Adaptation

This week’s topic of discussion is adaptation. When trying to adapt from one medium to another it can get quite complicated. The texts for this week were Watchmen the novel by Allan Moore and its adapted film by Zack Snyder.  Although the bases of the two were the same the viewer/ reader were left with varying impressions. As talked about in class there are issues with adapting a comic book to a film. In the film one has to decide how closely they will follow the novel in terms of the story line, characters and what direction they intended to take with the film. For example if they are going to take the purist approach or not. Something as simple as that can make or break the adaptation.

 Using Watchmen to explore this concept was quite an eye opening experience. The film did a decent job trying to stick with the novel. For example in trying to keep the look of the novel in the film as far as having the actors resemble the drawings in the novel they did a great job. But on a more technical level a lot of the back stories of the characters and the feel of the time that the novel was set in, was lost in the adaptation. A possible reason for this can be explain by what McCloud talks about in chapter thee and four of Understanding Comics. In chapter three he explores the different types of sequences moment to moment, subject to subject etc. Regardless of what type of sequence it is a lot of the interpretation is left to the imagination of the reader. This creates issues within the adaptation process because what is imagined by each individual is different. Since film fills in those blanks, it becomes problematic in an adaptation because what the reader imagined might be different from what appears on the screen possibly then giving the film a different feel than imagined by the reader. In terms of the timing in the film than in the novel it’s hard to determine where more time should be allocated. Of course every single detail cannot be in the adaptation but in the film they did a decent job as to where they spent more time over others and what to include versus what to cut out. But for the things that they glossed over or decided to cut out entirely really took away from helping to set the mood for the film, for example the comic within the comic. The theme of that comic accompanied the theme of the entire novel and added significantly to the tone of it. It having been left out of the film did more damage than it did good. These examples all illustrate how difficult it can be to adapt one medium to another. 

Moore, A & Gibbons, D (1987); Watchmen; New York: DC comics. 

McCloud, Scott (1993); Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art; New York: Harper Collins Publishers Inc. 

Snyder, Z. (Director). (2009). Watchmen [Motion Picture].