Movie Comics
Page to Screen/Screen to Page
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- £9.49
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- £9.49
Publisher Description
As Christopher Nolan’s Batman films and releases from the Marvel Cinematic Universe have regularly topped the box office charts, fans and critics alike might assume that the “comic book movie” is a distinctly twenty-first-century form. Yet adaptations of comics have been an integral part of American cinema from its very inception, with comics characters regularly leaping from the page to the screen and cinematic icons spawning comics of their own. Movie Comics is the first book to study the long history of both comics-to-film and film-to-comics adaptations, covering everything from silent films starring Happy Hooligan to sound films and serials featuring Dick Tracy and Superman to comic books starring John Wayne, Gene Autry, Bob Hope, Abbott & Costello, Alan Ladd, and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. With a special focus on the Classical Hollywood era, Blair Davis investigates the factors that spurred this media convergence, as the film and comics industries joined forces to expand the reach of their various brands. While analyzing this production history, he also tracks the artistic coevolution of films and comics, considering the many formal elements that each medium adopted and adapted from the other. As it explores our abiding desire to experience the same characters and stories in multiple forms, Movie Comics gives readers a new appreciation for the unique qualities of the illustrated page and the cinematic moving image.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this insightful new work, cinema and media studies scholar Davis (The Battle for the Bs: 1950s Hollywood and the Rebirth of Low-Budget Cinema) takes a currently profitable and high-profile relationship the one between comics and film and reveals a history going back to the earliest days of both media. Davis's lens focuses on three decades, the 1930s through the 1950s, alternating between page-to-screen and screen-to-page adaptations. Davis is a keen cultural interpreter, carefully balancing references to documents such as promotional materials and sales figures with close reading of individual works. He goes on to detail the production and distribution of comic films, such as the 28-feature Blondie series and the equally prolific Dick Tracy, and film comics, a medium with less clearly defined borders and goals. Sometimes these were faithful recreations of movies; sometimes they built upon narratives and cross-promoted characters, as when Disney released a short comic book story about Dumbo meeting Snow White's Dwarfs; and sometimes they even used images from films to tell original stories. This is an enlightening, scholarly history. Davis treats his topic seriously while also celebrating the pleasures of these two lively arts.
