From Static to Motion Pictures
Liam Burke looks at the growing trend for making comic books into moving pictures.

‘Based on a Comic Book’, are words that immediately send caped heroes and nocturnal vigilantes Biff!, Zap! and Pow! across the silver screen of our minds. This superhero reflex, which has punters thinking Ghost Rider rather than Ghost World, has been created, in part, by Hollywood’s efforts to give every character ever to don spandex the cinematic treatment. This inevitable but misleading association has prompted many, more grounded comic book adaptations such as From Hell, 300 and A History of Violence to adopt the more acceptable term ‘Graphic Novel’ (essentially a comic book with more pages but less critical derision); while Sam Mendes’s Road to Perdition further distanced itself from its comic book source, dropping the ‘graphic’ from its early promotional work. Whatever response ‘Based on a Comic Book’ elicits, in recent years the phrase and its derivatives have become a permanent fixture on film posters and multiplex marquees.

POW!
Over the coming months Irish theatres will join the rest of the world in a four-colour whitewash, as no less than seven comic books make the leap from page to screen in a single bound. Most will be of the Superhero variety, and, without a Fantastic Four in sight, they appear a promising bunch. Chief among these will be the Batman sequel The Dark Knight with Cillian Murphy once again donning his straw mask to play Bat-tormentor The Scarecrow, and Hellboy II: The Golden Army, which includes shots of the Giant’s Causeway – no doubt to be blurred beyond recognition by some form of computer-generated japery. But before the superheroics comes something heroically super in the form of Persepolis, artist Marjane Satrapi’s account of growing up in Iran during the Islamic revolution and Iran-Iraqi war. This monochromatic delight – a Cannes Jury prize winner and Academy Award nominee – is the artist’s adaptation of her own comic book/graphic novel/picture book, which conveys a child’s perspective by using simple imagery to tackle complex issues.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 122.