Since their beginning, superhero flicks have always scavenged special effects magic and visual style from the tables of preceding adventure films rather than their original source material, comic books themselves. Superman could only fly through Metropolis after Skywalker flew through the Death Star Trench; Batman only became a believable crime-fighter in the vein of Jason Bourne’s hyper-realism; and I groaned aloud in the theater when my own best-loved comic hero, Spider-Man, performed a horribly superfluous Matrix-esque slow motion flip-dodge to evade a hail of razor-sharp projectiles. Superheroes are homeless on the silver screen. The characters that inspired action films on a large scale too often prefer to dress themselves in the precedents other films rather than establishing their own stylistic identities. Good comics do more than depict fantastical stories about characters endowed with great power. They create an environment in which art and symbol converge to create semiotic storytelling that has the potential to transcend the written word. Is it possible then to develop a true "comic book film" genre, and would it have anything to contribute to the medium as a whole?

My answer: yes and yes—if it can avoid being mere extensions of the Tarantino B-movie aesthetic and if it is possible to ban Frank Miller from ever using a camera again.