Think “comic book adaptations”, and you’d be forgiven for focusing on the box-office blockbusters that bring classic Marvel and DC superheroes to the big screen, such as X-Men, Iron Man, Batman and Spider-Man franchises.

If you’re a 40-year-old bloke like me, though, you can’t really get away with reading superhero comics lest you get a withering glance off the wife.

But I actually like the comic book format. And comics don’t have to be about superheroes. So what should you read? I’m glad you asked. And the funny thing is, all of the following have been films, or are about to be adapted.

American Splendor is an obvious start, if only for the fact that anyone who’s read it can’t fail to see its not-so-secret origins – it’s based on the autobiographical work of “little-known working-class everyman, and first-class curmudgeon” Harvey Pekar.

Also mined from the same indie comics seam as Pekar is the forthcoming film adaptation of Charles Burns’s Black Hole, which, with its storyline of an Aids-alike illness affecting America’s teens, we can only hope won’t become a Cabin Fever-esque torture extravaganza under the directorship of Fight Club’s David Fincher.

Charles Burns’s work has a lot in common with that of Daniel Clowes, but it was one of Clowes’s less grotesque works, Ghost World, which made it to the cinemas – and critical acclaim – in 2001. Ghost World was first serialised in Clowes’s comic Eightball in the Nineties.

More mainstream productions include Road To Perdition from 2002, starring Tom Hanks, Jude Law and Paul Newman. The comics were published under a literary imprint out of the DC comics stable, Paradox Press, written by Max Allan Collins and telling of a mob enforcer forced to flee his gangster bosses with his young son.

Road To Perdition gives a tip of the hat to Lone Wolf And Cub, a successful Japanese manga that again featured father-and-son central characters, this time in feudal Japan.

Which brings us neatly on to the film adaptations of Frank Miller. Miller was, in the Eighties, one of the twin colossuses bestriding comic books along with Alan Moore (his adapted oeuvre – Watchmen, From Hell, V For Vendetta – falls too much in the camps of speculative fiction for us to consider here).

Movies of Miller’s comics include Sin City, based on his own hardboiled noir series and given a very comic-booky monochrome feel on screen, and 300 – his highly-dramatised take on the Battle of Thermopylae. The next adaptation of a Miller work is based on his comic Ronin – itself inspired by Lone Wolf And Cub.

So there you go. Comics that have been films and have no men wearing underpants outside their trousers. Never say this column doesn’t teach you stuff.