#tog and diabolik hit and i'll be real off the top of my head tog is hitting 1/5 (which seems to be normal for modern comic book movies)

[youssefguedira]

if i really wanted to i could contrast the old guard 2020 and diabolik 2021 as comic book adaptations and the different ways they approach both adapting their source material i.e. diabolik as an adaptation is both paying homage to its source material constantly and regularly reminding you that it is a comic book adaptation whereas the old guard is more trying to make a regular action movie based on a comic book, drawing occasional visual parallels that won't be recognisable unless the viewer is familiar with the source material. both are also adapting the story in some way for film, but diabolik stays much more strictly to the book it's adapting while the old guard makes a lot of changes (afaik there's almost nothing from the comics verbatim) but keeps the core of the story and essential scenes in. something interesting there about diabolik reminding us of the series' origin as comics probably due to a) its long-running history and b) cultural icon status (source: me and my powerpoint) vs the old guard falling into what i might call the current style of comic book adaptation where the focus is on appealing to a wide audience, comics fans or not, to the point where you might not even know it's based on a comic outside of marketing. but also essentially i think a comic book adaptation should match the tone of its original, which they both do: the old guard is a darker, more serious, more "adult" comic, and so it follows that the adaptation largely follows that tone (save for one or two parts that to me feel very recognisably comic book style), whereas diabolik is, albeit technically also for adults, a different genre / tone. and then there's something else to be said there in the evolution of comics considered adult, e.g. diabolik considered adult in the context of its first publishing because it contained crime and killing but generally becoming considered one of the more tame examples of the subgenre it spawned, vs the old guard being adult in terms of current standards via depicting sex / nudity / swearing / violence far beyond the scope of diabolik, which is pretty much unchanged. anyway these two things are not really connected beyond "both being comic book movie adaptations released in the 2020s featuring notable italian luca marinelli in a somewhat major role as a character who says vaguely ominous things and largely emotes through microexpressions" but it's fun to think about sometimes