Reading Marvel - A Marvel Super Special: Raiders of the Lost Ark

Cody is endeavoring to read his way through Marvel's entire publishing history. Let's see if he can do it!

This time, a comic book adaptation of the original Indiana Jones movie.

Well, I have recently read the comic book adaptation of Jaws 2, which was a sequel to a Steven Spielberg movie, the comic book adaptation of Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the comic book adaptation of the Spielberg-produced movie Arachnophobia, so why not keep the them going and follow those up with a reading of the comic book version of Spielberg's 1981 adventure movie classic Raiders of the Lost Ark?

Like the comic book versions of Jaws 2 and Close Encounters, the Raiders adaptation was published as part of the Marvel Super Special series - and, to be exact, it was issue #18 of that series. 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.

For issue 18, writer Walt Simonson and artists John Buscema and Klaus Janson were tasked with bringing a condensed version of the Raiders of the Lost Ark screenplay (written by Lawrence Kasdan from a story by George Lucas and Philip Kaufman) to the page, with Rick Parker doing the lettering and Michele Wolfman adding the color.

Like Star Wars, the idea for Indiana Jones was born out of George Lucas's love for serials, a form of entertainment that had its golden age between 1936 and 1945, adventure films that were broken up into short chapters and released to theatres weekly to be played before features. In this case, rather than space battles and alien worlds, Lucas came up with his own "man of action." The story was set in 1936 to properly pay homage to the golden age of serials, and the hero, Indiana Jones, is a professor of archaeology, an expert in the occult, and an obtainer of rare antiquities. He searches the world for ancient artifacts, which he then sells to his friend Marcus Brody (who is also the dean of Marshall College, where Indy teaches), to be displayed in the museum he's the curator of.

Following an opening action sequence that involves Indy making his way through a dangerous jungle and into a boobytrap-rigged cave to retrieve a golden idol, which he then loses to his rival, French archaeologist René Belloq, the story proper gets started when two men from Army Intelligence inform Indy that the Nazis have been searching the world for religious artifacts because Hitler is obsessed with the occult. The Nazis are currently digging for something outside Cairo, and Indy immediately deduces that they must have discovered the lost city of Tanis, the possible resting place of the lost Ark of the Covenant, the chest the Hebrews used to carry around the stone tablets the Ten Commandments were written on. The Ark may have been taken to Tanis and hidden in a place called the Well of Souls, after which Tanis was consumed by the desert during a sandstorm that lasted a full year. The Ark contains the power of God, and legend has it that any army carrying the Ark is invincible. Not something you want in the hands of the Nazis. Army Intelligence is willing to pay handsomely if Indy can beat the Nazis to the Ark and retrieve it for them, and that's an offer that's right up his alley.

Indy's first stop is Nepal, where he expects to find his mentor, Abner Ravenwood, who was an expert on Tanis and the Ark, and is believed to have found the headpiece for the Staff of Ra, which has to be taken into a map room in Tanis so the sun can shine through the crystal in the headpiece and point out the area on the map where the Well of Souls is. Indy finds that Abner has passed away - but his daughter, Marion, is still in Nepal. Indy and Marion have a rocky relationship; they were romantically involved ten years earlier and did not part on good terms. The headpiece is in her possession, but she's not so willing to give it up. Joining Indy may be her ticket home, so she ends up accompanying him to Cairo and through all the danger that follows.

Some great action and suspense sequences play out as Indy searches for the Ark, battles Nazis, and tries to keep the artifact out of the hands of the villains, which include Belloq, who turns out to be the archaeologist heading up the dig in Cairo.

Raiders of the Lost Ark is an action-packed movie with a running time of 115 minutes, so Simonson faced quite a challenge when he was asked to tell the story in just 40-or-so comic book pages. He pulled it off, though - and even managed to dedicate 13 pages to the opening action sequence! It's kind of odd that the opening is the sequence that gets the most focus in the entire book; it almost comes off like Simonson had been told that he was going to get a lot more pages to tell the story, then found out the number was lower than expected after writing out this sequence.

From there, most of the action scenes go by very quickly, while more panels are taken up by suspenseful moments and the steps of the "treasure hunt." It's kind of disappointing when some iconic moments are missing and the scenes around them rushed through... but chances are that Simonson and the artists hadn't even had the opportunity to see these scenes in the movie yet. They were probably only working from the script. There are some other differences here and there - like the fact that Gestapo agent Toht is killed in a car crash and not present for the climactic scene where the Nazi forces make the mistake of opening the Ark. Indy is also less of a skeptic in the comic than in the movie, and is even said to say a prayer at one point.

Simonson did a good job with the writing, though, and the art is fun to look at. I'm sure Raiders super-fans have had a lot of fun flipping through the pages of this adaptation over the decades.