Books, Arts & Manners: Uncomic Strips

WHY the fascination with comic strips as material for movie adaptations? One can see making films from art forms of equal standing—fiction, drama—though even these seldom work out; but why adapt beneath your station? Because comic strips, no laughing matter, have an enormous following, and people want to see how four frames per day translate into 24 frames per second.

And so we have Judge Dredd, based on a popular British strip, and filmed in England and Iceland. We are in the Third Millennium, when “the world changed. Climate. Nations. All were in upheaval. Humanity itself turned as violent as the planet.” How violent is that? I thought that planets were well-behaved, and only man was vile. But never mind: why shouldn’t most of the United States be a vast desert called Cursed Earth, where “nothing grows, inhabited by marauders, scavengers, and outcasts” from the three Mega-Cities in which the population is concentrated? Perhaps because even marauders, scavengers, and outcasts have to eat, and how are they to manage that where nothing grows? But never mind: mind is never what comic strips are about.

JS

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John Simon

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WHY the fascination with comic strips as material for movie adaptations? One can see making films from art forms of equal standing—fiction, drama—though even these seldom work out; but why adapt beneath your station? Because comic strips, no laughing matter, have an enormous following, and people want to see how four frames per day translate into 24 frames per second.

And so we have Judge Dredd, based on a popular British strip, and filmed in England and Iceland. We are in the Third Millennium, when “the world changed. Climate. Nations. All were in upheaval. Humanity itself turned as violent as the planet.” How violent is that? I thought that planets were well-behaved, and only man was vile. But never mind: why shouldn’t most of the United States be a vast desert called Cursed Earth, where “nothing grows, inhabited by marauders, scavengers, and outcasts” from the three Mega-Cities in which the population is concentrated? Perhaps because even marauders, scavengers, and outcasts have to eat, and how are they to manage that where nothing grows? But never mind: mind is never what comic strips are about.