Hollywood goes graphiC: the intermedial transposition of graphic novels to films

Abstract

Comic books have always been consigned the children's shelves at libraries and bookstores. Recently, however, a massive publishing of comic books designed for the adult audience called graphic novels has caught the attention of academics, critics and the film industry. Despite the existence of a vast theoretical bibliography of screen adaptations based on novels, those theories can not be satisfactorily applied to the analysis of films based on comics and graphic novels, since they do not conceive, among other aspects, the translation of the drawing image in comics to the photography of film. In this sense, this thesis focuses on an area that has remained quite untheorized: the specific case of the translation of comics and particularly of graphic novels into films. In light of this, I approach Alan Moore's Watchmen and Frank Miller's Sin City and their respective film versions. In order to support this debate, I will draw upon Irina Rajewsky's categories of intermedial relations as well as Pascal Lefvre's considerations about film adaptations of comics.