Comics into Movies

Posted on February 18, 2003 in Writing

Last night’s author contorted her face into interesting positions when she mentioned that The Road to Perdition appeared originally as a comic book. She’d been dis-enthralling me with a lecture which failed to deliver on its promise of revealing how to transform real life into fiction when the topic came up as a response to a question about selling your work to the film industry. The writer, a former archaeology professor, seemed to think that this was a kind of blasphemy. Too bad Teresa from In Sequence wasn’t there to fill her in on more of the history of comics becoming movies.

I don’t see it as an abomination. Writers can learn something from comics. As can a few politicians. I’ve been impressed, for example, with how the enemies of cartoon super heroes are usually handled, especially by the Marvel Group. They wage war against imperfect heroes, but when you examine their life stories closely, you understand just why they are so pissed off. This is a technique exported directly from the psychological novel (it’s no coincidence that Stan Lee’s early ambitions were to become a fiction editor).

Some writers feel threatened by the phenomenon. It’s the old “I won’t get my rightful cut of the pie” syndrome. (I don’t expect my rightful cut, but I keep writing anyways.) I certainly feel that was the case with last night’s author. It was the old “limited good” world view that writers seem to have expropriated from ethnologies about Central American peoples. I don’t feel threatened. I’ve examined comic books and films based on them with interest. The thing I seek is the Great Themes that unify the stories. I don’t think most comic book writers needed to read Joseph Campbell to understand the concept of the Hero: it came to them naturally. And I dare say that I feel reading comics will help many a struggling fiction writer return to her or his roots, to understand that what counts is the story.

Some years ago, I read a book which advanced the theory that if today’s intellectuals want to reach the masses, they should use comic books. The bookstore had piles of “simplified” tracts about evolution, etc. written in this style. And who doesn’t remember Marx for Beginners or Freud for Beginners? These books worked because they mixed great ideas with attractive illustrations of the concepts being explained.

My advice to writers of my generation is not to write the comics off. I don’t have the skill to do the illustrations for one myself, but if offered the chance to write the script for one with a different flair, I’d probably accept.

Comics and urban legends are America’s fairy tales. Great national writers like Yeats didn’t spurn their country’s traditions? Why are American writers often so hot to piss on ours?