Movie Comics: Page to Screen/Screen to Page

In this insightful new work, cinema and media studies scholar Davis (The Battle for the Bs: 1950s Hollywood and the Rebirth of Low-Budget Cinema) takes a currently profitable and high-profile relationship—the one between comics and film—and reveals a history going back to the earliest days of both media. Davis’s lens focuses on three decades, the 1930s through the 1950s, alternating between page-to-screen and screen-to-page adaptations. Davis is a keen cultural interpreter, carefully balancing references to documents such as promotional materials and sales figures with close reading of individual works. He goes on to detail the production and distribution of comic films, such as the 28-feature Blondie series and the equally prolific Dick Tracy, and film comics, a medium with less clearly defined borders and goals. Sometimes these were faithful recreations of movies; sometimes they built upon narratives and cross-promoted characters, as when Disney released a short comic book story about Dumbo meeting Snow White’s Dwarfs; and sometimes they even used images from films to tell original stories. This is an enlightening, scholarly history. Davis treats his topic seriously while also celebrating the pleasures of these two lively arts. (Jan.)