20 TV shows and movies that you didn’t know were adapted from comic strips

Before Gomez, Morticia, and the rest of their mysterious and spooky family were haunting us on our screens, they were being creepy and kooky as comic characters in The New Yorker. Cartoonist Charles Addams created the iconic family.

Fans everywhere were obsessed with Wednesday when it first dropped on Netflix. While most knew that the series was inspired by the iconic character from The Addams Family, some missed the memo that it all began with a 1930s comic strip. 

The Flash Gordon character has been around since the 1930s. It didn’t take long for the comic strip to be adapted to the screen, and the hero figure has been entertaining audiences ever since. 

Defenders of the Earth is another series to come from Flash Gordon. It features Flash Gordon himself, as well as some other characters from the original strip. 

Friday Foster first appeared in the early 1970s. The comic strip was one of the first to feature an African-American woman as the main character. Unfortunately, fans didn’t love the movie adaptation of the groundbreaking comic strip.  

Buck Rogers hit the stands just as the market was crashing, leading into the Great Depression. Despite the poor economy, the comic strip was adapted for all sorts of screen projects, making it a very valuable IP. 

A fairly new comic character, especially compared to Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, Big Nate first appeared in the early 1990s. The sixth grader became popular enough to warrant his own novel series, a video game, and a television series. 

American Splendor was self-published for many years before being picked up by Dark Horse Comics and then DC Comics for a couple of years. The strip has been adapted to screen and stage. 

Graphic novels are the modern media equivalent of comic strips. Scott Pilgrim started as a graphic novel series and was eventually adapted to a feature film, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, starring Michael Cera as the titular character. The series was also adapted to television as Scott Pilgrim vs. the Animation. 

The Boondocks first premiered as a comic strip in the late 1990s and ran for about a decade. The strip’s creator, Aaron McGruder, later got to turn the strip into the animated television series of the same name.

Snowpiercer started as a graphic novel series in 1982. It has since been adapted to the screen in multiple formats, including a 2013 feature film and a 2020 TV series that ran for four seasons. 

Not to be confused with the chicken restaurant Popeyes, Popeye the Sailor Man first entered the public consciousness in 1929 through his comic strip. He’s since been in all sorts of TV and movie adaptations, which have arguably become more iconic than the comic strip. 

The Diary of a Teenage Girl is a very unique comic. It’s technically a hybrid graphic novel comprised of both comics and prose. In any event, it made for a book good enough to be adapted to the screen. The film of the same name came out in 2015. 

The Punisher is a Marvel Comics character. The character’s eponymous TV series was a spin-off of another popular MCU series, Daredevil. 

If you didn’t read the graphic novel The Death of Stalin in its original form, don’t feel bad. It was written in French. But it was printed in English, and, of course, it was adapted to the 2017 film of the same name. 

Lucifer was based on the DC Comics character Lucifer Morningstar. It took a while from Lucifer’s first comic appearance for him to get his own series, but it was clearly a good decision as it eventually ended in a hit TV series. 

Old has one of the most unique plots of modern film. And it wasn’t an original idea. The same idea can be seen in the graphic novel from which the film was adapted, Sandcastle. 

The Walking Dead was so popular as a TV series that it’s hard to imagine it wasn’t an original idea. But alas, it was an adaptation of the comic strip of the same name, which ran from 2003 to 2019. 

Dennis the Menace has been wreaking havoc across America since the 1950s. It started as a comic strip and has since been adapted to TV and film. It’s a timeless classic that will likely see another screen adaptation in the future. 

Brenda Starr is an iconic character who first came to life in the comic strip Brenda Starr, Reporter. She’s since been portrayed on screen by the likes of Jill St. John and Brooke Shields.