Masks, Capes, and Crime-Fighting: Dawn of the Comic Book TV Show
Thursday, 26 May 2016
It seems like every other TV show right now is either about superheroes or based on comic books. Is it a way for studios to capitalise on second-rate superheroes or perhaps a chance to stay true to the source material?
There are currently 16 television programs based on comic books and, wait for it, 39 upcoming series confirmed or are in active development. From big names such as The Punisher to an indie-cult offering Preacher, there is no doubt that soon masks, capes, and crime-fighting will dominate your TV schedule.
Such is the prevalence that last night #ComicBookTVShows was the theme of Comedy Central’s @midnight #HashtagWars. The spoof game show featured The Living Dead scribe Robert Kirkman and became a Twitter worldwide trending topic.
While fans and the moviegoers anticipate the latest box-office iteration of familiar characters such as Superman, Batman, Iron Man and Captain America, less familiar ones like Luke Cage, Iron Fist and Archie are coming to the small screen.
Peter Allen, 46, an award winning Australian filmmaker, animator, and visual effects artist for Iloura thinks that part of the reason behind the influx of adaptation is because darker-toned comic books and antiheroes fits better in TV’s longer form.
Classic superheroes such as Superman is deemed too powerful and morally perfect to stand alongside characters like The Sopranos’ Tony Soprano or Breaking Bad’s Walter White.
“Television works best for characters with human flaws that allow for both visible growths over the life of the series and believable social conflict with supporting characters,” he says.
Big studios Marvel and DC’s approach to designate their most popular icons for movies is also a pragmatic decision intended to capitalise on the film’s buzz to sell toys and merchandise.
“This allows them to maintain a consistent creative universe across both large and small screens without risking them huge amounts of money a feature film requires on a lesser known character,” says Allen.
Each studio has their own strategy to decide which properties would end up where.
Disney-owned Marvel is extremely successful with their family-friendly silver screen adaptations and use lesser known characters for shows on TV and streaming services to expand their Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Created for US network ABC, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D and Agent Carter was relatively successful, but Netflix’s Daredevil and Jessica Jones has won both fans and critics for its noir-treatment, creative retelling of the source material, and perfect casting.
DC, owned by Warner Bros., however have struggled to establish a successful movie franchise since the end of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy.
Although a relative box-office success, Batman v Superman were poorly received by critics and has failed to bolster interest for upcoming movies within the DC Extended Universe.
But the studio has found a lot of success on CW with shows such as Arrow, and The Flash, choosing to completely separate their TV and feature film universes and are casting different actors for the movies.
Comics ≠ Superheroes
Superhero comics began in the 1930s and took hold of the public’s imagination especially in the years leading up to World War II.
The era termed The Golden Age of Comic Books gave birth to the superhero archetype introduced in Superman, Captain America, and Wonder Woman, who at the time were given prominent roles fighting Nazis and Japanese Imperial forces.
For Allen, comic book heroes play to a sense of powerlessness and a desire to have agency in an overwhelmingly large and intimidating world, “Superheroes are a welcome fantasy, the idea that a powerful, morally upright individual can make a positive difference in the world.”
The familiar characters seen in summer movies generally comes from The Golden and Silver age of comics, which ended in the 1970s.
But obscure titles such as Watchmen, Sin City and Hellboy comes from The Dark Age of Comic Books, where main characters are more psychologically complex and the story takes on subject matter based on contemporary themes such as drug-use and urban poverty, as well as science-fiction and fantasy.
Lately, it looks like TV is a better fit for these darker-themed comic books, which is proved by the popularity of The Walking Dead, and the newly released, Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen-produced Preacher.
Preacher is a supernatural tale that features a hard-drinking pastor as the main character, packed with sex, blood, bullets, angels, demons, vampires and all sorts of deviants. The comic book also has an army of die-hard fans worldwide.
Highly anticipating Preacher, Wayne Nichols, 37, acclaimed Australian comic book artist who has penciled titles such as Incredible Hulk, Exiles, and Orphan Black, thinks that TV’s retelling could draw attention to the source material and garner interest from people who would not normally read comic books.
But he also notices a downside, “If the television adaptation is not up to par with the quality of the comic book, people may be turned off from continuing to read the comic.”
Nichols emphasises the involvement of the creator in the production of the TV adaptation as key to a successful adaptation.
“This is partly the reason why we get TV shows and movies that end up panned by fans and critics. The people making the TV shows perhaps don’t have the necessary creative vision to do justice to the source material,” he says.
Meanwhile, Down Under…
Not based on comic books at all, ABC Australia’s Cleverman employs the superhero genre to effectively juggle between entertainment and political commentary.
The series, which premieres on June 2, draws on Aboriginal mythology and tells a tale about segregated ‘hairypeople’ with superhuman powers that exists within contemporary society. It brings to mind X-Men, which also deals with the theme of coexistence and the struggle for cohesion.
For comic artist Stu Campbell, 35, winner of this year’s Gold Ledger–the most prestigious Australian comic art award–for his comic book Neomad, trying to bring his creation into animated format has been challenging.
Neomad is part of arts and social company Big hArt’s YijalaYala project, a community development project based in Roebourne in Northern Western Australia that involves the participation of over 50 community members.
Through 18 months of content creation workshops, community members contribute to activities ranging from cultural consultation for story development, colouring panels using Photoshop, recording voice overs for the interactive iPad version, and acting and film-making for the short films and music videos.
Now together with Big hArt, Campbell has been aiming to leverage the community’s newly gained skills to produce an animated version of Neomad.
But the combination of community development with a commercial production creates a unique situation since it costs a lot of money and takes more time to produce and train at the same time, which has been deterring potential investors.
“But the pay off is by the end of the project we’ll have a new generation of indigenous creators equipped with the skills and experience to tell more of their stories,” says Campbell.
“Aboriginal Australians have been around of fifty thousand plus years, they have a lot of stories to tell.”
The Good and The Bad
Aside from the narrative and stylistic problems that might arise from not involving comic creators in the production process, the current onslaught of comic book TV shows poses a number of unique opportunities and problems.
Firstly, even without needing the budget for visual effects to destroy an entire city block, the action-heavy Daredevil and the supernatural theme of Preacher still needs a lot of money for choreography and costume.
It is save to say that comic book adaptations need more money to create than original drama series, but that’s where new players like Netflix, HBO, and AMC comes in with their distribution prowess to co-produce adaptations with relatively more freedom than free-to-air networks.
Secondly, comic books put extra emphasis on the central characters. With a lot of top actors attached to their own comic character, soon the supply of capable actors to portray the already popular comic characters will inevitably be depleted.
The success of Iron Man in 2008, which gave Marvel the confidence to create a whole transmedia universe, owes largely to the successful portrayal of Iron Man’s alter-ego, Tony Stark, by Robert Downey Jr.
Thirdly, the popularity of the TV show can create high demands from viewers, which leads to the business-logic of the studios to prevail and overtake the plot of the comic book.
There’s only too many examples of this happening, with the latest being the current season of Game of Thrones.
Recently it was reported that Robert Kirkman criticised George RR Martin for letting the showrunners to take over his characters and produce the sixth season before he finishes The Winds of Winter, the book that the season is supposed to be based on.
In addition, there is also a chance that weak distribution and marketing strategy hinder the adaptation from taking off.
Powers, a popular comic series with Sharlto Copley in the lead was adapted last year by Sony and distributed by The Playstation Network. The PlayStation should have been a doorway to the global market, but instead Sony decided to only make it available in The United States.
Finally, Allen thinks that amount of comic book interest might increase competition for shows intended directly for television, which from development side might lose to the already established characters and story arcs, as well as fan-base of an existing comic book series.
“As more comic book properties are turned into TV programs we risk losing original content such as Breaking Bad or Mad Men,” he says.
Nichols however, is not particularly worried about the TV treatment detracting his enjoyment from reading comic books, which he describes as “an inspiring and joyful experience.”
“If it’s no good, I can always go back and re-read the comics,” he says.
