Adventures

People who judge/criticize/are annoyed with things that happen in the film/tv adaptation of a novel/series/comic without having read the source material.

Example The Walking Dead doesn’t have enough zombies, character development, or answering the real question, what would happen in a society if weren’t forced to follow the rules? Dan O’Brien at Cracked has done two separate articles on it. In the show, the characters are bland stereotypes, they do nothing for 45 minutes then “holy shit zombies” and it’s dull and repetitive. And he’s 100% correct. He also assesses the First episode as the high-point of the series and a look at what could have been. 

But the comics? The comics are amazing. It’s why the first episode is so good. It’s almost directly the same, some scenes are shot directly from the comic’s story board. And almost immediately episode two turns right and Story arc two turns left. It’s like the TV writers put an interstate over the  comic’s old US highway. It’s sleeker and gets you from point A to point B, but you lose so many of the twists and turns, see so much less and forget the beauty of some of the small bits. They’re going the same place and go through some of the same towns, but the journey is completely different. 

Conversely George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice And Fire series has been beautifully adapted as HBO’s A Game of Thrones (the name of the first book in the series). They tell the same story, maybe with a bit less depth, but with the same great characters and emotional evocations. I’m re-reading the series after watching Season 1 and I’m still amazed at how well they captured things, and what they left out, I’d forgotten myself, because it wasn’t as important. 

I’m a huge hypocrite writing this rant, because I judge the stupidity of things in comic book movies all the time. And I don’t read a lot of them the same thing with some series (Twilight being a perfect example, though I did try and fail to read the first one) But give the source material a chance, there is some great stuff out there beneath the surface.