Word: graphically
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Graphic novels--long comic books for grownups--have always had mostly cult appeal. Last year's most successful, the 13th volume in a Japanese manga adventure series--Naruto, by Masashi Kishimoto--sold 80,000 copies, far short of 2007's hottest novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini, which sold more than 1.5 million copies. The point of the comics was largely their transgressiveness. "They're the last pirate medium," says Millar, a Scottish writer who consults for Marvel Comics on more mainstream fare, like Iron Man. "They're the last medium for a mass audience where...
...drafting tables have also become the movie industry's most reliable development tool. Thanks to the box-office success of A-list superheroes like Spider-Man and the X-Men, Hollywood's appetite for comics-fueled material is insatiable. Titles from the darker corners of the genre, including gritty graphic novels like Wanted and Alan Moore's watershed deconstructivist superhero tome Watchmen are getting the big-screen makeover. Stories and characters first written for an audience of a few hundred thousand geeks at most are reaching, at the box office and on DVD and cable, popcorn-chomping crowds that number...
...lesser-known comic books got a shot. Some, like Sin City and Hellboy, became modest box-office successes by adhering to the distinctive spirit of their creators. Others, like Road to Perdition and A History of Violence, attracted audiences with sophisticated stories that few people knew were derived from graphic novels...
Watchmen, easily next year's most anticipated comic-book movie, is based on a graphic novel that's more than 20 years old. What Hollywood would really like is the next big thing. If studio execs can't find one they like by thumbing through publishers' catalogs, they'll create it themselves. In May, Disney announced that Ahmet Zappa, son of Frank, will head up its new Kingdom Comics, a publisher with the express purpose of developing graphic-novel film projects for the studio. This month TokyoPop, a Los Angeles-based manga publisher, announced the creation of a comics...
Millar, meanwhile, is giddily anticipating the opening of Wanted on June 27, even though the poopy bad guy didn't make the final cut. (Imagine the missed merchandising opportunities!) Millar views the graphic-novel-to-movies trend as being likely to stoke creativity, not stifle it. "Hollywood eats up ideas quickly, but comics come up with 300 new ideas a month," he says...