Think "comic book adaptations" and you’d be forgiven for focusing on the box-office blockbusters that bring classic Marvel and DC super-powered characters to the big screen, such as the successful X-Men, Iron Man, Batman and Spider-Man franchises, and forthcoming celluloid outings for Captain America, Thor and Green Lantern.
But the weekend’s premiere of Tamara Drewe at Cannes is the latest in a series of movies enjoyed by viewers who might well have no inkling of the graphic novel origins.
As any Guardian reader knows, Tamara Drewe is the "re-imagining" (to use a word beloved of the film industry) of Thomas Hardy’s Far From The Madding Crowd by cartoonist Posy Simmonds, which appeared in instalments in-paper during 2006 and 2007.
It’s a fairly high-profile adaptation given the mainstream availability of the source material, but how many recent or upcoming movies were based on comic books that have no super-powered, supernatural or Lycra-clad content?
American Splendor is an obvious start, if only for the fact that anyone who’s seen it can’t fail to see its not-so secret origins - it’s based on the autobiographical work of "little-known working-class everyman, and first-class curmudgeon" Harvey Pekar.
Also mined from the same indie comics seam as Pekar is the forthcoming adaptation of Charles Burns’ Black Hole, which, with its storyline of an AIDS-alike illness affecting America’s teens, we can only pray won’t become a Cabin Fever-esque torture porn extravaganza under the directorship of Fight Club’s David Fincher.
Charles Burns work has a lot in common with that of Daniel Clowes, but it was one of Clowes’ less grotesque works, Ghost World, which made it to the cinemas - and critical acclaim - in 2001. Ghost World was first serialised in Clowes’ comic Eightball in the Nineties.
More mainstream productions include Road to Perdition from 2002, starring Tom Hanks, Jude Law and Paul Newman. The comics were published under a literary imprint out of the DC comics stable, Paradox Press, written by Max Allan Collins and telling of a mob enforcer forced to flee his gangster bosses with his young son.
Road to Perdition gives a tip of the hat to Lone Wolf and Cub, a successful Japanese manga that again featured father-and-son central characters, this time in feudal Japan. Which brings us neatly on to the film adaptations of Frank Miller. Miller was, in the Eighties one of the twin colossuses bestriding comic books along with Alan Moore (hugely filmed, but his adapted oeuvre - Watchmen, From Hell, V for Vendetta, falls too much in the camps of speculative fiction for us to consider here).
Movies of Miller’s comics include Sin City, based on his own hardboiled noir series and given a very comic-booky monochrome feel on screen, and 300 - his highly dramatised take on the Battle of Thermopylae. The next adaptation of a Miller work is based on his comic Ronin - itself inspired by Lone Wolf and Cub.
A couple of quickfire ones: Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi's autobiographical book on her young life in Iran became one of the movies that stuck most closely to its source material, thanks to the animation of her own artwork. A History of Violence, starring Viggo Mortenson and directed by David Cronenberg, was based on Alan Wagner and Vince Locke’s graphic novel, originally released through the Paradox Press label. And Josie and the Pussycats, anyone? This 2001 movie of a girl band was adapted from the long-running Archie comic of the same name.
The French, of course, have long had a more mature attitude to comics than the UK and the States, and because their industry has been less focused on superheroes they have always found them a good source of material for mainstream movies - the western Blueberry, pilot action-drama Les Chevaliers du Ciel and the forthcoming Gainsbourg, adapted from a graphic novel biog of the singer.
Personally, I’d like to see something done with Joe Sacco’s fine body of graphic war reportage such as Palestine or Safe Area Gorazde to bring them to the movies.
