Is Sucker Punch Based On A Comic Book?

For me, there is nothing better than finding out about a movie’s background, especially when it appears to have been based on another script. Such is the case with Sucker Punch, a very original story by Zack Snyder and Steve Shibuya. Sucker Punch appears to be a comic book movie, all hyper-visualized and very action orientated, much like an anime movie or even better, a graphic novel (e.g. like a Vertigo comic). Actually, the complex storyline of Sucker Punch follows the very imaginative dreamscapes of main character Babydoll, interwoven with the dark and gritty reality of the asylum where she is locked away. It’s amazing how Snyder managed to come up with such an original story that still seems to be infused with the typical comic book aesthetics. (I’d even gone in there thinking it to be a movie based on a graphic novel…).

But that would be amazing as a comic first! The world-building in the film is so dense and so incredibly rich that a prequel graphic novel could develop so much more of the lore that we see in the film than we actually do get to see in the movie. The steampunk samurai and the bomber pilots fighting against dragons and the robot Nazi clockwork soldiers? Amazing. It would make an incredible comic. Hopefully one day there will be an expanded universe to this film in print, but for now it stands as a very, very strange and ambitious original work that somehow feels at once underdeveloped and overwhelmingly detailed at the same time.

Sucker Punch has no comic roots. It is all the product of Snyder's roiling brain, spun into this mad vision and Hollywood blockbuster. It's closest antecedents are perhaps the surreal violence found in the seminal underground magazine Heavy Metal, or the dense, single-issue storylines of some of the work of Warren Ellis. However, all of the ideas presented in the film are entirely original. While it's a very 'adaptational' movie (i.e. the opening hospital sequence is some seriously dark and twisted psychological horror manga, while the samurai battle within the fantasy world is something straight out of an arc of Bersek), one can't help but wonder what Snyder and co. might have created were they to be collaborating with an actual comic book artist. Instead, as always, everything is all drawn out in front of us in photographic detail.

I went into Sucker Punch half-expecting it to be a manga or indie comic that had gotten picked up for a film adaptation, given how the movie frequently breaks from the plot to explore the more fantastical scenes of the narrative’s brothel fantasy within the more grounded scenes of the asylum’s attempts to strip the girls of their identities. In the end, however, the film is 100% all-Snyder, and draws heavily from comic and anime influences (the girls piloting giant mechs and fighting orcs would feel right at home in a story like Claymore or Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, while the entire story is framed within an asylum much like the world of Battle Angel Alita).

Interestingly, Snyder has made a sort of love letter to geek culture and not a specific comic book adaptation. The soundtrack, the slow motion action sequences, even the excessive dialogue all combine to make a sort of fan boy project. This is interesting to note because it proves just how much comics can influence our expectations of what kinds of fantastical stories are possible in films. Even a non-comic book adaptation of a story can end up looking and feeling like one because of the comic book inspired visual language that it uses.