I've been a comic-book ...
Question: I've been a comic-book collector for better than 30 years now, and I recently began wondering what the first movie based on a comic book was. I'm not talking about matinee serials or the like, but a standard feature film. I'm sure it's probably an adaptation of a Japanese manga or a European book, but I'm more interested in what the first American feature film based on an American comic book was.
Answer: I'm tackling this question even though it's not my area of expertise and I know how complicated the history of comics and comic-strip and comic-book heroes is. But it actually looks to me as though the very earliest film adapted from a comic is American and featured Chester Gould's square-jawed lawman, Dick Tracy. Gould's strip debuted in 1931, at the height of public interest in gang wars, and Dick Tracy (1937) was released in both serialized and conventional feature versions. And the first costumed-hero movie based on a comic seems to be the 12-chapter serial The Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941), based on C.C. Beck's newspaper strip. There were movies featuring Lamont Cranston/The Shadow in the '30s, but at that time Cranston was a radio-show character; he didn't make his comic-book debut until 1940. The silent French serials Fantomas and Judex, which date from 1913/1920 and 1916, respectively, had their roots in pulp novels; the history of pulps is certainly connected to that of comic books, but they're not the same thing.
