The Best (and Worst) Comic Book Adaptations
What the successful ones share
The comic adaptations that work tend to have two things in common: a creative team that understands what the source material is actually about, and the creative confidence to change what needs changing for a different medium.
Sam Raimi's Spider-Man (2002) is not a faithful adaptation of any specific comic run, but it understood the emotional core of the character: guilt, responsibility and the gap between the person you want to be and the person your circumstances allow you to be. Scott Pilgrim vs the World is not the best-known adaptation, but it is one of the most formally inventive, using the language of both comics and video games to tell a story about nostalgia and arrested development.
Why some fail
The pattern of failed adaptations usually involves one of two problems. The first is too much fidelity: a literal translation of panel compositions and dialogue that worked on the page but becomes flat on screen because the grammar of film is different from the grammar of comics. The second is too little: an adaptation that uses the name and character designs but abandons everything that made the source material worth adapting.
Zack Snyder's Superman films illustrate the second problem. The character's visual identity is preserved; the character's moral identity, his uncomplicated commitment to good, which is the thing that makes Superman interesting as a subject, is discarded.
The television moment
The medium that has adapted superhero comics most successfully in the contemporary period is prestige television rather than film. Watchmen (HBO, 2019) used the original comic as a foundation to examine American history and racial violence, producing something that stands on its own as television. Invincible and The Boys use animation and satire respectively to examine the genre from new angles.
The longer form of television allows for the kind of character development and thematic complexity that the best comics achieve across dozens of issues.
