Page - 11 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 03/01

Editorial | 11www.jrfm.eu 2017, 3/1, 9–16 in recent years, turning comic books into movies and television shows has be- come a popular and financially lucrative endeavour. The cinematic adaptation of a written text is a complicated task and more interpretation than simply the transfer of content from one medium to another. the screenplay writer has to choose which parts of the storyline to pick and which to leave out, acting as both interpreter and censor.8 the artists drawing the storyboard are limited in their freedom to sketch the pictures because they have to cater to the pictorial literacy of the viewers and their cultural context. Compared to the adaptation of just-text, the adaptation of a comic book appears much simpler because it provides the artists involved in the adaptation process not just with the (writ- ten) narrative but also with rich visual resources. But, in fact, a comic book ad- aptation is even more complicated. The visual universe of the comic offers only so much help, because the drawn image and the animated image are quite dif- ferent. A character that is very popular in a comic book may lose much of its ap- peal when translated into an animated character. some of the challenges of this translation have to do with the expectations and the imagination of the audi- ence. they may already have formed a mental image of an animated character, with their ideas of how a drawn character walks, moves, behaves and interacts with other characters. the animation provided by the studio might then be at odds with the audience’s imagination or expectations. sound, too, is challenging to translate from a comic book into an animated movie. some comic book fans can be quite disappointed when they hear the an- imated version of their favourite comic books for the first time and when they hear how their familiar characters sound. in a comic book, the “audio track” is represented by visual means such as speech bubbles or written sound (e.g. “CrAsh!”, “ZiP!” or “GULP!”), again leaving room for the individual imagina- tion. Last but not least, the comic book – even though on average it consists of only 40–70 pages – contains far more material than can possibly fit into a feature film–length work. Further, a comic book contains not only what is vis- ible but also what is invisible. scott McCloud emphasizes the importance of the space between the panels, where the mind of the reader (re)constructs consid- erable parts of the story that are only insinuated by the authors. As such, com- ics encourage a high level of audience engagement and involvement, and the audience becomes co-creator and co-writer of the story. it is then challenging to translate and transfer both the space-in-between and the level of audience engagement from comic books into movie adaptions. Adapting a comic book into a live-action movie, rather than an animated movie, can be highly controversial. Some artists are sceptical about – or reject 8 The length of a screenplay is roughly calculated with a one-page-per-film-minute formula, limiting it to 90–120 pages, whereas the underlying novel might consist of three or four times that number of pages.