2005 was the year Hollywood fell in love with the other form of visual storytelling—the graphic novel. The graphic novel is nothing more than an elaborate comics story, produced in book form. The term came to prominence around 1978 with the publication of legendary comics creator Will Eisner's A Contract with God, a collection of literate comics short stories based on his own life, growing up in the Bronx during the Depression.
Since then the form has evolved to encompass such varied works as Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize—winning work of graphic nonfiction, Maus, and Alan Moore's epic superhero graphic novel Watchmen.
But in recent years, Hollywood producers have enthusiastically embraced comics and the graphic novel, producing one blockbuster film after another based on classic and contemporary comics properties and characters. This year alone, the ultra-dramatic graphic works of Frank Miller—the super hard-boiled crime fiction of Sin City and his dark 1986 reinterpretation of Batman, The Dark Knight Returns—have been made into blockbuster movies whose combined box-office gross has surpassed the $200-million mark. Miller is held in such high esteem in Hollywood that director Robert Rodriguez gave him co-directing credit on the film version of Sin City because the movie's narrative and visual style re-creates the original graphic novel, quite literally, panel for panel.
Miller is quick to credit Eisner, and A Contract with God, for giving him the notion that comics could have the literary depth and emotional power of a prose novel. In The Dark Knight, Miller's portrayal of Bruce Wayne as a grim, aging, psychologically twisted vigilante, haunted by the murder of his parents and betrayed by the criminal justice system, rescued the Batman franchise from the campy legacy of the 1960s TV series. Much like The Dark Knight Returns, Miller's Sin City graphic novels have also redefined crime fiction, not to mention the adventure films based on them—and in the process created a backlist of graphic novel bestsellers.
