When people gather – on the internet or in other, physical venues – for any sort of pop culture ruminations, it won’t take very much time at all for the conversation to be steered in the direction of superheroes. Like them or not (and most people seem to like them), established superheroes and their corresponding cinematic iterations are the current dominating force in both movies and popular culture in general. Look online, and you’ll see hundreds of lists and thousands of board postings debating the best and worst comic book movies, what superheroes are the best, which comic books are the worst.
Related: Watch 16 Comic Book Movies in 2 Minutes
But those discussions, however thoughtful or even offensive, frequently fail to acknowledge something important about comic books: they’re not just for superheroes. Comics books belong to a large and varied medium, and while it seems like most comics are indeed devoted to children’s genre stories, there are smaller, more adult, far more interesting stories being drawn all the time. Indeed, just this last year, we saw a pair of excellent feature films – We Are the Best! and Snowpiercer – that were based on comic books, but haven’t been included in most discussions of comic book movies because, well, they are not about superheroes.
Let us strip the tights from comics, and see what sort of films the medium has provided for us outside of the superhero world. Here are the 12 best comic book movies without superheroes.
Slideshow: The 12 Best Comic Book Movies Without Superheroes
Witney Seibold is a contributor to the CraveOnline Film Channel, and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. You can follow him on “Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
The 12 Best Comic Book Movies Without Superheroes
-
12. Heavy Metal (1981)
The comic fantasy sci-fi sex-scented underground magazine was a regular staple in the households of the counterculture freaks of my generation. It was a weird mixture of old-school superhero comics, but tempered and reinterpreted through old Conan stories, half-forgotten pulp sci-fi novels, and outright pornography. It was a true celebration of genre entertainment, but carefully constructed to remain underground. The 1981 feature film based on the magazine was an anthology of animated shorts that came awfully close the capturing the naughty genre-mashing attitude of the source material.
-
11. The Addams Family (1991)
Charles Addams is one of the cleverest, most morbid, and most prolific of all the cartoonists to contribute to The New Yorker. In 1938, he invented a series of one-panel strips featuring a family of unnamed ghouls who took pleasure in death, decay, and monsters, while recoiling from warmth, happiness, and any image of typical wholesomeness. Addams' family – eventually called The Addams Family and given first names – wormed their way into TV and, over fifty years after their inception, to the big screen. Barry Sonnenfeld's film adaptation is badly plotted, but contains just the right spirit. Never before have we so wanted to be death-loving ghouls, perfectly content to be weirdo outsiders.
-
10. A History of Violence (2005)
David Cronenberg's career took a dramatic turn in 2005 when he made A History of Violence. Based on a 1997 comic book by John Wagner and Vince Locke, A History of Violence follows a small suburban family, led by a stern-but-warm patriarch (Viggo Mortensen) who kills a pair of robbers who would steal from his restaurant. This seems like a cut-and-dry case of self-defense, but it is slowly revealed that dad might still be harboring a streak of brutality within him. This is a psychologically dense, and very thoughtful film about how violence might just always be a part of who we are.
-
9. Snowpiercer (2014)
Much has recently been said of Bong Joon-ho's neo-cult hit Snowpiercer, based on a 1982 French comic Le Transperceneige by Jacques Lob, Benjamin Legrande, and Jean-Marc Rochette. Snowpiercer is the kind of story you see frequently in speculative sci-fi short stories and comics, but rarely see translated to the big screen. The world has experienced a nuclear winter, the Earth has frozen, and the few surviving members of humanity have been bundled together on a giant train that is constantly in motion. The lower-class citizens live near the back, while the rich live up front. The movie embraces the inherent absurdity of the situation, making a Gilliam-like commentary on the fragility – and evil – of society in general. It's a grimy and fascinating movie.
-
8. Persepolis (2007)
Marjane Satrapi grew up in Tehran during the 1970s and 1980s, a time when her family was protesting the Shah, and when Muslim fundamentalists took over. Satrapi, in a seminal 2000 comic book, describes her experiences growing up in the socially strict environment, and also her romantic adventures in France. In 2007, Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud developed Persepolis to the big screen in an animated film that looks exactly like the stark and simple drawings of the original comic. The result may be politically significant, but more than anything it's playful and knowing, using humor and human foibles to tell a real life tale, rather than ham-fisting any sort of message.
-
7. American Splendor (2003)
Harvey Pekar, a file clerk from Jersey and a fully-formed misanthrope, was good buddies with cartoonist R. Crumb back in the day. Inspired by his friend, Harvey tried writing out a comic autobiography of his banal life, hoping his angst would connect with someone. The result was American Splendor, a comic that started its run back in 1976, and continued to run, sometimes sporadically, through 2008. In 2003, documentarians Sheri Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini adapted American Splendor to film, cleverly mixing the real Pekar with a fictionalized version of him played by Paul Giamatti. The result is a mirror of introspection, and a wonderful celebration of an old grump who does indeed have love and complexity beneath.
-
6. Akira (1988)
Manga is more common in Japan than comic books are in America, and they are typically read by a wider variety of people. This is a fact repeatedly hammered on by American fans of the form. In 1981, Katsuhiro Otomo wrote a dystopian manga about a dark future Tokyo overrun by filth, criminal biker gangs, and a government conspiracy pertaining to mind-altering medical experiments. The manga was a hit, and in 1988, Otomo adapted his comic to the screen. The result is not only a twisted mindfuck of the highest order, but was so striking and powerful, that it managed to open up the gates for an influx of anime films into America. A subculture was born.
-
5. Oldboy (2003)
Park Chan-wook's excellent 2003 Korean film Oldboy plays like a Shakespearean play along the lines of Titus Andronicus, or some other forgotten revenge tragedy from Elizabethan times. Based on a 1996 Japanese manga by Garon Tsuchiya and Nobuaki Minegishi, Oldboy follows a Korean schlub (played by Choi Min-sik) who is inexplicably thrown into a motel-like prison for 15 years, and then just as inexplicably released to investigate what happened to him. What he finds is operatically sad and violent, and the film is just as theatrical and impressive. I did not see the subsequent 2013 remake directed by Spike Lee, but I can say the 2003 film is truly excellent.
-
4. The Wind Rises (2013)
Several of master animator Hayao Miyazaki's feature films are based on comics, including Porco Rosso and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, but his most recent – The Wind Rises – is perhaps the best of his comic adaptations, based, as it was, on a manga he authored himself. The film is a fictionalized version of the life of Jiro Horikoshi, the man who designed the Zero planes that bombed Pearl Harbor. In a fit of irony and in a supreme meditation of inner peace, Jiro is seen as a placid-minded engineer who is looking to create a great piece of art for the world, and only seems to distantly acknowledge the destruction and war that his creation may bring about. This is a film that looks at the form of art, and appreciates the peace and genius involved. It's a heart-rending and warming film.
-
3. Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013)
The comic story began in 2010, authored by French artist Julie Maroh. The film was made in 2013 by Abdelatif Kechiche. Both tell the story of a romance between two teenage girls in the late 1990s in Paris. What the film captures is not so much the rush of young love (although there is plenty of that), but the actual realist heft to making a relationship work. The lesbian lifestyle is very new to one girl, but more than that, her new girlfriend is richer and more sophisticated, and the two young women frequently clash over their class backgrounds. The sex is good – so good the film is rated NC-17 – but the romance is better. This was one of the best films of its year.
-
2. We Are the Best! (2014)
Easily one of the best films of 2014, Lukas Moodysson's We Are the Best! (with the delightfully poetic Swedish title Vi är bäst!) was based on the 2008 comic book Never Goodnight by his wife Coco Moodysson. The film tells the story of a trio of 12- and 13-year-old Swedish punker outsiders who decide to form a punk band in the early 1980s. The film isn't so much about their music (they only have one song, no name, and only one talented member) as it is about the playful punky relationship they have with the world they are only just learning to be dissatisfied with (but in a playful way), as well as the glowing friendship they have with one another.
-
1. Ghost World (2001)
The 1990s were a time of disaffection and dissatisfaction, and much of 1990s popular culture (at least in the experience of this '90s kid) was devoted to satire and the rejection of old pop traditions. This disaffection was felt strongly in the comic works of Daniel Clowes who, in 1993, wrote Ghost World, a comic book about a pair of cynical teenage girls who are learning to grow up a little, even though they may not want to. The film, directed by Crumb's Terry Zwigoff, is more bleakly funny, following Enid and Rebecca (Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson) as they try to hang onto – with varying levels of success – their valued teen dismissal of the uncool. We like Enid and we want her to stay who she is, but the world – and her best friend – may not let her. Ghost World is one of the best films of its decade.
