Or the comic being made in the 80s/90s and the adaptation being made in the 2020s.

The work was progressive for its time; today its ideals have been captured by managerialism.

> "Our predecessors were so wrong! Of course your otherness is worth celebrating! It's so much easier to extract value from your labor that way!"

Or could it simply be “the book is better.”

In my experience of the dozens of books I’ve read which have had movies made of them there are only two in which the book is good and the movie is better or even as good as the book - “The Shining” and “The Godfather”. I find it’s a very rare and hard thing to do.

Could be: I definitely enjoyed the comic immensely back in the day. However watching the adaptation after should be compared to a re-read perhaps.

Adaptations aren't necessarily worse though. The Martian is better than the book. The yesteryear Dune is better than the book (I don't really like the book tho). Altered Carbon is a draw on the first season, but quickly outshines the book sequels later.

I'd add The Princess Bride. In some ways the book is better than the movie, in other ways the movie is better than the book.

And in the case of The Hunt for Red October I like the movie better than the book.

Just to add another example, I think Tarkovsky's Stalker is far better than the book it's based on, Picnic on the side of the road.

I have yet to see the adaptation, but just finished reading the books a few months ago (in my 40s), and while I liked them they did not (to me) live up to the hype.

I can totally see that they would have stood out more as something new in the 80's. Going back and reading some of my favourite comics from the 80's is bittersweet - seminal stories like the X-Men Dark Phoenix saga or Days of Future Past are marred by extremely annoying and intrusive exposition (I like exposition in books, and when well done it's great in comics too, but 1980's Marvel and DC exposition was so in your face most of the time), and Sandman work much better today than they do (other examples that stands out in retrospect in that way is Watchmen and Alan Moore's Swamp Thing run).

But unlike, e.g. Alan Moore's Swamp Thing run which still stands out to me as outstanding by modern standards too, while I can see many things that'd make it stand out in the 1980's, and while it's still quirky, it didn't quite reach that level to me (admittedly, it's an extremely high bar, so to reiterate: I did like Sandman).

I can absolutely see myself having a very different view of it if I read it back then, though. Put another way: If I came to X-Men's Dark Phoenix or Days of Future Past story lines today because someone raved about it, and I wasn't used to the comics of the era, I'd have a very hard time seeing past the veneer of heavy-handed story-telling, but I remember them, and so I find it a lot easier to see through how dated they are, even though their execution is worse by modern standards.