We continue our coverage of the Thought Bubble 2012: Script-to-Screen panel, hosted by Impact's editor John Mosby and featuring Charlie Adlard (artist: The Walking Dead), Jock (artist: The Losers, Batman, Dredd, Snapshot) , Robin Furth (author: The Dark Tower: A Concordance, research assistant to Stephen King) and Phil Noto (artist: Jonah Hex, X-23, Batgirl).
John Mosby: We talk about the link between comics and tv/film, but, of course, the ‘Net is the place where a lot of projects are either finding a home or generating the real buzz… forums, webisodes. People reading comics and watching movies on the same devices now…
Phil Noto: It’s a double-edged sword… I mean… Snakes on a Plane? They thought it would make $60million on its opening weekend and it turned out people were happy to watch something on the internet for two-minutes, but didn’t want to see the whole film.
Jock: Wasn’t ComiXology one of the biggest downloaded apps? They sold ten million units or some crazy figure? It was a lot. I think that’s GOT to be because people are seeing material at the cinema or their smart phones. People download the movie, see they can get a comic on their same platform and decide it’s better than going into a sweaty shop on a Wednesday. Of course, then the comic doesn’t necessarily look anything like the film!”
Charlie Adlard: Not to contradict, but I don’t think it impacts THAT much – not the iconic characters. I think the first Tim Burton DID impact on Batman. The comic sold a lot more, but nowadays… I doubt this year’s Spider-man movie impacted in ANY way or created a significant spike in sales of the comic. Everyone knows who Spider-man or Superman are. People have made an informed choice already. I suppose The Avengers may have made an impact on some titles with some of its focus on second-tier characters as well. But films about less mainstream titles (Ghost World, Hellboy etc)… THEY are the ones that will make an impact on their comic sales. Half the people in my queues at cons say ‘Oh, I watched the TV show first, THEN I discovered the comic-book…’ THAT’s an impact… but that’s when people aren’t aware that it is/was a comic first. THEN they’ll seek it out…
Though it’s interesting that they introduced Agent Coulson to the film series and just when they (spoiler alert!) kill the character off, they actually launch him in the comics.
John Mosby: I don’t think it’s a spoiler any more, but it does look like Coulson somehow survived and will now appear in the S.H.I.E.L.D. tv series.
PN: I think Agent Coulson could be the Bobba Fett of the Avengers. One guy… and he becomes a fan-favourite! (laughs).
Jock: You can pick up an Avengers comic and it’s not the Avengers you expect (from the film). Where DO you start if you don’t know this stuff? I’m wary of non-creative choices… where it’s a case of how do we shoe-horn all this in? That’s never a good way to write a good story…
PN: I think comics have to keep all their different series and continuities… people need some one-and-done issues. It’s an instant turn-off if there’s too much continuity and you have to buy all these previous issues to make sense of it.
John Mosby: Some projects seem to lean towards specific formats if their adaptations are going to work to the best effect…
CA: Yeah, the thing about Sin City is that it HAD to visually look like that. If they just took the story and not the stylistic side of it, you’d just have the most cliché-ridden, bog standard film-noir story ever conceived. All the bullet-points of film nor in one movie and that would be it. They had to do the visuals to make it stand out.
Jock: As Charlie says, it depends on what the project is.
John Mosby: The Walking Dead needs a television series if it’s to be a saga rather than a one-off story…
CA: Robert and I were very reluctant to give The Walking Dead away as a film. I’m not saying we would have point-blank refused to have done that and we had plenty of offers… but we held out for a television series because that’s the way it would work better. If The Walking Dead was a film, I really doubt it would have had the same impact. It needs the longevity of a television series, otherwise it would be just another zombie movie. You wouldn’t have had the characters able to ‘breathe’ as much as they do in the comics and the television series. In a small way we view a film option with a more cautious eye than a TV option…
With HBO, FX, Showtime etc you’re also less worried they will soften your vision. The budgets are there now as well – you don’t have to worry about it looking ‘cheap’ just because it’s television. The last ten or so years, television has really changed.
John Mosby: One of the questions from the audience is about animation and anime. We ARE seeing more animated projects which you’d think comics could easily lean towards, but with anime – though it’s much bigger than it has been – it’s still not in the western mainstream as much as it is in the East…
PN: Honestly? I think it’s the fact that as soon as something is a ‘cartoon’, they lose three-quarters of their audience in theatres and it’s perceived as ‘just a kids movie’. That’s the short answer…
CA: Yeah, the western view of animation is that it’s for kids. If you are making an adult version of a kids’ format, no-one is going to see it. But it has worked in Japan and has worked for decades… Here it’s a more limited market, though Hollywood has dipped its toes in it.
RF: It’s definitely a very different cultural thing. As a woman who has talked to women who work in manga or who have spent time in Japan… they talk about the division of readership. There’s a huge, huge –more than half of it – readership by women. It just works differently, but it’s fascinating to see that. Studio Ghibli is HUGE but it hasn’t really ‘broken through’ to the mainstream here yet. That’s easy to forget… the fact that something YOU love isn’t always appreciated by the mainstream.
CA: If you stopped the average person on the street and asked them about ‘Studio Ghibli, they wouldn’t know what you were talking about. They’d probably just say ‘Oh, down there, third on the left…’ (laughs)
RF: It’s going to take somebody with a lot of clout who wants to really make a go of it to push it. Is the audience there? Will they respond to something different? It’s interesting… I was re-reading V for Vendetta. The way that was handled, especially with the mask (being kept on) etc … that hadn’t really been done before. That was risky. When one film does something it CAN change the whole scene.
John Mosby: Dredd was highly anticipated, but internationally, it didn’t pick up the audiences. Is the character just too ‘British’ an institution?
Jock: Dredd did very well here, it was number one, but in the States it did nothing at all. I can’t say why that was, but perhaps people’s perception of Judge Dredd was still the Stallone version.
PN: Comics are a niche. 2000AD comics in the states… forget it. The ONLY frame of reference for them was the Stallone film.
CA: You got the opening sprawling shot of Mega-City One in the original movie and I wouldn’t be surprised if those who don’t read the comic immediately went ‘Oh, look it’s Blade Runner!’ You might want to get up and scream that mega-City One was before that, but it wouldn’t do any good… I think that’s why John Carter didn’t work at all. It doesn’t matter what came first, it’s a film that comes after you’ve seen years and years of films that are already like it… so it LOOKS generic.
John Mosby: Don’t get me started on John Carter. The director Andrew Stanton and I had something of a stand-off at the press conference! (laughs). He didn’t like my saying that taking out the ‘…of Mars’ seemed counter-productive. His answer was that they did it because they didn’t want to put people off who didn’t like science-fiction. Which, I told him, seems… a bizarre rationale.
CA: Science-fiction is a massive genre, WHY would it put people off?
PN: Actually, I’m convinced that because John Carter was Disney…before that film their biggest bomb was Mars Needs Moms… I guarantee you there was a board meeting and they were saying ‘You can’t have Mars in the title because the last Mars film bombed so badly!’
CA: Could it be ‘John Carter of Jupiter’????” (laughs)
RF: I remember one of the ‘funniest’ things being in a room for The Dark Tower and people were saying: ‘We don’t really want this to look like a western…’ (rolls eyes). What DO you say to that?
PS: I think if they follow the model of The Avengers and get good people working on it and let them do their thing… that’s good. Just make it a good Star Wars movie…top writer, top director…
CA: I viewed it with such disinterest. When it was announced I thought ‘I was done with it - and George Lucas - ages ago…’ The fact he’s not involved is actually a plus. To be honest, it can only be better than the three prequels, so that’s a positive… I mean this is Disney, the ultimate in branding for kids, so it’s almost a perfect pairing…
Jock: Yeah, I’m somewhere between the two. I thought ‘Who cares?’ but then I thought ‘This could actually be really good…’. Maybe I’m fooling myself that it’ll be better this time… (laughs).
