I was reading on StarWars.com about the new Star Wars comic by Jason Aaron and John Cassady, and came across this:
[testimonials_box_style client_name="StarWars.com"] [p]In the original films, masks and costumes were hand-made. In order to maintain a visual continuity with those movies, Cassaday followed the rules of practical effects. “The key approach to design on this book,” Cassaday says, “is very much in touch with the original trilogy and the technology, make-up, and costuming of the time. No intricate CGI or mo-cap. When I design a new character or alien, I think of it as an actor wearing a rubber mask, prosthetics, or possibly a puppet, and I try to work within those given boundaries.” [/p] [/testimonials_box_style]
That’s an interesting thought. It may work just fine for this project, but in general, I’m against it.
When you adapt something into comics, or any medium, there are changes you have to make. There are things that work in one medium that don’t in another. Car chases are the usual example. Singing, too.
On the other hand, comics can offer things that other media doesn’t. As long as you’ve got the likeness rights, you can bring back any character you want. You can also do longer plots and subplots in a way that you can’t in a feature film. Marv Wolfman, when editing DC’s Star Trek comic, demanded that it be written like a comic, with new characters and multiple plots. It’s one of the reasons it was one of the best Trek comic adaptations.
Speaking of Star Trek, Peter David wrote about this very issue, focusing on how much humor he used in his run.
[testimonials_box_style client_name="Peter David"] [p]What’ve we got in the comics? Music? No.
Visual effects? Not that pack the same punch as TV, no. Besides, when people read the comics, they spend most of the time trying to determine whether the likenesses are consistent. You think anyone tunes in Next Gen saying, “Let’s hope that Riker looks like Jonathan Frakes this week?” “Let’s hope they got the bridge right”?
Acting? Only what the readers can conjure in their minds upon reading the words. Sound effects? Silent medium. Again, lacks that TV punch.
Make up? Come on. We have an audience which is used to seeing Nightcrawler or The Hulk every month. If Ensign Fouton, the tall, skinny blue alien, appeared on the TV show, fans would be singing praises about the makeup required to give him life. In the comic book, the most response we’ve had to something visual was R.J. Blaise, and she was human! Exotic aliens and civilizations don’t have the same effect on comics fans as it does when they see the same thing on the series. Face it, the comics can’t possibly work as well, on all levels, as the TV series– both old and new– do.
Except for one thing: humor.[/p] [/testimonials_box_style]
If you’re going to do a comic of something, I think you should do all the things you can in comics that you can’t somewhere else. One of the many things Whedon’s Buffy comic got right is focusing less on clever banter and long scenes in the library and more on the type of scope and effects that were cost prohibitive. I’m not objective about the My Little Pony franchise for obvious reasons, but I love that the second series, Friends Forever, focuses on characters who would never get to carry their own episode.
As a creator, you have to make decisions about how you’ll tell a story. I like leaving as many things in my toolbox as possible
the photo a couple of times to make sure it wasn't black and white, so apparently they're going with the super-muted color scheme that's permeated so much of the DC movie stuff.
I liked it okay in Man of Steel, and it certainly works for Batman, but I miss color in my superhero characters. The Marvel Cinematic Universe certainly does that better, though the DC characters don't seem to need to constantly apologize for wearing costumes, so they've at least got that going for them.
