Comic book adaptations of novels, plays, short stories, etc.

The Pinefox nominated The Hobbit in the best comics ever poll! Again I haven't read it.

The only one I ever bought was a comic version of Gene Wolfe's The Shadow Of The Torturer - it was RUB.

I remember really enjoying Trickster King Monkey, adapted from Journey to the West, but the English translation only lasted a few issues.

http://www.sonic.net/~jason/titles/coverdream2.gif

NB the Kane/Woodring Ring was written by Roy Thomas, so even if it was longer, you'd just be more bored. But more pretty pictures!

Film adaptations are usually pretty lame. A great bowdlerisation appears in "Robocop", where the line "Bitches - leave!" becomes "I'd go now if I were you, ladies" in the comic.

I actually think the comic version of CoG might be better than the original.

I should go check the comic -- I seem to recall the ending as being very wordy, pretty much lifted from the book...

It's the only Auster book I could really stand, anyway -- it's certainly pulpy enough to make a good comic. (Maybe The Music of Chance could work, too.) But I still tend to think that comic bookshops tend to overstock adaptations, as they're one-offs, and so many graphic novels tend to be parts of longer series. (And the series are more reliant on internal continuity than, say, an Ian Rankin novel).

got the Mazzucchelli City of Glass! Haven't read it yet.

It's great.

How about vice versa, where comics are turned into novels, like Tintin in the New World or Cantor's Krazy Kat, with some pretty mindboggling sequences of ignatz fuckin' krazy?
http://www.amazon.com/Krazy-Kat-Jay-Cantor/dp/0375713824/ref=sr_1_16?ie=UTF8&qid=1250366895&sr=8-16

The Krazy Kat novel is pretty good.

Did anyone else fall in love with the recent Marvel adaptation of The Wizard Of Oz? Eris Shanower did the script with Skottie Young doing the art. Liked it way more than I remember liking the book as a kid. Looks like they're going to continue with the later Oz books, which I never read.

Shanower probably knows the Oz stuff better than anybody else in comics. By a factor of about a billion.

I really liked that Darwyn Cooke adaptation of the first Parker book that just came out.

On the "City of Glass" front: It's probably worth mentioning that Auster's New York Trilogy owes rather a lot to Samuel Beckett's "Molloy"/"Malone Dies"/"The Unnameable" trilogy (but is kind of a more pop-ist approach to it).

I gotta say that I'm still a bit confounded by all the comic booky Cooke love; his work seems like a more static, less interesting and less meaty shadow of Bruce Timm.

what have you read of his?

I think Douglas has made the Auster/Beckett comparison on every Auster thread on the internet (because I read them all--the threads, not the entire combined works of A/B--a month ago after finishing Mr. Vertigo). Which doesn't dampen its validity.
Cooke's Parker is very good, and what misgivings I have about Cooke limiting himself to 50s/60s themes are tempered by reminding myself how many other comic book artists limit themselves to shitballs superhero themes.
There was a critique of The Hunter making the rounds in the linkblogs that seemed to take Cooke to task for making it too POP! and not doing a fumetti.

Sic: Frontier and The Spirit.

^ if yr talking about Nadel's, I think that's enormously reductive and inaccurate.

xpost above

forks: if you came out of the whole of New Frontier feeling that, you're not super-likely to change, but I'd say take a look at his first issue of Tangled Web, as well as some of the Catwoman work, if you can borrow them from a person or library. That might give a bit of an idea of the subtler tonal modulations he can make to his writing and drawing styles, while still remaining in that post-animation general vocabulary.

(I avoided the Spirit bcz a) it specifically looked like pretty pointless wheel-spinning when I'd rather see Cooke working on something he actually cares about, and b) don't give a fuck about anyone hacksurrecting the Spirit tbh)

I have. Sorry for the repetition.

Frontier was OKAY, but that was about it for me. The Spirit was absolutely pointless wheel-spinning. I may try reading this noir adaptation, but I gotta say that I found this piece in comics comics (Along with the visual examples provided), pretty convincing:
http://comicscomicsmag.blogspot.com/2009/08/hunter.html

I'd be down with trying the catwoman sometime though. I keep meaning to get a piece of the brubaker run.

Do these ever work? What are the good ones, what are the bad?

Martin Rowson's adaptation of Tristram Shandy belongs in some hypothetical pantheon. Didn't much care for Tardi's The Bloody Streets Of Paris but I really can't be bothered with the mystery genre anyway, outside of two or three Chandlers.

Bill & Ted the comic book is supposed to be good, also the ALF comic book. Another big ups for CIty of Glass. You will think the novel is crap in comparison after reading it.

Parker was cool but the main character looked too youthful and Cooke's so much better in colour.

the Bill & Ted comic is good, but probably better in the actual Dorkin-written series than the movie adaptation

What about comic strip adaptations of films adapted from comics? I remember the Carlos Ezquerra drawn comic of the film of Judge Dredd. Fascinating.

Shameless attempted revive of my own thread:
Fantasy adaptations

There were comic book adaptations of the two Burton Batman movies, but I'm not sure if the Nolan movies have gotten the same treatment. Apparently Catwoman and Constantine got comic adaptations though. I don't quite understand what's the target group for these, but then again I don't get who reads novel adaptations of movies either? Apparently there was a novelization of Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of Stoker's Dracula, talk about postmodern!

That happened to Little Women's latest movie version too, I think.

Return To Oz is one of the more glaring offenses I remember in that regard.

But we're straying from the subject at hand.

Return To Oz wasn't a Baum original, though. And, yeah, I still recall the joy I had spotting FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA'S BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA BY SOME GUY in a bookshop window.

At least for the comic book adaptation of FFC's BM's Dracula® SOME GUY was Mike Mignola! Not just random dude on the corner. Script was Roy Thomas. Result was better than the movie by far.

I believe SOME GUY for the movie novelization was the one and only Fred Saberhagen. Never read it though.

BM's should be BS - though Coppola's was a bit of a turd.

Return To Oz wasn't a Baum original, though.

It was a pretty faithful adaptation of two of his Oz books, so I'd say close enough to count.

But, again, I digress.