Peter Chung.

How does one justify the activity of making comics, or, for that matter, movies? What could be more frivolous, a worse influence on today's youth, and a greater erosion on the public's literacy and grasp of higher cultural values? However there is nothing inherently less serious or respectable about visual narrative media as compared to traditional literature -- only in the debased way that the majority of comics artists and filmmakers use them. In fact, the best visual narratives push the audience to levels of interpretation so new and so complex, that they aren't even recognized by the public. This is the source of the power of popular media; they affect the audience subconsciously. Even so, the lack of visual literacy in the general public is suffocating the progress of both comics and film as serious artistic tools.

As a writer and director of animated films, I've often been inspired and influenced by the great comic book artists. But even while I take in their pleasures with quiet gratitude, I've always felt that the very qualities which enthrall me are probably too elusive, too rarefied, to ever be appreciated by the mainstream public. For me, it is that deeply personal sense of discovering something hidden, something which might be missed by too casual a glance, that is the reward offered by art in any medium. Yet the current atmosphere of commercialized production of visual media, works against this from happening.

In August New Line Cinema will release Blade, a live-action feature film based on the Marvel comic book Blade the Vampire Hunter. Comic image © Marvel and film still © B. Talamon/New Line Cinema.

We may regard comics as a rudimentary type of film, lacking movement and sound. Looking at the problems with comics lets us study the basic nature of visual narrative and eventually reach a better understanding of the importance of film.

Comics And Hollywood: An Unhappy Marriage
The dismal state of comics in the U.S., both as an industry and as an art form, gives little hope that it can break through as a medium with an influence beyond the closed subculture it now occupies. I rarely pick up comics any more. I'd rather watch an old movie on video to satisfy my retinal needs. As for reading, I prefer an actual book than to suffer trying to decipher the incoherent page layouts of today's comics.

Ironically, the wide dissemination of comics-derived films and TV. programs can be blamed for the decline in both the level of public interest in comics, and in the quality of the output of comics creators. That is, the success that comics enjoy by their acceptance in the more mainstream media of film and TV. is the very thing which is suppressing their artistic evolution.

When Hollywood adapts comic characters to the big screen, there is an emasculation effect whereby producers and directors, refusing to acknowledge serious themes present in the original work, exploit only the "high-recognition/high concept" aspects for their own commercial ends. Comics are regarded as trafficking in stereotypes, and thus, as a source, provide an easy excuse for directors unequipped or unwilling to handle complex characterization. Mainstream audiences, seeing only the bastardized movie version of a comics character, have their preconceptions confirmed, thus inhibiting their desire to consider picking up a comic book to read.