Any transfer of a Francis Ford Coppola film into another medium has to be measured against the gold standard: Bram Stoker's Dracula on the Nintendo Game Boy, once voted the 21st worst video game in the world. On the spectrum of film spin-off materials, with prose novelizations (literate, world-building, trigger the mind's eye) at one end, and video games (physical interaction, challenge and reward, trigger a kick to Count Dracula's face) at the other, comics might sit balanced in the middle. Culturally justifiable, artistically variable, largely ignorable. Do dollar signs still flash in the eyes of the publishers putting them out, or is it a muscle memory? Marvel Comics gave Star Wars to Roy Thomas and Howard Chaykin in 1977 expecting to make coin and enthusiastically let them plough straight on into new apocrypha, into Jaxxon Tumperakki the six-foot green rabbit and Jedi fantasist Don-Wan Kihotay. But what was the publisher's level of enthusiasm 48 years later for The Rise of Skywalker, announced and then cancelled and then appearing more than five years after the film came out? Once publishers and film companies are part of the same industrial megaliths, adaptations look like an obligation, a bullet point on a PowerPoint slide titled 'Synergy For Four-Quadrant Appeal'; a need to know your readers turned into a need to know your shareholders. What are the chances today of an adaptation jamming its fingers into the socket and producing an actual fully activated comic, something to sit on the table with steam rising from it? No marketing calculation prompted the high-board dives of Jack Kirby's 2001: A Space Odyssey and Jim Steranko's Outland, just an acceptance from all concerned that the source materials could be detonated into a thousand pieces before resurrection as different machines entirely.
There was a comics adaptation of Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula too, by Roy Thomas and Mike Mignola, tightly faithful and representational. When Topps published it in 1992, Coppola's name appeared in discretely modest type on the cover, and when IDW put it out again in 2019 the director's name had vanished completely, no selling point. But Megalopolis An Original Graphic Novel has the Coppola name everywhere it can go. It's up top, first and foremost on the cover, with the other creators squeezed in at the bottom. Various oblique descriptions of who did what follow. "Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis with Chris Ryall & Jacob Phillips... Adapted by Chris Ryall in collaboration with Coppola himself... Working alongside co-author Chris Ryall and artist/colorist Jacob Phillips, Coppola tells a tale..." Contractual language. The publisher's press release says that "Megalopolis: The Director's Cut [a label absent from the actual book] is his debut graphic novel, not a licensed adaptation of his film of the same name," a construction you might try and parse for a while. Coppola's biographical note at the end of the book doesn't profess any lifelong love of comics, which by convention would have been the appropriate place to mention it, while Sam Wasson's recent and not wildly flattering biography The Path to Paradise says young Coppola's cultural life involved radio serials and The Catcher in the Rye and Alexander Korda, but doesn't mention Atlas Comics or Mad Magazine. Sifting Megalopolis to detect the director's taste in comics seems to be a dead end. The book looks like something Jacob Phillips drew and Chris Ryall wrote corralled from the film's excess of excesses, and that's probably the best way to look at it.
Megalopolis the graphic novel tackles Megalopolis the film with earnest respect, sticking to conventional panel layouts and sequential presentation, ironing out the source's sharp eccentricities. The film is full of people representing vice; but in the comic most people seem neutral or virtuous, partly since Phillips's evocative art has a lush human feel, dominated by gold and ochre with lots of extraneous brush strokes and ink wash and judicious dapples of mark-making in the panels and on the faces. Letterer Jared Fletcher gives the word balloons long narrow rat-tails rather than pointed chevrons, the deeply theatrical dialogue delivered seemingly without declarative heft. The plot, being Coppola's loose wrapping of Roman affairs circa 63 BCE around a contemporary declining America with a dose of added fantasy, remains similar overall, although there are multiple tweaks. Several small scenes in the comic are not in the film, almost all of them with or around Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel in the film) and the Cicero clan, including a couple of short dream sequences. The climactic big speech by Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) is almost thrown away, not least as it occurs before the riot that he quells in the film has got going. Rather oddly Cesar in the comic is shot in the left eye, rather than the right eye as per the film...which might be the point to note that artist Phillips "Never saw any footage…went off the script and a few bits of concept art and set stills." Thus Cesar resembles Adam Driver but no one else could be described as a lookalike. The aspects of the film entirely conjured in Coppola's editing room, the montages and the trippy histrionics of Cesar's boozy meltdown, are completely absent. One problem posed by the finished film might be tricky in any steady metronomic comics grid: what to do when Cesar freezes time, as he does occasionally just by calling for it to happen? If comics are all about suspension of instants that are not in fact frozen solid, motion from stillness (Matt Seneca's phrase), then how to draw actual immobility, cessation of time? Phillips does it by dropping out nearly all the artistic flourishes, the brush strokes and dapples, leaving just the flat colors in solid outlines for those panels where Cesar tries to do that voodoo that he do; but the palette remains the same and the panels themselves are not emphasized in the layouts, and they only number half a dozen or so anyway. If it's Cesar's will-to-power move, then it has low comics wattage.
The comic offers some better views than the film does of individual buildings in Megalopolis, the malleable homes of tomorrow in the utopian city grown as much as constructed by Cesar's wonder-science. Phillips draws them as curvy, golden, biophilic bell-shaped layers, very striking. But all the views are from ground level, and the book doesn't have much sense of the city as a city, no cartographic dimension. For all its talk of urban life, the rich above and the poor below, it isn't a comic of architecture. An actual comic of architecture happened to come out a few months before the film Megalopolis was released, that being Time²: Hallowed Groundº, Howard Chaykin concluding his Time² series with a third story 37 years after the second one. It too involves architecture and architects, arena spectacle, urban clearance, institutional corruption, riots, sorcery and sex. And although Chaykin's energized page layouts, overlapping dialogue, non-narrative inclinations, flamboyant use of color and overwhelming (if inaudible) soundscapes are a drastic use of the comics machinery, they get closer to Coppola's cinematic methods in Megalopolis than anything in the book carrying that film's name. Time² is a more suspicious work too, cynical and sour - and modern. Coppola arrives at Megalopolis as a utopianist, professes to it several times, has faith that Cesar Catalina is a good man and knows the score; nothing in the Ryall and Phillips comic disputes that. But "dystopias will have cycle lanes and host World Cups," wrote Darran Anderson in the book Imaginary Cities. Whether or not solid faith in rule by a benevolent technocratic elite is really how artists should meet our current moment in 2025 is a question. Megalopolis seems serenely confident; Time² not so much.
The post Megalopolis appeared first on The Comics Journal.
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