Since their beginning, superhero flicks have
always scavenged special effects magic and visual
style from the tables of preceding adventure
films rather than their original source material,
comic books themselves. Superman could only fly
through Metropolis after Skywalker flew through
the Death Star Trench; Batman only became a
believable crime-fighter in the vein of Jason
Bourne's hyper-realism; and I groaned aloud in
the theater when my own best-loved comic hero,
Spider-Man, performed a horribly superfluous
Matrix-esque slow motion flip-dodge to evade a
hail of razor-sharp projectiles. Superheroes are
homeless on the silver screen. The characters
that inspired action films on a large scale too
often prefer to dress themselves in the
precedents other films rather than establishing
their own stylistic identities. Good comics do
more than depict fantastical stories about
characters endowed with great power. They create
an environment in which art and symbol converge
to create semiotic storytelling that has the
potential to transcend the written word. Is it
possible then to develop a true "comic book film"
genre, and would it have anything to contribute to the medium as a whole?
My answer: yes and yes—if it can avoid being mere
extensions of the Tarantino B-movie aesthetic and
if it is possible to ban Frank Miller from ever using a camera again.
<http://metaphilm.com/index.php/detail/watchmen/>Link
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Posted By johannes to
<http://www.monochrom.at/english/2009/06/watchmen-semiotic-superheroes.htm>monochrom
at 6/15/2009 03:19:00 PM
