An Adaptation Casestudy in Comics
One of my favorite examinations of adaptation from book to movie or television is comics. That covers graphic novels, superhero comics, manga, webtoons, etc. All these types of comics while ostensibly in the same essential format present entirely different challenges.
Graphic novels and completed short serials (ex. V for Vendetta, Gender Queer, 30 Days of Night) present a comparable challenge to an all-text novel. The story ends at some point. It is a complete narrative. That narrative just also happens to come with some of those visuals ready to go. Choices still have to be made, however. Does the graphic novel need to be updated due to changes in social norms? Are there things that are just not translatable from illustration to the physical space of a movie? Nimona translated much better into animation than it would have live-action. They still had to make changes to the character models, though, to work better in an animated space. To make The Watchman work a little better in live action, they made a major visual narrative change. This allowed them to have scenes in the movie that mimic comic panels one-to-one. So when we look at adaptation here, you’re making very similar decisions to a more “traditional” novel.
A sort of caveat to this are the long-running serials that have a practical or theoretical end. Fables ran for a whopping 162 issues, but it did end. Saga is still ongoing, but Brian Vaughn sees it ending somewhere around a hundred issues. These are things that could be adapted as completed stories. They’re just long, and that length creates a new challenge. Sandman is only 72 issues, later collected into ten volumes. The first ten episode season covers the first two volumes of story comfortably, so we can math that out to a minimum of fifty episodes to cover the entire story. So an adapter has to weigh all the variables in the modern television environment. Will watchers stick around that long? Will streaming services that famously cancel shows after one or two seasons give me distribution that long? It presents a series of tricky choices.
From the Japanese media perspective, we see a different version of this. Most anime are based on a manga, and that manga is typically still ongoing when that anime starts airing. While there are some very specific exceptions, manga are typically the creative result of a single person (with assistants for toning and inking). So that story is ending at some point. That mangaka is going to stop producing that manga. But you (and the mangaka) don’t necessarily know when. It’s often going to depend on what genre that mangaka is writing in. Successful shonen manga are going to be under a lot more pressure to continue a story for as long as possible, while a josei writer might have more leeway to conceive and write more succinct stories.
So the anime has to make a lot of choices depending on what their goal is. How much are they going to adapt? Are they going to alter the story to make it more self-contained? And the answers to these questions have changed through the years. Most importantly, though, anime rarely expects to adapt the entirety of the manga right from the get-go, and pretty much always starts before the manga finishes. This leads to an entirely different way of approaching adaption.
Coming back to western media, we can then look superhero comics. Our big bad Marvel and DC lines. These are also long-running comics, but they have an entirely different narrative approach. There’s not a single story-line, rather just eighty years of story-stuff. Any give hero through-line (ex. Spiderman, The Avengers) sees dozens of contributing writers and artists and any number of major story branches and continuity changes as the years progress. So there just is no singular story.
And when you do have the ability to excise certain major arcs of narrative (ex X-Men’s "Days of Future Past"), it doesn’t break cleanly. You’ll still have hundreds of issues of characterization and setting information that informs the context and backstory of that arc. If you’re making a movie, you have to find a way to get all those frayed edges to work in a self-contained story. Because that’s what movies not in serial typically are. And successful movies have to appeal to a different audience than comic book readers. Animated shows have their own demographic and expectations. Live-action shows have yet another.
The place where all these things intersect ends up being a fascinating study in the way we approach stories and storytelling as a whole.