These days, thanks to films like The Dark Knight, the first couple of Spider-Man films and Iron Man, comic books are seen as entirely legitimate source material for motion pictures. This is good in that comic books seem to finally be coming out of the ghetto to which they've been confined for the longest time, but bad in that now, a lot of comic book storylines feel extremely self-conscious, as if their writers were making pitches for Hollywood screenplays. Worse still, a lot of writers working on comics these days are screenwriters or TV writers, and their work is of mixed quality; while I loved the work of J. Michael Straczynski, for example, I can't say the same for that of Jeph Loeb. Quite frankly the problem with comics these days is that a lot of them feel like wannabe movies.
And this is a terrible thing. Comics are comics and movies are movies, and both are distinct art forms, each with its own peculiarities and idiosyncrasies, and each with characteristics unique to its own form that the other cannot and should not aspire to mimic.
There are so many things about comics that simply have not been translated to movies: Spider-Man has forgotten the ability to wisecrack. V (in V for Vendetta) suddenly became an agent of democracy rather than anarchy. Superman has not faced any of his cosmos-shattering adversaries like Darkseid or Braniac and has had to content himself with flying really fast and lifting really heavy objects. The Hulk, well, for two movies running now, the Hulk has not quite felt real. This may not speak very well of the movies that adapted them, but it speaks well of the source material in that there remain certain intangibles which they have over their adaptations; there remains reason for viewers to say "I liked the comic better" the same way Lord of the Rings purists will always say "I liked the book better."
Bill Watterson, creator of the now defunct Calvin and Hobbes, hit the nail on the head when he refused to allow his creation to be adapted as a cartoon. Basically, even though he had a deep respect for the art of animation, he had a problem with voice actors giving life to Calvin. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine Watterson feeling that no six or seven-year-old boy could properly deliver Calvin's ridiculously precocious dialogue properly, or that some middle-aged woman (e.g. The Simpsons' Nancy Cartwright) would always be just that: a middle-aged woman and not a child. Thanks to this little bit of artistic integrity on Watterson's part, the strip is now immortalized in its current form and Calvin will never be reduced to the identity of his voice actor or Korean animation studio, which is more than I can say for Spider-man, who is indelibly linked to Tobey Maguire by millions of people who've never picked up a comic book.
Lest I be misconstrued, I'd like to clarify that I'm not against adapting comic books at all; I love many of the comic book adaptations that have come out over the years, with the first two Spider-Man film and last year's Iron Man being my favorites with my (personal) runnerup honors going, in no particular order, to the Bryan Singer X-Men films, the Hellboy films, Guillermo Del Toro's lone Blade film, Blade II, and the Christopher Nolan Batman films.
My point is that the attempts of some comic book creators or publishers to "make life easier" for the filmmakers that may or may not adapt their work by writing stories that pander to them or redesigning costumes or origins or various other tweaks is doing the comic book industry as a whole a severe disservice. Of course, in some cases "realistic" costume tweaks can help; without Adi Granov's designs, I'm pretty sure Iron Man would not have been half as watchable as it eventually was.
I say, let the film industry play catch-up. One can only imagine how frightfully dreadful comic books and their subsequent adaptations would have been had Stan Lee been content to limit his stories to the kind of images that the technology of the time was capable of realizing.
Hollywood has caught up with a lot of comic books, having made some pretty sterling adaptations in the last few years. If comic book writers absolutely have to think about Hollywood when writing their plots and scripts, I think their driving concern should be "so what CAN'T Hollywood do yet?" Assuming visual effects studios can ever crack those nuts, that would make for some pretty engaging viewing.
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