The dark and unsettling story of the first independent comic adapted into a movie
Steroid-pumped pecs squeezed into a bodysuit. Tired quips you’ve heard a million times before. CGI pillars of light in the sky. A comic book movie isn’t difficult to define.
Comic book movies are a modern equivalent to what westerns were in the 1950s, megabudget musicals were in the 1960s and action blockbusters in the 1980s. Except in the case of those previous genres, they were phenomena that only lasted a maximum of a decade. We’ve now gone well past the two-decade mark for the comic book movie’s box office dominance, and it’s only just starting to slow down. However, just because you feel like you’ve seen all the superhero spectaculars you can possibly take, comics are a medium; all is not lost.
Comics are, after all, a medium, not a genre. Capes might define said medium, but the more you look, the more you can find examples of comic books that tell any kind of story. The titans of DC and Marvel do dabble in this kind of work from time to time (DC actually stands for Detective Comics, fact fans!), but for more expansive work, there’s the wonderful world of independent comics. In a strange way, these are comics that are more in touch with the medium’s origin than most, reflected in the kind of movies adapted from them.
Many comics from the world of independent publishing have been picked up by Hollywood. Granted, most of these have been works that boil down to edgier takes on superheroes like Kick-Ass, Wanted or basically anything else originally written by Mark Millar. However, many different kinds of stories have come from this world. Stories from Ghost World to Persepolis. From When The Wind Blows to Ichi The Killer. Few things illustrate this better than the very first independent comic adapted into a mainstream movie.
A film whose reputation is as dark and unsettling as the comic itself.
What was the first independent comic adapted into a film?
From the very beginning, The Crow was an unreconstructed, untrammelled howl of rage-fuelled grief and grief-fulled rage. Death had stalked James O’Barr his entire life, taking his parents from him and forcing him to be raised in the foster care system. As a teenager, O’Barr met Beverly, the young woman who would later become his fiancée. Sadly, at the cusp of seemingly finding a family after searching for so long, Beverly was killed by a drunk driver.
O’Barr joined the Marines as a way of coping with his grief, but that wasn’t enough. While stationed in Berlin, he began channelling his grief into the comic that would later become his masterpiece, The Crow. Published in 1989 by Caliber Press, the comic would become a sensation, selling over 750,000 copies and talks for a film adaptation began shortly afterwards. Astonishingly, the first major studio interested in the film had grand plans to make The Crow a musical with Michael Jackson as the lead.
The film was (much like the comic) made independently before being sold to Miramax for distribution, where it was a box office hit despite its troubled production, which directly led to the death of its star, Brandon Lee. While technically being a film about a costumed crime-fighter, very little else about The Crow has anything to do with a traditional superhero flick, being more of a gothic supernatural action film than anything else.
A reminder, if one was needed, that if you’re tired of the mainstream, you can always look a little deeper to get to the really good stuff.