Cape Jeer is a review site for movies based on superhero comics.  It also stretches to cover some cases of comic book characters who aren't super, and some superhero characters who lack a comic book pedigree.  Your reviewer is Paul Kienitz.

For some reason, I ended up watching a fair number of movies that are based on comic books, even though I rarely read the comic books themselves.  So, inspired by such fine B-movie sites as Stomp Tokyo and And You Call Yourself A Scientist!, I just thought I'd give my rankings and reviews of which are the good and the bad in this category of film.  And once I'd seen about fifteen of them, I figured I might as well start filling in the rest of the list.  Little did I realize, back then, how many there actually are.

Now that a whole ton of new comic book movies are coming out -- and you wouldn't believe how many are still in development -- this may offer a little perspective.  Especially since they are now making so many of them that I wouldn't be surprised if they oversaturate the market and cause a crash in the popularity of the genre.

Making a movie based on a superhero comic book is a difficult art.  The film medium demands a certain realism that the comic page seems to demand an absence of.  There is a difficult set of choices to be faced about how much to tone down the outrageous parts -- too little and your film story can lose all believability, too much and you lose the flavor of the comic.  (Should Captain America have silly winglets on his head, or be sensible and wear a helmet?  Should the Hulk make mile-long jumps, or just stomp around?  In each case, both approaches have been tried.)  And do you present the world in which the action takes place as realistic and true to life, or as stylized and artificial, distanced from reality?  Too much of the former and any scientifically impossible elements of the story put a real strain on believability unless you tone them down, and too much of the latter can make the story as meaningless as watching somebody else play a video game.

And how much do you remain "true to the source material"?  That's what the serious comix fans want from you, but failing to expand beyond the limitations of the comic book medium can impose major limitations.  Sticking close to what worked in the comics will probably give you a film that's solidly in the middle of the pack.  Departing in an original direction can send you to the bottom, or to the top.

In the left-hand panel, you will see links to indexes listing the movies.  You have a choice of four, depending on how you want the titles ordered.  In the default index, I have ranked the titles roughly in order from best to worst.  Alternately, you can choose an alphabetical list of titles, or a list organized by year of release, or one grouped in categories based on the type of comic the movie was made from.  I have put in placeholders for those films I haven't seen yet (which are msot often pointless sequels).  Unseen film titles are in italics.  Each title has a little popup quote from the accompanying review that displays itself when you move the mouse over it.

Certain measures had to be taken to keep the list down to a manageable size.  I disregard stuff over 50 years old, such as the serials popular in the nineteen thirties and forties.  I summarize what I know of this old stuff in a special section.  I will include some newspaper comic strips that encroach near a superhero-like form, but ignore most newspaper strips -- no Blondie or Garfield films.  I disregard most hero characters who have a presence in comics but originated elsewhere, like Tarzan.  (But The Shadow slipped through as an exception.  The Green Hornet may end up being another.)  I will also disregard TV movies, except for mentioning their existence in passing in another special section, and animated films in general (with one exception)... actually, almost all superhero animation comes under the TV category anyway.  And I can't cover manga films such as the blood-drenched Lone Wolf and Cub (Kozure Okami) series -- which I hear is now being remade by, of all people, Darren Aronofsky -- or, in general, films made in languages other than English.  (This is another area where I had to make one exception.)

I especially do not include serious non-genre dramas based on graphic novels.  For instance, I don't include the marvelous films Ghost World or Persepolis -- they really have nothing to do with the others I'm reviewing.  In the former case especially, there is nothing in the film that indicates a comic-book origin.  The same applies to Road to Perdition or A History of Violence, and for that matter, to Tales From the Crypt.  American Splendor is even farther outside this page's territory.  For a note on how I would grade those films if they were here, see the The Rating System page.

(Tiny personal connection to Ghost World: the author of the graphic novel, Daniel Clowes, lives in my old neighborhood.  Whee!)

Within this realm, I will try to include most everything that you'd have any chance of finding in a video shop.  And I certainly do include some films about superhero-like characters which are not derived from any actual comic.  Parodies, for instance.

So forget about fine art, it's time to put on your long-johns and join the battle against Communism!  I mean, against crime.