While connections between cinema and comics suggest themselves readily to viewer and reader alike, it is difficult to draw conclusive, generalised links between their forms. One may point intuitively to a family resemblance that suggests the obvious influence of the older drawn medium on the newer practice of capturing moving images, especially at the dawn of cinema, but the comparison is not so easily established. On the one hand, filmmakers of the silent era appear to have honed their craft without obvious assistance from the fin de siècle comic strip's formal arrangements of panels and gutters, images and text. On the other hand, the comic strip might have anticipated several of the formal narrative solutions that cinema would later adopt, thereby demonstrating its influence. Whatever the case, it is not possible to make such broad statements with any confidence.

It may be too strong a claim to suggest that comics played midwife at the birth of cinema; yet there is little doubt that the older medium would make its presence truly felt in filmmaking in the second half of the twentieth century, most obviously in the graduation of comic narratives to the screen. ‘Comic-book movies were scarcely a genre in the studio era’, as David Bordwell has observed, ‘but they became a central one with the arrival of the blockbuster’ (Bordwell 2006: 54). Many adaptations of comic-book titles certainly followed in the wake of Superman: The Movie (Richard Donner, 1978), but just prior to the era of big-budget productions in the United States, comics had already worked themselves into cinema across the globe in a variety of subtle and inventive ways. Comics were used as both a wry prop and an important part of the narrative in Artists and Models (1955), Frank Tashlin's deceptively funny exploration of American pop culture at mid-century. The panels of comic strips played an increasingly prominent part in Jean-Luc Godard's mises-en-scène for a stretch of his career extending from Pierrot le fou (1965) to Tout va bien (1972) (Morton 2009).