Added: 438 days ago by Kevin Holmes | Posted in: Nerdcore | 9 Comments

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<div align='center'><a href='http://www.kontraband.com/blog/15413/Films-Comics-Video-Games-The-Eternal-Cycle/'>Films, Comics & Video Games - The Eternal Cycle</a><br><div align='center'></div><br><a href='http://www.kontraband.com/blog'>See more like this on kontraband.com</a></div>

Part I - Comics and film

There are many similarities (and differences) between films, comic books and video games - all enduring and popular 20th century art-forms. The obvious ones being all three are visual mediums and all are considered forms of popular entertainment. But they also share other similarities, the fact that they are mostly a collaborative effort (though not always the case), sometimes involving tens, hundreds or (with film) even thousands of people. And each had, to a degree, a golden age, in the Western world at least, in the last century. All have worked their way into our consciousness (along with television) so that now popular characters are instantly recognisable to us like Jungian archetypes lurking in our collective unconsciousness. Popular phrases have entered the public lexicon or become known acknowledgements among friends or like-minded individuals, so that we only have to refer casually to them and people will know what we are inferring. They have become the new cultural language, the language used not only by geeks and fanboys, but also by everyday people immersed in everyday dialogue.

The influence each exerts on each other can be felt in many ways, the obvious one being the act of adaptation, whether this is a whole story or just a character. All three mediums have been in a ménage-a-trois regarding this with varying degrees of success. We often see Hollywood brutalising comic book and gaming folk-lore in its desperate bid to realise the next mega-blockbuster. What better way to guarantee an audience than by adapting something which you know already has a massive following? This has worked both well and not so well for comics, but video games have fared far worse. A good video game adaptation has eluded Hollywood again and again; it mostly takes all the intelligence from the games, leaving them a narrative desert of brain-dead conventions and lazy interpretations, if not completely stylistically redundant.

The fact that they are all considered forms of leisure or entertainment may prove why they hold so much influence on each other, or perhaps they all just share basic ideas of kinetic interplay, the juxtaposition of images and sounds, whether this is implied, as in the soundless world of the comic, or actual.

Both cinema and the comic form have a long, fraught history that goes back to the very beginnings of the comic-book as a medium. Although on the surface the relationship between comic books and Hollywood would seem the typical Hollywood story of appropriation and regurgitation, these mediums actually have a far more reciprocal, symbiotic history. As visual arts both emerging in the early part of the Twentieth Century the cross over between mediums was a mutual relationship of shared exploration and innovation. In the 1930s before the Golden Age of the comic book, Hollywood had already adapted Alex Raymond's comic strip Flash Gordon which gave the cinema its Saturday matinee serials. While they may not have been made on the biggest budgets, they remained a blueprint for adventure stories and influenced early sci-fi films with their laser guns, anti-gravity belts and spaceships, which in turn influenced future comic book writers and artists, and eventually game designers.

The comic strips where Flash Gordon had his origins were, however, to change and a more sophisticated art form was to emerge, a form that Will Eisner would go on to call Sequential Art. The comic book's bastardised birth came from an amalgamation of the wordiness of the pulps (The Shadow et al) and the three or four strung panels of the newspaper comic strip. The early comic books were just collected volumes of these strips; while these were brilliantly drawn and well written they were designed to appear in a daily newspaper - with a weekly cliff-hanger - not collected together in one volume as a comic book. As such they appeared quite static on the page, the stories too contrived and out of place - this new art form was struggling to find its feet, its chance birth had meant it didn't know which way it was heading. What it needed was some direction, a mould it could use again and again; what it needed was to create its own mythos. In June 1938, in Action Comics No.1 the super hero was born in the guise of Superman. Originally conceived as a newspaper strip character it was in the comic book that he came into his own and begat, over 70 years ago, that stalwart of pop culture, the comic book superhero. The creators of this 'golem' were two teenage Jewish kids, writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, 17 and 19 respectively. What they brought to the comic book was to transform it and create a multi-million dollar industry along the way. Shuster imbued his panels with a certain cinematic presence, forging three panels into one to show Superman bounding over and around tall buildings. He used cinematic techniques to convey drama, to tell a story, to not only serve the narrative but embellish it, enrich it.

Other early comic book writers and artists would also look to cinema for their inspiration. Bob Kane, creator of Batman, was heavily influenced by the movies - using cinematic vocabulary to frame shots, using close-ups of terrified faces or tracking shots or a zoom-in over panels to create dramatic tension. Jack 'The King' Kirby, one of the greatest and most influential comic book creators was a huge movie fan. The Universal horror movies and the early James Cagney, George Raft and John Garfield Warner Brothers gangster flicks were a huge influence on him and he borrowed ideas freely from them. He went on to create or co-create some of the most endearing and familiar comic book characters that we know, practically creating the entire Marvel Universe. Comic book artists, like Kirby, experimented with their art, playing around with the spatial frame-work, the lighting, pacing, emanating how cinema used these - framed its shots and sequences, pushing the medium, letting cinematic techniques guide and inspire it, allowing it to thrash out its own individual language.

Under the visionary guise of Orson Welles - the errant and restless son of Hollywood - the comic book was to get, in a sense, its live action equivalent. Welles created the perfect unification of image and narrative when he wrote and directed Citizen Kane (1941). It seemed to epitomise what Will Eisner, creator of The Spirit, realised in the comic book - the blurring of the line that separates image and narrative (something prevalent in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen), both becoming one synergetic whole. Comic book artists were already experimenting, like Welles, with odd angles, extreme close-ups and quirky juxtapositions of foreground and background, the two forms developing in an unseen, synchronistic bond. The films narrative approaches were directly reflected in the pages of comic innovator Eisner. He was the first artist to venture 'outside' the panels in his comic books, where characters and sounds would spill over and onto the page. He would break free of the nine panelled layouts and the limitations this brought, creating dislocated, overstretched and circular panels and claim the medium as Art, dragging it away from its pulp and low caste origins - a unique idea at the time, a lone trumpet call over an empty battlefield. In 1978, the year when the first big-budget superhero movie (the one that paved the way for today's never-ending crop) Superman: The Movie was released, he would create and release the world's first modern graphic novel called A Contract With God, helping the form to be realised as legitimate literary art.

To be continued...

Added: 438 days ago by Kevin Holmes | Posted in: Nerdcore | 9 Comments

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