There are so many movies being made from comic books these days, but not so many the other way around.
That didn’t used to be the Natural Order of Things. It used to be that a lot of movies got adapted into comic books by Dell and later, when Western Publishing left them, by Gold Key comics. DC and Marvel did several film adaptations, as well (with Marvel doing adaptations of all three of the original Star Wars trilogy).
Times have changed. In particular, newsstands have all but disappeared from the landscape, and even comic book stores are failing here and there. If you want to see a comic book adaptation of a film, you’d have to find it at the magazine section of a Barnes and Noble (which include most college bookstores) or a BAM/Books A Million, or one of the remaining comic book stores. You’re a lot less likely these days to find comics at your local drugstore or convenience store. That, I suspect, is a big reason why the number of adaptations has fallen.
What’s been adapted recently? Both the two recent Star Wars films have been done in multi-issue adaptations – The Force Awakens and Rogue One. (There are also books based on the characters – prequels and sequels, but I’m not counting those).
You’d think that Pixar films would be a natural for this, but they aren’t. There was a Disney/Pixar Comics Treasury issued not as a comic book, but as a softcover trade paperback. A few of the entries had appeared previously inn comic book form, but most of them are drawn from foreign editions, or seem to be original with the Treasury: Disney-Pixar Comics Treasury | Disney Wiki | Fandom
And there have been a few way-after-the-fact adaptations. A comic of the original Tron came out with the release of the sequel Tron" Legacy. It! The Terror from Beyond Space from the 1950s was adapted as a comic only a few years ago.
I have to admit that I haven’t been following closely. It used to be that when Disney re-released a movie they re-released the comic book, but they don’t seem to be doing that anymore. The publishing world has changed.
What other films recently released have had comic book adaptations? Do any of you (or your kids) read these?
Browsing through recent coimics, most of the comic adaptations of movies I’m seeing are for movies that were already adaptations of comics, and I don’t think those really count. The most recent thing I’m seeing is what seems to be a prequel to the *Ghostbusters *reboot called Ghostbusters 101, which had its first issue last month.
ETA: Going by the google image search, there do seem to be spin-off comics of Pixar movies.
Yeah, but not adaptations, in most cases.
Heck, when I was a kid, it seemed that every Disney movie and every movie likely to appeal to kids had an adaptation.
There was an adaptation for Santa Claus Conquers the Martians!
And for the Russian film marketed as The Sword and the Dragon
(This eventually showed up on MST3K, but as a kid, I actually paid to see this in a movie theater)
Back when, they adapted HAVE GUN - WILL TRAVEL as a comic book, but that feels
like cheating since Paladin is about as close a miss as possible to ‘superhero’ status.
There was a trade edition of “Creepshow” done as a comic after the movie came out. Illustrated by Berni Wrightson. Had a couple of subtle differences from the movie–probably scenes that were cut for time.
I’m sure I remember having a comic book version of Crack in the World (1965), probably published by Gold Key, but I can’t find any evidence of it online.
Folks, these are all in the distant past (even Alien, which was 1979). There were plenty of them back then – my point is that they seem to be a dying breed. aside from the recent Star Wars adaptations, and comic book versions of much older films, what else has been done recently?
or, going the other way, what’s the oldest comic adaptation? The late 1950s-early 1960s seems to have been the heyday of these. I doubt if any adaptations existed pre-1938 (I’m not counting things like the Gold key circa 1967 adaptation of King Kong), but when did the start?
Not the same thing – that was a comic book based on the TV show. Such things had plots not adapted from the TV show. Twilight Zone. Boris Karloff Presents, Outer Limits etc. didn’t give you comic stories based on individual episodes. (Something that DID happen much later on. There’s a graphic novel adaptation of Harlan Ellison’s Demon with a Glass Hand, for instance – but it came out in the 1980s.)
Transformers (2007) series has an accompanying comic series, with additional movie-plot-related-stories, as well as mostly straight adaptations of the movies.
Se7en (1995) had a comic adaptation released in 2008, with the same overall story, but told from John Doe’s POV. Not a straight adaptation, but I think it’s an intriguing twist.
You know, it has been a while since I’ve seen a comic adaptation, other than The Force Awakens and Rogue One. They came out all the time in the 80’s.
Actually, this is a meeting of the original team with the reboot team, via dimension hopping shenanigans. The original team has already met the 80’s animated team in an arc from last year. The IDW Gostbusters books have been pretty good.
Not an adaptation but IDW also has a series called “Star Trek Go Boldly” which picks up after the the events of “Star Trek Beyond.”
I think the current trend is to adapt books into comics, not movies. They’ve made comicbooks out of The Dark Tower, the Anita Blake books, the Otherworld books, The Thief of Always, The Stand, Ender’s Game etc.
That said, wiki has a long list of comics based on films here. The newest I spot on the list are based on Cloverfield, The Devil’s Rejects, The Hills Have Eyes, Underworld, Push, and Inception.
Yeah, while browsing around for comic adaptations of movies I discovered a comic adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s short story How To Talk To Girls At Parties, which would never crossed my mind as a subject for a comic adaptation.
Except the Cloverfield comic isn’t an adaptation of the movie – it’s peripheral to it. That’s another innovation. I’ll bet some of those other ones are, as well.
And — The Hills Have Eyes as NEW? Even if they mean the remake, that was 2006. (Cloverfield, for that matter, was 2008). We’re talking about things a decade old.
There are actually 3 movie adaptations (the first one, Revenge of the Fallen, and Dark of the Moon), and prequels to all three. No prequels or adaptations of Age of Extinction, or The Last Knight, though - IDW is concentrating on their Hasbroverse for Transformers (and Micronauts, ROM, and MASK - GI Joe still has an unrelated ongoing as well as the Hasbroverse one).
Interesting, while most of their current Star Trek comics are in the Kelvin Timeline* (save for John Byrne’s New Visions series, which is set in the Prime Universe, and various crossovers with other properties - the latter of which are set in variants on the KT), they haven’t done any straight adaptations of any of the movies, just prequels and sequels - the first ongoing spun out of the first movie, the second movie had Countdown to Darkness leading up, and Khan (and the second half of the ongoing series) following on, and the third one spun out the new ongoing, Go Boldly (already mentioned), but to get the events of the movies, you have to actually watch the movies (or extrapolate from what comes after).
Well…that depends on whether you buy the ‘Kelvin Timeline was created by time travel’ thing…the comics version contradicts the Prime Universe in a lot of ways that have to predate Nero’s traveling there. The stuff in the movies themselves can mostly be explained within the ‘time travel’ framework with a little jiggling and handwaving, but the comics definitely require Nero and Spock to have intervened in an existing alternate universe, which also makes the movies far smoother, as a bonus.