SPIDER-MAN ON TOP

Interpreting the dreams of youth is a slippery endeavor, and it’s only made more dicey if you involve a grumpy spider and some razor wire. Director Sam Raimi, bullhorn in hand, feels that pressure from his command post in a dank downtown Los Angeles alley.

At Raimi’s command--”OK, agitate please”--a bearded arachnologist from Arcadia begins coaxing a temperamental spider to cross a fake web stretched over a loop of concertina wire. The setup is slow and the alley smells like rotten fruit, but this day’s labor will produce a key early scene in “Spider-Man,” one of the most anticipated films of 2002 and the shiniest new model on a crowded Hollywood assembly line of comic book adaptations.

Comic books are the new heroes of Hollywood, with more than a dozen projects now in various stages of production. But heroes never have it easy, and neither do the filmmakers brave enough to translate them into movies.

“Spider-Man” is the biggest budget--reportedly $100 million--ever handled by Raimi, whose previous work includes “A Simple Plan” and “The Gift.” But that’s only part of the pressure: He grew up in the Detroit suburbs with a mural of Spider-Man painted above his bed, a 12th birthday gift from his mother, and, like scores of today’s filmmakers, his childhood passion for comics has translated to high standards for handling the subject matter. He knows, too, that rabid fans of Spider-Man are already dissecting this production in chat rooms and at comic book conventions. One is probably standing across the street on Broadway right now and drafting a report on the misbehaving spider.

“There is a big pressure to handle it right,” says Laura Ziskin, who is producing the film for Sony Pictures. “Every fan has their version of the movie in their head and they’re passionate. That’s the good news and bad news of working with something this well-known and revered.”

Revered? Comic books are indeed the new hot-source material in Hollywood (the most intriguing projects are Ang Lee’s plan to bring gravitas to the Hulk and Johnny Depp’s starring role in the relentlessly bleak Victorian horror of the “From Hell” graphic novel). But it’s still a bit jolting for comic book fans and creators when they hear movie executives toss around words like “revered.” In the comic book community, filmmakers have long been cast as brusque and condescending villains who excel at treating beloved heroes shabbily. On the flip side, Hollywood has viewed the ethos of comic books as being as disposable as the newsprint they are published on, and their fans as ridiculous zealots who can’t be made happy by projects aimed at a general audience.

Casualties of this conflict include Howard the Duck, Judge Dredd, Swamp Thing, the Rocketeer, the Punisher and other acclaimed comic book characters that have ended up in lousy movies consigned to the dusty bottom shelves of video stores. Even when Hollywood devoted big money and attention to iconic characters, it found a way to mess it up. For every heroic success in Tim Burton’s take on “Batman” in 1989 and Richard Donner’s “Superman: The Movie” in 1978, there were a multitude of wrenching failures in some ill-conceived sequels to both. More recently, “X-Men,” “Men in Black,” “Blade” and “The Mask” struck gold by deftly mining comic books, while “Mystery Men” and “Spawn” were as artful as a pickax. “Captain America” and “Fantastic Four” were adaptations in the 1990s that were so poor they never even made it to the big screen.

This dysfunctional relationship between comic books and film started in 1941, when Captain Marvel took flight on the silver screen in the first live-action comic book adaptation. The result is a production that is still praised by connoisseurs as perhaps the finest Hollywood serial ever made. The jolly red-suited character from the comics was wisely presented on screen as a vengeful caped hero with a sleek look and surprisingly good flying effects. The popcorn crowd loved it and--shazam!--just like that, the romance between Hollywood and comics was on. Soon to follow was Batman (he didn’t look nearly as good as Captain Marvel--his mask looked like a floppy black pillowcase with poorly cut eyeholes) and Superman himself. The natural union of comic books and film (both are, after all, sequential visuals that tell a tale) seemed headed toward heroic horizons.

Any romance turned sour after the 1960s, though, when Batman returned, this time with a nicer mask but with no resemblance to his roots as a tormented orphan turned harsh crime-fighter. The campy treatment of this caped crusader, both on the hit TV show and its tie-in film, marked a sea change in the handling of comic adaptations. The screwy, mocking irony of Adam West’s Batman would inform nearly every comic book project filmed for the next 30 years.

That all changed, however, with mutants and money.

“X-Men” became one of the top-grossing movies of 2000 by faithfully translating the comic book of the same name and presenting its mutant superheroes on the screen with a bold seriousness. The film’s first scene--a heart-wrenching episode at a Nazi concentration camp--served notice that this was not a film about stiff heroes delivering one-liners and wearing fluorescent long johns. “It was a real turning point, you could sense that,” says Frank Miller, among the most celebrated creators in the comic book world. Miller wrote and drew “The Dark Knight Returns,” a watershed 1986 graphic novel that shows an aging, embittered Batman fighting demons both real and imagined. Despite his definitive take on the hero, no one called Miller to help with any of the four films in the Warner Bros. Batman franchise. But after the success of “X-Men,” he was quickly drafted to help with the next Batman installment. Miller and Darren Aronofsky (“Requiem for a Dream”) are writing, with Aronofsky directing.

“Unless I’m completely misreading the Hollywood people I’ve talked to,” he says, “there’s a sense now that we’ve got something. Generally, a younger bunch of people are rising to power and many of them have been reading comic books since, well, since they could read.”

Film people of all ages are revealing secret identities as comic book fans. Nicolas Cage is a self-avowed Superman nut and has angled to wear the big red “S” himself in the on-again, off-again “Superman Lives” update of the Warner Bros. franchise, which would be directed by Tim Burton, the comic book fan who helmed the first two “Batman” films. (The project is currently “off,” but no one believes the property will languish.) Wesley Snipes, who brought “Blade” to life from the Marvel comic, has flirted with the idea of wearing the cowl of Black Panther, another Marvel creation. In addition to filmmakers Raimi and Burton, James Cameron, the Wachowski brothers, Joe Dante, Joel Silver and Aronofsky are comic book mavens.

Michael Uslan, the executive producer of the “Batman” franchise, not only owns 35,000 comics, but wrote for DC Comics in the 1970s and, as a student in 1971, taught an Indiana University course on the cultural Zeitgeist of comics. Kevin Smith, director of “Dogma” and “Chasing Amy,” not only sprinkles references to his comic book collecting in his movies, but he’s currently scripting titles for both Marvel and DC Comics. Last year, M. Night Shyamalan’s “Unbreakable” was structured like a comic book and, with a dour and deliberate resolve, placed the concept of a superhero squarely in a realistic world. The comic book references of “Unbreakable” could make it the most faithful adaptation of a comic book that never existed, except that the title is already taken by “The Matrix.” That film, according to Uslan, is “the best comic book movie ever made even if it’s not from a comic book.”

The breathtaking, computer-generated special effects of the Wachowski brothers’ film are of the style that will open up even more comic book opportunities. “God bless the computer-generated special effects,” Uslan says. “The reason you’ve never seen a Green Lantern movie is because you need a level of special effects that keeps it from seeming cheesy or looking like some throwback space opera. Now anything is possible. It’s still expensive, but now the sophistication lets you create a seamless world.”

Indeed, with the powerful special-effects tools, comic book characters that would have been too over-the-top visually a decade ago are now in the works as movies. Among them: the Silver Surfer, a bald, space-faring alien on a flying surfboard (really) who looks like he and his board were dipped in cosmic shellac. Ghost Rider, a stuntman, who (literally) goes to hell and returns in a bad mood with a floating, flaming skull and a motorcycle that spits fire. And Namor the Sub-Mariner, the vengeful prince of Atlantis who looks a lot like Mr. Spock, except that he wears only a green Speedo and there are tiny white wings on his ankles that allow him to fly. He will require an underwater kingdom, which, after “Waterworld,” you’d think would send a shudder down the back of Hollywood types. “No, no, they love it,” says Avi Arad, chief creative officer of Marvel Comics.

Visiting the “Spider-Man” set, he glances over his shoulder and then whispers the name of an Oscar-winning actor with aquiline features and an A-list director who are eager to bring Namor to life. “This is a very exciting time for us,” Arad says. “Very exciting.”

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NAMOR GOES BACK TO THE VERY BEGINNING OF MARVEL COMICS (Namor appeared in the inaugural issue, Marvel Comics No. 1, in November 1939). But the company made its real mark on pop culture in the early 1960s, when it unleashed Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, Hulk, the X-Men and a rainbow of other vivid characters, most created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. The late Kirby was arguably the most influential creator in the history of comics, but it was Lee who defined Marvel’s worldview with his bizarre lexicon. It was an oddball mix, part snake-oil sales pitch, part cosmic grandiosity. The result sounded like P.T. Barnum channeling Carl Sagan, and it led to such incongruous creations as Thor, a Norse god who, for no good reason, speaks Shakespearean English and wears blue tights.

Marvel also presented the first comic book heroes grappling with troubled personal lives, bigotry, their own bad tempers and bitter defeats. This was a shocking departure from the then-dominant and then-stodgy DC Comics, where icons Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman spoke in platitudes and rounded up mob guys who always wore ties. “Spider-Man, in particular, was amazing,” Raimi says, “because here he was a kid himself; he’s not rich or a kid of extraordinary background. He’s average. Girls don’t think much of him, and he’s from a broken home, his parents aren’t around anymore and he has real struggles.”

The Marvel Comics renaissance made it fashionable for college kids to read comic books, and it helped spur the far-edgier underground comix scene in the 1960s. It also inspired the collector’s market and so-called “fandom” to congeal, leading to huge conventions, monthly magazines and thick texts all devoted to the appreciation of a formerly disposable medium. By the 1980s, Marvel Comics dominated the youth market. Yet the company never had much luck with putting its heroes on the silver screen. Despite numerous TV shows, both animated and live-action, Marvel’s big cinema push was the foul “Howard the Duck.”

It wasn’t until the company nearly died that it found a robust new life in Hollywood, where, as always, the rescue came in the nick of time.

Arad, who rides Harleys and made his money in the toy business, says it was a passion for the Lee and Kirby characters that prompted him to buy into a foundering Marvel Comics. The company was reeling, dealing with lawsuits and bankruptcy in 1996, but Arad says it was “the elemental characters and stories,” not spreadsheets, that mattered. Arad’s Toy Biz merged with Marvel and quickly focused on film and toy tie-in projects to right the ship.

He began working Hollywood aggressively in 1993 to get Marvel projects filmed, but outside of animation, he had little luck. It was the strong turnout of core fans for “Blade” and the advent of computer-generated special effects that helped him turn the corner. The payoff came last year, when Artisan Entertainment inked an alliance deal with Marvel and promptly announced their goal to create a pipeline that would begin with nine movies from the comic book company’s deep library.

Despite the Hollywood heat, Arad’s company--like all comics today--is still struggling with dwindling circulation and a host of rivals: video games, the Internet, the World Wrestling Federation, Harry Potter and every other competitor for the time and money of young people. Last year, comic book sales in the U.S. were in the neighborhood of $375 million, down significantly from the boom days of the 1980s and early ‘90s, when the total peaked at $1 billion. Still, the remaining comic book collectors are a loyal lot and, with the Internet, powerfully concentrated and networked.

Arad wears two large, flat-topped pewter rings, one with Spider-Man’s face on it, the other with a symbol that seems vaguely Gaelic but is actually an insignia for the X-Men. “Hollywood was surprised by the opening week of ‘X-Men.’ They didn’t get it,” Arad says. “They totally underestimated the community, the passion.” When the buzz on an adaptation is good, that passion prompts fans to race to theaters on opening weekend and scoop up multiple copies when the film hits video or DVD. There are also lucrative tie-ins--from action figures and video games to fast-food meals and lunch boxes.

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FRANK MILLER, THE ACCLAIMED COMIC BOOK WRITER AND ARTIST, is optimistic about the future of comic books as a medium, a future that only could be helped by more heroes hitting the screens in cinemas nationwide. “But who knows where it will go? Is it just fad? Is it one business that’s so hamstrung with its own worries and bureaucracy that it’s just desperate for ideas from a fresher field? Are comics connecting with Hollywood or just being strip mined? I don’t know.”

Arad points with hope to the ongoing flood of young filmmakers and executives who are working their way up through the ranks and grew up with a passion for the visual storytelling of comics that is so similar to Hollywood storyboards. The Marvel vault has thousands of characters, Arad says, and scores of even the most obscure heroes are viable as film vehicles.

Iron Fist is in the works now, and Black Widow, Werewolf by Night and Deathloc are among a dozen others that are getting film interest of some level.

For archrival DC Comics, the volatility of the next Superman sequel seems certain to clear up at some point, while two new Batman projects are being sized up: an adaptation of Miller’s gritty “Batman: Year One,” which details the hero’s early struggles, and a live-action take on “Batman Beyond,” the Saturday morning cartoon of Bruce Wayne’s successor in a futuristic Gotham. The supernatural “Constantine”; a Joel Silver production of “Wonder Woman”; and a potential Catwoman movie are also being mulled. The classic Will Eisner crime-fighter “The Spirit,” hailed by many as the height of comic book achievement, may also hit the screen; it is now being showcased by DC Comics in high-priced hardcover reprints. A graphic novel about Depression-era gangsters from DC Comics and Paradox Press titled “The Road to Perdition” is also in the works, with Oscar winners Tom Hanks and director Sam Mendes (“American Beauty”) on board.

The box office and special-effects trends suggest that comic books will finally reach their heroic potential in Hollywood. For fans of both comic books and films, it may be better news that now those projects will be guided by directors, screenwriters and actors who grew up with secret identities as comic book fans--people who, in Stan Lee’s old hyperbolic style, would have been dubbed “true believers.” It’s a lucky thing. After all, the greatest comic book heroes are all orphans--Spider-Man, Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel--and history shows that, in Hollywood, it’s hard to get by on your own no matter how strong you are.