I appreciate your thoughts, but I do, by and large, disagree (surprise, surprise).

Almost every time a “comic-booky” aesthetic has been brought the screen, I feel it has, in some way, neutered the material. Such “cartoons with real actors” very rarely truly engage or ever feel natural. They feel absolutely artificial.

This actually goes against the spirit of reading a comic book. When reading a comic book, such visual stylization does not strike the reader as blatantly artificial or stilted, but feels much more natural. Thus a film like Tim Burton’s BATMAN feels much more overtly “fake” than reading an issue of a comic.

I’d argue it was its adherence to the comic book aesthetic that single-handedly killed SIN CITY. SIN CITY tries too hard to recreate a comic book visual vocabulary that feels alive on the page, but feels entirely stale when rendered on the screen. It’s a live-action film that wants to be animated.

I know you’re not too happy with how Christopher Nolan re-imagined the Batman aesthetic by drawing from other sources (Ridley Scott’s BLADE RUNNER, Michael Mann’s HEAT), but I think two quotes from Nolan are essential:

“[A comic book] sparks your imagination with words, pictures, colors, light and shape. Just as when you adapt a novel, you do not consider the superficial form of the novel, you push to imagine the cinematic equivalent. Why should comic books be any different?”

“[The films of my childhood] created entire worlds that you believed in, and they had a very tactile, realistic, concrete sense of place and texture and, though they were all dealing with fantastic, outrageous material, they were all extreme exaggerations with idealistic heroes, but they had a recognizable taste and smell—we believe in the reality of what we see for two hours. We’re never let off the hook, we’re on that rollercoaster and we’re not looking at a cartoon. I would get asked all the time about Batman as a comic book and I would say, well, it’s not a comic book, it’s just a movie, the way that STAR WARS wasn’t just science fiction and RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK wasn’t just a cartoon serial.”

I agree with him. That “tactile, realistic, concrete sense of place” is a very necessary component of a live action superhero film, if we are truly to expect it to have some semblance of life. If we are to try and replicate the comic book aesthetic, it would be better to do so through entirely animated cinema.

But you spend a great portion of your article arguing for more overtly symbolic language in these comic book films. I have no problems with that at all, but I think you can be symbolic and still maintain a significantly greater sense of tactile reality than films like SIN CITY or WATCHMEN provide. An example would be Stanley Kubrick’s seminal 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, which brings together a distinctly symbolic and iconic aesthetic with a very detailed realism. Another would be Scott’s BLADE RUNNER, which presents a very stylized reality in a very real fashion. Even Peter Jackson’s LORD OF THE RINGS adaptations manage to strike a proper balance.

So while the aesthetics of Nolan’s BATMAN BEGINS and THE DARK KNIGHT’s may be derivative, they get a key part of the equation right. That tactile reality is a pretty valid - and sensible - way to go, if we are truly to make these cinematic visions feel alive. Nolan may have lost a real sense of iconography and symbol in the transition, but that’s less a casualty of his attempt to coat the story in an illusory reality than it is his consistent directorial reluctance to seek an iconic language for his films.

I think that this thesis is premised upon a bunch of ideas that are wrong.

For instance, ‘Watchmen’ the comic is probably as realistic - or at least, not flamboyant - a comic book as you’ll read.  Everything from the panels to the layout of the panels to the dialogue is tempered and thoughtful.  (Conversely, the movie is like an MTV video: chaotic and hyper-real.  This is obvious, but most evidenced by the violence, which is very restrained in the comic book ‘til the very end, but, in the movie, is full of slow-mo shots of compound bone fractures and the like.)

Secondly, I think that the success of the new Batman franchise totally disproves that comic book movies have to be over-the-top.  To be sure, both Batman movies are totally unbelievable....but they’re believable enough (and cut very, very quickly) that you can suspend disbelief.

Then there’s the issue of compartmentalizing all comic books into being “symbols”.  Hey, I don’t want to be coarse but....how many comics have you ever read?  They’re as varied as the color spectrum!  Even within single characters.  Dennis O’Neil’s Batman (approx. 1985 thru 1995) was, like the new movie series, restrained and borderline-plausible.  Conversely, the modern Batman writers have elected to make it supernatural and wild. 

Lastly, I don’t think that ‘Watchmen’s style is anything new....at all.  CGI has been in heavy use since ‘Terminator 2’, and certainly since ‘Jurassic Park’.  So the claim that ‘Watchmen’ somehow represents any sort of technological or stylistic breakthrough is just bogus.

That’s my opinion, anyway.

Then there’s the issue of compartmentalizing all comic books into being “symbols”.  Hey, I don’t want to be coarse but....how many comics have you ever read?  They’re as varied as the color spectrum!  Even within single characters.  Dennis O’Neil’s Batman (approx. 1985 thru 1995) was, like the new movie series, restrained and borderline-plausible.  Conversely, the modern Batman writers have elected to make it supernatural and wild.