BK FEATURE: The top five comics that should never be turned into movies

Anything Alan Moore did for America's Best Comics

 

Tom Strong, Top Ten, and Tomorrow Stories are all self-reflexive comics; they alternately mock and pay homage to (mostly the latter) the comics of yesteryear; Tom Strong is basically Iron Man mixed with Batman, except with severe intimacy issues stemming from the fact that his parents raised him in an isolated, high-gravity training room. Top Ten takes place in a world where superpowers are ubiquitous, and therefore not special. Tomorrow Stories takes a bunch of golden-age superhero archetypes and turns them on their head. A comic fan can pick up on these concepts and enjoy them for what they are. A movie executive would see only the aesthetics, and turn each comic into a pointless, action-packed film extravaganza sharing nothing with its source material.

Don't get me wrong: I think a truly faithful Tomorrow Stories anthology TV show could be positively badass (can you imagine seeing a new Greyshirt story every week?), but a Tom Strong movie would almost certainly entail a young, Paul Walker-ish actor with dyed grey hair shooting faceless bad guys in the head while zooming through a CG city on his CG jetpack, right before having vigorous (but PG-13) sex with his caucasian girlfriend. In the same way they screwed up V for Vendetta, the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and the way they probably will screw up Watchmen*, mainstream movie studios would remove everything that makes Alan Moore great and replace it with stereotypically awful Hollywood crap.

 

The Goon

 

Eric Powell already mocked the idea of a Goon movie, but that doesn't mean Hollywood might stand up and take notice of the hilariously offbeat action/comedy/horror/noir/western sooner or later. On paper, The Goon sounds like it'd make a great movie: it's about a wise-cracking badass who kills zombies and gets involved in paranormal dealings at every turn. It could be like Hellboy, but good.

There's a reason that Hellboy wasn't good, however; it's nearly impossible to translate the weird, sorta-dark humor of an occult-obsessed action comic to the big screen without making it feel really, really cheesy and/or awkward. The Goon would have to be recreated using Sin City-esque greenscreen techniques, meaning most of the gags would feel detached and inhuman while the action would come off as exceedingly artificial. The Goon works when Powell draws it because he creates a perfect world where all his characters fit and make sense – it's totally natural for the Goon to walk down the street and see a talking spider hanging out with a reformed zombie. The comic has the sort of imagination and scope that only works when drawn by hand, and to put it on the big screen would just feel horribly forced. 

 

Scud The Disposable Assassin

 

Rob Schrab tried to get a Scud movie made for a while following the pseudo-ending to the series, and he ran into the typical troubles one might associate with an indie comic artist trying to get a big-budget movie made: they wanted to change Scud from an assassin into a superhero, they wanted the story to be less nihilistic, and they generally didn't understand that Schrab had effectively created a world that was dark, unforgiving, and hopeless yet also really funny and entertaining. 

I don't consider it a bad thing that a Scud movie never got made, if only because you really don't need one: Schrab's illustrations are incredibly kinetic and cinematic all on their own. While the prospect of seeing something akin to a full-length version of Robot Bastard is definitely pretty badass, the original comic feels enough like a movie that a 2-hour adaptation would feel redundant at best.

 

Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth

 

Chris Ware's magnum opus might make a good movie, if handed to an indie director. It could be another Ghost World, or something. But no matter how good a Jimmy Corrigan movie could be, it would never, ever be as good as the comic. I say this not in a typical "adaptations are always worse than their source material because the directors don't get it" sort of way, but simply because Jimmy Corrigan uses the medium of comics to tell its story in a more effective, emotional way than almost any other graphic novel ever written.

Jimmy Corrigan is a comic, and to change the medium would be to ruin that which makes it so brilliant. Ware stuffs every page full of minimalistic drawings that are tragically easy to empathize with, extended digressions into fantasies and family trees, detailed diagrams of cut-out paper dolls with hidden subconscious commentary , and all manner of other things which can only be achieved through the medium of comics. The story of Jimmy's life is incredibly tragic, and perhaps would be in any medium, but he's best in comics. No need to mess with, much less adapt, a perfect thing.

 

Sandman

 

Since Neil Gaiman ended up surprisingly happy with the Stardust movie, there's a chance – however infinitesimally slim, given Stardust's lackluster performance – that a Sandman movie series might be in the cards. This would be the worst idea ever conceptualized by man or beast since the dawn of time. 

Sandman is a truly epic series in every sense of the word: the whole story fills enough pages to take up an entire shelf, it constantly digresses into short stories or the adventures of tertiary characters, and it deals with more mythology and fable in two books than you'd find in Alan Moore's entire career. It's a HUGE series, about everything from insanity to love to death, and to shorten it to even a 20-hour film series would still be a travesty.

Not that Hollywood would ever allow for a 20-hour film or TV series, of course; they'd probably wanna just shave off everything but the main plot involving the King of Dreams, and turn that into a pseudo-Lord of the Rings "epic" trilogy, of sorts. It might look nice, and it might even be mildly entertaining at points, but it'll never touch what the original Sandman series had. Sandman is unlike anything that's ever been written, and to turn it into a movie that can be easily recognized and classified would be, again, one of the worst ideas ever.

*I don't care how good the character photos look; the dude playing Ozymandias looks like he's about 16.