And that’s the rub, says filmmaker Kevin Smith. Smith, a comics fan well known for filling his movies with comic book creators (Remember Stan Lee’s cameo in “Mallrats”? Uh, probably not) and tropes (”Dogma” was essentially a superhero story about violent angels) has moved back and forth from film to comics. His most recent film, “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back,” had a strong comic-book theme, while his run on the DC Comics title “Green Arrow” has made that book one of 2001’s runaway hits. But don’t look for a Smith-helmed movie version of the emerald archer anytime soon.

“I’m not really interesting doing a G.A. movie because it’s not the same thing,” Smith says. “Right now, I’m doing a story for an audience who knows who Oliver Queen is, and when you’re doing a movie, you have to start from scratch.” (Queen, for the most of you who don’t know, is Green Arrow’s secret identity.)

And Smith says he write comics far differently than he writes films. “I tend to think more visually when I’m writing for comics, When I’m writing a screenplay that I know I’m going to direct, I don’t write about how (the scene’s) going to look because I have it in my head already.” As a comic script is then handed off to an artist, Smith admits he “works far harder on comic book scripts.”

Smith is a longtime comics advocate — “(The mass audience) doesn’t know that it’s watching comics-influenced TV or film because comic books are the best-kept secret in the entertainment industry right now” — but he’s not worried about a slumping comics industry or efforts to find new or younger readers.

“Just concentrate on telling great stories and the audience will come,” Smith says. “I don’t even think comics are geared towards kids anymore; they’re not who’s reading them. There are a far too many distractions: video games, the Internet, cable TV — things that didn’t exist in the heyday of comics. People who want to read them will find it later in life. And they’ll stick around. I don’t think the kids are coming back to comics, and that’s OK.”

But film and TV creators are still devoted to them, and devoted to seeing what comic book ideas can work on the screen. But striking that delicate balance between what can be rendered on the page and what will entertain a movie audience remains paramount. As Petrie says, “I would get notes from Joss on my early Buffy drafts telling me to `real it up,’ make this more lived-in. That’s the tension: playing with how far can you go beyond reality and still keep it believable.”