. A lot of the credit for the visual style of The Sandman must go to Dave McKean, who was essentially the artistic director of the entire series and created some stunning cover designs, typography, and interior designs of the books themselves. Open any Sandman volume and you will be met by some haunting images before you have even started reading.
My conclusion can only be this: comic books have an inherent value as a medium, with their own unique methods of conveying emotion, plot, character, and deeper themes that are entirely separate from those of other media. Those methods are no more or less artistically valuable or significant than those used by literature, film or any other artistic medium. They allow for the slow, at-your-own-pace digestion of traditional novels while also imbuing the writing with an important visual element that is not limited by technology or budget, like cinema. Not only that, but the particular format of comic books, with panels, speech bubbles, and so on, can be utilised by the creator to help reinforce what is occurring on the page, just as a film director can use camera angles or a writer can use syntax and paragraphing. It is my sincerest hope that the next generation of comic book writers, many of whom I believe are creating new ‘webcomics’ as I write this, will continue to embrace the comic book medium as its own unique entity separate from film and literature. It deserves love and attention and, most importantly, it deserves an audience as large and diverse as that of the more traditional artistic media.
