Cody is endeavoring to read his way through Marvel's entire publishing history. Let's see if he can do it!
This week, the comic book adaptation of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
As I’ve mentioned before, Marvel Comics launched Marvel Super Special, a full-color magazine series that was “devoted to concepts thought to be deserving of special treatment” in 1977. The early issues featured stories about Conan the Barbarian, Star-Lord, and Weirdworld, as well as bands like The Beatles and Kiss, with some movie adaptations mixed in. As of issue #14, and continuing through its final issue (#41), the Marvel Super Special series became dedicated entirely to movie adaptations. I’ve covered a couple of those adaptations before: the James Bond movie For Your Eyes Only, which was also released as two separate issues in addition to the Marvel Super Special issue that was dedicated to it, and – a random pick – Jaws 2.
The very first movie adaptation to be featured in the pages of Marvel Super Special was a take on director Steven Spielberg’s 1977 hit Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which was just making its way out into the world when Marvel Super Special #3 hit store shelves.
Scripted by Spielberg (with uncredited contributions from the likes of Paul Schrader, John Hill, David Giler, Hal Barwood, Matthew Robbins, and Jerry Belson), Close Encounters was brought to the page with an adaptation was written and edited by Archie Goodwin, with Walt Simonson and Klaus Janson providing the illustrations, which were colored by Marie Severin and lettered by Gaspar Saladino. A note at the end of the book confirms that the illustrators were not allowed to use the likenesses of the actors from the film, which is why all of the characters look different here.
The film Close Encounters has that same tone and set-up that many of the Spielberg’s best, most popular work has. That epic feeling, the fun people-next-door vibe of the characters, the idea of ordinary people dealing with extraordinary events. And yet, while I love a lot of Spielberg’s work, I’ve never been a fan of this one – mainly because I don’t like the characters, and it’s really long (ranging from 132 to 137 minutes, depending on which cut you watch), moving through its long running time at a slow pace, with not a whole lot happening. That gives the comic book adaptation the advantage over the movie for me, because Goodwin had to condense the story into just fifty pages or so. That makes it a lot easier (and quicker) to get through.
Like the movie, the comic gets started with a gradual build-up. United States Navy aircraft that vanished over the Bermuda Triangle in 1945 appear in the Mexican desert in 1977. Air traffic controllers witnessing a near-miss with a UFO on their radar monitors. A little boy’s toys in Muncie, Indiana start moving on their own. There are power outages in the area and electric utility lineman Roy Neary is sent to find out why. On the road in the middle of the night, Roy sees a UFO, a close encounter that leaves him with a sunburn on half of his face.
More people, including young mother Jillian Guiler and her toddler son, witness UFOs as they fly around the area... and the people who see them become obsessed with them. Especially Roy, who is compelled to start drawing pictures of a mountain and moulding the image of the mountain, freaking out his kids and scaring his wife in the process. When he decides to build a mini-mountain out of dirt and bricks inside his house, that’s when his wife and kids bail on him. Eventually, everyone is able to deduce that the mountain is Devils Tower near Moorcroft, Wyoming. The area is evacuated, but Roy, Jillian, and other UFO obsessives converge on the area for the climactic encounter with the aliens.
In the end, I found the Close Encounters of the Third Kind comic book to be underwhelming, which is how I’ve always felt about the movie – but I did like reading the story more than I liked watching it on screen. In writing his adaptation, Goodwin removed the dull moments and made Roy a somewhat more likeable character. In the film, he’s such a jackass that he’s willing to abandon his family so he can take a ride on a UFO. Spielberg has said that he wouldn’t have had Roy make that choice if he had made the movie later in life. He made this one before he had a family of his own. In the comic, the decision is easier to take – partly because Roy’s family comes off worse, and partly because the ending happens with such a shrug on the page.
The film also has an awful moment where Roy kisses Jillian before he catches his ride. The comic book left that out.
So if I ever feel the urge to experience the story of Close Encounters of the Third Kind again, I guess it will be the Marvel Comics adaptation I will be turning to.
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