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Comic book adaptations tend to fare much better than their source material when it comes to storytelling. With the rise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the DC Animated Universe, comic book adaptations have become more profitable and far easier to access than the comics themselves. Captain America: Civil War is a great example of this.
There are cases, however, where the adaptation will fall short. Whether shortening the story to fit a limited time and excising important characters as a result or adding content that wasn't present in the source material, there are instances where the original comic book proves superior to the adaptation. This is best seen in Watchmen.
Disclaimer: This list will contain spoilers for the comics as well as their adaptations. Any opinions are solely the purview of the author.
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5 comic books that worked better when adapted
1) Captain America: Civil War (Marvel's Civil War)
The Marvel Cinematic Universe version of Civil War is generally considered better than the comic book and an example of how to adapt controversial material. Both comic book versions of Marvel's Civil War are considered terrible, but the first one stands out as aggressively so for multiple reasons.
The comic book had terrible characterization for both the pro and anti-registration sides (for example, making Iron Man into an authoritarian, Captain America short-sighted, etc.), the registration act was never explained fully and resulted in writer and audience confusion, and the events of the story were retconned by One More Day and Secret Invasion.
Captain America: Civil War is considered the best possible version of the story. The characters are written better, so their arguments are easier to follow; the conflict is far more personal and therefore more heartbreaking; and it felt like the writers agreed on where the story went as opposed to the comic book.
2) Betrayal and Aftershock (Teen Titans: The Judas Contract)
The tragic story of Terra has been told many times since the original The Judas Contract comic book appeared in 1984. The original is memorable because of Terra and for being a fascinating story about revenge, betrayal, and manipulation. The main problem with the comic book is that it went out of its way to make Terra the villain instead of Slade Wilson/Deathstroke.
This is problematic because not only did Slade use her for his unjustified, grief-stricken revenge against the Teen Titans, but he got a clean slate from writers and fans afterward and turned into an anti-hero. Terra was still considered irredeemable for years, despite Slade's manipulations and her barely being 14 years old at the time.
By contrast, both the Teen Titans animated series and the Young Justice animated series emphasized the tragedy of Terra as a girl being taken advantage of by older man obsessed with revenge. The Teen Titans series focused more on how Slade's manipulations twisted her psyche, whereas the Young Justice series focused on how Terra became dependent on Slade as a surrogate father figure and savior.
3) The Dark Knight Returns part 1 and 2 (The Dark Knight Returns)
Frank Miller has gone downhill since the original publication of The Dark Knight Returns in 1986. As a cornerstone of Batman comics, The Dark Knight Returns bridged the gap between the Adam West series and the more serious versions of the character for mainstream, non-comic fans of Batman at the time.
Over time, Frank Miller's personal bigotries and biases began to take hold. Many began noticing that the incessant political commentary, the sexism, the racism, the overuse of purple prose, the borderline fascism, and that Miller was incredibly against Superman and Batman being friends in future works like The Dark Knight Strikes Again, Holy Terror, and All-Star Batman and Robin got their start in The Dark Knight Returns.
The two animated films of the same name took the concept of an older, grizzled Batman coming back and cut most of the unnecessary tropes Frank Miller was known for. One particular positive was cutting out Batman's constant internal monologues, allowing for a variety of perspectives that helped enhance the tragedy of fights like Batman vs. Superman.
4) The Boys (The Boys)
The original The Boys comic book contains violence for its own sake, brutality for its own sake, and meaningless jabs at superheroes. Whatever anti-corporate messaging is in the comic gets swept aside for uninformed jabs at heroes like Captain America, the X-Men, and Superman.
In the comic book, the character of Soldier Boy is supposedly criticizing Captain America as an insult to WWII servicemen. This falls flat because Captain America was invented as an insult to fascism, his first comic cover featuring him punching Hitler in the jaw. The insult falls flat when audiences remember that Jack Kirby and Joe Simon served during World War II, and the Captain America comic books were popular among servicemen at the time.
The Boys television show trims down any insults and has reasons for its brutality and themes of "What if Superheroes went fully corporate?" It has a lot to say about the intertwining of politics and celebrity culture and how corporations can make even outright Nazis like Stormfront look rebellious and cool.
5) Superman vs. The Elite (What's so Funny about Truth, Justice, and the American Way?)
What's so funny about Truth, Justice, and the American Way? is considered an iconic Superman story regarding the dangers of blind hatred and senseless violence. The comic book's flaws are regarding the sheer amount of padding in the book; there are too many things that can be excised to get to the point of the conflict between Superman and the Elite.
There's no point in having the final fight on one of Jupiter's moons when Earth's moon suffices. There's no point to a group of rogue DEO agents aside from a Men in Black reference. While the movie and comic both arrive at the same conclusion, the movie eliminates a lot of the filler and unnecessary parts of the story.
The movie version was written by the original comic's author, Joe Kelly, who made great use of a 70-minute runtime by focusing purely on Superman and the Elite. The differing perspectives between the two, as far as what lines they will cross regarding violence, are handled better in the movie by showing the cost of the lethality on the Elite's side and how Superman not killing is ultimately better.
5 examples where the comic book was better than the adaptation
1) Flashpoint
Flashpoint is a story that many adaptations have struggled with. The basic plot is that Barry Allen, aka Flash, runs back in time, saves his mother from death, and ends up in a bad timeline that's on the brink of total annihilation. Yet every adaptation, from the CW Flash to the animated The Flashpoint Paradox to the recent The Flash movie, somehow manages to botch this story.
The key problem with these adaptations, aside from the liberties taken in what they showcase and excise, is the length. While adaptations don't need to be 1-to-1 translations of the source material, Flashpoint adaptations fail to show the full scope of the damage done to the timeline and the world and lose a lot of context for the newer characters.
The Flashpoint comic book has a lot of tie-in material that gets the audience settled into this alternate timeline. While it may all be erased by the end, the story presented and the characters presented are still unique. Sometimes a story needs time to develop the characters and world rather than rushing through things.
2) Injustice: Gods Among Us
The Injustice series is better known for video games, but the series started as comic books, and the games came later. The games are good at giving a summary of what happens and at telling the overall story of fighting an evil Superman. The movie falls short of this goal.
This Injustice movie adaptation is over an hour and 20 minutes long, which results in a severely rushed story with important characters like Cyborg and Flash dying, unlike in the comic, and the movie condensing several films worth of a potential story into a one-shot.
By comparison, the game version's story runs for about five and a half hours, and the comics continue even after a decade. The comics are recommended due to the level of detail, showing the breakdown of Superman into a villain in real-time as well as the other incidents that led up to the first and second games.
3) The Killing Joke
Despite the controversies surrounding The Killing Joke, especially Barbara Gordon's disabling and subsequent retirement until the creation of Oracle, most fans can still enjoy the comic for being a Joker story. By contrast, the animated film falls woefully short when compared to the original comic book.
In an attempt to make the movie more Barbara-centric to correct for her being rendered disabled, the filmmakers added a completely unrelated story involving Barbara stopping a gang. Also, she and Batman sleep together. This results in a confusing and awkward story unrelated to The Killing Joke that feels tacked on.
Audiences have been advised to stick with the original book and read about Barbara Gordon's time as Oracle. The comic books are considered far better than the 77-minute film, especially in regards to how Barbara recovers from the Joker shooting her.
4) Watchmen
Another landmark comic book that had its adaptation fall short is Watchmen. While the Watchmen HBO series was considered at least decent, the 2009 Zack Synder-directed film wasn't. Amid the myriad reasons why fans and critics didn't care for the film, a consensus begins to emerge.
The problems with Zack Synder's version of the story are as follows: it is a massive tonal shift away from the comic book, embracing ultraviolent superheroism as a positive when the comic book decried such theatrics. Likewise, the movie suffers from being too faithful of an adaptation and not enough simultaneously.
Watchmen is considered better as a comic than a movie. The comic does a lot to explain what the movie leaves out; the movie is considered incomprehensible for people who haven't read the comic. The comic book is well over 12 issues long, and the movie tries to condense that into 163 minutes, much like how Akira tried to condense over 70 chapters of a then-ongoing manga into a 124-minute film.
5) Secret Invasion
The allure of Secret Invasion has always been the paranoia factor of finding out which famous costumed Marvel hero was a Skrull in disguise. The Earth's Mightiest Heroes cartoon version of this premise did this beautifully with their version of the Avengers, whereas the MCU show of the same name didn't.
While Nick Fury getting a solo adventure is long overdue in the MCU, it was altogether considered inferior to the original comic. The main reason was that replacing the iconic heroes being replicated with regular politicians in a spy vs. spy thriller didn't have the same appeal.
The comic book not only fixes Iron Man's prior record of disastrous decisions in the Civil War by having him be a Skrull but is also a legitimately paranoia-inducing idea. The idea that the heroes could be aliens in disguise, waiting to strike with the originals out of the picture, meant that many had to do damage control afterward.
Adaptations can be very hit-or-miss, depending on the quality of the source material. In the case of comic book adaptations, this is doubly so. Some comic books, like Civil War, were awful to begin with, so the adaptation can only improve upon what was there.
Sometimes the adaptation gets so many things wrong, like in Flashpoint or Injustice, that the comic book is better by comparison. Should any comic books or their adaptations be off this list that should have made it in, readers are encouraged to post examples in the comments.
