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Wesleyan University The Honors College Moving Panels: Translating Comics to Film by Logan Ludwig Class of 2009 A thesis submitted to the faculty of Wesleyan University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors in Film Studies Middletown, Connecticut April, 2009 2 I’d like to thank Jeanine Basinger, Scott Higgins, Lisa Dombrowski, Steve Collins, Mark Bomback, Lea Carlson, the entire staff and faculty of the film studies department, my fellow film majors, and my friends and family. All of whom were instrumental in the completion of this thesis. 3 Chapter 1: Previously… Comic books are currently the hot ticket when it comes to new source material for adaptations. Whether it’s long time series featuring characters such as Batman or Spider-Man, new comic properties, or even comics that haven’t been released yet, sequential storytelling offers filmmakers a well of ideas that seem to be ready made for translation to the big screen. The trend doesn’t seem ready to slow down and with the massive success of The Dark Knight Hollywood will likely continue scouring the comic world for more material for years to come. Not only is Hollywood taking comic properties and turning them into films, there is also a growing trend of creators crossing from one medium to the other. Noted Iron Man artist Adi Granov helped design the film version of the character while writer/directors like Joss Whedon are crossing over to write comics more frequently. Because of this it becomes important to ask ourselves how closely related the two media are and just how easy it is to move from comics to film and vice versa. It’s easy, and most certainly correct, to say that comics and film are two distinct media, but this doesn’t get to the root of the issue. Just how much do these two media share, and are comics as natural a fit for translation to the screen as Hollywood seems to believe? My goal is to show just how disparate these two media are, proving that comics are much more than just storyboards for films that would be too expensive to produce. Despite this, it is still impossible to say that the two media are wholly different as they certainly share some aspects of visual storytelling. I intend to demonstrate how the two media possess unique identities in terms of their storytelling capabilities that will still coincide at times. As opposed to films being a 4 better version of comics or comics being a better version of film the two media are merely different. Neither is better, neither is worse, each simply has certain capabilities and certain rules that any creator must learn. And while creators moving from one of these media to the other might have a slight advantage over creators starting out in either of the two, each will require the artist to learn new and varied techniques so they can tell their stories in the most effective fashion possible. The goal of this thesis is not simply to distinguish these media, but to understand how they can relate to one another when they attempt the act of adaptation. This raises an important issue, the notion of fidelity. For the purposes of this thesis fidelity will mean creating equivalent rather than identical effects across the media instead of referring to literal translation of images and content. As it stands the current mood in adapting comics tends towards a strikingly superficial approach to adaptations that still claims fidelity. One need only look at the film version of Watchmen, one of the most important comics of all time, to see this trend. In the words of the actor portraying The Comedian in the film, “’It's so true to the book I can't even begin to tell you how. Everything is so true to the book it's insane. You can put anything that has been built for Watchmen next to a panel in the book and it'll trip you out. It's amazing.’”1 While this may be correct on the most base level, the movie certainly emulates the comic’s look, it misses a crucial aspect of why the original work looked the way it did. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons designed Watchmen to evoke classic comic books and their aesthetics, as such their choices for aspects of the 1 Fred Topel, 2007, Jeffrey Dean Morgan Says Watchmen's Comedian Lives Up to the Book, http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/watchmen/news/1697905/ jeffrey_dean_morgan_says_watchmens_comedian_lives_up_to_the_book, (accessed October 27, 2008). 5 book’s design, such as color, built upon the visual history of comics, something that most of the readers of the book would have been able to grasp. This creates a subtext for the work, commenting on the story and its relation to other stories that have preceded it. When the film version of Watchmen copies this visual style exactly, the subtext breaks down. Viewers of a mainstream film cannot be expected to have knowledge of the history of comic book aesthetics, and because of this the very decision to be “faithful” to the original interferes with the actual intent of the original’s design in the process of adaptation. Perhaps the film could have attempted to replicate aesthetic traditions from previous film adaptations of superhero comics, but this is not the case. Watchmen is tied into a long history of art, and more specifically the art of comics. The story relies on a variety of aesthetic and storytelling norms that have been built up over decades and as such it becomes more than just a simple story but a commentary on the medium as a whole. As such adapting the material to a different medium feels essentially pointless. Brian K Vaughan, a writer who works in comics, television, and in the near future film, put it most simply, “it's like making a stage play of Citizen Kane. I guess it could be OK, but why? The medium is the message.”2 The film ends up failing simply because it is too slavishly faithful to its source and in doing so loses sight of what made the original comic so important and effective. Admittedly Watchmen is an extreme example and it is quite rare for any work to be so strongly tied to its medium. On the other hand I believe it is useful to think about because it helps highlight the fact that 2 Adam Rogers, 2009, Filming the Unfilmable: Behind the Scenes of the Watchmen Movie, http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/1703/ff_watchman?currentPage=all, (accessed March 15, 2009). 6 no matter how close the two media may seem, they are inevitably unique in both their storytelling capacities and their aesthetic histories. It would be easy to go on about how adapting Watchmen is an essentially unproductive task due to the fact that the story and its meaning is inherently tied into comics as a medium, but that would be too specific an example. In this thesis I would like to look into the issue of adapting material between media as a way to better understand the differences and similarities of each medium. As such I have selected three successful film adaptations of comic books that are not merely carbon copies of the material they are adapting. Each features a distinct level of involvement from the original comic creators in the adaptation process. This will let us see just how different comics are from film and just how much liberty can, and must, be taken while still remaining faithful to the original work. For my first case study I have selected Hellboy: Wake the Devil and Hellboy II: The Golden Army. These two works do not feature identical stories but they do feature a director who was an immense fan of the comics and desired to bring them to the world of film along with the help of the original writer/artist. This case helps point out some of the current trends in adapting comics and ways that comics and films relate to the conventions of their media. I have selected Persepolis as my second case study because its film adaptation features the original writer/artist as a writer/co-director, insuring a very close relationship between the two pieces that will allow for a close look at how the process of adapting specific material can lead to either similar or dissimilar results. For my last case study I have selected the film Iron Man and a current ongoing series focused on Iron Man called The Invincible Iron Man. This pairing features a reversal of sorts since the 7 ongoing series was timed to coincide with the film’s release and capitalize on potential new readers. As such it presents a case where film influences the creation of a comic. It also presents the furthest removal between the source material and the adaptation and will provide a unique look into how comics and films work to thrill and excite mainstream audiences of each medium. These case studies can help illuminate the ways these two media are distinct and similar. As it stands there is a relative lack of useful writing on comic book aesthetics, especially when compared to the large and extensive amount of work dealing with aesthetics in film. By and large, current comic book criticism seems to deal with the content of the works as opposed to the form. While there are obviously many critics who understand how comics function this seems to be of less interest to those writing about comics than interpreting what comics “mean” in a more traditional, literary sense. As such, symbolism and metaphors have come to the front in many critical essays while there is a relatively large hole where a formal discussion of aesthetics should reside. This style of literary comic criticism is not particularly useful for this project and is exemplified by Douglas Wolk’s work in his book Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. Wolk’s work tackles larger issues that seem to interest him more than they actually engage with how comics work; to say his book is weighted towards the “What They Mean” side of his title is an understatement. Wolk states that, “Comics are not prose. Comics are not movies. They are not a text driven medium with added pictures; they’re not the visual equivalent of prose narrative or a static version of film. They are their own thing: a medium with its own devices, its own innovators, its own clichés, its own genres and 8 traps and liberties.”3 While I certainly agree with Wolk’s assertion his book doesn’t do much of anything to prove this fact. Most of it deals with his interpretations of his favorite artists’ works or lists of things he loves about comics. There are certainly useful moments here and there where Wolk will break down a page layout and how the reader moves their eye along and comprehends the page, but such analysis is few and far between. Wolk’s work is not particularly useful in developing an understanding of comic book aesthetics and some of the rules that govern them. Also since Wolk is interested only in comics there is a lack of writing on how comics relate to other media, something that Will Eisner and Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, both talk about even if they do not devote large portions of their work to this comparison. McCloud’s work on comics is a step in the right direction from Wolk’s but still doesn’t quite align with what would be useful for this undertaking. McCloud takes a big picture view of comics and ends up focusing more on large-scale theories than the small details of comics. He also has a tendency towards very specific labeling of techniques that he describes, breaking down and defining comics in ways that don’t allow for much wiggle room if one is to accept his definitions. Most of the time this isn’t a major problem since McCloud’s ideas are generally sound, but not everything seems particularly useful and some of his ideas even feel a bit restrictive. For instance, McCloud’s definition of “comics” reads: “Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an 3 Douglas Wolk, Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean, (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2007) 14. 9 aesthetic response in the viewer.”4 While a seemingly good definition of comics, this leaves out one area that McCloud seems slightly biased against, single panel comics. These comics, such as The Family Circus, simply do not fit McCloud’s definition and this speaks to how McCloud views the medium. This is a bit of a problem because by focusing on the sequential nature of comics and other large scale issues McCloud spends less time with the smaller details of aesthetics and how they function within individual panels on a minor scale. This sort of analysis and understanding will be important if I intend to compare panels and shots between comics and films in a direct fashion. Yet, since McCloud never describes how, for instance, a long angle composition can affect a reader his work falls slightly short of what I need. While many of McCloud’s ideas are indeed strong, his focus tends to be on larger issues relating to comics such as how humans have been trained to read from left to right and then top to bottom, why this has occurred, and how this then in turn guides the norms of comic book storytelling. This is interesting and material that is certainly worth exploring but ultimately it, and McCloud’s intent focus on one aspect of comics that he calls closure, makes it slightly off the mark for the more focused aesthetic study I am undertaking. McCloud describes closure as what the reader does in between panels or while they read a panel: they create the motion, time, and actions that one does not see but are suggested by the images. As McCloud puts it, “there lies a medium of communication and expression which uses closure like no other. A medium where the audience is a willing and conscious collaborator and closure is the agent of change, 4 Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, (NewYork, NY: HarperPerennial, 1994), 9. 10 time and motion.”5 While I agree with McCloud to an extent, I believe he is slightly in error in this assertion. Certainly comics do not replicate the same subconscious closure that twenty-four frames per second brings, but I would argue that a cut in a film is very similar to a break in panels in a comic. The viewer or reader is asked to take the previous image and meld it to the current one while they attempt to build the relationship between the two spaces they are being presented with. This is a difference of degree, not kind, between the two media. The real change is that there must be more breaks in a comic since motion or a moving panel is not possible. Closure seems to be one of the key points of McCloud’s argument for what makes comics unique from other media and I simply can’t say I agree with him enough to make his work a solid base for my study of aesthetics. Closure and what happens in between panels will of course be an aspect of this study, but it will not be the unifying force in the way that McCloud seems to assume it must be. He makes good points about other areas of comics and how they function, but his work is based upon the concept of closure and as such it eschews a more specific approach of how panel layout functions or the ways in which the printed page can affect the reading of a comic. This focus seems to build out of McCloud’s fascination with how readers interact with comics. He is very interested in understanding why comic books work and at times will sacrifice understanding how comics work because of this. This approach is easy to observe in the early portion of the book, McCloud talks at length about how different types of pictorial representation will elicit different reactions 5 Ibid., 65.