THE NEXT WAVE

About five years ago, a couple of Hollywood producers had the seemingly foolish idea of taking an unsuccessful comic book and making a big studio picture from it. Evidently, nobody had asked the obvious question: If the idea didn’t succeed as a book, why would it work as a movie?

Last summer, moviegoers saw the result. In fact, so many people saw it that the film is now one of the top 15 pictures of all time in domestic gross earnings. The movie is “Men in Black,” and its take to date at the box office is a stunning $250 million (and counting) in North America alone.

In the wake of the success of “Men in Black,” producers are developing other obscure or unsuccessful comic books. The latest comic to be snapped up is the small press title “Wolff & Byrd,” which has a fresh premise about two lawyers who defend supernatural creatures.

The book, created by San Diego-based cartoonist Batton Lash, sparked a bidding war last fall that was eventually won by Universal Pictures, which reportedly paid seven figures for the property, renaming it “Supernatural Law.”

“I began getting calls [from Hollywood] right after ‘Men in Black,’ ” Lash says. “I think [the film deal] was a direct result of ‘Men in Black,’ ” adds Greg Stump, news editor of the Comics Journal, a Seattle-based magazine about comic books.

The bidding for “Wolff & Byrd” is part of a new Hollywood gold rush. Among the strips being mined is Daniel Clowes’ “Ghost World,” an offshoot of his popular “Eightball” title, which is being brought to the screen by Terry Zwigoff, the director of the documentary “Crumb.” “Hate,” a cartoon by Seattle’s Peter Bagge, has reportedly landed at MTV as an animated show. And HBO is said to be developing Terry Moore’s “Stranger in Paradise” comic.

It’s not just obscure comics causing all the interest. One producer, Ben Myron (“Mr. Magoo”), is making movies of the well-known “Archie,” “Flash Gordon,” “Madman” and “Daredevil” strips.

Elsewhere, “Spiderman,” reportedly caught in a web of business problems and rights disputes, is still a project that James Cameron is interested in bringing to the screen. There are reports of an “X-Men” live-action movie in the works. And, of course, an adaptation of the very popular “Spawn” comic was released earlier this year. Lately, it appears that Hollywood is using the comics world as a rich source of unproduced storyboards.

Surprisingly, the book that started the trend, “The Men in Black,” was almost completely unknown a year ago. “In the world of comics, ‘Men in Black’ was considered just another crappy black-and-white title,” Lash says. “I didn’t even know about it until it became a movie,” Stump adds.

“ ‘Men in Black’ was not a popular comic book, but it was a good idea for a movie,” Myron explains, “whereas a popular comic book might not be a good idea for a movie.”

He cites another chancy adaptation that paid off. “ ‘Batman’ was really a dead item when they got ahold of it [in the late ‘80s],” Myron says. “The last thing anybody had heard, it was a ‘60s TV show. The ‘Batman’ comic books were not selling that well. . . . But it was a great idea for a movie.”

Myron recently bought the rights to a defunct Malibu strip called “The Trouble With Girls.” He was interested in its comedic premise and characters, not in its level of commercial success. “Lester Girls is this James Bond-like character pressed into action when all he really wants to do is read Steinbeck,” he says. “And he wishes he didn’t have to go out and save the world, but, gosh darn it, he has to.”

All this cinematic comic booking has given new definition to an old genre: the Comic Book Movie. Among the best adaptations are the 1989 “Batman” (featuring Tim Burton’s dazzling vision of Gotham City); the second “Superman” (in which the villains literally blow away their victims); the winsome “The Rocketeer”; the witty “The Addams Family” (from Charles Addams’ cartoons in the New Yorker magazine); the evocative “The Crow: City of Angels”; Warren Beatty’s “Dick Tracy” (which is occasionally upstaged by its own visual style); and the 1967 French-Italian film “Danger: Diabolik,” based on a popular Italian strip. Among the worst? Most cite “Howard the Duck,” “Batman and Robin,” “Judge Dredd” and “Tank Girl.”

More important, films are increasingly being produced in the style of comic books, though they’re not based on them. These films are equal parts killer B, Saturday matinee serial and post-”Jaws” summer blockbuster.

Examples include “Face/Off” (which shares many elements with the imaginative 1990 film “Darkman”), “Independence Day,” the “Star Wars” series (which became a strip after the film’s release), the Indiana Jones movies, “A Clockwork Orange,” “RoboCop” and “Starship Troopers.” Other examples of films with comic book qualities are works by directors who rely heavily on storyboards, like Alfred Hitchcock (“The Birds” and “North by Northwest”) and Steven Spielberg (“Jurassic Park” and “Jaws”).

As Times critic Kenneth Turan noted in his review of “Starship Troopers” in November: “[It] has the simple-mindedness of a live-action comic book, with no words spoken that wouldn’t be right at home in a funny paper dialogue balloon.”

What are the distinguishing characteristics of the genre? The bad guys are irredeemably evil. There is vengeful violence. A hero frequently has an Achilles’ heel. Characters endure an unlimited number of bare-knuckle punches. There are machine-gun fire and wisecracks and harebrained schemes. The bad guys always get theirs. People get champagne bottles and flower pots smashed over their heads.

Characters are simple-minded but technically sophisticated. There is an overabundance of inventive gadgets, gizmos and contraptions. Someone with large breasts is rescued. And, of course, the hero is always out to save the world.

In contrast to the superheroes, underground comics like “Wolff & Byrd” seem like near parodies of mainstream fare. In Lash’s strip, supernatural creatures wind up in court for breaking the laws of gravity; his fictional attorneys represent vampires and ghouls. As a prosecutor says: “These attorneys represent monsters.” The comic book is being brought to the screen by Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton, the directors of “The Max Headroom Show.”

The comic book aesthetic has affected many other aspects of culture, including pop music, stand-up comedy and advertising art.

“Comic books have had a more far-reaching influence on the culture than people give them credit for,” Lash says. Comics have also helped to blur the distinction between so-called high art and popular forms.

The late Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, for example, based much of his style on comic strips. Art Spiegelman’s graphic novels earned him the Pulitzer Prize. And Robert Crumb is regularly favorably compared to major painters of the past (“He’s the Bruegel of the last half of the 20th century,” says art critic Robert Hughes in the documentary “Crumb”).

But even as comic book movies and culture are on the rise, the comics industry itself is in sharp decline. Marvel, a major pioneer in the business, has been in serious financial trouble over the past year; several weeks ago it laid off a third of its staff. Industry observers note that DC continues to be successful partly because it is owned by Time Warner, which can cushion the failure of any of its titles.

“Comics aren’t selling as well as they used to,” Lash says. “And why is that? Because everything is focused on superhero comics . . . and the superhero’s a bit tired.”

“The superhero phenomenon . . . has kind of run its course,” Stump says. “I think even DC and Time Warner realized that the last ‘Batman and Robin’ [was] kind of lucky to do as well as it did, because the gas has run out of that particular machine.”

Just as the film world is divided between the studios and the independents, so the comics realm is split between the majors and the indies. “There’s a big chasm between the comics that are mainstream and the alternative/underground comics,” Stump says.

“There are two separate audiences for comics,” Lash says. There are the superhero fans. “And there are the people who are into ‘Eightball’ and ‘Hate’ and ‘Milk & Cheese’ and other independents. And they don’t like superhero comics. And that indie audience is growing.”

The indie audience may be expanding, but it’s still minuscule. Even cult items like “Eightball” sell remarkably low numbers (for some indies, sales of 20,000 or 30,000 are considered successful, and several prominent titles sell far fewer).

“[Film director] Kevin Smith had a great quote,” Lash says. “He said, ‘It’s probably easier to make a hit independent film than to sell a black-and-white independent comic.’ As far-fetched as that sounds, it’s probably true.”

Still, there is much creative vitality in the indie strips. Besides “Eightball,” “Hate” and “Wolf & Byrd,” the most original of the new underground titles include Evan Dorkin’s irresistible “Milk and Cheese” strip (“I’m milk / He’s cheese / Dairy products gone bad”) and the edgy “Rare Bit Fiends” by Rick Veitch, who draws his dreams.

What’s surprising to many is that indie filmmakers have not yet converted underground comics to movies. “Chasing Amy” may be about the world of comic strips, but it isn’t from one; and “Crumb” is a documentary on Robert Crumb, not a film based on his work.

Some comic book creators, including Crumb, are not at all eager to sell their books to Hollywood. Crumb still feels burned by those who made two movies of his books, including “Fritz the Cat” in the ‘70: “[The film] ‘Fritz the Cat’ was a major embarrassment to me for the rest of my life,” he says in “Crumb.”

Stephen Bissette, creator of the comics “Tyrant” and “Taboo” (which visits a new cultural taboo in each volume), also has no desire to go Hollywood.

Still, Bissette’s “Tyrant” seems suited to the big screen; it’s about the “life, birth and death of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. . . . . I’m trying to make as accurate a record as I can of what life may have been like in the late Cretaceous era for this animal.”

If a producer wanted to option “Tyrant,” what would Bissette say? “No,” he says. Why? “In the case of ‘Tyrant,’ if I sold the movie option and they did a [bad] job . . . it would eat away at the integrity of the actual source material.

“We can point to any number of properties that were turned into failed films, from ‘Howard the Duck’ to last year’s movie ‘Steel,’ ” he says. “The movie vanishes without a whimper in the case of ‘Steel,’ or in the case of ‘Howard the Duck’ becomes nomenclature for bad movies. And I’m not going to do that to my creation.”