Following the recent cinema release of Kick Ass, I was surprised by the number of people who didn’t know it was based on a graphic novel. Maybe that’s just my nerdy side showing through, but surely a story of a frustrated, hormonally zealous teenager with a mundane existence, deciding that the best way to excite his own life and right the wrong of the world is to don a wetsuit and fight crime can only have started life in this medium? What about the overt goriness for a film with such a purposefully ‘silly’ storyline? The intentional clash of genres? The campness? No?... Maybe it’s just me. Perhaps films of Spider-Man and X-Men films have brought graphic novels so far into the mainstream that these films have blended into our cinemagoing psyche without us even knowing it. Sin City and Watchmen, amoung others, have introduced us all to a new style of film using artistic influences directly from the original artwork. Perhaps that’s the reason why even my friends recognised Watchmen for what it was; an adaptation of a ‘classic’ graphic novel. These films are, in essence, made to exploit a ready-made audience, and these examples at least attempt to stay true to the spirit of the original comics. Matthew Vaughn’s adaptation on the Mark Millar graphic classic, Kick Ass is worth a try with your mind open and your tongue in your cheek, but I highly recommend you venture into its original world with the graphic novel too. And, in that vein, I have collected together just a few of the graphic novels and comics that went on to spawn films… whether that was a good thing or not, I will leave up to you to decide!
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