The past decade has seen a mad rush to adapt comics and graphic novels into films, TV series, and online content, from Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, Wonder Woman, and Black Panther to Snowpiercer, Persepolis, and The End of the F***ing World. Historically, however, comics’ relationship with the cinema goes deeper, beginning with a literal, technical similarity between the two media: both media display series of images, usually presented in rectangular frames. And their historical relationship begins with the invention of cinema, as case studies early in the course will help to demonstrate. The earliest live-action film comedies and melodramas borrowed framing and storytelling techniques from the newly-popular comic strips of the turn of the twentieth century; adaptations of films into comic books and vice-versa date back to the late 1930s, when U.S. comic books were born; and storyboards—sketches of shots and their sequences, used by filmmakers at least since Alfred Hitchcock to pre-visualize scenes for filming—look just like comic-book pages on first glance.
This course is founded on the tenet that film and comics share some means of expression while retaining unique qualities that set them apart. An informed and creative exploration of their similarities and differences makes it possible to understand each medium’s capacities in new ways that help expand our rhetoric of adaptation between comics and film.