Comics on screen is a bigger and stranger category than the box office suggests. Alongside the superhero films sit Cannes winners, Oscar-nominated animation, a Broadway musical and a run of documentaries — and alongside those sit the celebrated books that have never been adapted and probably never will be. These four guides map what was made, what it was made from, and what changed on the way.
The guides
Graphic Novel Adaptations
Persepolis, Ghost World, Nimona, American Splendor, Fun Home and the rest of the literary end — what each adaptation changed, and the celebrated books that were never made.
10 major adaptations · what changed in each
The Comics Canon on Screen
Which canonical comics reached the screen, which never will, and why the teaching canon and the adaptation canon are two different lists selected on incompatible criteria.
Watchmen · Maus · Sandman · Jimmy Corrigan
Award-Winning Comics on Screen
The Eisners, the Harveys and the Angoulême Grand Prix — which prize-winners were adapted, the 2016 shortlist controversy, and what a comics award is actually worth.
Eisner · Harvey · Angoulême Grand Prix
Marvel Adaptations
Every Marvel adaptation mapped back to the specific comics run it came from, from Rob Liefeld and Fabian Nicieza's Deadpool through the Fox X-Men years to the MCU.
Fox era · MCU · Sony · source runs named
Three things worth knowing first
A comic is already a storyboard — except for time
Comics and film are closer than either is to prose. A comic already has a cast, a shot sequence, a palette and a set of compositional decisions. What it does not have is a fixed running time: the reader controls the clock absolutely, holding a panel for a minute or taking a page in two seconds, and cartoonists compose for that. Handing the clock to an editor is the change that causes nearly every other difference.
The screen canon and the critical canon are different lists
Adaptation selects for a transferable premise, a returnable format and a clean rights position. Canon selects for formal ambition and authorial voice — the things that only work on a page. The two criteria overlap occasionally and by accident, which is why so much of the most admired work in the medium has never been filmed, and why the films give a general audience a badly skewed impression of what comics are.
The creators are usually recoverable, even when uncredited
Adaptations tend to be discussed in terms of directors and studios while the people who invented the material go unnamed — a legacy of work-for-hire contracts that gave creators no legal claim to a credit. But most successful adaptations are not adapting a character in general; they are adapting one specific run, and that run has authors. Naming them is usually possible and always more informative.
Which guide to start with
You have read the book and want to know what the film did to it
Start with the graphic-novel guide. Each entry is organised around the changes: what was cut to fit a running time, what was compressed, and what was invented to give a film an ending the book refused to supply. For a superhero run, the Marvel guide does the same job.
You have seen the film and want the source
Start with the Marvel guide for a Marvel property, because it maps every adaptation back to a run and its creators. For everything else, the canon guide is the quickest route from a title to the book behind it.
You want a reading list rather than a watch list
Start with the awards guide. It sorts prize-winning comics into the ones that were adapted and the ones that were not, and the prizes select for exactly the qualities that keep a book off the screen.
How to find a specific adaptation
The guides tell you what exists. Finding a particular title on a particular evening is a separate job, and it goes faster in this order:
- Note the exact title and year. Adaptations share names with their source books, with earlier adaptations and with remakes; the year is what separates them in a search box.
- Check the film channels in the guide. Broadcast film channels schedule days ahead, so the 7-day EPG shows what is coming before it airs. Set a reminder in your player rather than trying to remember a slot.
- Search the on-demand library by title. Older adaptations tend to live on demand rather than in a broadcast slot, because scheduled film channels lean towards recent releases.
- Use catch-up for anything that aired in the last week. A catch-up entry is usually quicker to reach than waiting for a repeat.
- Accept the gaps. No single service carries everything on these lists, and we do not claim that any particular title is carried. The free 24-hour trial exists so you can check before paying.
Our guide to how the movies and series library is organised covers the on-demand side in more detail.
What to check during the free 24-hour trial
The trial answers the only question that matters for a reader of these guides: are the titles you care about reachable from one place? Spend it on three checks.
- ·Search for three titles from the guides, picked from different decades, and note which turn up on demand, which are in the film-channel EPG, and which are absent.
- ·Play one on-demand title past its opening sequence and check subtitles and audio tracks, which matter more for a subtitled film like Persepolis than for a studio release.
- ·Do this on the device you will actually watch on, not on a phone, because player behaviour differs between a TV app and a mobile one.
Watching them in the UK
The practical difficulty with any list like this is that the titles are scattered. A 2001 adaptation might be on a broadcast film channel one month and nowhere the next; an animated feature that was cancelled by one studio and rescued by another can end up somewhere nobody expects. Tracking a specific title down is usually harder than deciding to watch it.
A Flickhaven subscription carries live film and entertainment channels alongside a large on-demand catalogue, which covers most of the mainstream titles on these lists from a single place. The full channel list shows what is carried, and the free 24-hour trial lets you check for a specific title before paying for anything; our complete UK IPTV guide explains how the service works. For broader viewing guides, see best movies on IPTV UK and best TV shows on IPTV UK.
FAQ
What is the most faithful comic book adaptation?+
Persepolis is the usual answer among people who write about comics, because Marjane Satrapi co-directed it and kept her own drawing rather than converting the book to a house animation style. Among superhero films, Captain America: The Winter Soldier is most often cited — not because it reproduces panels, but because it adapts the spirit of one specific run, Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting's, rather than a character in general.
Why do some famous graphic novels never get adapted?+
Usually because their achievement is formal rather than narrative. Maus, Jimmy Corrigan and Understanding Comics all do things that only work as drawing on a page — an interrogated metaphor, an architectural page layout, an argument conducted through the form it describes. There is no camera position from which those survive. Rights and authorial refusal account for most of the rest.
Are comic book adaptations only superhero films?+
No, though the box office makes it look that way. Road to Perdition, A History of Violence, Ghost World, American Splendor, Persepolis and Blue Is the Warmest Colour are all adapted from comics, and none is a superhero story. Several were nominated for or won major awards without much of the audience realising the source material was a comic at all.
Where can I watch comic book adaptations in the UK?+
They are scattered across broadcast film channels, catch-up services and on-demand catalogues, which is why tracking a specific title down is often the hard part. A Flickhaven subscription carries live film and entertainment channels alongside a large on-demand library, so most of the mainstream titles on these lists are reachable from one place rather than four.
Do the guides say where each title is streaming right now?+
No, deliberately. Availability moves month to month as broadcast rights and on-demand windows change, so a 'where to watch' line written today would be wrong by the time most readers arrive. The guides are editorial: what was adapted, from which book, and what changed. Checking whether a particular title is reachable is what the free 24-hour trial is for.
Is a graphic novel the same thing as a comic?+
For these guides, yes. A graphic novel is a long-form comic, either written as one book or collected from a serial afterwards, and the distinction is mostly a bookshop category rather than a difference in the medium. The guides use 'comic' for both and name the format only where it changed the adaptation, as it did with the serialised Watchmen.
Do the guides cover television series as well as films?+
Yes. Several of the most-discussed adaptations of the last decade were series rather than films, and the canon guide treats Sandman and Watchmen on those terms. The same questions apply either way: which run was adapted, what the longer format allowed that a two-hour film could not, and what was still lost.
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See also: Best Movies on IPTV UK · Best TV Shows on IPTV UK · Watch US TV Shows in the UK.