Later this year, the Fantastic Four will make their return to Marvel’s comic universe. That’s a great sign, especially given how rubbish the series’ translation into films has been. But it also raises a question: what if a film was given a complete comic makeover?
Writer Dan Slott and artist Sara Pichelli are teaming up to reunite the Fantastic Four, which Marvel announced just last month. And it’ll be fun to see how the quartet is put back together given the destructive nature of Secret Wars, the mega Marvel even that basically blew up the entire comic universe.
You can see a few panels from the upcoming Fantastic Four book in a teaser that dropped recently, and there’s a little bit of neat animation just to liven things up.
So that got me thinking: what would happen if someone took the comic book visuals, added full voiceovers and a bunch of techniques – not showing each panel in full immediately, focusing on different parts of scenes and then animating different aspects of each panel on screen – and turned that into a movie?
For one, it would probably make the CGI element a lot easier. Given that superhero movies are a dime a dozen, and the stars within are commanding top dollar, there’s surely a business incentive for film studios to find different ways to tell all of these stories.
From the fan perspective, it would also alleviate one of the biggest annoyances of the rise of superhero films: shitty acting. And it’d be interesting from a production perspective to see what could be done with an entirely hand drawn/CGI crafted world, rather than overlaying bits of CGI onto parts of a scene/set.
Then again, I don’t make movies. So maybe it’s actually easier – even if it’s not more cost-effective – to use real sets and real actors, using CG to fill in the blanks. But it’d be fun to see comics brought to life, but still in that classic comic-book form rather than just having the stories lifted into a live-action film with varying degrees of competency.
Either way, the Fantastic Four comics are coming back this August.
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