Adaptation of a Comic Book to Film



Adaptation of a Comic Book to Film

Introduction

The process of making a film from a book is known as adaptation. Over the period of many decades, the film makers have been making films based on the famous books including short stories, biographies, novels, comic books and plays. A number of problems arise while adapting a comic book to film because of the fundamental differences between them. This essay analyzes the argument of Craig Hight according to which “American Splendor” by Shari Springer Berman and Bob Pulcini, is a successful adaptation of the comic book by Harvey Pekar.

Discussion

About American Splendor

The movie, American Splendor is a comic book adaptation/biopic/ love story/documentary “sick” flick. It is a combination of many styles. It includes a touch of 'Mr. Deeds goes to town' as the little guy took on the world and earned a score draw. The story is about Harvey Pekar, who was a file clerk and had divorced twice. He was almost crushed under the weight of his own problem and ordinariness, but ultimately his averageness was transformed into art. This happened as he became friends with Robert Crumb, who was an underground comic artist. Pekar showed the stories to Crumb, which he had written on the topics of every day frustrations and old ladies at supermarkets. Crumb worked on the stories and combine they developed a set of comic books detailing about super powers and super heroes.

Issues and their Solutions in Adaptation of American Splendor

Various critics and media professional believe that it is not worth to adapt comics to the movies, as most of the work done in this regard did not add anything and simply translates the original. Most often, the movies based comics do not prove to be successful despite of the success of the original comics (Lefevre, 2007). The comics' readers do not feel much appeal to watch the film versions of the comics they have read. Although some of the comics' adaptations went blockbusters including Donner's Superman (1978) and Sam Raimi's Spider-Man (2002), the audience might not have included the comics' readers. Thus, the success of these movies does not explain the success of comic adaptation. Another important objections posed by Lefevre states that most of the times it is not possible to adapt the comic books into live action movies, because the adaptation into movies fundamentally disturb the metaphoric style of comics which is essential part of the story telling.

The argument of Craig Hight seems to be valid upon careful analysis of the movie and associated comic. The directors Berman and Pulcin have successfully managed the adaptation of a comic book, to an interesting movie. The directors drafted three different version of Pekar. First, Paul Giamatti portrays the character, second is Pekar himself, and thirdly, stop motion Harvey pops up to take the character forward. Using these three versions of Pekar, his life events are covered through documentary and interviews. The movie successfully proves the fact the comics and film are ...