ADAPTATIONS FROM OTHER MEDIA 7
Characters from animated cartoons were natural candidates for adaptation to the
comics, and characters such as Felix the Cat (1920), Mickey Mouse (1927), and
Donald Duck (1934), became the heroes of their own comics early on. One of the
earliest movie adaptations was the six issue Movie Comics from National (later DC ) in
- Others included Fawcett’s Fawcett Movie Comics (also known as Motion Picture
Comics 1949 –53), the other Movie Comics titles from Fiction House Magazines
(1946– 47) and Gold Key/ Whitman (1962–84), and Dell’s Movie Classics , which
were also included as part of Four-Color Comics and continued as Walt Disney Showcase
(1956– 80).
Many more adaptations over the years have been either one-shots—sometimes even
adapted into a tabloid-sized work—or limited series. In recent years those limited series
have been put into various collected works. Some of these works simply collect the
limited series, while others, especially in cases where the story is based on an existing
comic book character, include reprints of related stories. Th e vast majority of these
adaptations are of fi lms in the science fi ction, horror, and fantasy genres.
A notable title from the late 1970s and early 1980s was the Marvel Comics
Super Special which was mainly released in a magazine or tabloid form. Adapta-
tions included Close Encounters of the Th ird Kind , Battlestar Galactica , Star Trek: Th e
Motion Picture , Raiders of the Lost Ark , Blade Runner , Th e Last Starfi ghter , Th e Mup-
pets Take Manhattan , Dune , Buckaroo Banzai , and Sheena. Many of these were also
released as individual limited series and some were even put into paperback book
form. Other publishers made movie comics by using fumetti which, like some of the
early movie adaptations, would take movie stills and add captions and word balloons.
Some have also been used to start an ongoing comic book series based on a particular
fi lm. Another notable work is Alien: Th e Illustrated Story published by Heavy Metal
in 1980 and based on the classic science fi ction fi lm. Adapted by Archie Goodwin
and Walter Simonson, this was the fi rst graphic novel to be on the New York Times
Best Seller list.
In recent years, adaptations of both new and old fi lms have been made with both
direct adaptations and volumes that expand upon the original work. IDW has pub-
lished adaptations of several of George Romero’s zombie fi lms. A 1990 Eclipse Comics
limited series adaptation of Fritz Lang’s 1931 classic fi lm M was recently collected and
reprinted by non-comic publisher Harry N. Abrams. Darren Aronofsky adapted and
expanded his fi lm Th e Fountain into graphic novel form in what has been referred to as
the ultimate director’s cut and a sister-project to the fi lm. An adaptation of Underworld
bundled it with an original story set hundreds of years earlier.
As with Underworld , additional works are also created which, while not direct
adaptations of a fi lm, are written as a way to directly tie in the work. Marvel has cre-
ated various “one-shot” stories that act as prequels to the various X-Men fi l m s. D C
did something similar prior to Superman Returns. In both cases, the portrayals of the
characters in these stories were the same as they appear in the fi lms, but not as they
appear in the mainstream comic books. Fox Atomic’s 28 Days Later: Th e Aftermath is
