Throw the book at 'em!
A book that's a film? Millie Stein looks at the evolution of graphic novels, and why Hollywood continues to loves them
By Millie Stein
The culkt comic carnage of Frank Miller's Sin City became blockbuster noir on the big screen
There's a scene in the 1960s comic book Mr Natural, from the pen of R. Crumb, where the title character, a bearded, white-robed guru, is asked the meaning of the phrase "do-wha-diddee."
To the conservative, elderly woman responsible for the query, Mr Natural replies: "Lady, if you don't know by now, don't mess with it." Until recently, graphic novel fans would have been in the same boat.
The 'graphic novel' - not quite an illustrated book, not quite a comic - was born any time between 1837 and 1971. The genre's development is often linked to early 20th century comic books but, as Frank Tsai, owner of Sydney's Title Music & Film store suggests, it originated in the late 18th century from the Japanese art of Manga.
"The Americans thought it was a pretty good idea, so they started bringing out their newspaper comics in book form as well," he says.
Art Spiegelman was the first American graphic novelist to make it as a household name with Maus: A Survivor's Tale, which depicts the Holocaust according to his father's experience. Originally published in 1972 in the underground comic Furry Animals as a three-page-strip, Spiegelman lengthened the work, and in 1992 it received a Pulitzer Prize Special Award.
Tony Ayres, the AFI award-winning director of The Homesong Stories, says his career in film was heavily influenced by the comics he read as a child. "Then comic book art became more adventurous from the early 90s onwards," he recalls, "and the framing became bolder and more cinematic."
These days the illustrations vary in style from traditional comic cells to the more abstract or freehand novels, like John Porcellino's Diary of a Mosquito Abatement Man, published in 2005, which depicts the author's experience of studying mosquitoes. It is almost entirely without framing, apart from the occasional hand-drawn border.
Renegade illustrators such as Frank Miller, Charles Burns and R. Crumb secured graphic novels a reputation as legitimate, if admittedly still "cult" media in the 1970s. But it's the success of films such as Sin City and Ghost World, (adapted from the work of Frank Miller and Daniel Clowes), which has brought authors and illustrators the type of mass audience Hollywood can offer.
Works of illustrated literature are now in high demand with producers. Australian graphic novelist and illustrator Shaun Tan says it's no surprise. "It's not only easier to imagine a graphic novel as a film, but also to sell the idea. Because film is such an investment-heavy form of creativity," Tan suggests, "it helps to have an existing model, such as a published book that has already proven commercially viable."
Hollywood production studios have courted Tan since his critically lauded work, The Arrival, a wordless but highly evocative depiction of the experience of an immigrant, was published in 2007.
"There is always a very big risk that the original sentiments and subtle concepts that inform a graphic novel - as with any novel - may be lost. The two mediums work on the imagination in different ways. The manner in which films are produced means lots can go wrong."
The unique characteristics of Tan's work, "the fundamental magic of humble pencil and pen drawings on paper," as he calls it, are difficult to imagine at 24 frames per second. Look at last year's adaptation of Thirty Days Thirty Nights, a vampire film which had none of the emotional impact of the original graphic novel. "It's all about reduction," Ayres explains. "In a graphic novel, there are always richer and more complex characterisations, there is always a bigger world."
Critics of Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis argue that the animation veers into solipsism, and cinematic techniques such as montage, work against the audience developing sympathy. "It's tempting to say that we already have the storyboard for the movie," Satrapi admits. "But that's dangerous. You really have to forget about the book, otherwise you'll be caught in between.