When a huge part of the movie hinges on the musical communication between humans and aliens, something gets lost in the comic book adaptation. Over his career, Archie Goodwin was no stranger to these kind of comic book adaptations. His and Walt Simonson’s Alien adaptation is a classic graphic novel and his Star Wars adaptations with Al Williamson faithfully stuck to and translated the movies into comic form. Of course, it certainly helped that Goodwin was a fantastic and gifted writer. He may be one of the strongest storytellers to emerge in the 60s and 70s but his writing career was over shadowed by a fantastic editorial career. While a book like Alien is a fantastic story on it’s own, the adaptation of Close Encounters is ham-strung by the limitations of comics, unable to produce sound when the narrative demands it.
There’s a lot of good going on in this comic book. The art is produced by Walt Simonson and Klaus Janson. While the credits don’t go into much more detail, a text piece in the back by Goodwin suggests that Simonson laid out the story and Janson finished it up. That makes some sense since the artwork mostly doesn’t feel like either of their standard work at the time. In fact, if I had to take a guess, I would have said that Tom Palmer had done. The final linework is not nearly as heavy or over-powering as Janson’s would later become after working with Frank Miller.
While most of it doesn’t look like the Janson we’d come to know, almost none of it looks like Simonson either. His sharp and distinct linework is often hidden below Janson’s ink but Simonson’s design-sense pops through now and again. Every now and then in this book, Simonson goes crazy on the panel designs and produces pages that I just want to stare at.
The kinetic energy that Simonson and Janson produce here is just crazy (six eyes?) as household appliances seem to come alive with some alien energy. And the text at the bottom, “BBRROOAAMMMM,” while probably done by letterer Gaspar Salandino, shows how Simonson would later incorporate John Workman’s sound effects in Thor.
Unfortunately, the story doesn’t translate well into comics. In Twomorrow’s Modern Masters V8: Walter Simonson, Simonson talks briefly about the process of making this book:
“Also Marvel didn’t have likeness rights, so we couldn’t use Dreyfuss or Teri Garr or anybody else in the comic. We just had to work from nothing. We had a script and that was it. Even the script we had wasn’t the final script.”
Archie Goodwin has to pack a 2 hour movie into just 45 pages and it comes off as clunky, over-expository and it just doesn’t stand well on it’s own. Where we have Spielberg and his actors building their characters over reels of film, Goodwin has to try to boil them down to develop them while briskly moving the story along. Everything that the movie relies on is lost to Goodwin. For the adaptation of Ridley Scott’s Alien, Goodwin has the room and is able to create mood and tension in that graphic novel but he’s unable to recreate Close Encounters in comic form here.
Sometimes movie adaptations work out great and sometimes they fail. Without the sensory experience that Spielberg creates in the film, the adaptation of Close Encounters of the Third Kind falls flat, unable to induce the chills and tension that Spielberg is able to by using effects, lighting and sound.
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Tags: Archie Goodwin, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Klaus Janson, Steven Spielberg, Walter Simonson