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Marc OxobyUniversity of Nevada, Reno, oxoby[commat]aol.com
The movies and comics (both in strip and book form) have long merited comparison to one another. Indeed, the forms share something of a parallel early history, both undergoing their formative years in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Both forms quickly rose to great popularity, and both suffered the slings and arrows of critics leading up to and during the McCarthy period. The infamous 1954 Kefauver hearings in the U.S. Senate, in which the supposed influence of comic books on juvenile delinquency was investigated, bore no small similarity to earlier similar attacks on the movie industry. In response to these attacks, both mediums instituted comparable self-censorship codes.
But more than just the parallel history, the two forms have also often been compared aesthetically. In a 1988 essay, ''Film and the Graphic Arts,'' for instance, Richard Shalesummarized the frequent comparisons, noting how ''both are primarily pictorial, and both employ sequentially ordered individual segments, either frame or panel, for a cumulative effect... both create the illusion of motion, convey an often dreamlike state, and are omnipotent in that they can do anything in any situation'' (65). He further cites filmmakers who have been influenced by the comics: Alain Resnais, Federico Fellini, George Lucas, William Freidkin, and others. From the other side of the fence, comics scholar Scott McCloudsuggested that the distinction between the two mediums was that ''Space does for comics what time does for film,'' that is, that each film frame appears in the same physical space, whereas those of a comic are spatially juxtaposed (7). McCloudnonetheless goes so far as to suggest that ''you might say that before it's projected, film is just a very very very very slow comic'' (8). Even more notable, a 1973 book designed to instruct young students on how to critically view films was called Moviemaking Illustrated: The Comicbook Filmbook, and in explaining various film techniques used panels from various Marvel comic books, ''assuming that a comicbook panel is closely analogous to a film shot'' (Morrow and Suidn.pag.)
While one might quibble about just how much film and comics are alike, there's no doubt that their similarities have played a part in what has been a long...