Review: Drew Morton, Panel to the Screen: Style, American Film, and Comic Books During the Blockbuster Era (2016)

The comic book adaptation has become one of the most prominent genres in recent cinema. In response, academic studies on comic books, comic book adaptations, superheroes and their ilk, have increased in number with many scholars bringing a variety of critical approaches to this popular type of production. Drew Morton’s Panel to the Screen: Style, American Film, and Comic Books During the Blockbuster Era (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016) focuses on an aesthetic used throughout cinematic adaptations of comic book properties, that of “remediation,” defined by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin as “the representation of one medium in and by another” (6). Morton uses “remediation” as a critical model to analyse a wide range of texts and creators throughout this book. He also incorporates other approaches including historical, industrial and narratological, ensuring that his discussion of remediation is thoroughly contextualised and coherent across his diverse study texts. Morton’s wide-ranging and insightful arguments make Panel to the Screen an excellent contribution to the study of comic book adaptations, both for students and researchers.

The structure of the book moves from definitions and historical context to a diverse set of case studies. These case studies cover a wide range of texts that demonstrate remediation, texts that represent the comic book medium in film while simultaneously borrowing comic book visual tropes. The sheer range of Morton’s case studies demonstrates the significance and pervasiveness of this stylistic adaptation across film production. From the blockbuster adaptations of Superman, Batman and the X-Men to the more obscure Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright, 2010) and Dick Tracy (Warren Beatty, 1990) to the visually distinctive 300 (Zack Snyder, 2007), Watchmen (Zack Snyder, 2009), Sin City (Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller, 2005) and American Splendor (Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, 2003) (Fig. 1), Morton identifies and discusses the “formal and stylistics attributes that are specific to one medium or the other” (24). In doing so, Morton persuasively debunks the conception that comic books and film storyboards work in the same way (5-6, 30). He does this by citing practitioners both from the comic book and film industries, while also performing his own insightful analysis of case studies.

Fig. 1 - American Splendor (Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, 2003).

Morton’s close attention to the crucial differences between spatial and temporal arrangements of framed images makes for a compelling argument, one he maintains throughout the book and across a breadth of material. Morton synthesises a discussion of distribution and reception with archival research, the textual analysis of comic book and cinematic texts, promotional and ancillary material, as well as original interviews. His analysis is insightful and persuasive,  particularly his discussion of graphical remediation in Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy, a text often overlooked in studies of comic book adaptations. Morton points out the distinctive make-up and production design of Beatty’s film, designs that graphically remediate the caricatured artwork of the original comic strip (73-74), therefore remediating the comic book form into a cinematic equivalent. Morton also demonstrates the industrial and commercial logic of Hollywood’s continuity editing in relation to Ang Lee’s Hulk (2003), arguing that this system largely overwhelms Lee’s attempts to remediate the comic book through the multiframe (83). Contrasting examples like this are typical of Morton’s study, and help to demonstrate the ongoing exchanges between comic books and film.

Morton also incorporates multiple views into his analyses, relating comic book lettering and shading to cinematic colouring, industrial expediency to audience response. The cumulative effect is that he creates a complex picture (pun intended) that rewards close attention, balancing his evident passion with his critical eye. Despite the potential for such material to become fanboyish, Morton’s academic critique never wavers. His discussion of action lines in The Matrix (The Wachowskis, 1999) refers to specific studies of the film, including Garrett Stewart’s analysis of temporal manipulation and Henry Jenkins’ discussion of “transmedia storytelling”, and Morton relates these recent studies to the established film theories of André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer (120-123). Morton combines these analyses, as well as a delightful visual study of comic book motion by Scott McCloud (117-119), in order to explore how cinema’s ‘debt to reality’ (Morton, 122) is affected by non-realist aesthetics in The Matrix.

The vibrancy of Morton’s writing ensures that his analysis is never dryly academic, making him a thoughtful and inviting guide on this intriguing journey through comic gook gutters and along the sprockets of film stock. Authorial flourishes like ‘Yet the stylistic mediation continues!’ (140) are likely to evince a chuckle from the reader, making the journey through the book and its arguments enjoyable as well as educational. Furthermore, so precise is Morton’s analysis that when a claim is unsupported (such as the response to Batman Returns [Tim Burton, 1992] 146-7), it is unusual and jarring. The only recurring problem with the book is phrasing and grammatical errors. There is inconsistent spelling, incorrect and duplicated words at various points. This might be down to poor copy editing, but regardless of the cause is only a minor detraction from an impressive piece of analytical study.

As well as being a useful intervention into the fields of adaptation and comic book studies, Morton also makes an interesting contribution to studies of animation, especially with the attention he draws to digital visualisation. In his discussion of 300 (91-92), Morton comments upon the use of blood in Frank Miller’s comic book in relation to Zack Snyder’s digital adaptation of that effect. Similarly, Morton identifies the facilitating effect of digital film in the production of Sin City (158). The line between digital effects and animation is a fuzzy one at best, with an artificial distinction often drawn between ‘CGI’ and ‘animation’ (a point underscored at the 92nd Academy Awards when Disney submitted their remake of The Lion King (John Favreau, 2019) in the category of Best Visual Effects rather than Animated Feature, seemingly to avoid the film being treated as animated). Morton makes no such distinction, discussing digital effects as part and parcel of the overall production. This raises an interesting point in relation to contemporary studies of fantasy and animation, and indeed screen studies more generally. With the use of digital imaging and editing becoming the industry standard, while photochemical filming as well as hand drawn animation becomes more niche, all audiovisual media can potentially be considered a form of animation (something that writers on animation’s genealogy are often at pains to remind us; see Crafton, 2011). Therefore, studies like Morton’s may become highly influential in the future, including animation as part of the overall discussion of moving images, rather than needing to be a distinct discipline.

Fig. 3 - The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born (2007).

The potentially wide application of Panel to the Screen is exemplified in what is possibly Morton’s master stroke: expanding his analysis beyond film adaptations of comic book properties. His fifth chapter, “Remediation beyond Comic Book Adaptations in The Matrix (1999), The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966) and The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born (2007)”, explicitly focuses on wider aesthetic exchanges between forms of media. Morton’s analyses of these texts demonstrate the pervasiveness of comic book-esque stylistics, incorporated into texts that are distant in production context (Fig. 3). The common thread, Morton argues, is that these texts demonstrate an ‘ongoing, dialogical process of remediation’ (116). This dialogism helps the reader to see the potentially disparate titles, franchises, practitioners and contexts as a pattern of mutual exchange, as concepts and practices from one medium inform the other. While the practice of narrative adaptation can be read as a linear progression from source text to adaptation, stylistic adaptation is a transmedia ouroboros. Therefore, Morton’s book makes a strong contribution to the study of comic book adaptations, and also offers a valuable understanding of transmedia flow.

**Article published: June 5, 2020**

References

Crafton, Donald. 2011. “The Veiled Genealogies of Animation and Cinema.” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 6, no. 2: 93–110.

Biography

Vincent M. Gaine is Lecturer in Cultural, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College London. Vincent earned his BA and MA at Keele University, before receiving his PhD in Film and Television Studies from the University of East Anglia. The locus of Vincent's research is the intersection of liminality, identity politics and globalisation in contemporary media. He researches mainstream cinema and television, with particular emphasis on popular filmmakers and genres.