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things I used to watch on TV. They were set by books, and more specifically, comics. I was blessed with a documented reading age of 14 when I was 5 years old, and my imagination was fed with richly detailed tales of myth and legend from all over the world. I was practically an Arthurian scholar by the time I was 8, and as a 12 year old I'd have soundly kicked Indiana Jones' ass on a spot Egyptology test.

But around about that time, something happened to me on a dark torrential November evening whilst I was sitting in a doctors' waiting room with my mother. I reached across to a stack of well thumbed reading material and grabbed my first copy of 2000AD Magazine. Comparing it to the standard Marvel / DC fare was like comparing....something good with something...not quite as good. I'm out of metaphors right now, k? The cartoony, simplistic messages of 'good ultimately triumphing over evil' that burst forth from the musclebound pages of the staple US comics were brushed aside for an altogether darker, more emotive set of characters and stories that dealt with humanity and society on a series of much more complex and fascinating levels.

From that moment on, my tastes were redefined. I began reading comics alongside books - not as an inferior medium, but as an equally valid source of knowledge and insight. And over 25 years later I'm still reading them, and taking as much pleasure and insight from them as I did as a small boy.

All preambles aside, it simply comes down to this: Had I to make a choice between never watching a movie and never having access to comics or graphic novels again, there's absolutely no choice to make. I don't have a ten-point bulleted list of reasons why - I personally don't need to quantify my choice in such a way, but it's got lots to do with the sterility of the transitional process from literary to screen; what to leave out, or worse - what to distort from the original text in order to comply with time and budgetary restraints. Even the mighty LOR trilogy is guilty of such considerations - a pure, unabridged adaptation would be impossible - but even so, all credit to Peter Jackson for producing a masterpiece of cinema.

If we imagine a writer's original vision as being like a stock car at the beginning of a race, it gets dented and smashed by the influences of writers, producers, directors and who knows how many others before it crosses the finish line. Sometimes it barely rolls across - a mangled wreck of the machine it was at the start. The words 'John Constantine' come springing to mind, but this isn't really about my personal gripes with Warner Bros' interpretation of the character, or Keanu Reeves' portrayal of the blonde, British occultist anti-hero. Writers like Garth Ennis, Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, Frank Miller et al are masters of their craft, and they weave subtleties and nuances into their work that are sometimes brutalised by movie producers and executives more interested in merchandising revenues. Hey, it's economics. I know.

So anyway...your average cinematic experience has between 90 and 120 minutes to complete its story arc regardless of text, and sometimes that's plainly visible on screen, especially when you're familiar with the original material. Harry Potter films are a case in point, even though not strictly a comic book narrative. But here's where the 'Marvel Movie Machine' does its thing - sometimes condensing years of story arcs and character developments into a couple of hours. I'm not saying it's wrong, I'm just saying that there's so, so much more to these characters and stories than you'll ever find in a movie theatre...

Learn more about this author, Jason Hoffmann.
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