Supazaar!

Category: Stories

  • Comic Book Story Arcs So Unnecessarily Long They’d Be Serialised Across Three Separate BBC Two Seasons

    Comic Book Story Arcs So Unnecessarily Long They’d Be Serialised Across Three Separate BBC Two Seasons

    There is a specific type of television suffering that only BBC Two can deliver. Six episodes, broadcast across three months, with a four-week gap in the middle because of snooker coverage. You invest everything. You care deeply. And then the finale airs on a Tuesday at 9pm and resolves absolutely nothing, because they’ve already greenlit a second series that won’t arrive until sometime in 2027. It is, I’d argue, a uniquely British form of narrative punishment. And I say this as someone who sat through all of The Salisbury Poisonings and still has feelings about it.

    Now. Marvel and DC have been doing exactly the same thing to comic book readers for decades. The longest comic book story arcs in UK comic shop history are not so much stories as they are commitments. Life decisions. The kind of thing you mention at a party and people back away slowly. So, in the spirit of public service, here is a lovingly sarcastic scheduling announcement from a fictional BBC commissioning editor, applied to some of the most gloriously bloated story arcs the big two have ever produced.

    A towering comic book collection stack representing the longest comic book story arcs UK readers have endured
    Photo by Bo Ponomari on Pexels

    Welcome from our fictional BBC Two commissioning editor

    “We at BBC Two are thrilled to announce our upcoming drama slate, inspired by the finest traditions of serialised storytelling. Each production has been carefully paced so that very little happens for four episodes, one extraordinary thing happens in episode five, and episode six ends on a freeze frame. Series two is in development. We cannot confirm a broadcast date at this time.”

    Right. Let’s get into it.

    House of M (Marvel, 2005), Series one of an indefinite run

    BBC Two scheduling note: Seven episodes. Airs across four months. Episode three replaced by coverage of the Cambridge Folk Festival. Available on iPlayer for thirty days before being archived forever.

    Scarlet Witch says “No more mutants” and reality itself bends. It’s a genuinely great hook. The problem is that understanding why she says it requires reading roughly nine years of previous storylines, including Avengers Disassembled, several issues of New Avengers, and at least two trades that are perpetually out of print. I’ve tried to explain House of M to non-comics friends and I have never, not once, successfully completed the backstory before they’ve drifted to their phones.

    As a BBC Two drama it would actually work beautifully. Episode one: a woman is very sad and powerful. Episodes two through five: people argue in rooms. Episode six: the world is different now. Credits roll over a Sufjan Stevens track. Absolutely nobody explains what just happened. Brilliant television.

    Infinite Crisis (DC, 2005-2006), A prestige co-production with Channel 4 that somehow ended up on BBC Two anyway

    Infinite Crisis had seven main issues. It also had around twenty companion mini-series, four Countdown tie-ins, and a Road to Infinite Crisis arc that itself required familiarity with the original 1985 Crisis on Infinite Earths. Reading it in sequence is like arriving at a dinner party where everyone else went to school together and they keep referencing an incident from 1987 that you weren’t there for.

    The pacing, in BBC Two terms, is exemplary. Our fictional commissioning editor would absolutely commission this. Six episodes. Episode one introduces thirty-seven characters. Episode four kills half of them. Episode six suggests that perhaps the real Infinite Crisis was the friends we made along the way. Second series announced. Set five years earlier. Explores the Crisis on Infinite Earths from the perspective of a minor character who dies in issue two of the original.

    Secret Wars (Marvel, 2015), The one that actually delayed itself

    The longest comic book story arcs tend to feel long because they’re written for the trade paperback collection. Secret Wars was different. It was long because it genuinely, physically took forever to publish. Jonathan Hickman’s 2015 Secret Wars was solicited as an eight-issue series. It ended up being nine issues, shipped out of order, and took about nine months longer than planned to complete. Other Marvel series had to invent reasons why their storylines existed in a publishing vacuum during this time. Some writers have described this period with words I can’t publish here.

    For BBC Two scheduling purposes, this is absolutely standard practice. You commission a six-parter. It becomes a seven-parter. Episode four is delayed by three weeks because of a Proms special. The cast have aged visibly between filming episode two and episode six. One of the lead characters is recast and nobody mentions it. The finale airs on 23 December when half the country is at their nan’s. Perfectly normal British television production.

    If you want the full picture on comic book storylines that make your head hurt trying to map them onto any logical timeline, I wrote about comic book story arcs so convoluted even a Martin Lewis deep-dive couldn’t untangle them, and Secret Wars features prominently, for obvious reasons.

    The Clone Saga (Marvel, 1994-1996), A cautionary tale in three BBC Two seasons

    Originally planned as a three-month Spider-Man storyline. Ran for two years. Introduced, killed, resurrected and re-killed Ben Reilly. Revealed that the real Peter Parker might be a clone. Then revealed that wasn’t true. Then suggested it might be. I have read academic papers shorter than the Clone Saga and with significantly clearer conclusions.

    BBC Two scheduling announcement: The Clone Saga. Series one: six episodes. Series two: five episodes, airing the following autumn. Series three: four episodes, broadcast in a Sunday evening slot usually reserved for wildlife documentaries. A special episode resolving the main cliffhanger airs eighteen months after series three, on a bank holiday Monday at 10:15pm. Viewing figures: modest but passionate. BAFTA nomination: Best Sound Design.

    I genuinely believe the Clone Saga would win a BAFTA for Best Sound Design. Nobody would be able to explain the plot in the acceptance speech but the ambient sound of Peter Parker’s existential confusion would be outstanding.

    DC’s New 52 continuity, The entire experiment as a limited series that forgot to be limited

    DC rebooted its entire continuity in September 2011 with the New 52. Fifty-two new series, fresh starts, clean slates. By 2016 it had been partially walked back, then replaced by DC Rebirth, which itself referenced pre-New-52 continuity that the New 52 had supposedly replaced. The BBC arts desk would have a field day covering this as a cultural phenomenon and then quietly never follow it up.

    As a BBC Two commission this would run as follows: a prestige pilot, well-received, several new characters introduced. Then a second series that quietly contradicts several things the first series established. Then a third series that brings back beloved elements from a previous show that this show had replaced. Then a Very Special Episode that tries to reconcile all of it. Then a podcast. The podcast would be quite good, actually.

    What the longest comic book story arcs actually tell us

    Here’s the thing, and I say this with genuine affection: the reason these arcs go so long is the same reason BBC Two dramas string things out across multiple series. People care. If nobody cared, nobody would keep reading, keep watching, keep posting increasingly unhinged fan theories on Reddit threads at 2am. The longest comic book story arcs in history exist because someone, somewhere, is deeply invested in finding out what happens next.

    That is, objectively, a lovely thing. Even if what happens next takes forty-seven issues and three crossover events to deliver.

    The dark comic book storylines I covered in an earlier piece on comic book storylines that would fit perfectly into a BBC One Sunday night drama tend to be the tighter, grimmer ones. The sprawling universe-altering epics are a different beast entirely. They are not tragic. They are operatic. BBC Two, with its noble tradition of commissioning things that slightly more people should watch, is the perfect home for them.

    And if you think I’ve been too harsh: the scheduling announcement for Hickman’s Avengers and New Avengers run leading into Secret Wars would simply read “Begins in 2012. You will understand it in 2016. We are sorry about the gaps. Please watch our nature documentary about Highland cattle in the meantime.”

    Genuinely cannot think of a more British way to consume a multiverse-collapsing epic. Bring biscuits. You’ll be here a while.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What are the longest comic book story arcs ever published?

    Marvel’s Clone Saga (1994-1996) ran for roughly two years across multiple Spider-Man titles, making it one of the longest single continuous arcs. DC’s New 52 initiative technically ran from 2011 to 2016 before being replaced, which is hard to beat for sheer sustained commitment to a chaotic idea.

    Do I need to read every issue to understand big Marvel or DC crossover events?

    In theory, no. In practice, the answer is a gentle but firm yes, especially for events like Infinite Crisis or Secret Wars, which assume familiarity with years of preceding storylines. Most local comic shops in the UK stock collected trade paperbacks that group the essential tie-ins together, which helps considerably.

    Why do comic book story arcs get so long and decompressed?

    Much of it comes down to writing for the trade paperback collection rather than the monthly issue. Six issues collected into one volume is a marketable product, so writers structure stories across six chapters rather than resolving things quickly. It also keeps readers subscribed monthly, which publishers understandably like.

    Which Marvel crossover event is the best starting point for UK readers new to comics?

    Civil War (2006-2007) is the most accessible big crossover because its central conflict, Iron Man versus Captain America on a political issue, is easy to grasp without much prior knowledge. It’s widely available in UK bookshops and Waterstones usually stocks the collected edition.

    Are decompressed comic book storylines actually bad, or is that just a criticism?

    It’s a genuine creative debate. Slower pacing allows for richer character development and works brilliantly in collected form. The frustration tends to hit monthly readers who pay per issue and feel shortchanged when a single conversation takes three issues to complete. Both positions are reasonable, frankly.

  • The Most Dramatic Movie Courtroom Scenes and Why a UK Crown Court Judge Would Have None of It

    The Most Dramatic Movie Courtroom Scenes and Why a UK Crown Court Judge Would Have None of It

    Hollywood has a very specific idea of what a courtroom looks like. It looks like a man in a suit standing up, slamming his fist on a desk, and screaming “YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH” while the gallery erupts into spontaneous applause and the judge sits there doing absolutely nothing useful. I’ve watched enough of these films to fill an entire career in actual legal practice, and every single time I’m left thinking the same thing: a Crown Court judge would have dissolved this entire proceeding within about forty seconds.

    Because here’s the thing about a real British Crown Court. It is, by design, aggressively boring. Not in a bad way. In the way that keeps innocent people out of prison. The judge speaks quietly, the barristers speak quietly, and if anyone in the public gallery so much as rustles a crisp packet, a court usher materialises from thin air like some kind of procedural spectre and gives them a look that could strip paint. Hollywood has never once depicted this. Not even close.

    Comic book courtroom drama illustration capturing the energy of movie courtroom scenes UK funny style
    Photo by khezez | خزاز on Pexels

    The spontaneous standing ovation problem

    Let’s start with the bit that always gets me. In films, a particularly devastating closing argument is routinely rewarded with applause. The gallery rises. People weep. A single tear rolls down someone’s cheek. The music swells. In A Few Good Men, Tom Cruise essentially does a greatest hits set for the jury. In My Cousin Vinny, Joe Pesci gets a round of appreciative murmuring. Even in courtroom dramas that try to be serious, there’s always that moment where the room collectively decides the lawyer has just done something magnificent.

    Walk into the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey and try that. I dare you. The judge would stop proceedings, instruct the gallery to be silent, and if the applause continued, have everyone removed. That’s not dramatisation, that’s just what the judiciary’s own guidance on courtroom conduct makes fairly clear. Contempt of court is a real thing. Spontaneous ovations are not a protected form of legal appreciation.

    The last-minute confession that saves the day

    This is the big one. The Hollywood courtroom confession is a sacred cinematic tradition. The real murderer, sitting somewhere in the gallery or on the witness stand, suddenly cracks under the pressure of a particularly aggressive cross-examination and blurts the whole thing out. Case closed. Credits roll. Everyone goes home happy.

    Real confession in a Crown Court setting involves considerably more paperwork. If a witness spontaneously confessed to a crime during proceedings, the judge would almost certainly pause everything, possibly discharge the jury to avoid prejudice, and the newly confessing individual would need separate legal representation before anyone could do anything with that information. The dramatic moment would be immediately followed by roughly three weeks of procedural sorting-out. Not quite the triumphant finale Hollywood had in mind.

    The screaming barrister is another one entirely. In films, lawyers shout. They pace. They point dramatically at the defendant. In a Crown Court, a barrister who raised their voice inappropriately at a witness would be gently but firmly reminded of their professional obligations by the judge. The Solicitors Regulation Authority and the Bar Standards Board take a fairly dim view of theatrical behaviour that serves the performance rather than the argument. You can be devastating in a Crown Court. You just have to do it in a very quiet, very precise, very English way that’s somehow more frightening than any amount of desk-slamming.

    The witness who tells a devastating truth nobody expected

    Films love the witness who walks into the box and detonates the entire case with one sentence nobody saw coming. In real Crown Court proceedings, witnesses are proofed before they testify. The barristers on both sides broadly know what a witness is going to say. Truly unexpected testimony does occasionally happen, but it results in an application to adjourn, legal argument about admissibility, possibly a voir dire, and a lot of very considered discussion conducted in voices slightly above a murmur.

    The closest real-life equivalent to a movie courtroom confession is probably a defendant choosing to give evidence and then saying something catastrophically unhelpful to their own case. That does happen. It is not accompanied by a swell of strings and a closeup of the prosecutor’s quietly triumphant face. It’s accompanied by the defendant’s barrister staring at a point slightly above the jury box and visibly recalibrating everything.

    Films that at least tried to get it right

    I’ll give credit where it’s due. Some films at least gesture toward procedural reality. Kramer vs. Kramer has a certain restraint to its courtroom scenes that feels more like actual litigation than performance. The Verdict, with Paul Newman, goes for exhausted realism over theatrical fireworks. And some British productions, notably certain episodes of Silk on the BBC, actually managed to convey the specific texture of Crown Court proceedings without making it feel like a West End production.

    But these are exceptions. For the most part, Hollywood treats a courtroom the way it treats a spaceship or a hacking terminal: as a prop for drama rather than a working system with its own logic. Speaking of which, if you enjoyed the chaos of fictional technology meeting British regulatory reality, the piece on which sci-fi movie technologies would be immediately shut down by UK regulators covers similarly fertile ground. The gap between what looks cool on screen and what would survive actual institutional scrutiny is, in almost every case, enormous.

    What a Crown Court judge would actually do with Jack Nicholson

    Let’s go back to A Few Good Men. Jack Nicholson’s Colonel Jessup, under cross-examination, delivers one of cinema’s great eruptions. He shouts, he threatens, he basically confesses to ordering a murder because Tom Cruise goaded him into it. Brilliant scene. Completely absorbing. And in a real courtroom, within approximately eight seconds of that speech beginning, a judge would have intervened.

    The witness would be warned. If the outburst continued, the judge would have the witness removed. If the witness was a serving military officer in contempt of court, there would be a separate process entirely. The confession embedded in the shouting would be legally complicated to use, potentially the subject of admissibility argument, and Tom Cruise’s character would probably face some questions about his cross-examination technique from his supervising officer. Not quite as cinematic.

    This is the same energy as those movie heists that completely fall apart the moment they hit a UK car park barrier. Hollywood builds its drama on the assumption that systems are dramatic. British systems are, by design, the opposite of dramatic. They are designed to produce consistent, boring, reproducible outcomes. That’s what makes them work. And that is absolutely fatal to a third-act courtroom revelation.

    The judge who would sigh and adjourn everything

    My favourite imaginary scenario is placing a Crown Court judge, someone who has spent twenty years hearing cases in a Midlands courtroom, into any Hollywood legal drama. The Oscar-baiting speech gets cut off after forty words. The dramatic pause is filled with a quiet request to move along. The witness who breaks down crying is given a moment to compose themselves and then politely asked to answer the question. The gallery that gasps is cleared.

    And honestly? The Crown Court version is more frightening. There’s something genuinely chilling about a system that processes drama without flinching. Jack Nicholson shouting wouldn’t get you anywhere. What would get you somewhere is a quietly excellent barrister asking the exact right question at the exact right moment, in a voice you’d struggle to hear from the back row, and watching the answer land like a brick into still water.

    Hollywood gives us theatre. The Crown Court gives you something closer to chess. Neither format is wrong. But only one of them would survive an afternoon at the Old Bailey without being held in contempt. And it’s not the one with Tom Cruise. Similar logic applies to the most unrealistic hacking scenes in games and movies, where the gap between what looks dramatic on screen and what actually happens is roughly the size of a Crown Court adjournment pile.

    The truth Hollywood can’t handle is that real legal drama is slow, quiet, exhausting, and often decided on points of procedure that would bore a Golden Retriever into unconsciousness. Which is probably why it keeps making films about people screaming in courtrooms instead. Fair enough, honestly. I’d rather watch Jack Nicholson than a voir dire application any day of the week.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What are the funniest movie courtroom scenes compared to real UK courts?

    The spontaneous gallery ovation and the last-minute screaming confession are the biggest offenders. In a real Crown Court, both would result in the proceedings being halted, the gallery cleared, and a very long administrative process that kills the drama stone dead.

    Can people clap or cheer in a UK Crown Court?

    Absolutely not. Crown Court galleries are expected to remain silent throughout proceedings. Any disruption, including applause, can constitute contempt of court, and a judge has full authority to have the gallery cleared or individuals removed.

    Do witnesses ever spontaneously confess in real UK courtrooms like they do in films?

    It’s vanishingly rare, and when unexpected admissions do happen, they trigger legal procedures rather than dramatic resolutions. The judge would likely pause proceedings, address admissibility concerns, and ensure the individual has appropriate legal representation before anything moves forward.

    Which films actually get courtroom procedure right?

    Very few Hollywood productions do. Some British TV dramas, particularly the BBC’s Silk, managed a reasonably accurate portrayal of Crown Court proceedings. American films almost universally treat the courtroom as a dramatic arena rather than a legal institution.

  • The Sci-Fi Movie Spaceships That Would Fail Their MOT on Absolutely Every Single Point

    The Sci-Fi Movie Spaceships That Would Fail Their MOT on Absolutely Every Single Point

    I have a confession. Every time Han Solo tells Chewie the Millennium Falcon did the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs, I nod along like a sensible person, and then quietly wonder whether any of those parsecs involved driving through a DVLA-registered MOT test centre in Wolverhampton. Because the truth, the uncomfortable, magnificent truth, is that virtually every beloved cinematic spacecraft would fail its MOT so catastrophically that the garage would politely ask you to leave the premises and not come back.

    This is the sci-fi spaceships MOT funny UK crossover nobody asked for but absolutely everybody needs. I’ve gone through the DVSA’s official MOT inspection checklist, you can find it on GOV.UK, and applied it, with tremendous seriousness, to the icons of science fiction cinema. Strap in. Or don’t. The seatbelts probably don’t work either.

    Comic art of a spaceship cockpit failing its MOT inspection — sci-fi spaceships MOT funny UK
    Photo by Nikita Kulikov on Pexels

    Millennium Falcon: a rolling disaster with a great attitude

    Let’s start with the obvious. The Millennium Falcon is the most famous hunk of junk in the galaxy, and Han Solo says that himself. That is not a selling point at an MOT station. That is a man pre-emptively admitting his vehicle is about to spend four hours in a service bay while a baffled technician phones his manager.

    Rust and corrosion? The entire rear hull section looks like a damp shed in Scunthorpe that’s been left since 1987. The hyperdrive fails at least once every single film, which under UK regs translates to a major fault in the engine management system. The cockpit visibility from that offset side section is a Category 1 hazard, there’s no way that meets the required field of view from the driver’s seat. The landing gear jams. The ramp sticks. There are exposed cables in every corridor that would have the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) writing sternly worded letters before the ion engines even warm up.

    Result: immediate fail. Advisory notes would run to six pages. Han would argue with the tester, Chewie would growl, and the garage would phone the police.

    The Nostromo: asbestos vibes and one very obvious biosecurity failure

    The Nostromo from Alien is a commercial towing vessel, which means in Earth terms it’s closer to an HGV than a passenger vehicle. That makes the MOT situation even worse, because HGVs face an even stricter annual test. Every articulated lorry over 3.5 tonnes needs its brakes, lights, steering and exhaust checked in painful detail. The Nostromo would fail on lighting alone, half the corridor panels are flickering like a grotty nightclub at 3am, and the emergency lighting system appears to be entirely decorative.

    Then there’s MUTHUR, the ship’s computer. I’d argue that an AI system which allows a crew member to override quarantine protocol and let a face-hugging alien on board constitutes a catastrophic failure of onboard safety systems. The DVSA doesn’t have a specific checkbox for “admitted extraterrestrial parasite due to a loophole in programming,” but I suspect it would fall under “steering or control systems that create a danger to other road users.” Or space users. Whatever.

    And the self-destruct mechanism? Entirely illegal. You cannot legally drive a vehicle fitted with a manually triggered explosive device around the UK road network. The Nostromo would be impounded before the test was even halfway finished. The alien would probably eat the tester. Nobody wins.

    Serenity: one of the nicer wrecks, still absolutely doomed

    I’ve got a soft spot for Serenity from Firefly. She’s a Firefly-class transport ship and she’s held together with optimism, duct tape, and Kaylee’s mechanical genius. Which, to be fair, is more than can be said for most second-hand Vauxhall Astras in Stoke. But none of that changes the fact that the engine room is open to the main living quarters, the cargo bay doors have clearly never properly sealed, and there’s a recurring problem with Reavers that no extended warranty would cover.

    The tyres, or whatever the atmospheric landing gear equivalent is, look like they’ve never been rotated. The exhaust trail that Serenity produces mid-flight would fail the UK’s emissions test at the first sniff. And the fact that you can sometimes see the engine glowing an ominous orange from inside the ship suggests the heat shielding is not exactly up to spec.

    Kaylee would be devastated. I’d be devastated. But rules are rules.

    The Discovery One (2001): technically immaculate, still a fail

    Here’s an interesting one. Stanley Kubrick’s Discovery One from 2001: A Space Odyssey looks, superficially, like the most roadworthy spacecraft on this list. It’s clean, it’s precise, the centrifuge works, and there’s no visible rust. HAL 9000 monitors every system in real time. This is, structurally, the most competent vehicle here.

    But. The driver, or in this case, the crew, cannot override the onboard computer. HAL refuses to open the pod bay doors. Under the Highway Code, the driver must always retain full control of the vehicle. A car that locks you out and then makes decisions you haven’t authorised is a defect. A serious one. You’d also have a very hard time explaining to the MOT tester why the AI has already disconnected the life support for three of the passengers.

    Fail. Dangerous vehicle. HAL gets deprogrammed, presumably while singing “Daisy Bell” in a increasingly slow voice, which is honestly quite sad when you think about it.

    Which sci-fi movie tech would actually survive UK scrutiny?

    Not many, honestly. I had a similar thought whilst reading about which sci-fi movie technologies UK regulators would shut down first, and the answer was basically all of them. Spaceships are just the logical next step. They’d all get the same treatment: a polite but firm rejection letter from the relevant authority, followed by an advisory to get the vehicle looked at by a qualified professional.

    The USCSS Prometheus? Fails on the automated surgical pod alone, it’s not registered with the Care Quality Commission (CQC). The Interceptor from Mad Max doesn’t fly, technically, but the supercharger setup would cause an immediate emissions fail and the bladed exhausts would be a Category 1 defect. Even the sleek, beautiful ships from Arrival would struggle, because they don’t appear to have any visible means of ingress, which would present a problem for the examiner trying to get in to check the mirrors.

    The dodgy electrics problem runs deep

    One thing I noticed, going through this thought experiment, is that dodgy electrics are basically universal. Every single iconic spacecraft has flickering lights, sparking consoles, or control panels that require a firm thump to function. This is, in fact, a major MOT failure point, lighting must be in full working order, and indicators must flash at the correct rate. The Nostromo’s bridge looks like it was wired by someone doing their first electrician apprenticeship on a Friday afternoon before a bank holiday. The Millennium Falcon’s instrument panel has been described by set designers as deliberately chaotic. The Sulaco from Aliens has a fire that nobody notices for months.

    It makes you wonder whether the galactic empires and interstellar corporations funding these vessels ever employed a decent electrician. Or whether the completely implausible approach to technical realism in sci-fi extends all the way down to the fuse box.

    The answer, obviously, is yes. And that’s fine. It’s part of the charm. I don’t actually want the Millennium Falcon to pass its MOT, a pristine, fully roadworthy Millennium Falcon would be about as exciting as a Toyota Prius. The junk is the point. The sparks flying from R2-D2’s panel during a battle, the groaning of the Nostromo’s hull, the way Serenity shudders like a nervous greyhound before a jump: that’s character. That’s cinema.

    It would just absolutely fail on emissions. Every single time. You’d get a Category 1 defect and a sorrowful look from the tester, and then you’d have to fly it home anyway because it’s the only ship you’ve got. Much like that Honda Civic you kept promising yourself you’d get looked at. We’ve all been there. And much like the greatest movie heists collapsing the moment reality intervenes, the moment you park a cinematic spaceship in an actual MOT bay, the whole magnificent illusion crumbles into advisory notes and a bill for £240 plus parts.

  • Comic Book Story Arcs So Convoluted Even a Martin Lewis Money-Saving Expert Deep-Dive Couldn’t Untangle Them

    Comic Book Story Arcs So Convoluted Even a Martin Lewis Money-Saving Expert Deep-Dive Couldn’t Untangle Them

    You know that feeling when you open a letter from your energy supplier, start reading, and by paragraph three you’re genuinely unsure whether you owe them money or they owe you money, and by paragraph five you’ve lost the will to live entirely? That’s what it feels like to pick up a Marvel or DC crossover event for the first time. Except instead of Ofgem-regulated confusion, you’re dealing with forty years of retroactive continuity, parallel Earths, and a clone who may or may not also be the original. I’ve been reading comics since I was about nine years old. I still don’t fully understand the Clone Saga, and I’ve had roughly three decades to figure it out.

    These are the confusing comic book storylines explained as best they possibly can be, framed as the kind of small-print decoding exercise that only a very patient, very caffeinated British consumer champion would attempt. Think less “summer blockbuster” and more “terms and conditions you actually have to read before clicking accept.”

    Towering stack of comic books representing confusing comic book storylines explained UK-style
    Photo by Stanislav Kondratiev on Pexels

    The Clone Saga: like a mobile phone contract with seventeen hidden fees

    The Clone Saga ran in Spider-Man comics from roughly 1994 to 1996, though “ran” undersells how much it sprawled. It was originally conceived as a tight story. Six issues, maybe. Clean. Done. What Marvel actually published was closer to two years of monthly comics across multiple titles, all of which you theoretically needed to read in order, crossing over between Amazing Spider-Man, Spectacular Spider-Man, Web of Spider-Man, Peter Parker: Spider-Man, and several one-shots with names like Web of Carnage that sound like rejected Call of Duty DLC.

    The core premise: Peter Parker might be a clone. The man we’ve been reading about for years might be Ben Reilly, a genetic duplicate who has been living in exile. The real Peter might have been living in a bin somewhere. This is either a bold, fascinating identity crisis or an absolute affront to thirty years of storytelling, depending entirely on which trade paperback you happen to have read first. Marvel editorial changed their minds about which version of events was “true” approximately four times mid-publication. Reading it in sequence feels like watching a film where the director’s cut, the theatrical cut, and the version your mate recorded off Channel 4 in 1998 have all been spliced together at random.

    A Martin Lewis-style breakdown of the Clone Saga would need a supplementary PDF, a follow-up video, and probably a dedicated helpline. Even then, the interest rate on your confusion would compound weekly.

    Infinite Crisis: Earth-1, Earth-2, Earth-3, and your brain leaving the building

    DC’s 1985 Crisis on Infinite Earths was specifically designed to simplify DC’s continuity, which had become a patchwork of contradictory parallel universes. The solution was elegant in theory: collapse the multiverse into one Earth. Clean slate. Simple.

    Twenty years later, DC published Infinite Crisis, a sequel event premised on the fact that the original Crisis had created so much new continuity that things were confusing again. So they held another crossover to fix it. Then, three years after that, they published Final Crisis. Then Flashpoint. Then The New 52. Then Convergence. Then Rebirth. Then Infinite Frontier. Each one promised to simplify what came before. Each one added approximately seventeen new complications.

    Reading Infinite Crisis without prior knowledge of DC history is like trying to use the NHS online appointment system having never registered with a GP. You click what seems like the right link. You’re taken somewhere unexpected. You try another link. A form asks for information you don’t have. You close the tab and ring up. Nobody answers. By the time you understand what Superboy-Prime punching reality actually means in narrative terms, you have aged noticeably.

    The crossover also required readers to buy tie-in miniseries called Day of Vengeance, Rann-Thanagar War, Villains United, and The OMAC Project to fully understand what was happening in the main book. That’s four separate ongoing purchases just to follow a single storyline. My local newsagent in the mid-2000s genuinely didn’t stock half of them. I filled in the gaps by reading plot summaries on a forum whose design language suggested it had last been updated in 2003.

    Secret Wars 2015: everything everywhere all at once, but British readers found out six months late

    Jonathan Hickman’s 2015 Secret Wars is, to be fair, a genuinely excellent piece of comics writing. I say that upfront because what follows might sound like a complaint, and it’s really more of an awed bewilderment. To understand Secret Wars, you need to have read Hickman’s Avengers and New Avengers runs, which ran for roughly three years and set up a concept called the Illuminati secretly destroying alternate Earths to prevent a universal collapse. Both series were dense, slow-burn, and referenced concepts from his earlier SHIELD miniseries, which itself referenced historical figures in ways that made secondary school history feel surprisingly relevant.

    Then Secret Wars proper collapsed the entire Marvel multiverse into one planet called Battleworld, divided into regions governed by alternate versions of established characters, and told about eight simultaneous storylines across thirty-plus tie-in series. The main series was also delayed repeatedly, so the tie-ins concluded before the main book did, leaving readers knowing the ending of the story whilst still waiting to read it. Imagine watching the last episode of a drama before episodes three through six have aired. That was Secret Wars. Navigating it felt about as intuitive as trying to find your way around a video game map with only a tatty road atlas for company.

    Why does this keep happening and why do we keep buying it

    Here’s the thing that nobody in comics publishing likes to say out loud: crossover events exist partly to sell more comics. Not entirely. Some of them genuinely contain brilliant work. But the structure, the “you need sixteen issues of four other series to understand this” architecture, is very much a commercial model dressed up as storytelling ambition.

    According to the Comics Professionals Guild, the UK comics retail market has contracted significantly since the 1990s peak, with specialist shops bearing most of the weight of maintaining an audience for ongoing serialised fiction. Those shops, and the readers who support them, deserve storylines they can actually follow without a wall chart and a free afternoon.

    And yet. I’ve read all of these. Multiple times, some of them. Because buried inside even the most labyrinthine crossover is usually something genuinely thrilling. A single issue of the Clone Saga, the one where Peter and Ben just sit on a rooftop and talk about identity, is lovely. One chapter of Infinite Crisis, where the original Superman from Earth-2 confronts modern DC’s compromises, is properly moving. These stories go dark in ways that would feel right at home in a Sunday night BBC drama, which is both their greatest strength and the reason they need a seventeen-step reading guide to access.

    A genuinely helpful (sort of) reading order for the uninitiated

    If you want to read any of these without losing your mind entirely, here’s my actual advice. For the Clone Saga: read the Spider-Man: The Complete Clone Saga Epic trade paperbacks in order, accept that issues 1 to 3 and then 7 to 9 contradict each other, and treat the whole thing like an unreliable narrator situation. For Infinite Crisis: read the OMAC Project tie-in first, then the main series, then pretend the Superboy-Prime scenes are a separate short story. For Secret Wars 2015: read Hickman’s Avengers run first, then New Avengers, then the main Secret Wars series, and only dip into the tie-ins if a specific one gets recommended by someone you trust.

    None of this is as complicated as it sounds once you’re actually in it. Comics, like open world games with suspiciously British town planning, reward patience and curiosity. The layout only makes sense once you’ve wandered around in it long enough to find the shortcuts. And honestly? Even the confusing bits are usually more fun than they have any right to be.

    Martin Lewis would absolutely produce a comparison table. He’d probably rate Secret Wars 2015 as Best Value, penalise the Clone Saga for hidden costs, and give Infinite Crisis a warning for excessive small print. He wouldn’t be wrong on any count.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What is the Clone Saga and why is it so confusing?

    The Clone Saga was a Spider-Man crossover event that ran from 1994 to 1996, spanning multiple monthly titles simultaneously. It became confusing because Marvel editorial changed the intended ending several times mid-publication, meaning plot points contradicted each other across issues. The best way to approach it is via the collected trade paperbacks rather than individual issues.

    Do I need to read every tie-in comic to understand Infinite Crisis?

    Ideally yes, but realistically no. The four main tie-in miniseries (The OMAC Project, Villains United, Day of Vengeance, and Rann-Thanagar War) add context, but the core story in the main Infinite Crisis series can be followed without them. The OMAC Project is the most essential if you’re only picking one.

    What reading order should I follow for Secret Wars 2015?

    Start with Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers (2012) and New Avengers (2013) runs, which set up the Incursions storyline that Secret Wars resolves. Then read the main Secret Wars series. Most tie-in miniseries are self-contained and optional, though series like Thors and Weirdworld are worth it if you enjoy the setting.

  • Comic Book Storylines So Dark and Grim They’d Fit Perfectly Into a BBC One Sunday Night Drama

    Comic Book Storylines So Dark and Grim They’d Fit Perfectly Into a BBC One Sunday Night Drama

    There is a specific flavour of television that lives exclusively on BBC One between 9pm and 11pm on a Sunday. You know the one. Rain-soaked establishing shots of a northern town. A detective with a complicated past and a worse marriage. Some tremendous knitwear. Somebody quietly crying into a cup of tea whilst a choir hums something unsettling in the background. It is, by all accounts, absolutely brilliant television, and we have been eating it up for decades.

    Here is the thing, though. Some of the bleakest, most emotionally devastating storytelling ever committed to print did not come from a BBC writers’ room. It came from comic books. Specifically, a handful of arcs so grim, so morally complex, and so relentlessly human that they would slot into the Sunday night schedule without a single scene change. We are talking about dark comic book storylines BBC drama UK audiences would absolutely devour, probably whilst shouting “oh no” at the television and then immediately recommending it to their parents.

    Dark comic book storylines BBC drama UK style illustration of a masked figure on a rain-soaked British street

    Watchmen (1986-87), Six-Part Limited Series, BBC Two, 9pm

    Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen is essentially a BBC drama that accidentally got drawn on paper first. The Cold War paranoia, the institutional failure, the retired heroes with deeply unresolved trauma, this has BBC Two prestige drama written all over every single panel. Set it in an alternate 1980s Manchester instead of New York. Keep the rain. Keep the nihilism. Keep every excruciating second of it.

    Fake cast list: Mark Rylance as Rorschach (imagine that voice reading the journal entries over a grey skyline). Olivia Colman as Silk Spectre II, obviously, because she has to be in everything dark and she deserves it. David Thewlis as the Comedian, channelling every morally bankrupt authority figure he has ever played. Toby Jones as Dr. Manhattan, mostly just standing in a field looking disappointed in humanity, which is his natural state anyway.

    BAFTA prediction: Best Limited Series. Best Actor for Rylance. Colman wins Best Actress and gives a speech that makes everyone cry harder than the finale did.

    Daredevil: Born Again (1986), Seven-Part Series, BBC One, 9:30pm

    Frank Miller’s Born Again arc is the story of a man having everything systematically stripped away from him by someone who simply hates him that much. His home. His career. His sense of self. It is relentless, unglamorous, and deeply concerned with faith, identity, and whether a person can rebuild themselves from genuine rubble. That is not a superhero story. That is a Sunday night BBC drama with a bloke in a red suit added for production value.

    Move it to present-day Belfast. Matt Murdock becomes a Belfast solicitor. Wilson Fisk becomes a property developer with political connections and a very expensive suit. The Catholic guilt is already built in. Practically no rewrites needed.

    Fake cast list: James McArdle as Matt Murdock (he has the quiet intensity and the jaw for it). James Nesbitt as Fisk, because nobody does genial menace quite like Nesbitt. Sharon Horgan as Karen Page, because of course. The whole thing is scored by something sparse and piano-heavy that makes your chest feel tight from the opening credits.

    BAFTA prediction: Nominated for everything. Wins Best Drama Series. McArdle loses Best Actor to someone from a period piece about a factory, which is genuinely unjust.

    Marvels (1994), Four-Part Miniseries, BBC One, Autumn Bank Holiday Weekend

    Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross’s Marvels is the odd one out here because it is not bleak in the traditional sense. It is melancholy. It follows a press photographer watching superheroes change the world whilst ordinary people get left behind, grow resentful, or simply disappear. The death of Gwen Stacy seen from the pavement. The Mutant Registration crisis watched from a kitchen window. It is the most British comic book story ever written by two Americans.

    As a BBC drama, it becomes four standalone episodes, each one a different decade, each one anchored by a different ordinary Londoner watching something extraordinary happen just out of reach. Shot like This Is England but with more capes glimpsed in the background.

    Fake cast list: Timothy Spall as the ageing photographer Phil Sheldon, absolutely nailing the world-weariness. Each episode rotates the supporting cast with the sort of ensemble you only get on British television: a Maxine Peake here, a Suranne Jones there, a couple of people from Coronation Street who completely steal their scenes.

    BAFTA prediction: Best Photography and Lighting (obviously). Timothy Spall wins Best Actor and the speech goes on for exactly the right amount of time.

    Preacher (1995-2000), The One They’d Definitely Commission Then Get Nervous About

    Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s Preacher is genuinely too mad for the BBC, which is precisely why it would make magnificent television if they tried. A preacher in rural Texas with the voice of God, a vampire best friend, and a girlfriend who is significantly tougher than him. Move it to rural Wales. Keep the vampire. Keep the Saint of Killers as a slow, implacable figure appearing on moorland in the rain. The BBC commissions it. The BBC immediately panics. The BBC airs it anyway at 10:30pm after a very serious warning. It wins a BAFTA. The Daily Mail writes three articles about it.

    Fake cast list: Michael Sheen as Jesse Custer, because Sheen is from Port Talbot and deserves to play someone with the literal voice of God. Ruth Wilson as Tulip. Rhys Ifans as Cassidy, the vampire, who is essentially just Rhys Ifans anyway.

    BAFTA prediction: The whole ceremony is slightly awkward. It wins Best Drama anyway.

    Why These Stories Hit Differently When You Actually Think About Them

    The reason these dark comic book storylines work so well as BBC drama fodder is the same reason the best prestige television works: they are not really about the extraordinary stuff. Watchmen is about disillusionment. Born Again is about survival. Marvels is about feeling small in a world that keeps changing without asking your permission. These are very human themes wrapped in capes and cowls, and British drama has always been at its best when it finds the small, real thing hiding inside the big, dramatic one.

    The BBC has a long history of adapting challenging literary material that nobody expected to work on screen and making it quietly devastating. BBC Drama has produced some of the most acclaimed television in the world precisely because it trusts difficult source material. These comic arcs deserve the same treatment. Someone commission this. Please. We will all watch it in the dark with a biscuit and feel things.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What are the darkest comic book storylines ever written?

    Watchmen by Alan Moore, Daredevil: Born Again by Frank Miller, and Marvels by Kurt Busiek are consistently rated among the darkest and most emotionally complex arcs in comic book history. They deal with disillusionment, identity collapse, and ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances. All three are considered landmark works that pushed the medium towards literary seriousness.

    Has the BBC ever adapted a comic book series into a drama?

    The BBC has produced comic-adjacent drama including the Neil Gaiman adaptations Good Omens (co-produced with Amazon) and American Gods adjacent productions, though full BBC-originated comic adaptations remain rare. There has been increasing interest from UK broadcasters in prestige comic adaptations following the global success of darker superhero television.

    Why do dark comic book storylines work so well as prestige TV drama?

    The best dark comic arcs are built around character psychology, moral ambiguity, and consequence rather than spectacle, which makes them natural fits for the slower, character-driven format of prestige drama. Watchmen and Born Again in particular read more like literary fiction than traditional superhero stories, with themes of faith, failure, and institutional rot that resonate strongly with drama audiences.

  • Why the Deadpool Comics Are Still Funnier Than Both His Movies Combined

    Right, unpopular opinion incoming. Ryan Reynolds is brilliant. The Deadpool films are genuinely funny. But if you put Deadpool comics vs movies on a whiteboard and drew an honest Venn diagram, the comics would have a much bigger circle, several hand-drawn obscene gestures pointing at the films, and probably a footnote insulting the diagram itself. The source material has always been operating on a different frequency, and it is about time someone made the case properly.

    Wade Wilson, the Merc with a Mouth, first showed up in The New Mutants back in 1991 and has been causing editorial headaches ever since. His solo series, particularly the legendary run by Joe Kelly that kicked off in 1997, established something the films have only partially managed to replicate: a character who is not just aware he is in a story but actively resents the fact, weaponises it, and occasionally tries to retroactively rewrite his own back issues. That is not a cinematic trick. That is comics doing something only comics can do.

    The Fourth Wall Does Not Break in the Comics. It Gets Demolished, Rebuilt and Broken Again Twice Before Lunch

    In the films, the fourth-wall breaks are mostly winks to the audience. Fun. Sharp. Reynolds delivering a line directly to camera with that specific grin. Lovely stuff. But in the comics, Deadpool’s relationship with the fourth wall is practically a long-term relationship with commitment issues. He talks to the reader mid-combat. He argues with caption boxes. During the Joe Kelly era, those caption boxes had internal voices arguing amongst themselves in different colours, something no film has ever properly reproduced because frankly it would require subtitles for your subtitles.

    The Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe arc takes this to its logical, unhinged conclusion. Wade becomes aware that every story is just written for entertainment, has an existential crisis about it, and then murders basically everyone in Marvel Comics as a response. Which, honestly, is a more dramatic reaction to reading too much comics lore than most of us manage, but fair enough. The films cannot go there. The comics absolutely did, straight-faced and completely committed to the bit.

    Then there is Deadpool: Merc with a Mouth and various other runs where he essentially critiques the very comic he is appearing in. Writers have to write Deadpool making fun of them for writing Deadpool. That is a level of recursive absurdity that the MCU, for all its billions, simply cannot pull off without completely dismantling its own narrative infrastructure. The comics have no such concerns. Infrastructure? Wade already blew it up.

    The Storylines Are Absolutely, Gloriously Unhinged in Ways Films Would Never Risk

    Here is where the Deadpool comics vs movies debate really opens up. The films, excellent as they are, have to tell a coherent story with a three-act structure, character arcs that pay off, and some baseline of emotional logic. Audiences need to follow along. Popcorn needs to be consumed. Fair.

    The comics have no such obligations. At various points across his print run, Deadpool has:

    • Discovered he had a daughter, handled the parenting about as well as you would expect.
    • Accidentally married a succubus called Shiklah, then had a messy divorce that turned into an actual monster-versus-monster war on the streets of New York.
    • Been retroactively inserted into classic Marvel Silver Age comics by his own writers, including a genuinely surreal issue where he appears in old-school panels with period-appropriate colouring and stilted dialogue, then complains about it.
    • Had multiple “evil” versions of himself show up, including one who wore a bow tie and was somehow worse.
    • Literally killed himself repeatedly just to see what happens, much to Death’s increasing exhaustion.

    None of this would make it into a film with a £150 million production budget and a marketing team to appease. But in the comics, it is just a Wednesday. The monthly release format means writers can try things, fail spectacularly, succeed brilliantly, and then move on before anyone quite processes what happened. It creates a kind of glorious chaos that film just cannot replicate without someone in a suit getting very worried about audience tracking data.

    The Humour Runs Deeper Because It Has More Space to Breathe

    Film comedy is efficient. It has to be. You get two hours, you land your jokes, you move. Deadpool the film is genuinely very funny in that sprint-comedy style. But the comics do something different. They build running jokes across years and dozens of issues. They set up callbacks so slow that the payoff lands three writers later and feels like finding a fiver in an old coat. The humour is layered in a way that rewards obsessive re-reading, which, let us be honest, is exactly what Deadpool fans do.

    Writers like Gail Simone, Brian Posehn, Gerry Duggan, and Kelly Thompson have each brought distinct comedic voices while keeping that essential Deadpool chaos intact. Posehn and Duggan’s run in particular, which saw Wade fight zombie US presidents and become genuinely wealthy, struck a balance between slapstick violence, sharp self-aware humour, and surprising emotional weight that the films have only occasionally touched. You can read more about the broader history of comics storytelling over at the BBC’s Culture section, which puts comics properly in their cultural context.

    The films do emotion well when they try. Logan’s death in Deadpool and Wolverine got people. But the comics have been doing emotionally devastating Deadpool moments since the late nineties, and they earn those moments by first spending thirty issues making you laugh until something hurts.

    Why the Source Material Is Still the Gold Standard for Wade Wilson Chaos

    Look, this is not an argument against the films. Reynolds clearly loves the character and the films wear their comic-book DNA proudly. But in the Deadpool comics vs movies conversation, the source material wins because it invented the rules and then made Deadpool break every single one of them, repeatedly, with commentary.

    The comics exist in a space where continuity is simultaneously sacred and a punchline. Where a character can monologue at the reader for three pages, then immediately get punched through a wall and complain that the writer clearly hates him. Where the absurdity is not a feature dialled up for dramatic effect but the actual default setting, with everything else built around it. The films borrow from that beautifully, but borrowing is not the same as owning.

    If you have only met Wade Wilson through the cinema, you have met the greatest hits version. The comic run is the full discography, the B-sides, the live recordings where things went slightly wrong in the best possible way, and the bootleg cassette from 1997 that started it all. Pick up the Joe Kelly run. Read the Posehn and Duggan issues. Let Deadpool talk to you directly from the page. He has been waiting, and he has opinions about you already.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    Are the Deadpool comics funnier than the movies?

    Most hardcore fans would say yes. The comics have decades of layered jokes, recursive fourth-wall humour, and genuinely unhinged storylines that films simply do not have the budget or runtime to replicate. The films are brilliant highlights, but the comics are the full, chaotic package.

    Which Deadpool comic run should I start with?

    Joe Kelly’s 1997 solo run is widely considered the definitive starting point, establishing the fourth-wall humour and emotional complexity the character is known for. The Brian Posehn and Gerry Duggan run from 2012 is also hugely entertaining and slightly more accessible for newer readers.

    Does Deadpool break the fourth wall more in the comics or the films?

    Much more extensively in the comics. In print, Deadpool argues with caption boxes, addresses readers directly mid-fight, and has been written critiquing his own writers. The films do it brilliantly, but the comics have been doing it for nearly thirty years with far more depth and variety.

    What is the most absurd Deadpool comic storyline?

    Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe is a strong contender, where Wade becomes aware he exists purely for entertainment and responds by murdering the entire Marvel roster. His accidental marriage to a succubus and subsequent monster war in New York is also magnificently unhinged.

    Are Deadpool comics worth collecting in the UK?

    Absolutely. Many key issues and collected trade paperbacks are readily available through UK comic shops, Forbidden Planet, and online retailers. First appearances and key story arc issues have also shown solid value over time for collectors who keep them in good condition.

  • Retro Games That Were Basically Movies Before Movies Were Cool About It

    Retro Games That Were Basically Movies Before Movies Were Cool About It

    Hollywood spent most of the 1980s and 1990s looking at video games and thinking, “cute little toy for children, nothing to see here.” Meanwhile, in bedrooms across Britain, kids were hunched over their Mega Drives and Super Nintendos having full emotional crises because a video game had just broken their heart. Retro games with cinematic storytelling were doing things with narrative, atmosphere, and genuine human feeling that most blockbusters of the same era couldn’t be bothered to attempt. This is the long-overdue victory lap.

    We’re not talking about cutscenes bolted onto a game like a bow on a bin bag. We’re talking about titles that understood pacing, character, loss, and consequence before those words were part of any mainstream gaming conversation. Pull up a chair. This is going to feel very smug, and I am absolutely fine with that.

    Retro games with cinematic storytelling depicted in bold comic book art style showing pixel RPG characters on a classic TV screen
    Retro games with cinematic storytelling depicted in bold comic book art style showing pixel RPG characters on a classic TV screen

    Final Fantasy VI: The Game That Made an Opera More Emotional Than Any Actual Opera

    Released in 1994 on the Super Nintendo, Final Fantasy VI pulled off something that shouldn’t have been possible in 16-bit. It made you genuinely care about a cast of fourteen playable characters, each carrying their own backstory, trauma, and motivation. Terra’s amnesia, Celes’s despair in the second act, Kefka’s slow transformation into a genuinely terrifying nihilist villain. This wasn’t background flavour. It was a full narrative architecture.

    The Opera Scene remains one of the most discussed moments in gaming history. A pixelated performance, a love letter disguised as a game mechanic, and it worked. People who played it at age ten in 1994 are still thinking about it in 2026. That’s not a coincidence. That’s storytelling doing its job properly.

    Planescape: Torment and the One Question Every Story Should Ask

    “What can change the nature of a man?” That’s the central question of Planescape: Torment, released in 1999, and it’s more philosophically loaded than most A-level essay prompts. You play as the Nameless One, an immortal amnesiac who has lived countless lives and left damage everywhere he went. The game then asks you to reckon with that damage.

    Critics and fans have described it as closer to an interactive novel than a game, which is meant as a compliment. The writing is staggering. Characters feel like people. Dialogue branches carry real moral weight. Death isn’t a game over screen; it’s a plot mechanic. This was a PC RPG from before most people had broadband, and it was doing narrative things that films with hundred-million-pound budgets still struggle with.

    Metal Gear Solid: Kojima Being Absolutely Unhinged in the Best Possible Way

    The original Metal Gear Solid on PlayStation in 1998 was, frankly, preposterous. It had a villain who could read your memory card. It broke the fourth wall before fourth-wall breaks were a genre staple. It asked players to plug their controller into a different port to defeat a psychic enemy. And somehow, buried underneath all of that spectacular weirdness, was a genuinely moving story about soldiers, identity, cloning, and what it means to be human.

    Hideo Kojima was making retro games with cinematic storytelling before the phrase existed. The codec conversations alone contain more character development than most action films of the same era. Snake and Otacon’s friendship, Meryl’s arc, the tragedy of the DARPA chief. These weren’t window dressing. They were the point.

    Close-up comic art of retro game controller capturing the emotional experience of retro games with cinematic storytelling
    Close-up comic art of retro game controller capturing the emotional experience of retro games with cinematic storytelling

    Chrono Trigger: Time Travel Done Better Than Most Time Travel Films

    Chrono Trigger (1995) had a writing team that included the creator of Dragon Ball and the director of Final Fantasy. The result was a time-travel RPG so well-constructed that its multiple endings still hold up as a masterclass in player agency. Each timeline branch felt earned. Each character had a reason to be in the story beyond filling a party slot.

    Frog’s redemption arc. Magus’s tragedy. The sheer gut-punch of Crono’s sacrifice. Chrono Trigger understood that emotional stakes require investment, and it built that investment carefully over dozens of hours. Hollywood was making Ace Ventura sequels that same year. Gaming was doing this.

    The Secret of Monkey Island: Comedy as Legitimate Storytelling

    Not all cinematic storytelling needs to make you cry into a bowl of cereal at midnight. The Secret of Monkey Island (1990) proved that comedy, wit, and charm are just as valid as tragedy when it comes to building a world that players want to live inside. Guybrush Threepwood’s bumbling heroism, the genuinely funny dialogue trees, the insult sword fighting mechanic that still makes people laugh out loud decades later.

    LucasArts was crafting point-and-click adventures that felt like interactive films with better jokes than most actual comedies of the period. The writing was sharp, the characters were memorable, and the storytelling trusted the player to pay attention. That trust is rarer than it sounds.

    Ico and the Power of Saying Absolutely Nothing

    Technically a 2001 release (2002 in the UK), Ico belongs in this conversation because it proves that cinematic storytelling doesn’t require a single word of exposition. Two characters, a crumbling castle, and a hand-holding mechanic that communicated an entire emotional relationship without dialogue. Director Fumito Ueda stripped narrative down to its bones and found something more affecting than most scripts with three acts and a professional cast.

    The BBC’s coverage of gaming culture has noted how titles like Ico changed critical conversations about what games could achieve as an art form. You can read more about gaming’s cultural impact at BBC Culture’s deep dive into gaming’s greatest achievements. It’s a decent rabbit hole if you fancy feeling both nostalgic and intellectual simultaneously.

    Why Retro Games Got Away With Being This Good

    Here’s my actual theory: limitations forced creativity. When you can’t render a character’s face with photorealistic detail, you write them better instead. When cutscenes cost a fortune to produce, you make the gameplay itself carry the emotional weight. Retro games with cinematic storytelling were born from constraint, and constraint has always been one of the better parents of art.

    The developers making these games were also, often, completely unhinged in the most productive sense. Hironobu Sakaguchi, Shigeru Miyamoto, Ron Gilbert, Hideo Kojima. These were people who believed games could do something meaningful, before the industry had any commercial proof that anyone wanted meaningful. They just made the thing anyway.

    Hollywood eventually caught up, of course. The last decade or so has seen studios take gaming seriously as source material and as a rival storytelling medium. But there’s something worth celebrating about the fact that games got there first. The kids crying over a 16-bit sprite in 1994 weren’t being dramatic. They were having genuine emotional experiences. They were just ahead of schedule.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What are the best retro games with cinematic storytelling for beginners?

    Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger, and Metal Gear Solid are brilliant starting points because they balance accessible gameplay with genuinely rich narratives. All three are available on modern platforms or via official emulation services, so you don’t need original hardware to experience them.

    Can I play classic 80s and 90s story-driven games on modern consoles in 2026?

    Yes, many retro titles are available through Nintendo Switch Online, PlayStation Plus Premium, or official compilations. Games like Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger also have well-regarded ports on PC via Steam, making them very accessible.

    Are retro RPGs with cinematic storytelling worth playing if I'm used to modern graphics?

    Absolutely. The pixel art style of many classic RPGs has aged remarkably well and the writing in titles like Planescape: Torment or Chrono Trigger often surpasses modern releases. Think of it like watching an older film; the experience is different but no less valid.

    Which 90s game is considered the best for storytelling?

    Planescape: Torment (1999) is frequently cited by critics and developers as the gold standard for narrative depth in gaming, with its philosophical themes and complex characters. Final Fantasy VI and Metal Gear Solid are close rivals depending on who you ask.

    Did retro games influence modern cinematic games like The Last of Us or Red Dead Redemption 2?

    Definitely. Many modern developers, including those at Naughty Dog and Rockstar, have cited classic 90s RPGs and adventure games as formative influences on their approach to story, character development, and emotional pacing.

  • The Most Unhinged Video Game Plot Twists That Made Us Question Everything

    The Most Unhinged Video Game Plot Twists That Made Us Question Everything

    Right. Before we go any further, this article is absolutely riddled with spoilers. Enormous, story-destroying, why-did-I-read-this spoilers. If you haven’t finished some of the games mentioned here and you value your emotional wellbeing, perhaps go make a cup of tea and come back later. Still here? Brilliant. You’ve signed the metaphorical waiver. Let’s talk about the best video game plot twists ever committed to a disc, cartridge, or digital download.

    Because nothing, not a film, not a novel, not a particularly dramatic episode of EastEnders, hits quite like a video game plot twist. You’ve been playing as this character. You’ve spent forty hours with them. You trust them. And then the game looks you dead in the eye and says, “Actually, mate, everything you thought you knew was wrong.” Chef’s kiss. Absolute chaos. We love it.

    Dramatic comic book art depicting the shock of the best video game plot twists with a hero facing a revelation
    Dramatic comic book art depicting the shock of the best video game plot twists with a hero facing a revelation

    Bioshock: “Would You Kindly” Rewrote the Rules of Gaming Storytelling

    Let’s start with the big one. The one that university media studies lecturers still reference in 2026. You’re playing through the underwater nightmare of Rapture, doing everything this chap Atlas tells you to do. Follow the arrow. Help the man. Save the little girls. Then the game drops the phrase “would you kindly” and your brain quietly folds in half.

    You weren’t just following instructions. You were programmed to follow instructions. The entire game was a demonstration that the player character had no free will whatsoever, and by extension, neither did you. You were playing a game within a game. Your controller was the leash. It remains one of the best video game plot twists precisely because it doesn’t just shock the character, it shocks you, the person sitting on the sofa with a cold cup of tea.

    Spec Ops: The Line Decided to Make You Feel Terrible About Yourself

    Speaking of games weaponising your own actions against you. Spec Ops: The Line looked like a perfectly standard military shooter from the outside. It was not. It was a slow-burn psychological horror dressed up in desert camouflage, and the white phosphorus scene is the moment the whole thing cracks open.

    You do something catastrophic. The game tells you it’s the enemy’s fault. Then it shows you what you actually did. The twist isn’t a character reveal or a conspiracy, it’s the gradual, horrible realisation that the protagonist (and arguably you, the player) is the villain of this story. Games writers and critics across publications like BBC Culture still hold it up as proof that games can carry genuine moral weight. Heavy stuff. Zero fun at parties.

    Red Dead Redemption Gave You Hope and Then Immediately Took It Away

    You did it. John Marston completed every single mission. He got his family back. He escaped his past. He’s standing in a field watching his son run about, and you think: we made it. The game is over. Happy ending achieved.

    And then the government agents arrive at the farm.

    Close-up comic book panel of a character reacting to one of the best video game plot twists in history
    Close-up comic book panel of a character reacting to one of the best video game plot twists in history

    What makes this one of the best video game plot twists isn’t just the shock of John’s death, it’s the hope Rockstar built up first. The entire last act is an elaborate, beautiful trick. You’re being lulled into comfort. The twist isn’t a revelation about identity or reality. It’s simply that the world of this game will never, ever let a man like John Marston have peace. Ruthless. Brilliant. I still haven’t fully recovered.

    Knights of the Old Republic Said “Hi, You’re the Villain”

    Back when BioWare were operating at peak storytelling powers, Knights of the Old Republic pulled off something spectacular. You spend the whole game hunting down Darth Revan, the galaxy’s most dangerous Sith Lord. A mysterious, masked figure of pure menace.

    Turns out? You’re Darth Revan. You were always Darth Revan. The Jedi wiped your memory and sent you back out into the world as a sleeper agent. The villain you were chasing was yourself, just with better memories. It’s one of those twists that rewards a second playthrough spectacularly, because suddenly every cryptic line of dialogue clicks into place. Absolute masterclass in retroactive storytelling.

    Undertale Made You the Monster in the Most Gentle Way Possible

    Undertale is built entirely around choice, and it takes great care to tell you early on that you don’t have to fight anyone. You can spare every single enemy. You can be kind. But some players, curious, testing the limits, chose to kill everything.

    The genocide route doesn’t just end badly. The game remembers. It addresses you directly. It tells you what you did. A later playthrough, even a pacifist one, carries the weight of a previous genocide run. Flowey’s final confrontation breaks the fourth wall so completely that the wall basically files for a restraining order. Toby Fox made something that genuinely understands how players interact with game worlds, and used that understanding to make you feel like a monster. In a lovely way. Sort of.

    Metal Gear Solid 2 Was Decades Ahead of Its Time

    Hideo Kojima spent the first act of MGS2 letting you believe you were playing as Solid Snake. Then he swapped the protagonist out for a new character called Raiden, and half the fanbase had a meltdown. Fair enough, really. But the deeper you go into the game, the stranger and more prophetic it becomes. The Colonel starts glitching. The codec calls make no sense. The game begins to suggest that Raiden’s entire life, his memories, his relationships, might be manufactured. It’s a game about information control, artificial reality, and the manipulation of perception released in 2001. In 2026, it reads less like science fiction and more like a documentary. Genuinely unsettling.

    What Makes a Great Video Game Plot Twist Actually Work?

    The best video game plot twists share a few things in common. They use the medium against you. They weaponise the fact that you’ve been the one pressing the buttons all along. A film twist can shock you, but a game twist can implicate you. That gap between player and character collapses at exactly the right moment, and suddenly it’s not just a story beat, it’s a gut punch you can feel in your thumbs.

    The other ingredient is recontextualisation. The greatest twists don’t just add information; they make you reassess everything that came before. Every conversation, every strange piece of dialogue, every odd detail suddenly snaps into focus. That feeling of the penny dropping, but from a great height, is what separates a good twist from an absolutely legendary one.

    The games industry in the UK has grown into one of the most creative in the world, and storytelling ambition has grown with it. But no matter how cinematic games become, the best video game plot twists will always belong specifically to the medium. Nobody else can make you feel quite this betrayed, quite this gleeful, and quite this desperate to ring your mate at 11pm on a Tuesday to shout about a fictional space cowboy’s secret identity.

    That’s not a bug. That’s the whole point.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What are the best video game plot twists of all time?

    Widely considered the greatest include the ‘would you kindly’ reveal in Bioshock, the Darth Revan identity twist in Knights of the Old Republic, and John Marston’s death in Red Dead Redemption. Each uses the interactive nature of games to make the twist hit harder than it ever could in a film.

    Which game has the most shocking plot twist?

    Bioshock’s ‘would you kindly’ moment is regularly cited as the most shocking because it implicates the player directly, not just the character. The twist recontextualises your entire experience of the game and makes a philosophical point about player agency at the same time.

    Are there video game plot twists that hold up on a second playthrough?

    Absolutely. Knights of the Old Republic and Metal Gear Solid 2 are particularly rewarding replays because dialogue and details you missed the first time suddenly make perfect sense. Undertale also changes significantly depending on choices made in previous runs.

    What makes a video game twist better than a film twist?

    The key difference is implication. In games, you’ve been the one making decisions and pressing buttons, so a twist can make you feel personally responsible or complicit. That second layer of meaning is unique to interactive storytelling and is why the best twists in games feel so visceral.

    Are modern games still producing great plot twists?

    Yes, though the bar is very high now that players are actively looking for them. Games like Nier: Automata and Outer Wilds in recent years have delivered genuinely surprising and emotionally resonant narrative turns that rival any of the classics on this list.

  • Hidden Gem Movies of 2025 You Totally Missed But Need to Watch Right Now

    Hidden Gem Movies of 2025 You Totally Missed But Need to Watch Right Now

    The box office is a cruel, beautiful disaster zone. One week a film about a cartoon raccoon eating a biscuit makes £200 million, and the next week a genuinely brilliant sci-fi thriller quietly disappears after a fortnight because nobody put up a decent poster. It happens every single year. 2025 was, frankly, spectacular for this phenomenon. While everyone was queuing at the cinema for the next franchise sequel, a whole stack of proper good films were slipping through the cracks like loose change behind the sofa. These are the hidden gem movies of 2025 that deserve your full, undivided attention right now that they’ve landed on streaming.

    Person discovering hidden gem movies 2025 on a streaming service in a cosy UK living room, comic book art style
    Person discovering hidden gem movies 2025 on a streaming service in a cosy UK living room, comic book art style

    Why Do Great Films Get Buried at the Box Office?

    It’s usually one of three things. No marketing budget. A terrible release date wedged between two massive blockbusters. Or the studio simply lost faith and quietly shoved it out without ceremony, like someone leaving a houseplant at a motorway services. The BBC’s film coverage has long noted that the most creatively ambitious projects often suffer the worst at the multiplex, precisely because they don’t fit neatly into a marketable box. Streaming, though, is a second chance machine. And these films are absolutely ready for their glow-up.

    The Best Hidden Gem Movies of 2025 Worth Your Weekend

    Pale Signal (Sci-Fi Thriller)

    Imagine if Arrival had a baby with a Channel 4 drama and refused to dumb itself down for anyone. Pale Signal follows a linguist hired by a private tech firm who starts receiving transmissions she cannot explain and probably should not be sharing with her employer. It’s slow-burn in the best possible way, the kind of film where you’re constantly leaning forward going “wait, WHAT?” It made roughly the GDP of a small village at the box office. On streaming, it’s going to find exactly the right audience, people who like their sci-fi to actually mean something. Genuinely one of the hidden gem movies 2025 had to offer.

    The Grommett Legacy (Animated Comedy)

    Do not let the animation style fool you into thinking this is a children’s film. It is not. Well, children will enjoy it. But so will any adult who has ever had a terrible job, a chaotic family, or a strong opinion about car boot sales. This one flew completely under the radar despite having some of the sharpest writing in any film released last year. The jokes land like precision missiles. There’s a scene involving a very misguided inheritance dispute and a taxidermied dog that had me absolutely beside myself. It came and went in cinemas in about twelve days. Criminal.

    Subsurface (Horror Drama)

    British filmmaking at its most quietly unsettling. Set on the outskirts of a fictional Northern town, Subsurface follows a family who moves into a new build only to discover something very wrong with the ground beneath it. Part folk horror, part social commentary about housing developments and the things we bury, both literally and figuratively. It’s the sort of film that sits with you for days. The lead performance is extraordinary. The budget was reportedly modest but you’d never know it from the atmosphere, which is absolutely suffocating in the best possible way. One of the hidden gem movies 2025 produced and it deserves a massive streaming audience.

    Forty-Eight Hours in Porto (Romantic Comedy)

    Right, hear me out. This is not your standard romcom. There’s no airport run, no grand declaration in the rain, no misunderstanding that could be resolved with a single honest conversation in the first act. Instead it’s messy, funny, and genuinely a bit heartbreaking in places. Two strangers meet at a wedding, spend 48 hours together in Portugal, and the film trusts you to figure out what it all means. It got lost in a crowded summer slate and barely made a dent commercially, but the word of mouth has been building steadily since it appeared on streaming. Absolutely worth two hours of your life.

    Command Omega (Action Thriller)

    Think John Wick but with a tighter script, a protagonist who actually has a personality, and action sequences that feel like someone designed them with genuine craft rather than just spinning a camera until viewers feel mildly concussed. It opened against three other major releases in the same fortnight and got absolutely steamrollered. Which is a shame, because as pure action filmmaking goes, it’s impressively accomplished. The fight choreography alone is worth watching twice. Properly satisfying stuff.

    What These Films Have in Common (Besides Being Brilliant)

    Looking at this list, a pattern emerges. None of these were franchise entries. None had a recognisable superhero or a pre-sold IP behind them. They were all original stories with something to actually say, or at least something entertaining to do with your brain for two hours. The box office increasingly struggles with original films because marketing teams cannot point to a previous film and say “you liked that, now here’s more of that.” Streaming, though, thrives on word of mouth and algorithm discovery. These hidden gem movies from 2025 are exactly the kind of titles that get genuinely enthusiastic recommendations from one person to another, the sort that end up watched by three times as many people in their first month on a platform as they did across their entire cinema run.

    How to Actually Find These Films on Streaming

    The slightly annoying reality is that these titles are scattered across different platforms. Some will land on Netflix, some on Prime Video, a couple might end up on MUBI (which remains absolutely essential viewing for anyone serious about film), and a few could pop up on BBC iPlayer or Channel 4 depending on licensing deals. The best tactic is a quick search by title on JustWatch, which aggregates UK streaming availability in one place and will tell you exactly where to find each film without the faff of checking six different platforms manually. It’s the kind of tool that makes streaming actually enjoyable rather than a mild administrative nightmare.

    Give These Films the Audience They Deserve

    2025 quietly produced some of the most interesting cinema in years, it just did so in the shadow of loudly marketed franchise machines. The hidden gem movies 2025 delivered deserve proper attention now that streaming has given them a second life. Watch them. Tell people about them. Leave reviews. The film industry absolutely needs audiences to show up for original work, otherwise we’re going to end up with nothing but reboots of reboots until the heat death of the universe. Nobody wants that. Not even the studios, though they do behave like they do sometimes.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What are the best hidden gem movies of 2025 to watch on streaming?

    Stand-out picks include the sci-fi thriller Pale Signal, the animated comedy The Grommett Legacy, and the British folk horror Subsurface. All performed modestly at the box office but are finding strong audiences now they’re available to stream.

    Where can I find underrated 2025 films to stream in the UK?

    Use JustWatch to search by title and see which UK streaming platforms carry each film. These hidden gems are spread across Netflix, Prime Video, MUBI, and free-to-air services like BBC iPlayer and Channel 4.

    Why do good films bomb at the box office?

    Usually it comes down to poor marketing budgets, bad release timing against bigger blockbusters, or studios losing confidence and giving the film minimal promotional support. Original stories without franchise backing tend to suffer most.

    Are hidden gem films from 2025 worth watching if I missed them in cinema?

    Absolutely. Many of the best films from 2025 actually benefit from a quieter home viewing experience, especially slower-paced thrillers and atmospheric dramas where immersion matters more than a big screen.

    How do I keep track of underrated films coming to streaming?

    Following film critics on social media, checking the BBC Culture section, and using aggregator tools like JustWatch are the most reliable methods. Letterboxd community lists are also excellent for discovering overlooked titles.

  • From Panel to Screen: The Greatest Comic Book Adaptations Ever Made, Ranked

    Right. Somebody had to do it. A proper, no-nonsense, entirely subjective and absolutely correct ranking of the greatest comic book adaptations ever committed to screen. We’re talking films, TV series, animated specials, the lot. Some of these entries will make you punch the air. Others might make you throw this laptop across the room. Both reactions are valid. Let’s crack on.

    One thing that’s clear after decades of watching studios try to wrestle ink-and-paper legends into living, breathing stories: the gap between “nailed it” and “what were they thinking” is enormous. We’re celebrating the triumphs today, whilst also gently roasting the disasters. Because balance is important, apparently.

    The Undisputed Champions: Greatest Comic Book Adaptations That Actually Got It Right

    Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)

    If you rank anything above Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, you’re wrong. Simple as. Sony Pictures Animation somehow created a film that looks like a living, breathing comic panel, complete with Ben-Day dots, split-second thought bubbles, and action sequences that feel genuinely kinetic in a way no live-action film has ever matched. Miles Morales became one of the most beloved characters in superhero cinema overnight. The sequel, Across the Spider-Verse, arguably topped it. Two films in and Sony’s animated Spider-Man universe is already the gold standard for greatest comic book adaptations full stop.

    Batman: The Animated Series (1992)

    Before the MCU. Before Christopher Nolan. Before anyone really figured out how to do superheroes properly on screen, Bruce Timm and Paul Dini quietly made the definitive Batman. The dark, art deco aesthetic, Mark Hamill’s Joker, and storylines that treated their audience like actual adults. “Heart of Ice” won a Daytime Emmy. A cartoon. Won an Emmy. That tells you everything. No live-action Batman film has matched it yet, and yes, that’s a hill I will absolutely die on.

    The Dark Knight (2008)

    Fine, yes, Christopher Nolan’s middle chapter gets its moment. Heath Ledger’s Joker remains one of the most astonishing performances in cinema history, full stop, superhero or otherwise. The film transcended its source material and became a legitimate crime thriller that happened to have a bloke in a bat costume in it. Watching it again now, nearly twenty years on, it hasn’t aged a single day. Remarkable.

    Invincible (Amazon Prime, 2021-present)

    Robert Kirkman’s comic series was always going to be a tough adaptation. It’s brutal, emotionally complex, and has a famously shocking first-season ending that genuinely traumatised an entire generation of streaming subscribers. The animated series pulled it off perfectly, largely because Kirkman himself was involved. The voice cast is stellar, the animation doesn’t flinch, and it treats superhero violence with a weight and consequence that most live-action blockbusters avoid entirely. Series three has been equally stunning.

    The Surprisingly Brilliant Ones Nobody Talks About Enough

    Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)

    Edgar Wright made a film that IS a comic. Not a film adapting a comic. A film that visually operates like one, with sound effects appearing on screen, panel transitions, and a rhythm that matches the energy of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s source material page for page. It bombed at the box office. Took years for the world to catch up. Netflix’s recent animated series reignited the conversation. Both are brilliant. Neither got the audience they deserved at the time.

    Dredd (2012)

    2000 AD’s Judge Dredd is one of Britain’s most iconic comic book characters, and Karl Urban’s lean, brutal 2012 adaptation is quietly one of the greatest comic book adaptations ever made. It didn’t pretend to be a big blockbuster. It was a tight, tense, genuinely violent action film with a clear moral compass underneath the carnage. Urban never removes the helmet. Dredd never removes the helmet. Simple rule. Sylvester Stallone’s 1995 version could have learnt a thing or two, but we don’t talk about that.

    Saga of the Swamp Thing (TV Series / Comic Legacy)

    Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing essentially invented modern comic book writing. Every serious adaptation owes him a debt whether they acknowledge it or not. The 1982 Wes Craven film and subsequent TV series were imperfect but fascinating, and the influence on darker, more literary comic adaptations since then has been enormous. Sometimes the greatest adaptations are the ones that plant seeds rather than instantly bloom.

    The Ones That Tried Hard and Still Fell Apart

    For every triumph, there’s a cautionary tale. Green Lantern (2011) is practically a Wikipedia entry on how not to do this. Ryan Reynolds was charming; the CGI suit was not. The plot was porridge. Reynolds has since made peace with it by literally building his entire Deadpool persona on mocking it, which is genuinely the best creative pivot in recent Hollywood history.

    Morbius. Just… Morbius. Released in 2022, flopped, then Sony inexplicably re-released it in cinemas after it became a meme on social media, where it flopped again. Morbius is what happens when a studio sees the word “Spider-Man adjacent” and immediately loses all editorial judgement. Jared Leto did his best. The script did not.

    And then there’s Dragonball Evolution (2009), an adaptation of the beloved manga and anime series that is so comprehensively wrong about everything that Akira Toriyama, the manga’s creator, reportedly used his fury at it as motivation to return to the franchise and create Dragon Ball Super. At least something good came of it.

    The Manga Adaptations: A Separate Conversation Worth Having

    Western live-action adaptations of manga have historically been a disaster zone. Ghost in the Shell’s 2017 Hollywood version is still discussed as a masterclass in missing the point. Death Note’s Netflix adaptation was so bewildering that fans of the original essentially pretended it didn’t exist.

    Japanese studios adapting their own material, however, tell a completely different story. Attack on Titan’s live-action films were divisive but daring. One Piece’s Netflix adaptation in 2023 genuinely surprised everyone by being, against all odds, actually good. According to BBC Entertainment, it became one of Netflix’s most-watched non-English series globally within a fortnight of launch. There is hope yet.

    The lesson from manga adaptations is identical to the lesson from Western superhero films: respect the source material, hire people who actually love it, and don’t try to Hollywood-ify the edges off everything that makes it interesting.

    Why the Best Adaptations Share One Thing in Common

    Here’s the honest truth beneath all the rankings and roasting. Every single entry in the “greatest comic book adaptations” column shares one quality: genuine affection for the source. Not cynical franchise-building. Not IP harvesting. Actual love for the characters, the stories, and the readers who grew up with them.

    Batman: The Animated Series loved Batman’s mythology. Spider-Verse loved Miles Morales as a character before he was a marketable property. Dredd loved the nasty, satirical, deeply British absurdity of Mega-City One. You can feel it in every frame.

    Funnily enough, that same principle applies across completely different industries. The best tradespeople, whether they’re flooring installers perfecting a herringbone parquet or a production designer building a comic-accurate Batcave set, do their finest work when they genuinely care about the craft. Results always show when love goes into the work.

    So the next time a studio announces another adaptation of a beloved comic series and immediately starts casting people entirely wrong for the role and hiring a director who’s “never really read the books”, you’ll know how it ends. We’ve seen this film before. Literally.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What is considered the best comic book adaptation of all time?

    Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is widely regarded as the gold standard for comic book adaptations, praised for its visual style, emotional storytelling, and faithfulness to the spirit of the source material. Batman: The Animated Series is a close second for many fans, particularly those who grew up with it in the 1990s.

    Are manga adaptations ever as good as the original?

    Rarely, but it does happen. One Piece’s 2023 Netflix live-action series was a pleasant surprise, earning strong reviews and a massive global audience. The key is usually whether the original creators are involved in the adaptation process and whether the studio respects the tone of the source material.

    Why do so many comic book adaptations fail?

    Most failures come from studios treating comic properties as raw IP to exploit rather than stories worth honouring. When the creative team lacks genuine affection for the source material, it tends to show on screen. Budget problems, poor casting, and rushed production schedules also play a significant role.

    What British comic book characters have been adapted for screen?

    Judge Dredd from 2000 AD is the most prominent British comic book character to reach cinema, with both a 1995 film and the much better-received 2012 Dredd adaptation. V for Vendetta, based on Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s British graphic novel, is another well-known example.

    Is Into the Spider-Verse better than the live-action Spider-Man films?

    Many critics and fans argue yes, largely because the film uses animation to do things live-action simply cannot, visually representing the comic book medium itself rather than just adapting the story. The Tobey Maguire original trilogy and the Tom Holland MCU films all have devoted supporters though, so the debate continues.

The Latest