Comics Fondle

So I guess there isn’t a Marvel Movie Premiere #2. I must have read about this adaptation of The Land That Time Forgot (I hate seeing ‘that’ used so poorly, typing it repeatedly is going to be torturous) about fifteen years ago, maybe more, undoubtedly in a Werewolf by Night or Monster of Frankenstein issue. I think I used to like comic book adaptations of movies, hopefully from the collector’s viewpoint, because they’re narrative messes. Too much is lost. Marv Wolfman’s adaptation here is no different. Action scenes make almost no sense and there’s no establishing shots I can remember. Sonny Trinidad’s art is pretty dispassionate, empty of any wonderment at the jungle island filled with dinosaurs.

Wolfman does something real interesting though–he combines the movie and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s novel in his adaptation. I’m figuring he did it to get more pages at the beginning, when it’s a war intrigue on a submarine story, because Burroughs spends half his novel on that sub. The second half, the island half, is all from the movie with a handful of exceptions. Except the movie only makes sense with sound, pacing, and music… and Wolfman’s sense of pacing here is way off….

He narrates the story from Doug McClure’s character and it works reasonably well, since the novel is first person and the whole idea is the story’s a written document. Wolfman even gives the story a better ending than the movie has in at least one respect. It’s not quite an admirable failure because it’s not really a failure… which means it’s not admirable… so I don’t know how to describe it easily. I might be too mired in Land–argh–That Time Forgot experience to give it a really clean read, but mired as I am, it works out okay in many ways.

I wonder if they did it Marvel style and Trinidad maybe thought it was going to be serialized? That situation would explain a whole lot.

C

Technorati Tags: Comic Book, Marv Wolfman, Marvel Comics, Marvel Movie Premiere, Review, Sonny Trinidad

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