Marvel Super Special #22, Blade Runner
Before the home video era, there were precious few ways that one could experience a favorite movie away from the cinema, all of them imperfect to a degree. Perhaps the best known, and one that still exists today, is the movie novelization, in which your favorite film appears in book form. Movie novelizations have existed for nearly a century now; what we know of Lon Chaney’s famous lost silent film London After Midnight comes from production stills and the film’s novelization. When I was younger, I read quite a few. If you wanted to “experience” the latest R-rated movie—i.e. Alien, RoboCop, Predator, Aliens—and your parents weren’t going to take you, then film novelizations were the best option. They cost about as much as a full price movie ticket yet were more widely available, easily purchased from the paperback racks at your local grocery or drug store. Best of all, most novelizations were based on the film’s shooting script and featured scenes that failed to make the final cut.
Comic book adaptations of films have existed almost as long as novelizations. In some ways, comic books would seem to be a better, more truer way to adapt movies as the form combines both words and images. And when I was growing up, there were no better film to comic adaptations than the Marvel Super Specials. These were oversized issues that were a bit pricier than normal comics, running between $1.50–$2.50 at a time when normal comics were 30¢-60¢, so saving allowance or good behavior to get a parent to buy me one was quite often required. But they were gold—adapting all of the blockbuster films that I wanted to see (but, again, sometimes couldn’t) while also allowing me to relive them again and again in the comfort of my bedroom. Among the films featured as Marvel Super Specials included The Empire Strikes Back, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Tarzan, The Dark Crystal, Battlestar Galactica, The Muppets Take Manhattan, The Last Starfighter, Dragonslayer, and Blade Runner.
Wait? What? Blade Runner?
Yes, in 1982, Marvel Comics published an adaptation of Ridley Scott’s masterpiece, Blade Runner, Marvel Super Special #22: Blade Runner went on sale May 25, 1982, according to Grand Comics Database, a full month ahead of the film’s release date, June 25. The adaptation then appeared as two issues that hit newsstands in July and August.
There’s a bit to unpack here. First thing, pretty much everyone reading this knows that Blade Runner is an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Yet the Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner documentary makes clear that Hampton Fancher, the film’s original writer, regards both his screenplay, and the resulting film, as being inspired by Dick’s novel, and as adaptations go, it is very different. But, for years afterward—well into the 90s—the only published edition of the novel bore the film’s artwork and title. While this edition no doubt served as a gateway book for many who would go on to read more of Dick’s fiction, it’s not a great way of re-experiencing the film as it plays on the screen, unlike those novelizations I listed above. So the only contemporary (i.e. 1982) film-to-page adaptation of the film Blade Runner was the one published by Marvel Comics.
Well then, how is it you may ask? It’s a bit strange … and that has everything to do with both the film itself and the time it was released.
In 1982, comic books were still very much considered to be the domain of boys, 8 to 14-year-olds. Yes, this is a generalization: girls were reading comics; there were older readers, too; but unlike today, where there is a much broader readership for comics, the primary demographic were pre-teen boys—revisit those old issues, look at the ads inside and see if you don’t agree with me.
Now, here’s a question you might have: if you believe your readership demographic is going to be young boys (again, 8 to 14, though you might stretch that out to 15 or 16), then why are you adapting an R-rated, under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian, property? This is a bit perplexing, too. It creates a demand to see the film among a group who had little chance of actually going to see the film. If a comic book adaptation is being seen as a promotional item to drive customers into the theatre, than it serves that the audience of that adaptation should not be impede from seeing the film in the cinema by the MPAA rating. Of course, when the producers approached Marvel about licensing the film for a comic book adaptation, the project would yet to have been rated. So, imagine yourself in Marvel’s position— you’ve been pitched a science-fiction film starring Harrison Ford, at a time that you are selling tons of Star Wars comics every month, which just happens to feature a character portrayed on-screen by Harrison Ford. Also, look at that list of films above adapted into Marvel Super Specials, most of them are sci-fi and/or star Harrison Ford. As such, Blade Runner sounds perfect, right? Of course it does. Neither Warner Bros. nor Marvel would be aware of the film’s rating until just before its release when all work on the adaptation would have already been completed. That said, based on the film’s themes and imagery present in the various draft scripts, an R-rating was highly probable, if not certain.
So come the summer of 1982, 8-year-old me couldn’t go see Blade Runner, and my parents were certainly not going to take me to see it, but I could buy the two issue adaptation for $1.20 total at the 7-11 spinner rack, or the oversized Super Special edition for $2.50. Again, both cheaper than a movie ticket. Yes, the nudity and violence from the film was toned down in the adaptation, but there was also no way that I would have seen the film, no matter how badly I wanted to.
Dan! Enough about movie ratings! What is the Marvel Comics Blade Runner like?
Again, it’s a bit strange… but you can read it here through the magic of the internet.
Have you read it? Do you see what I mean?
Okay, okay, for TL;DR persuasion, allow me to elaborate.
First off, Marvel’s creative team on the book was a stellar one: Archie Goodwin, who was one of the most beloved and well-liked figures in the industry for three decades, wrote the adaptation with artwork by Al Williamson and Carlos Garzon. Williamson was uniquely qualified for the project, having previously drawn Flash Gordon comics as well as the classic EC Comics sci-fi titles, Weird Science and Weird Fantasy. Goodwin, Williamson, and Garzon had all worked together on Marvel’s Star Wars series, including the Super Special adaptations of The Empire Strikes Back and, later, The Return of the Jedi. So you have a sci-fi experienced creative dream team in place, it should be great, right?
Well, if you’re a big fan of Blade Runner, then you are probably familiar with the film’s troubled production history, brilliantly charted in the aforementioned Dangerous Days documentary. The film’s script was in flux throughout filming. To briefly recap: Fancher’s original screenplay wasn’t quite working out so the production brought in David Webb Peoples for revisions and rewrites. Fancher would later return to contribute additional rewrites. However, well into post-production, the film still wasn’t “coming together”. Screenings for studio executives and test audiences were poorly received. This would lead to the love-it-or-hate-it voiceover narration being added to clarify the film’s action. All of this would have been problematic for a team working on a film-to-page adaptation. Given the production timeline needed in order for the comic books to appear concurrently with the film’s release, the Marvel team wouldn’t have been able to see a completed version of the film. Nor would a comic book adaptation be considered high priority enough to warrant that they be shown a rough cut much less any work-in-progress footage. Common practice with screen-to-page adaptations is to use the shooting script, but Blade Runner’s script was one being constantly revised and rewritten throughout filming and post-production. So my conjecture here is that Goodwin received a shooting script from the production but was unaware that the was still being tinkered with as dictated by post-production’s needs, requiring more and more revisions. And while motion picture footage might not have been available, it is clear that Marvel’s team did have access to concept art and production stills, allowing Williamson and Garzon to adapt and incorporate the film’s visuals into their artwork. The adaptation’s narrative is almost an impressionistic reading of the film with more than a few story beats that play differently.. Some of this would have been necessary to tone down the sex and violence to garner the Comics Code Authority approval needed at the time. Below are a few of those changes explored alongside screen-to-page comparisons—
If you’re pro-narration, then you’ll probably love the comic. Like a Chandler novel, Deckard narrates virtually all of the action via the comic’s captions.
Gaff’s “Cityspeak” is one of the biggest divergences from the film in Marvel’s adaptation. Edward James Olmos improvised most of his patois during production, so little of what we hear in the film would have been in any script sent to Marvel—what does appear in the comic reads as stilted and just plain goofy.
The comic never equates the “skin job” slur with the N-word, leaving the reader to rely on context to come to that understanding.
Here is why Roy is such a formidable bad ass, info cut from the finished film.
The film’s most problematic scene is still problematic in the comic, just in a different way. There are still consent issues present but Deckard’s raw aggression isn’t as evident on the page as it is onscreen.
Roy’s famous poetic final lines failed to make it into the comic. Rutger Hauer improvised them during a table read, but those lines seem never to have been written into the script, or at least not the one sent to the Marvel offices.
The unicorn is the most important symbol in Scott’s final cut, making the case for many viewers that Deckard, too, is a replicant. In the original theatrical release, the origami unicorn functions in two ways: first, it establishes Gaff visited Deckard’s apartment searching for Rachel; and second, it symbolizes Rachel’s unique replicant nature (no expiration date). In the comic, Gaff’s three origami dolls is reduced to one, the unicorn, but it makes two appearances. Deckard still finds it at his apartment just before fleeing with Rachel; however, the careful reader will notice the unicorn’s first appearance in Captain Bryant’s office, where it replaces the chicken. This shows, I think, that Marvel’s creative team intuited the importance of the origami unicorn while also seeing it as a baffling red herring—important enough to be included but its true context not being fully established in the script. To remedy this situation, the unicorn was added to the police station scene, creating a satisfying, if minor, plant and pay off moment.
Marvel’s adaptation splits the difference between the U.S. release cut’s tacked on happy ending and the filmmaker’s original, more ambiguous intent made manifest in the film’s subsequent cuts. Why, exactly, “Blade Runner” as a title? Well, the final lines here spell it out for the reader.
