Another comic-book concept is making its movie premiere Friday: "Cowboys & Aliens." And therein hangs a tale.
"Cowboys & Aliens" debuted as a stand-alone graphic novel from Platinum Studios in 2006 by writers Fred Van Lente and Andrew Foley and artist Luciano Lima. The story involved an expansionist alien species crash-landing in 1870s Arizona and annexing it while building a transmitter to contact their fleet to finish the job. Apache warriors, gunslingers and pioneer settlers joined forces to battle them, stealing alien equipment where they could to even the odds.
While the thrust of the story was action, there was social commentary, too. One gunslinger remarked that the aliens had no right to conquer our turf just because they had better weapons, which resulted in a sheepish, "Oh," after a stern look from the Indians. The "all men are brothers" theme was underscored by cross-racial romance, as a gunslinger and a female alien science officer fell in love, as did a white female gunslinger and an Apache warrior.
None of which seems to apply to "Cowboys & Aliens," the movie. Starring Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford and Olivia Wilde, the film seems to take little from the graphic novel except the name and the high concept.
How come Hollywood has come to rely so much on comic books as source material? Here are some reasons:
Comics have really grown up. Terrific non-superhero comics have been turned into occasionally terrific movies such as "300," "Constantine," "Kick-Ass," "Ghost World," "Hellboy," "A History of Violence," "The Mask," "Priest," "Men in Black," "Red," "Road to Perdition," "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World," "Sin City," "V for Vendetta," "Wanted" and more.
Movie special effects have caught up to comics. It used to be that if you wanted to see an exploding sun or a plausible spaceship, you'd read a comic book (or a science-fiction book and imagine it). Now the movies can do it.
Comics concepts come pre-vetted. If you're writing a "Batman" movie, for example, you're standing on the shoulders of giants. The Dark Knight has appeared in hundreds of thousands of stories over more than 70 years. If a concept is still in a long-running comic book, that means it's popular and it works. No thinking required.
