Comic book movies have become increasingly big business in the twenty-first century and, because this is the way that Hollywood works, that means that film producers have had to start taking comics seriously as source material. Where once a low rent Stallone vehicle could put a Lawgiver pistol in the hands of the Italian Stallion and call it Judge Dredd, now we can enjoy an implacable, deadpan Karl Urban coming far closer to his on-page equivalent. The blessing of the original comic creator is now seen as such a cornerstone of marketing the movie that the likes of Sin City's Frank Miller and Persepolis' Marjane Satrapi have even been given a co-director credit on the screen versions of their stories. All of this has been greeted with great delight by comics fans convinced that "staying true to the comic" is the key to ensuring a good movie. But is it? There's more to making a story transition from one medium to another than simply lifting dialogue and images from the page and slapping them up on screen (not that that seemed to hurt the aforementioned Sin City). Adaptations need to, you know, adapt their sources if they are to work in a different form. Here are ten times when a comic book film worked entirely because it threw away the details of its source and trod its own path.
