First Thought Of The Day

One thing that's strange about comics right now is that the proliferation of films based on comics has weakened if not derailed the assumption that certain comics are unfilmable. Like it occurred to me getting up just now that you could actually quite easily make a film straight out of Cerebus: High Society by establishing Jaka early on and changing the line about the Hsiffies to something like "They're on our side" and turning Moon Roach back into the Roach and as a result have a completely normal, funny film (as normal as a Charlie Kaufman movie, say) which you could animate in the Persepolis style.

I'm probably not communicating that very well, because I don't care about movies based on comics as much I like reading the comics and I have no interest in seeing a Cerebus movie of any kind let alone backseat driving one. It just seems to me our perception of film has changed somehow. Fifteen years ago I would have assumed just about any film closely informed by a comic book would be visually atrocious, impenetrable nonsense, while these days I could see just about anything having a legitimate shot at being either good or bad based completely on traditional merits. Heck, just five years ago the thought of Steve Rude and Mike Baron doing a Nexus movie seemed like insanity because the good guy might kill people and the concept might be difficult, while today's pop culture has shifted just enough where Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' sometimes horrifically nasty take on superheroes built on bits and pieces of squirelly-ass WildStorm Universe side story seems like a perfectly reasonable vehicle for Tom Cruise. Part of this may be that the Lord of the Rings films made a virtue of reduced expectations when it comes to adaptations -- that series wears its "boys' adventure version" label as a badge of honor -- part of it may be the proliferation of comics-influenced visual stylists finally having as much of an influence as they've had for as long of a time as they've had it, and part of it could even be an increased tolerance for unexplained, accrued detail in pop culture efforts. Whatever it is, it's totally weird.
 
posted 7:00 am PST | Permalink
 

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