Graphic Novels To Film: ‘A History Of Violence,’ ‘The Mask’ And Other Unexpected Adaptations

By Hallie Sekoff

Graphic novels are an interesting medium — wedged between a standard novel and a comic book, they don’t quite fit in either category, but meld the two into one.

Even the term “graphic novel,” is a point of contention for some scholars. As comic book scholar and author Gene Kannenberg, Jr. told The Huffington Post, via email, the term graphic novel was “coined independently by Richard Kyle (in 1960’s) and by Will Eisner (in the 1970’s) [as] a long-form book in comics form which stood on its own literary and artistic merits, not on a franchised commodity. Those types of graphic novels are out there, but so are a lot of long superhero stories under the same banner.”

For Kannenberg, the term “is more of a marketing term than anything else.”

With the release of “The Dark Knight Rises” today, we decided to go the opposite route and research some graphic novels that don’t encompass the larger franchised superhero comics and have been compelling enough to score a Hollywood script.

For example, many people would be surprised to learn that David Cronenberg’s “A History Of Violence” is actually an adaptation of the 1997 graphic novel of the same name by John Wagner and Vince Locke. Or that the 1994 Jim Carrey film, “The Mask,” is actually based upon a series of comic books published by Dark Horse Comics.

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10 Graphic Novels for the Literary Minded

By Kelly Thompson

As graphic novels continue to become more widely accepted by the general public, I encounter more and more people unsure about where to start reading.  There’s a lot of product out there, which can make it difficult to find the right entry point.  Additionally, many pick the wrong entry point and tend to run screaming from the medium. But when you read a bad book, you don’t swear off books, you just swear off that author, or perhaps that genre.  The same should be true for Graphic Novels.  And so with that in mind, I offer you 10 graphic novels for the literary minded, broken down by genre to give you a fighting chance at picking something you might enjoy.  I’ve avoided the usual suspects – Maus, Watchmen, and the like, which are both excellent of course, but have also been recommended a million times before – in favor of some more recent offerings that you may or may not have heard about.

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7 Must-Read Books on Time

By Maria Popova

What the second law of thermodynamics has to do with Saint Augustine, landscape art, and graphic novels.

Time is the most fundamental common denominator between our existence and that of everything else, it’s the yardstick by which we measure nearly every aspect of our lives, directly or indirectly, yet its nature remains one of the greatest mysteries of science. Last year, we devoured BBC’s excellent What Is Time? and today we turn to seven essential books that explore the grand question on a deeper, more multidimensional level, spanning everything from quantum physics to philosophy to art.

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