Adaptation

Before I go any further, I'm going to state outright that I'm referring to adapting properties for different mediums. This isn't anything new. Over the years, there have been tons of different forms of adaptations: novel to television, novel to film, novel to video game, video game to film, film to television, film to video game, film to comic, comic to film, comedy sketch to film and likely even more than that.

What got me thinking about that was the fact one of our favorite novels here at Imaginos is "The Strain" trilogy by Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan and that series has been adapted as a comic book series by Dark Horse Comics with David Lapham as the writer and Mike Huddleston as the artist. Now we are certainly hopeful that the series is going to faithful to the series, especially considering Guillermo Del Toro is involved in its production, but some early promotional artwork made us a bit weary of it. Now thinking about that, I realized that there's a ton of scrutiny that adaptations are put under as a result of them being developed from established properties and thus come with an established audience on top of the new audience they're striving to appeal to.

Now, there are numerous people that would consider adapting an established property as "taking the easy route" in terms of creative development but I think that there's a great deal of difficulty involved with taking a property established in one medium and adapting it for a different medium. And while I prefer making my own properties and developing those, but I can still understand the desire to expand a property beyond it's established medium.

Now, don't misunderstand, I'm not saying that there aren't any bad adaptations; god knows that there are likely WAY more bad ones than good ones. But, I will say that I believe that when it's done well, there should be at least some kudos for it, 'cuz it's not an easy task in the least.

-Joe