Take Comic Books Seriously

Apparently I acted too hastily. Forty-five years later, comic books are the common currency of contemporary Hollywood.

Today’s mass moviegoers might not read novels or go to Broadway plays. But they sure know Superman, Spider-Man, Batman and, now, Iron Man.

This should be the point where your grumpy critic goes on a rant against cultural trash and lowest-common-denominator literature. But I won’t.

For one thing, the recently released “Iron Man” is too good to be Exhibit A in a dumbing-down-of-America argument.

And for another, I’ve a newfound respect for comic books.

Or perhaps I should say “graphic novels.” Unlike most comic book series, which are the open-ended adventures of iconic heroes and heroines, graphic novels are just that — novels told in pictures, usually in just one installment.

And Hollywood is realizing that in today’s graphic novels they have a trove of new stories and fresh protagonists. What’s more, graphic novels come with their own visual styles … styles that have been cannily appropriated in the big-screen adaptations of graphic novels such as “300,” “Persepolis” and “Sin City.”

The difference between a comic book and a graphic novel is ambition. Both tell stories through pictures and dialogue. But the graphic novels that have impressed me are literary — complex stories, rich psychological insights, haunting moral questions.

I’m lucky enough to be the father of a graphic novel fanatic who buys as gifts for her old man the best titles around.

That’s how I became familiar with Craig Thompson’s astounding Blankets, a 600-page memoir of growing up in a conservative Christian home and discovering (and losing) one’s first love.

For my last birthday I got copies of Brian Michael Bendis and Marc Andreyko’s Torso (the fact-based story of a serial killer in Depression-era Cleveland that employs period photographs and even original newspaper headlines), Alison Bechdel’s FunHome, (a devastating autobiography about growing up in a seriously dysfunctional family) and Jeff Lemire’s Essex County Trilogy (a monumental look at the lives of fictional characters living in and around the author’s rural Ontario hometown).

Pictures or no pictures, these are ambitious, heart-wrenching and sublimely beautiful works of literature. A film already is in the works based on Torso, and I’d love to see movie adaptations of the others.

The importance of graphic novels and Hollywood became clear when the Walt Disney Studios announced it was creating Kingdom Comics, “an innovative new venture of developing graphic novels to create new film projects for the studio as well as re-imagining and rejuvenating motion pictures from the Disney live-action vault.”

This is a first. Instead of picking up film options on graphic novels as they’re published, a Hollywood studio is going to produce its own graphic novels, some original and some based on films and TV shows already in the Disney library. A new crop of writers who weren’t even born when “Davy Crockett” or “20,000 Leagues…” or “Darby O’Gill and the Little People” were filmed will get a chance to re-imagine those characters and stories for a new audience.

This rebranding may be a stroke of genius or a creative dead end. To me it sounds smart and efficient — it doesn’t cost much to have a writer and an artist sit down to create a graphic novel. If only one in a dozen of the Disney-produced graphic novels pops up on the radar of mainstream culture worthy of cinematic adaptation, Kingdom Comics would be cost efficient.

Moreover, Disney operates a huge publishing empire, issuing books and magazines in 85 languages in 75 countries and reaching more than 100 million readers a month. I’m betting that this new crop of Disney graphic novels will get plenty of ink in those publications.

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