UWM News Release

Fantastic Five: Ben Schneider's research looks at the cinematic side of comic books.

Photo by Alan Magayne-Roshak

MILWAUKEE — There’s more than one way to tell a story, and that, says Benjamin Schneider, is the most interesting aspect of any film adaptation, whether it be of written novels, graphic ones, or – as in Hollywood’s current rage – the humble comic book.

Schneider, a senior lecturer and assistant director of UWM’s Film Studies Program, is particularly curious about the topic. He currently is researching and writing a book-length study of comic book-to-film adaptations.

Movie versions of comic book characters are a natural for mainstream directors, he says, and the attraction hinges on the public’s love of familiarity.

“Comic book superheroes already have a history in the collective imagination,” says Schneider. “Some have been around for almost 70 years. If the film’s called ‘Spiderman,’ we know what we’re going to get.”

Schneider, who earned his Ph.D. at UWM, teaches U.S. independent cinema and genre studies, in addition to adaptation studies. He latched onto this topic because he saw a hole in the scholarship and wanted to explore how stories change as they go from illustration to live action.

Despite a spate of them out there today, the superhero adaptations are governed by special effects and big budgets certainly more than their book-bound cousins, graphic novels. When it comes to turning “sequential art” into cinema, he says, not all comics are equal.

Directors crafting a plot from a serialized superhero strip could go in any direction they wanted, but usually don’t deviate from a formula, he says. “It’s a long-term franchise, though the details may be updated. Batman may be driving a Hummer-type vehicle, but it’s still the Batmobile.”

And while that infusion of pop culture can be fun, of more interest to Schneider are film versions where the entire storylines could be blurred. Such is the case in some film adaptations of popular books or graphic novels.

Audiences seeing the film version of a book may have expectations that the story in the movie will mirror that of the book, but that isn’t what usually happens, says Schneider.

And that metamorphosis is the essence of adapting a story to the cinema, he contends. “It’s the conversation that’s important in creating a film from a defined story. That dialog between texts is what’s interesting and, often, so is the resulting product.”

For example, in the film “Apocalypse Now,” the story isn’t exactly the same as Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” he says, but on a metaphysical level, they are the similar.

“There’s this inter-textuality where films can play off cultural referents and also other versions of the story.”

Graphic novels are unique in their translation to film because they are the middle genre – not comic strips come to life, but a book already set in pictures, though not moving pictures. They are so prevalent now that many bookstores include a category for them, but most moviegoers won’t know that the films they inspire are adaptations.

Some better-known examples are Frank Miller’s “Sin City,” and the work of Harvey Pekar in “American Splendor.” But films such as “The Road to Perdition” and “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” also are based on graphic novels.

Such notions make engaging conversation, but can “studying” films really be academic? You bet, says Schneider. The study of English has traditionally been about word literacy and critical thinking skills; film studies brings visual literacy to the mix, an important component in today’s world.

Offering an interdisciplinary major and minor, film studies draws students from English, comparative literature, modern studies and art history. The program’s popularity is on the rise and the number of courses being offered for 2005-06 jumped 25 percent.

Course work involves enormous amounts of viewing and reading, both criticism and theory, says Schneider. The advantage, he says, is that students enter the program excited about the content.

“The world we live in is all about visual images,” he says. “The more we know about what we see, the more it enhances our ability to interpret.”

UWM Scholar Examines How Comics Are Adapted to Film