The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1666: Marvel Spring Special #1, 1988 (Movie Adaptation Week)

In an effort to get back to regular updates, I'm doing some theme weeks. This week we'll be looking at film adaptations. Like novelizations of films, these are always a bit of a dodgy prospect. The comic can't deviate too far from the source material, though there are instances where the comic was created from an earlier draft of a script and features things not in the film. I imagine that artists would also try as hard as possible to give the characters in the comic as much resemblance to the actors as possible, but in a stylized art form, that's not always easy. As such, adaptations can disappoint for not cleaving quite so photo-realistically to the film they adapt.

I've never seen the Elvira, Mistress of the Dark film. Or if I have, there's no recollection of it in my brain. I know of Elvira, mainly because of her prominent cleavage that was in the background of my adolescence, but I don't think I ever watched any of her television shows. For those not in the know, Cassandra Peterson plays Elvira as a late-night horror film host, sort of a sexy version of the Crypt Keeper. She's also featured in comics where she plays a similar role. At some point her popularity must have crested and she got her own feature film. The story is somewhat akin to Footloose, though with a slinky goth/valley girl in the role of agitator rather than Kevin Bacon. The sultry Elvira inspires the youth of the town to overthrow the restrictive laws of the older generation.

One thing that I'm curious about is whether or not each discreet scene in the comic follows the film. I suppose this would hinge on whether or not the artists were able to see the film prior to creating the comic. If not, I imagine that Colon made decisions for each scene that might have been substantially different from the choices director James Signorelli made. I am not, however, going to sit through the film just for the sake of comparison, I'm afraid. The story just wasn't that good.

Join me at the movies again tomorrow, won't you?

"Hey! I've seen "The People's Court"! I'm entitled to one phone call and a strip search!"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 880: Droids #6, February 1987

One of my favourite Star Wars comics is called Tag and Bink are Dead, written by Kevin Rubio, and styled after Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. It follows the adventures of two rebel soldiers who pop in and out of the backgrounds of many of the famous scenes in the original Star Wars trilogy. It's very clever, and trades on the ubiquity of knowledge of the events of Star Wars to increase its humour.

I'd kind of hoped that today's comic would be similar in execution, and it is to a certain extent. What keeps this comic from achieving the same level of metatext and commentary as Tag and Bink, though, is that this comic is explicitly linked to a children's cartoon. Droids was relatively successful when it came out, as was it's companion show Ewoks. But they were both definitely designed for younger audiences, and the comics versions are too. Instead of humorous entrances and exits into familiar action, which does happen a little bit, we instead get pretty much a retelling of the first half of Episode 4, interspersed with strange little side adventures (like with a weird race of mole creatures that live under the desert on Tatooine and worship an "acid lizard." Had the comic not been linked to the cartoon, I imagine we might have seen amusing commentary on the actions we've come to know and love, and different perspectives on how the events progress. What is C-3P0's take on the Rebellion, and the frankly haphazard way that Luke, Han, Chewie, and Leia go about their business of overthrowing a dictatorship? Would he even want that to happen?

Were the retelling a bit more self-aware, I'd likely track it down. But it's not, so we get a little taste of what the Droids comic and cartoon were like, how Star Wars (episode 4, that is) might have played out as a children's cartoon, and of Marvel's second (?) attempt to adapt this story. The first one, I think, was more successful.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 691: Battlestar Galactica #1, March 1979

We really should all thank our lucky stars for Ronald D. Moore. Though he starts out with a good idea, the original execution of Battlestar Galactica was just bad. Even here, in the comics adaptation, it's bad. Galactica tried too hard to be the next Star Wars when it was so much better suited to the kind of intelligent social commentary the reimagined series gave us in the early 2000s.

But televisual execution isn't all that's damaging this comic. Though drawn by Ernie Colon, an excellent illustrator, the arrangement of panels and speech bubbles, the indistinguishability of some of the main characters, even the colour palate, all work together to make a really uninspiring comic. There are some fine moments. The destruction of the Battlestar Atlantia is well-depicted. But a few nice panels can't save this comic from being confusing and disappointing.

Now, this is not to say that the comics adaptations of the 2000s series were much better. I was never able to get into them, despite loving the show. Perhaps some stories are simply better suited to the medium of their creation.

Onward.