A bit of history

Some forms of comic book adaptation can be dated back as far as the early 1940, when short stories from successful comic strips like Batman, Captain America or Superman started to be made into movies for theatre screening. The technology and the production techniques employed in this early attempts, far from being cutting edge, only allowed for a dramatization that was very close to real life, both in its aesthetics and in its construction. Although a few special effects techniques had already been developed, like the matte painting, the rear projection, the double exposure, the roto-painting and even early version of blue screen, the costs, time consumption and expertise required made most of them unsuitable for this kind of small productions. Even when the first comic book adaptations in the form of feature length films started to appear in the mid 1960s, both the quantity and quality of tools devoted to the development of an original form of narrative were very poor, making it very difficult for most of those films to achieve a sense of wonder that would set the action on a higher than real level.

Although a few cases, like Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) had tried to push the edge of the technology available to filmmakers, it wasn't until the late 1970s, with the advent of movies such as Star Wars (1977) that an understanding of how such advancements could greatly benefit the construction of narrative started taking place among filmmakers. The enormous success, in terms of both audience and critics, and the financial results that George Lucas's movie accomplished thanks to, among other things, the unprecedented quality and innovation in the visual effects pushed production companies to explore new ways to adopt the technologies. The revamp of the comic book movie (and in particular of the superhero sub-genre), was the perfect test subject for it.