Comic books have been in the media industry for a very long time in the United States, and the more popular ones are superheroes. These fans have seen change after change of their favorite characters from the beginning to the modern age of today.
Well, not all fans will know the beginning of their favorite characters and may see them in a different light. The topic that is being brought into light is the way movies are portraying said characters and even the minor characters, at that.
In many cases, some of the characters portrayed, like a majority of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, are accurate to the comic books and will more than likely continue to keep that up in the coming films. Meanwhile other media like the DC television shows show very little accuracy to the comic storylines and even well-known character development from the comic books.
For example, in DC’s Arrow, which is a great show, the character of Green Arrow is not all that accurate to the comic book origin of Oliver Queen. Oliver doesn’t have a sister in the comic books and the villains he faced aren’t originally from the Green Arrow comics.
With DC coming out with the new television show Titans, I find myself disappointed. Much like my hesitance with the Arrow series of doing the same thing over again, I worry for the future of Titans.
When I saw pictures and screenshots of what the characters look like in this new show, it looks like the producers made no strides when it comes to being remotely close to the look of the comic book. Even in a show meant for kids like Teen Titans Go, the style looks way better in comparison.
Now I criticized DC a lot, but to be fair, they didn’t handle the characters with care and love like Marvel has done. Marvel tried to stay fairly true to their characters in their long-running, expansive universe; almost never trying to stray away too much from the origins of the character. For example, Spider-man: Homecoming had Peter Parker as a teenager in high school trying to deal with the people around him and the burden of being Spider-man. Some characters in the movie were not really accurate as Flash Thompson shouldn’t have been a nerd like Parker or even on the decathlon team. Another difference was the choice to not to have Mary Jane Watson in the movie. Okay to clarify, MJ is in the movie, but she is not called Mary Jane nor is she a redhead and her personality in the movie is very different than in the comics.
With all this criticism and negative views in my media portrayal, does that mean I hate them? No; by all means I do like the material that comes out of these shows and movies, but it’s my inner purist in me to want to see those characters in the book on the screen and not to be changed for the sake of the story or because the director didn’t like the origin of a character.
