Well here's an article about comic book movies from the local fishwrap
Link:
http://www.azcentral.com/ent/movies/articles/0328comicflicks28.html
Comic relief
Dark Horse Comics
The original Hellboy spends his time hunting occult monsters for the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense.
Bill Muller
The Arizona Republic
Mar. 28, 2004 12:00 AM
BEVERLY HILLS - It's a little after 11 here, and hell has come to breakfast.
Actually it's Hellboy, in the personage of actor Ron Perlman, who plays the title character in a movie adapted, like so many these days, from a comic book.
"Try playing Hellboy for a day, man," says Perlman, who's best known for the TV show Beauty and the Beast. "You'll have the coolest time you've ever had in your life."
It's evident that Perlman enjoyed the role, his first genuine star turn, even though he endured four hours a day in a makeup chair to become Hellboy, a bright red, cigar-chomping, muscle-bound but domesticated demon who grinds down his horns and fights on the side of good.
As producers dig deeper into stacks of comic books and run out of well-known titles, such as Superman, Batman, X-Men and Spider-Man, Hellboy is leading an unprecedented group of obscure comic characters onto the big screen.
In the past few years, From Hell, Road to Perdition, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and other graphic novels have become film fodder. In 2003, Marvel unleashed B-level hero Daredevil onto the screen. He'll be followed by a squad of less-than-famous Marvel heroes, including The Punisher on April 16, Ghost Rider, Elektra, Man-Thing and Namor, along with Iron Man and The Fantastic Four.
"I don't think Hollywood was paying attention as to the limited amount of A-plus titles, so they've already sort of burned through most of them," says Todd McFarlane of Phoenix, who created the cult comic Spawn and is developing another film about the character. "I don't think the average person is well-versed in Thor. . . . Once you go down to, like, B and C (level), then to me you might as well go all the way down to Z and just try to find the stuff that will actually make good movies."
Good or bad, comic books are obviously hot properties. With the success of the X-Men films and Spider-Man (which has a sequel coming this summer), other studios are eager to join the parade of men in tights.
"Having run a studio as well as produced a lot of movies, what happens is that when something works - what's the big movie now? Lord of the Rings? - I promise you somewhere there's a meeting going on with a guy saying, 'It's kind of a Lost in Translation/Lord of the Rings,' " says Hellboy producer Larry Gordon.
"Hollywood always follows the leader. So if something works, it's going to be tried and tried and tried until it's a disaster, and (then) multiple disasters. That's just the way it is."
Kevin Smith, a comic-book aficionado and director of Clerks, Dogma and Jersey Girl, says, "In a world where they've got me doing Green Hornet next, that's reaching deep. That's reaching real deep.
"Comic-book movies have become the new Western . . . to some degree. Now every studio's like, 'We've got to make one.' . . . Thankfully Miramax was all set to give me Green Hornet, because at least I'm a comic-book fan making a comic-book movie."
As is Hellboy director Guillermo del Toro, who was determined to direct the film once he learned Hellboy was being pitched.
"To me, the great thing about Hellboy is that he is an incredibly flawed and human comic-book figure," del Toro says. "The guy is 90 percent Achilles' heel."
Del Toro says "white bread" characters such as Superman, whom he considers "almost like a CIA operative," don't interest him. Instead, he chose the wild story of Hellboy, who started his life in creator Mike Mignola's tale as a baby demon conjured by the Nazis near the end of World War II.
Hellboy was rescued and raised by a kindly scientist who founded the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, which employs a grown-up Hellboy to hunt down occult monsters. Although Hellboy may seem a modern monstrosity, Mignola says he sprang in part from the old-time heroes of World War II comics, in which Captain America and Nick Fury, "good American GIs, just red-blooded American boys," battled the Nazis.
"I said, 'Let me have Hellboy come out of that era,' " says Mignola, who was given a major creative role in making the film, "because that seemed to me the best time for comics."
Hellboy's trademark weapon, his huge stone "right hand of doom," may mirror the hammer wielded by Marvel's Thor, but Hellboy is a relatively new character, which gives him an edge with movie audiences.
"I just think there are huge advantages to doing stuff that isn't so well known," Mignola says. "You don't have that preconceived thing."
With mainstream comics, publishers eager to sell more books continually reinvent established characters. But it doesn't always work, especially as the heroes become more unrecognizable.
"You're trying to milk that trademark as much as you can," Mignola says, "so I think you see certain characters that have been changed so many times where you think, 'Wouldn't it have been better to make up a new guy?' "
Producers aren't tapping into fresh comic characters, but basing movies on lesser-known established ones instead. And it's not as though there's an inexhaustible supply of quality newcomers with which to work.
"The fundamental problem in comics today is most of the stuff is crap," Mignola says. "Everybody is saying, 'Oh, we want comics to be taken more seriously,' and yet very few people are doing comics that are worth taking seriously."
Del Toro says that despite the deluge there are still some well-known comics that have yet to hit the screen.
"In terms of scale, there are a lot of the big ones that have not been done," says del Toro, who also directed Blade 2, a movie based on a supporting character from a comic. "There's Superman. That could use another retelling. There is Fantastic Four. There is Iron Man. There is Green Lantern. There are still a lot of the bigger cannons to be fired."
The holy grail of comic adaptation is Frank Miller's revelatory, revisionist Dark Knight series, about an aged Batman who must don his cape one last time to battle new enemies, as well as Two-Face, the Joker and other familiar foes.
Yet del Toro called trying to make a movie from Dark Knight a "lose-lose" proposition.
"I think Dark Knight is a perfect work," del Toro says. "If Watchmen (an Alan Moore comic also tagged for a film) is the Proustian work of comics, Dark Knight is sort of the hard-boiled Mickey Spillane, Raymond Chandler of the genre. There's no way you're going to do it and elevate it any more than what it is."
Besides, del Toro says, it's heartening that films are being drawn from comics that don't feature classic superheroes.
"Hellboy gets made," he says. "American Splendor gets made. Ghost World gets made. And I like the idea that you cannot limit the term 'comic-book movie' and just think of men in tights."
Keep the sequel far away from Ang Lee.
