Moving Pictures

This summer is no exception, the big screens blazing with that favourite goose of the unimaginative exec: the comic-book adaptation. Typically a cargo of unremitting camp, the genre in recent years has traded its roller skates for Hush Puppies, recruiting both artisans and menials to wring cinema from chimera. Director Bryan Singer continues to cash in on his arthouse cred, revivifying yet another spent franchise with Superman Returns, while Rush Hour's Brett Ratner subs for Singer on X-Men: The Last Stand. But Americans aren't the only ones to have put their comics on camera.

In 1961, the reigning king of European comicdom, Tintin, was made flesh in the Belgian feature Le Mystère de la Toison d'Or (The Mystery of the Golden Fleece). Lanky, pale-faced Jean-Pierre Talbot starred as the flare-haired reporter, and the gruff Georges Wilson made a crack Captain Haddock. Though Hergé's iconic characters and gut-tingling plots seem tailored for the big screen, the film and its 1964 sequel, Tintin et les Oranges Bleues (Tintin and the Blue Oranges), did little more than play dress-up. The rights to a future Tintin project currently sit in Steven Spielberg's tumid billfold. (Pray he and Tom Cruise aren't brainstorming.)

While the Belgians were Frankensteining their bandes dessinées, from across the English Channel came Modesty Blaise: kittenish superspy who, with her slippery sidekick Willie Garvin, tangled in various criminal intrigues at Her Majesty's behest. Writer Peter O'Donnell and artist Jim Holdaway first published the series in the early 1960s in The London Evening Standard. The 1966 Modesty Blaise movie marinated in the era, juggling Bond spoofery with New Wave freakouts and hefty kitsch, predating Austin Powers by three decades. Monica Vitti starred, with the indefatigable Terence Stamp as Willie. The cult hit became a DVD in 2002.

Another choice video is the Japanese samurai epic Lone Wolf and Cub, one of manga's arch-works, by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima. The 28-volume, 8,000-page epic traces a shamed executioner and his young son on their passage through Hell to find the family that betrayed them. Its bristly inking and sombre mood spread like herpes through comic art in Japan and America, with public flare-ups from celebs like The Dark Knight's Frank Miller, and Max Allan Collins, whose graphic novel Road to Perdition (recently filmed with Tom Hanks in the lead) moved the tale from 18th-century Japan to 1930s Chicago. The original film, 1973's Sword of Vengeance, is fodder for wood-paneled basements, with its fountains of blood and sage samurai wisdom. Like the comic, the movie was serialized, with five more episodes of varying quality. In 1980, North American audiences got a cut-and-paste of the first two films called Shogun Assassin, but the first and best chapter is now out on DVD.

Such titles don't draw the crowds that mutants and muscular aliens do. But they give the indie buff something to watch this summer when the swarms descend.

Tags: 1930s , adaptation , adventure , Belgium , Brett Ratner , Bryan Singer , capes , end times , fantasy , Frank Miller , Goseki Kojima , guns , Herge , Japan , Kazuo Koike , London , martial arts , Max Alan Collins , Modesty Blaise , Monica Vitti , movies , samurai , Sonny Chiba , spies , Superman , Terence Stamp , Tintin , UK , X-Men