A little audience participation

I just finished reading The Surrogates, a five-issue SF comic series written by Robert Venditti and drawn by Brett Weldele. Published in 2005 and 2006, this is not exactly breaking news. However, if you listened to me and went out to see District 9, then you likely caught the trailer for the comic's upcoming film adaptation.

Now, I know I go on and on about this so I'm going to spare you the typical diatribe about remakes and adaptations. I'm going to play this one a little differently.

The Surrogates was good. Really freaking good, actually. Now maybe I totally missed the train on this one, because it certainly happens from time to time, but I didn't even know this series existed until I saw the trailer. I suspect a large portion of the folks who go to see this will not have been exposed to the comic.

Get your hands on it and read it. Do it for this little exercise, but also just because you won't regret it. After wading through all that Marvel junk, I decided to take a little sabbatical from comics. Thankfully, Venditti's imaginative series is a welcome change, fun and moving, smart and concise. However, it isn't quite Star Trek or Watchmen-grade nerd holy ground material and that's why it's perfect for this experiment. We can look at the comic and its adaptation and discuss the market and medium jump without having to fight against the never-ending current of ad hominem arguments that involve the term "fanboy."

Some things aren't meant to be accessible on the scale that Hollywood producers require. Sometimes when you force them to be, you lose that spark that made them original in the first place. A comic book has the luxury of assuming the reader is at least somewhat interested in the far-fetched and extraordinary -- it's free to experiment. On the other hand, a major motion picture is forced by the system to play to the center to justify its typically extreme level of financial investment.

This system obviously makes money, but it's not exactly geared toward preserving the artistic spirit of the source material. This is the root of my problem with adaptations, it's not just blind devotion to a franchise, as many like to imply.

Read the comic. Watch the movie. Decide for yourself.