I ran into another Comm PhD student while at the San Diego Comic Con this past summer. She recently emailed me and a bunch of other comic book readers to ask us what makes a good comic-to-movie adaptation. My response got so ridiculously long that I thought it would be a waste not to put it somewhere, so here you go. Seriously, though, it’s as nerdy as it is wordy: proceed with caution.

This probably sounds like a cop-out answer, but I’m going to say it depends very much on the property in question and the people who handle it. Some characters/properties are so iconic that they practically beg to be made and remade at this point, such as Batman. I am just as interested in seeing Paul Pope’s sci-fi comic book take on the character as Christopher Nolan’s special FX movie take. Not all comics have such a long history, though, or really beg to leak beyond the borders of their original self-contained stories. I personally prefer comics that tell self-contained stories by a single creator, including those existing in a broader “world” of shared characters, including Busiek’s Astro City and Miller’s Sin City. Even with those, though, I think some changes are to be expected in the adaptation process. Before Rodriguez took on Sin City, I’d have said that there’s no point at all in being as faithful as possible. Before Del Toro took on Hellboy (and some other studio took on an animated feature), I’d have said that animation would provide a better route than live action for Mignola’s work. As I see it, comic book adaptations require two major considerations: how will the formal properties of media affect the product, and how will market realities affect the product?

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Today, I caught a link off The Comics Reporter, Tom Spurgeon’s blog. USA Today reports:

Shades of the Patriot Act? In what Marvel Comics calls “the most politically charged comic series ever,” superheroes must reveal their secret identities and register with the government or resist and be hunted.

As Tom says, “Up yours, Palestine!”

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I am a terrific mitten.

I have said here before that Dr. McNinja is awesome, and I stand by that statement.

I must add that the writer behind this comic has channeled my spirit on the strip’s latest page. Can’t quite say that he’s ripping me off, considering that technically I was ripping off DC Comics and Christian marketers first. Also, I have to imagine that plenty of people have turned to the caped crusader as a moral compass in a moment of confusion/dementia.

Ha, and Dan thinks he’s all famous and sweet just because he writes for some Mac blog and gets quoted and stuff. Man, I beat Dr. McNinja to a joke! Beat that! Also I bit some kid on the way to school today. Ha!

First, I caught this article in CJR Daily, which applauds this article in the New York Times about the men who made a business out of inserting pro-American propaganda in Iraqi newspapers. Apparently, it was a couple guys who finally came up with a startup capable of landing a multimillion dollar contract, after failing repeatedly in other endeavors. CJR Daily suggests, tongue in cheek, that the details in this article “offer a much-needed road map for prospective propagandists looking to fleece U.S. taxpayers of their money.”

On the lighter side of propaganda, however, I then caught this bit on Drawn!:

The story so far: Danish paper publishes cartoons that mock Muslims. An Iranian paper responds with a Holocaust cartoons contest. Now, a group of Israelis announce their own anti-Semitic cartoons contest. Amitai Sandy, the publisher of Tel-Aviv, Israel-based Dimona Comix, and founder of the contest jokes, “We’ll show the world we can do the best, sharpest, most offensive Jew hating cartoons ever published! No Iranian will beat us on our home turf!”

Okay, now THAT is clever.

It turns out, taking the thought balloons out of Garfield makes it funny.

Bono is awesome. This is his homily at the National Prayer Breakfast.

This video is awesome. It features artwork inspired by lowbrow artist Jeff Soto.

This picture is awesome. It is my desktop picture in my office. (I felt I needed a third link to round out this post.)

UPDATE: Man, I totally forgot. Dr. McNinja is awesome.

UPDATE—THE SEQUEL: I don’t think I can write a post about awesome things without mentioning this. Chuck Norris is awesome. Awesomely deadly.

I don’t know much about the MIT Mystery Hunt, to be honest. I know that it’s an event in which teams figure out the rules to a series of puzzles, and then the solutions to those puzzles are clues for bigger puzzles, and then eventually some team figures out all the puzzles and is in charge of planning next year’s hunt. I probably don’t need to describe it further, as I suspect that most people who read this blog actually live in Massachusetts and played on Lake Effect Snow (a team name that baffles me only because I have no idea why it was chosen). Long story short, you hunt for mysteries. Also, I kind of like that you’d be hard pressed to come up with an event that sounds nerdier than “The MIT Mystery Hunt.” Here’s to hoping that next year it’ll be “The MIT Mystery Hunt (now with DRAGONS!)”

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Have you seen “Lazy Sunday,” the music video with a couple guys rapping about Narnia that played on Saturday Night Live ? Depending on your tastes, that might sound either exceptionally stupid, absolutely brilliant, or just nonsensical. (My friends and I laughed ourselves silly. Tony especially enjoyed the line “You can call us Aaron Burr from the way we’re droppin’ Hamiltons.”)

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Just some stuff I thought was interesting…

Hillary Clinton and her pals have formally introduced new federal legislation to restrict the sale of M- and AO-rated games to minors. I just wrote a paper about such legislative efforts on the state level. I have yet to find the full text of the bill itself, but unless they figured out some clever way to break legislative precedent set elsewhere, this will be declared unconstitutional.

Freelance comics/games writer Kieron Gillen writes an interesting blog post suggesting that Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics isn’t a “comic” (because it’s not a narrative, but more of an essay), and a (hypothetical) similar work used to theorize about games wouldn’t be a game because it’s actually a descendant of multimedia. Or something. Okay, so, I think the idea that video games aren’t “games” is kind of silly. I see no reason why video games shouldn’t be considered games. (And I don’t see much sense in arguing over the definition of “game” after Ludwig Wittgenstein already covered that one in depth.) But I have often thought that games could use a similar primer, and even more frequently I’ve thought that the definition of comics in Understanding Comics confuses the medium’s visual techniques with the medium itself. I tend to think of instructional diagrams in the form of comics being … well, just that: Graphic design borrowing visual techniques from comics, just as graphic design borrows from all the other visual arts to make whatever point it needs to make. After all, “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence” may as well be referring to nearly any application of graphic design in general (e.g., newspapers with lots of photos, a single-page ad that intentionally draws your eye from one point on the page to another, etc.).

Still with me? One more link: Two academics discuss a new book about Fredric Wertham, infamous comics antichrist (who, it turns out, really wasn’t such a bad guy after all, despite his senseless hyperbole regarding media effects).