In a multi-part series, Comic Book Film Editor William Gatevackes will be tracing the history of comic book movies from the earliest days of the film serials to today’s big blockbusters and beyond. Along with the history lesson, Bill will be covering some of the most prominent comic book films over the years and why they were so special. This time, we begin our four week “vacation” overseas with the most notable one-off comic films Europe has to offer.

Comic books are a uniquely American art form, but this doesn’t mean that they aren’t popular in other parts of the world. Europe and Asia have come to embrace the comic medium over the decades. As a matter of fact, they have been quicker to see the artistic merits of comic books than we here in the United States were. While Americans were considering comic books cheap entertainment for kids and emotionally stunted adults, people overseas were using the medium to expose on sexuality, politics and philosophy.

To cover every foreign comic book film would take up too many weeks in this here rundown, so we will be covering some of the films that have the most name value here in the States, either in their comic book form or in their film adaptation. This means that there will be a lot of great comic book films left out in these four weeks. And for that I apologize.

Our tour of Europe begins in Italy with one of the most influential Italian comic book heroes—Diabolik. Diabolik was created by sisters Angela and Luciana Giussani in the 1962 paperback graphic novel, Il Re del Terrore (“The King of Terror”). He is a highly-skilled thief who steals only from other criminals and is aided and abetted by his partner and lover Eva Kant. The character has influenced such comic writers as Mark Millar and Grant Morrison, who have created characters in their work influenced by Diabolik.

In 1968, Dino De Laurentiis brought Diabolik to the big screen in Danger: Diabolik.

Directed by Mario Brava and starring John Phillip Law in the lead, the film was a fairly faithful adaptation of the comic, with only the violence and adult themes toned down for the screen. The film detailed Diabolik going up against a crime boss who was upset about all the negative attention his organization was inadvertently getting from the police due to Diabolik’s actions.

Later that same year, De Laurentiis would bring another European comic book, this time a French one, to life on the big screen (with John Phillip Law along in a supporting role). The comic book was Barbarella.

Barbarella, like Diabolik, was created in 1962 by Jean-Claude Forest in a serialized form in the French periodical, V-Magazine and goes to show the difference in mentalities between American and French consumers.

That year saw the debut of Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk in American comics, the white-bread Superman was topping the sales charts, and American comic books couldn’t have vampires or werewolves in fear of damaging vulnerable readers’ minds. Barbarella was a woman who travelled through space, getting herself into troubles where she had to use sex to get out or get into them. Nothing terribly graphic was shown, but when even the word “sex” would have gotten a comic book banned in the U.S., it shows you how far ahead of the curve Europe was.

The film was directed by Roger Vadim and starred his then-wife Jane Fonda as Barbarella. This is odd when you realize that the comic book Barbarella’s appearance was based on Vadim’s first wife, Brigitte Bardot. Dinners after a day’s filming must have been mighty interesting.

If nothing else, the campy film served as the inspiration for one of the best bands of the 1980s—Duran Duran. The band named itself after Durand Durand, a mad scientist played by Milo O’Shea in the film.

There have been several attempts to remake the film, including one by Vadim before he died with Sherilyn Fenn, then Drew Barrymore in the lead role. The most recent attempt was by director Robert Rodriguez, who was hoping the remake would be a star-vehicle for his then-girlfriend Rose McGowan. This version fell apart when Universal, the studio set to produce the film backed out over budget concerns and McGowan’s ability to carry the film. A German company was set to step in, but the thought of being away from his family made Rodriguez scrap the idea altogether. The pair would move on to another comic book adaptation, Red Sonja, with similar results.

Europe is also home to a large number of Muslim immigrants. Many of these immigrants escaped from Muslim countries when a new conservative religion-based regime takes over, but not all are welcomed fully in their new home countries, as they face the turmoil over whether to assimilate or stay true to their Muslim upbringing. One of these stories was Marjane Satrapi‘s, a story she related in the graphic novels Persepolis and Persepolis 2.

Satrapi was a little girl around the time of the overthrow of the Shah in Iran, and she lived through the revolution that removed him from power and saw how that revolution had become co-opted by Muslim clerics. Eventually, at age 14, she is forced to leave Iran by her parents and relocate to Vienna, Austria. She finds a hard time adjusting to the Western world, struggling on what she should do—adapt to her new surroundings or stay true to her Iranian heritage. The graphic novels were made into a film in 2007 called Persepolis.

The film won a Jury Prize at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Animated Film of 2007, losing out to Pixar’s Ratatouille. The film also garnered some controversy in Muslim countries, with Iran filing a formal grievance with the French government about the film’s inclusion in the Cannes festival.

Dylan Dog: Dead of Night is proof that Hollywood can also screw up adapting foreign comics as well as homegrown ones.

Based on the incredibly popular Italian comic book, Dylan Dog, the film stars Brandon Routh, Peter Stormare, and Sam Huntington (thus reuniting Superman and Jimmy Olsen from 2006’s Superman Returns), the 2011 film adaptation doesn’t quite get it. The comic book was an existential satire on the world through the lens of horror.  The film is a typical action/horror film loaded with snark and obvious humor in place of the original’s subtlety and wit. The film was hardly advertised and died a quick death at the box office, making just over $4 million worldwide against a $20 million dollar budget.

Next time, we’ll travel a little farther East as we check out some comic book films from Japan, before we cover film series from both areas.

We continue our look back at the cinematic decade that has just passed with a look at the company that redefined film animation, Pixar.

It’s true that the era of Pixar started in the 1990s, when the company produced three films: 1995′s Toy Story, 1998′s A Bug’s Life, and 1999′s Toy Story 2. But the Aughts were when the animation studio became an overwhelming force in not just film animation, but at the box office as well.

Pixar has changed the world of films forever. At the start of the decade, computer generated animation was a rarity. Now, cel-based animation, such as last year’s The Princess and the Frog, are novelties. At the start of the decade, there was only Pixar and fledgling Dreamworks (which also started in the 90s with 1998′s Antz) in the field. Now, Dreamworks has become a powerhouse to rival Pixar, and other outlets such as Sony Pictures Imageworks and The Weinstein Group in producing CGI fare. Before, if you got one CGI animated film a year, it would be a lot. Now, each year features a multitude of CGI animated films for your movie going enjoyment.

But what separates Pixar from the rest is the quality of their output. They appear to never be a company that settles for being as good as they can be. They strive to be better. And that results in them accepting challenges and advancing technology to suit their needs. Look no further than their first offering of the decade, 2001′s Monsters, Inc. Consider the lead character, a furry monster named Sully. In order to capture the look of the character, Pixar’s animators had to painstakingly animate every hair on the monster and in such a way that it would appear natural. This attention to detail is one of the reasons why they are a leader in the field.

The focus on quality doesn’t just involve the technical, but also extends to the storytelling as well. On paper, films about the monster in your closet told from the monster’s point of view, a trash collecting robot on an abandoned Earth, and a rat that loves to cook haute cuisine might not seem like scintillating cinematic fare, but in Pixar’s hands it became great film magic. They have a unique ability to bring the most out of any concept, and tap into a sense of whimsy and wonder unlike anything seen since, well, Disney’s heyday in the 30s and 40s.

As the decade went on, Pixar became one of the most artistically solid film producers of the decade. Take 2008′s Wall*E, which featured the first 30 minutes devoid of almost any dialogue or last year’s Up, where a couple’s life together from childhood to late adulthood was captured in about a 10 minute wordless montage.  This kind of film making is almost impossible to pull off even in live-action. Pixar made it look easy and told more story on both occasions than other filmmakers did with full-length features.

While Pixar films have been critically well-received (the lowest rated at Rotten Tomatoes was Cars at respectable 75% fresh, the rest received no lower than a 95% rating), they have also been financial successes. Each Pixar film released in the past decade made it’s way into the top 10 grossing films of each particular year, with the lowest (again, Cars) making $461 Million worldwide.

The success of Pixar critically and commercially might have also had an affect on the Academy Awards. In 2002, the award ceremony added a category for Best Animated Feature. All of Pixar’s films released in the decade have been nominated for the award, and it has won four out of the eight Oscar’s given out in the category ( for Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and Wall*E). Critics of the new category have complained that it was only created to keep the Pixar films out of the Best Picture race. That argument will be tested this year as the number of nominees for Best Picture are risen to 10. If Up doesn’t get a nomination in the main category, then this argument will gain more weight.

On the business side of things, Pixar’s relationship with its parent company, Disney, start at the beginning of the decade as contentious to say the least. Squabbles over the number of films included in their agreement and release dates for the films caused Pixar to announce that they were ending their partnership with Disney in 2004. After several less-than stellar in-house CGI films developed, Disney eventually bought out Pixar in 2006, allowing the company to remain its own identity and placing Pixar bigwigs in charge of all of Disney’s animation efforts.

The next two years might be risky creatively, but most likely not financially, for Pixar as they release a second sequel to Toy Story on June 18th of this year and a sequel to Cars in June of 2011. They return to original projects in 2012 with The Bear and the Arrow and Newt set for release that year. So it looks like Pixar is set with film releases until the end of time, if the rumors about 2012 are correct.

The Aughts were a great decade for Pixar. They established a domination over a new breed of animation that they helped perfect. They have produced consistently excellent product again and again, and have become one of the last bastions of creativity in Hollywood. It was a great decade for Pixar, yet we’re the ones that reaped the benefits.

1. Up (Disney, 3,766 Theaters, 96 Minutes, Rated PG): One of the most amazing things about Pixar, at least in the past few years, is that they can take concepts that don’t seem that they would be all that good on paper and make financial and critical successes out of them.

I mean, a film where a stock car given human qualities is treated like an athlete is placed in a Doc Hollywood like plot doesn’t sound great, but Cars was a great success. A rat who want to be a cook sounds somewhat gross, but Ratatouille was charming and sweet. And a film with small amounts of dialogue with a scurvy robot as the lead might not seem like it would work, but Wall*E was awesome on all levels.

This time, they are dealing with a curmudgeon who ties balloons to his house in a ploy to visit South America, but complications ensue when he discovers a stowaway on board. It seems like there would be no way they could make a good movie out of this concept. But I’m sure that it will be one of the best films of the summer.

2. Drag Me To Hell (Universal, 2,508 Theaters, 99 Minutes, Rated PG-13): I kinda view Sam Raimi returning to horror the same way I would view Tom Hanks returning to a weekly TV sitcom. Yes, it would rock, but how can it not be viewed as a step backwards?

Raimi, of course, got his start on the Evil Dead films. But from that start has become a director at home with dramas that get Oscar Buzz (A Simple Plan) and your big-budget blockbuster (Spider-Man). Surely he is such a master of horror that this film will be chock full of scares even with a PG-13 rating, but a relatively low-budget horror film at this stage of his career seems out of place.

The film is about a young woman named Christine who is held back getting a promotion at a bank because she’s too nice. She tries to fix this perception by evicting an old lady from her home. Too bad the old lady is a witch who places a curse on her. If the curse isn’t broken in three days, she will be, well, dragged to hell.