Comic Book Movies

Blair Davis

• Editorial: Rutgers University Press
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780813588780
• Categoría: Médias et arts de la scène
• Categoría: Film et vidéo

Comic Book Movies explores how this genre serves as a source for modern-day myths, sometimes even incorporating ancient mythic figures like Thor and Wonder Woman’s Amazons, while engaging with the questions that haunt a post-9/11 world: How do we define heroism and morality today? How far are we willing to go when fighting terror? How can we resist a dystopian state? Film scholar Blair Davis also considers how the genre’s visual style is equally important as its weighty themes, and he details how advances in digital effects have allowed filmmakers to incorporate elements of comic book art in innovative ways. As he reveals, comic book movies have inspired just as many innovations to Hollywood’s business model, with film franchises and transmedia storytelling helping to ensure that the genre will continue its reign over popular culture for years to come.  

1

Genre

Despite how widespread the “comic book movie” label has become, it is perhaps the most problematic term to ever describe a film genre. The names we give genres shape our expectations as an audience about what a certain film might offer. The western implies a certain time and place (the Old West). Science fiction suggests stories rooted in scientific exploration. The romance promises tales of love, while horror films hint at frightful situations and menacing characters. Comic book movies, however, imply only that their narratives and characters originated in comic books. The term tells us nothing about the common settings of the films or their themes, characters, or images. We might assume comic book films feature superheroes, but this is not guaranteed; numerous films without any hint of caped crusaders or superpowers still get called “comic book movies” by fans, critics, and producers. Instead of giving us a real sense of what the movie will be about, the label only informs us about the source material. We don’t speak of To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), The Godfather (1973), or No Country for Old Men (2007) as “novel movies” or His Girl Friday (1940), Dial M For Murder (1954), or A Few Good Men (1992) as “play movies,” because such terms tell us little about the particulars of these films.

Using an entire medium to describe a certain group of films is an exercise in futility, because a medium itself is not a genre. A medium like comics (or novels or plays) is a unique form of communication used to tell stories in any given genre. Calling something a comic book movie only tells us that the characters in a film have been adapted from another medium. While some people might call His Girl Friday a newspaper movie or Radio Days a radio movie, such terms describe the specific settings and professions of the main characters in ways the “comic book” label does not. We wouldn’t refer to the Transformers or Lego film franchises simply as “toy movies,” because the term tells us nothing about the types of characters, settings, or story lines we might expect to find.

Describing a group of films as a certain genre is a categorical effort to include particular titles because of similarity and exclude others for being different. Films like Stagecoach (1939), The Searchers (1956), The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), Unforgiven (1992), and The Assassination of Jesse James (2007) are called westerns because they are all set in the mid- to late 1800s American West or Midwest, feature cowboys and outlaws who ride horses and shoot pistols, and explore themes of violence, masculinity, and societal belonging. Similarly, we call Flash Gordon (1936), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Star Wars (1977), and District 9 (2009) science fiction films because they involve travel to (or from) other worlds, feature advanced technologies and/or weaponry, and portray themes of social conflict, otherness, and heroism.

The same commonalities are more difficult to find when looking at the titles that make up the genre of comic book movies. How many narrative or character similarities exist between Ant-Man (2015) and American Splendor? Between Green Lantern and Ghost World? There is little comparison between the gladiators of 300 and the vampires of 30 Days of Night (2007) beyond mutual bloodshed, just as Sin City (2005) and Superman Returns (2006) sit far apart in their thematic approaches to identity and morality. But all of these films commonly get grouped together by audiences, journalists, and websites simply because they stem from the same type of source material: comics.

The film scholar Heather Dubrow describes how each genre “functions much like a code of behavior” in cinema (2), while the theorist Torben Grodal sees “a set of dominant features” for each individual genre, “which shapes the overall viewer-expectations and the correlated emotional response” (163). These “dominant features” include the kinds of character types, settings, props, themes, and narrative patterns that recur among certain films, unifying them within a single genre. This repetition of common elements across multiple films establishes the code of behavior that Dubrow describes, in which filmmakers reiterate or build on the patterns established in earlier films.

Audiences also participate in this code, which shapes their expectations for the type of story, characters, and imagery a particular genre film presents. The “emotional response” mentioned by Grodal is typically the comfort found by most viewers in familiar, reoccurring patterns or in how established tropes and images are reinterpreted in new ways.

On the whole, comic book movies don’t adhere to these definitions as neatly as other film genres do. Taking props as one example, both the western and science fiction genres are known for their distinctive weaponry. The six-shooter that Ethan Edwards wields in The Searchers would be out of place in Star Wars, just as Han Solo’s laser blaster would be equally ridiculous in John Wayne’s hands. But comic book movies offer a variety of handguns in Road to Perdition (2002), Sin City, and RED (2010), blasters and laser cannons in Men in Black (1997), Dredd, and Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), not to mention devices like web shooters (The Amazing Spider-Man [2012]), jetpacks and flying suits (The Rocketeer; Iron Man), Wolverine’s claws in the X-Men franchise, and the cosmic Tesseract of the Avengers films. Most such props would appear drastically out of place in a different film. If the gladiators of 300 or the criminals in Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015) suddenly sported claws, wings, or other such biological extensions, the result would appear ludicrous. Such amalgamation was tried in Cowboys and Aliens (2011), though it was largely dismissed by both audiences and critics, who found the anachronisms unsatisfying and unimaginative.

Just as we can’t necessarily expect to find close similarities between any two films based on novels, expecting commonalities across different comic book movies is equally problematic. We can’t even use superpowers to find common ground among comic book movies, given films like 300, Sin City, RED, Kingsman: The Secret Service, Judge Dredd (1995), Creepshow (1982), and Tales from the Crypt (1972) and their sequels or remakes. Supernatural-driven films like The Crow, Blade, Hellboy (2004), and Constantine also spawned sequels and/or television series despite their protagonists not being superpowered in the traditional sense.

Even if the term remains difficult to reconcile according to the theory behind it, the “comic book movie” moniker seems well entrenched. Some terms just become hard to shake, much like the way the “graphic novel” moniker is a contentious one among many comics fans and scholars (since it gets applied to both original works telling a unified story and reprint collections of previously published, serialized comic books). The “comic book movie” label increasingly appeared in the early 2000s as the success of the X-Men and Spider-Man franchises led to a wave of other films based on comics. Film critics and industry reporters and began using the term regularly (and often casually) by 2004, with USA Today calling The Punisher (2004) “Hollywood’s latest comic book movie” (Keck), and the BBC describing Catwoman as “the latest big-budget comic book movie” (“Catwoman Movie Mauled”).

Still, an air of condescension circled about the term, with a New York Times review of Batman Begins pondering, “It’s amazing what an excellent cast, a solid screenplay and a regard for the source material can do for a comic book movie” (Dargis, “Dark”). The San Francisco Gate suggested that with Spider-Man 2, director Sam Raimi “has succeeded in making what Ang Lee tried to make with ‘Hulk,’ a thinking person’s comic-book movie. Raimi and his writers succeed by realizing that the thinking has to be comic-book thinking and the crises have to be comic-book crises. This is not ‘Hamlet’” (LaSalle).

Despite the prevalence of comic book movies more than a decade later, they still get described in the same dismissive terms. A Hollywood Reporter review of Doctor Strange (2016) notes that the presence of respected actors like Benedict Cumberbatch, Tilda Swinton, and Chiwetel Ejiofor makes the film seem classier than it should given the source material: “Do comics-derived films really require thespians of this caliber when the effects and genre elements are their raisons d’etre? Well, no, but they unquestionably class up the joint by injecting wit, elocution, faces with character and commanding presence into material that needs all the elevation it can get to not seem entirely juvenile” (McCarthy).

Even after dominating the box office for over a decade, comic book movies—like comics themselves—are still regarded with dubious eyes by those who question their merit. But what many conceive of as a single genre is in fact composed of films representing a wide range of other genres, from action films to westerns, supernatural films, war movies, and science fiction. Their current popularity has been sustained in part because of the ways in which comic book movies combine elements of different genres together. Comic book movies are not a single genre but a hybrid of many genres, with new permutations like Guardians of the Galaxy, Deadpool, and Doctor Strange proving these adaptations’ enduring appeal.

GENRE CYCLES AND SUBGENRES

All film genres rise and fade in popularity. Some endure for decades, like the western, while others enjoy relatively brief phases lasting only a few years. When the screenwriter David Goyer was asked in 2004 whether he thought comic book movies might soon decline, he replied, “I don’t think so. I think they will ebb and flow like any other genre. . . . I think we’ve got a good five more years of a lot of comic book movies coming out [and] being massive hits. And I think it’ll ebb for a while, and then it will come back. I think it’ll be a genre that will stay” (Otto). While comic book movies have dominated box offices well beyond the five-year window Goyer mentions, the ebb and flow described here relates to genre cycles, which are “relatively brief but intense periods of production of a similar group of genre movies” (Grant 36).

One example of these cycles is the horror genre, which saw an upsurge in monster movies after Dracula’s success in 1931. More horror films followed, including Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932), Island of Lost Souls (1932), The Invisible Man (1933), Bride of Frankenstein (1935), and Dracula’s Daughter (1935). Similarly, X-Men and Spider-Man led to a wave of comic book adaptations, such as X2: X-Men United (2003), Daredevil, Hulk, Catwoman, Hellboy, and The Punisher (2004).

The horror genre also saw a cycle of films in the 1930s based on larger themes of the supernatural beyond just monsters, such as White Zombie (1932), Supernatural (1933), Black Moon (1934), The Black Cat (1934), Mad Love (1935), and The Walking Dead (1936). Both cycles died out in 1936, but a new cycle of films featuring monsters and mad scientists began in 1939 with Son of Frankenstein (1939), followed by The Return of Dr. X (1939), The Mummy’s Hand (1940), The Invisible Man Returns (1940), The Wolf Man (1941), The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), The Mummy’s Tomb (1942), The Return of the Vampire (1943), Son of Dracula (1943), House of Frankenstein (1944), and The Mummy’s Curse (1944). At the same time, another supernaturally themed cycle emerged emphasizing psychologically based horror rather than creatures on the loose, including Curse of the Cat People (1943), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), The Uninvited (1944), Weird Woman (1944), Isle of the Dead (1945), and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945). Similarly, the early 2000s surge in superheroes was balanced by films adapted from comics of other genres, such as From Hell (2001), Ghost World, Road to Perdition, Bulletproof Monk (2003), American Splendor, and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Once again, both cycles of horror films ended together in 1946 as the genre faded in popularity overall. Horror movies returned in the 1950s with various cycles emphasizing teenage protagonists (such as American International Pictures’ I Was a Teenage Werewolf [1957]), gothic monsters (including Hammer Films’ The Curse of Frankenstein [1958]), and atomic-era creature-features (Them! [1954], Tarantula [1955]). Later cycles featured demonic possession (The Exorcist [1973], Abby [1974], The Omen [1975]), psychopathic killers (Halloween [1978], Friday the 13th [1980], Prom Night [1980]), and literary adaptations (Bram Stoker’s Dracula [1992], Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein [1994], The Island of Dr. Moreau [1996]). Since these genre cycles can be organized around a certain theme, premise, character type, and so on, most of them were unlike any other yet remained united under the common banner of the horror genre. As the popularity of a particular cycle faded, the genre either reinvented itself or else disappeared for a time; the same is true of most film genres, which ebb and flow according to audience demands.

The endurance of comic book cinema may depend on producers and audiences understanding how different cycles can occur simultaneously at any given time. Batman’s success in 1989 quickly led to other films based on comic books and strips, such as Dick Tracy (1990), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze (1991), The Addams Family (1991), and The Rocketeer. The often family-friendly tone of that cycle continued with Addams Family Values (1993), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III (1993), Dennis the Menace (1993), The Mask (1994), Richie Rich (1994), and Casper (1995).

But a new cycle also emerged, taking after the darker mood of Batman Returns (1992). The violent imagery of films like The Crow, Timecop (1994), Judge Dredd, and Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight (1995) earned each an R rating. Both cycles ran side by side for a while but stalled toward the end of the decade as the critical and commercial disappointments of Batman and Robin, Spawn (1997), and Steel (1997) saw the genre’s presence in Hollywood dwindle.

The late 1990s saw only a few little-known characters adapted for the screen in Blade and Mystery Men. Blade star Wesley Snipes had connected with audiences in action films like Passenger 57 (1992), Demolition Man (1995), and U.S. Marshals (1998), while Mystery Men starred established comedy actors Ben Stiller, Janeane Garofalo, Paul Reubens, Hank Azaria, Kel Mitchell, and Eddie Izzard. In both cases, Blade and Mystery Men were marketed not using their source material (which few filmgoers were familiar with) but with the familiar codes and viewer expectations of the action, horror, and comedy genres.

The film historian Rick Altman sees the way in which the film industry and its scholars, critics, and audiences understand genres as the process of “constant category-splitting and category-creating” (18). Genres are not unified collections of narrative and visual patterns applied with unwavering consistency. They continually evolve, often fracturing themselves as they follow new directions...