Clubbed: Megalopolis An Original Graphic Novel
For The Comics Journal a read of Megalopolis An Original Graphic Novel by Chris Ryall and Jason Phillips and in some sense or other Francis Ford Coppola, which arrives a year late for any kind of cross-promotion with Megalopolis the movie and also feels like it could been finished a year before the film came out. The lines in the press notes implying Coppola's close hands-on involvement are widely spaced. You picture him walking past the window now and again. Fellini and Manara this is not.
Someone drawn a bit like Adam Driver is involved but no one else looks much like they do in the film, which never stops being distracting - without Jon Voight's gurning face and priapic boner you could almost mistake Hamilton Crassus for a trustworthy banker - and makes the book feel like a spin-off. It's A Tale Of The Megalopolis except the plot is exactly the same (or exactly what was on Coppola’s whiteboard when he ushered Ryall and Phillips out) and there's Adam Driver doing several things he does in the film all over again, without the actual sound of him rolling the word "club" around in his mouth like a boiled sweet.
Phillips's art has a soft fluid style and an obvious (family) connection with the feel of a 1990s DC Vertigo comic, but that's miles away from the crisp digital overlays and exaggerations that Coppola uses. Comics adaptations don't have to swerve away from the style of their sources with tyres smoking - although please do, Jack Kirby wrestling 2001: A Space Odyssey into a half nelson, Jim Steranko taking Outland apart like a diesel engine - but here all that's left is the plot, definitely not Megalopolis's strong point. Outland brings up another snag, since Phillips does essentially nothing with the instances of frozen time in Megalopolis, while Steranko's page-spreads were a nerve jangling lab experiment in stretching moments out like a rubber band and tying them in a knot, from a film where clocks ticking normally was the point.
About a year ago I thought Howard Chaykin's Time2: Hallowed Ground0 comic had something to say about Megalopolis the film before I even knew that a Megalopolis graphic novel was in the works. Now that Coppola has parked his trailer on Chaykin's professional lawn comparing the two more directly is fair game, but bad news for the newcomer. Everything in Chaykin's toolbox, kinetic layouts and overlapping speeches and frantic montages and architectural schematics and the rest, are closer to Coppola's film style than the graphic novel bearing Coppola’s name. And Chaykin's cynicism makes things feel more contemporary too, despite the Neverland timelessness of the Time2 city itself. Trusting the monied elite to deliver utopia is certainly a choice at this point in time, crisis what crisis. You wouldn't catch Chaykin doing it.
