Idea #97: Adapting by omitting

I bet that every adaptation in the world has angry fanboys whining that the adaptation sucks.

I remember seeing the first Harry Potter movie, thinking “Wow, they really managed to cram most of the book into this movie”. Then I talked to a big Harry Potter fan who was really upset with the things they had omitted. I was baffled, as I didn’t feel those things were terribly important (like, cutting down the number of tests they had to pass on the way to the stone). She was a much bigger Harry Potter fan than I was, though. Likewise, I have never read The Lord of the Rings, but I’ve seen enough of the Internet to know that many people find it horrible that the movies didn’t include Tom Bombadil.

Hey, it’s a different medium. To turn any book into a movie, you have to change something. And one of the rules for a successful Hollywood movie is that it can’t be seventeen hours long. The same thing goes for turning it into comics or any other medium, of course: Adaptation is not just a translation from one medium to another, the content has to change to adapt to the new medium.

But still, that made me wonder… Would it be possible to create an adaptation of a known work where you omit something really important – on purpose?

Take a fictional work, a book or a movie perhaps, and create a comic book version of it. But in the process, omit something you know the fans will really miss because it’s very important.

For example, imagine a comic retelling the story of Star Wars, pretending to be true to the original work, but omitting the character of Darth Vader.

Or a comic retelling the story of the Harry Potter books, pretending to be true to the original work, but omitting every single reference to magic.

Or a comic retelling the story of the Bible, pretending to be true to the original book, but omitting God and every single reference to a God.

I think the result could be interesting. If you don’t want too many fights with copyright lawyers, you should probably pick an original work so old it’s in the public domain, of course.

Bonus points for pretending to be a true adaptation to the original (“of course, I couldn’t include everything, I had to leave some parts out to actually be able to turn it into a comic”) when advertising this comic to the original work’s core fanbase. Or wait, is that what they call “trolling”?

97 down, three to go. Not much further now…