I'm slowly optimising some comics I created for The Prague Post in the mid-90's, they'll be available for the iPad and iPod Touch at some point soon.
The first strip follows the adventures of a taxidermist ex-pat in Prague and might be best described as a 'stream of consciousness' type adventure...that or unbridled lunacy.
Kidding aside, I did my best with this story to avoid the predictable. I'd rather these comics were labeled inexplicable than predictable any day of the week, although I tried to avoid that too. Traps I dodged (perhaps at the expense of narrative logic sometimes...) were (a) 'Oh, how strange Czech food / people / culture is' and (b) The flatline bore strip like you might find in the back pages of the Herald Tribune. Or at least you could find such strips in the HT in the mid-90's. Maybe they publish a broader range of strip now. I mean the kind of strip that might once have been great but now seems to be on life-support, one that makes the reader feel brain-dead. Perhaps I'm being unfair, perhaps my strip did that too. It certainly received its fare share of hate mail.
Perhaps I knew something in 1995 that many didn't. As an avid reader of intelligent stories in picture and word since 1982 I think I was aware of how good it could get. I think I failed to live up to the challenge in what I made, but I tried.
Today many films are adaptations of 'graphic novels', many of which I read in the 80's. I think the films are often pointless and although they gain the dimension of sound they lose a direction in time.
By that I mean in a comic you can be as complex as you like, your readers can always flick back and re-read those complex passages. In film the illusion of movement takes us in one direction, you are 'on rails' as they say in gaming, so the film-makers work hard not to lose us. The comic reader creates that movement by joining the panels within his or her imagination, another form of illusion perhaps but to me it seems far more rewarding. Mini-series are more like good comics, there is room for exploration, more time to delve into the life of the story. After all quality shouldn't be relative to media, a good story should transfer into any media, right?
GN to film is a trend borne out of the fact that many comics today are offering far deeper stories than many films and are ready-made storyboards for film. If it helps comics creators to flourish, then good. But often it looks to me more like a kind of 'comixploitation'. Did I just coin a phrase? Hell knows. Watchmen might be an example of that. Perfect recreation of the characters but compressed into 2hrs or so and with none of the art of Dave Gibbons...or the 'time' a novel affords you as a reader. Time is something a mini-series does have over a film.
Sometimes when I'm watching the excellent 'Breaking Bad' I feel it's the child of something like 'Love & Rockets'. Perhaps that's just me.
Here are three examples of writers of comics (whose work I've been reading forever) that have been adapted to film. Writing and drawing that has been an inspiration to me.
John Wagner: 'A History of Violence' +++ Buy the book here...
Daniel Clowes: 'Ghost World' +++ Buy the book here...
Ok, this last adaptation misses much that the book offers but the casting and costume of the character of 'V' is superb. Oddly 'V' is now the face of 'Occupy' and 'Anonymous' something I find completely astonishing as I was a reader way back in 1982/3. I'd love to know what the artist David Lloyd makes of it all.
Alan Moore: V for Vendetta +++ Buy the book here...
More information will be posted on my comics for e-reader ASAP.
Thanks for reading and drop me a line if you have any questions.
