Tue 8 Dec 2009
Screenplay
Posted by Sina under Art, Books with Pictures, My Life
This is solely my experience as a Los Angeles-based comic artist, and I post the following entry to see if comic artists nationwide are dealing with the same issue of adapting screenplays to graphic novels.
For the uneducated
Whether it’s successful or not, a lot of screenwriters will attempt to take their unsold scripts and turn them into 90-ish page graphic novels, hoping to add buzz to their property. It’s kind of like pre-branding. Whenever you see a movie that’s based off a novel, you are supposedly putting value to the movie because it stood its ground in one market already. Comic companies too have changed the way they market/ make their graphic novels. You now see a lot of six-issue mini-series termed as “seasons,” or advertised as “Die Hard meets Monkey Trouble!”
For those who don’t know me
I go through phases. At any given point, I want to achieve some kind of notoriety. Just enough to get free shit. However, I’ve stuck to a few key principles: I never make extraneous merchandise, my stories will be told as they’re meant to be told, and I won’t wear black and brown together. During its tenure, a few people tried to turn Books with Pictures into a this, or a that (including a benign t-shirt, which I violently protested). I always insisted that my comic was a comic, not a movie, not an icon on someone’s chest, and so on. At one point I had the opportunity to try and adapt the story to a low-budget, heartfelt indie flick with a friend and director who understood the source material, but that didn’t pan out.
At the end of the day I have a strong opinion about the relationship between comic books and movies. If someone wants to use one as a marketing strategy for the other, that’s fine, but expect a loss in artistic merit.
Reading is hard.
I hate reading screenplays. Ask my bestest friends, even though I respect their work and think the world of them, it will take an incredibly long time for me to read their work. So when I get scripts from strangers asking me to turn it into a graphic novel, I think of what a comic artist friend of mind once said: with very few exceptions, comic writers are predominantly failed screenwriters. On a bad day, I sometimes feel like screenwriters are failed novelists. These are terrible thoughts to have in my head, but that’s just how it is.
Artists around the world, how do you feel about this stuff? Writers, pitch in too.
Love love,
Sina
December 8th, 2009 at 4:55 pm
While I don’t know how I feel about the “screenwriters are failed novelists” idea (writing one is VERY different than writing the other, which is why screenplays are so hard to read (and write IMHO)), and I am not a comic book artist (unless The Adventures of Scissor-Man counts…), I do understand where you’re coming from. Most of the time, screenwriters seem to think “Ooh, I can turn this into a graphic novel, and then everyone will want to buy it!” Uh, no.
The problem is that today, there’s so much talk about cross-markets… Like if you have a television show idea, you also need to have ideas for its interactive website, and the webisodes they’ll make you make, and so forth. That’s why there are so many screenwriters trying the graphic novel route - studios and networks are practically demanding that anything you have needs to be something they can turn into something else too. It’s evil and stupid.. Yes, blame the studios.
The problem is there are way too many INSANELY bad scripts. I should know - I’ve written a few of them.
People seem to think writing a script is easy, and so they all want to do it, but it just doesn’t work that way. Then they go and inflict their crap on poor struggling comic book artists.
Speaking of which, I have a TV series I want you to turn into a graphic novel… Just kidding! I swear! ::puts the TV series in the shredder:: I promise.
December 9th, 2009 at 11:58 am
What does that make poets?
December 17th, 2009 at 9:42 pm
Seeing as I have no knowledge of any of these subjects, I found this very interesting. It does seem like there has been a real dirth of interesting movies over the past few years, but maybe that’s just me.
I am with you on the black/brown thing, but what about black/navy? I find it unsettling.