How Sound Can "Unify" Transmedia: Christy Dena on AUTHENTIC IN ALL CAPS

Today, we are going to continue this week's focus on transmedia with the following guest post by Christy Dena. Dena's PhD dissertation transmedia really put her on the map for those of us who closely follow developments in this space. Dena is a gifted designer/theorist or theorist/designer depending on one's priorities at a given moment: someone who has a deep knowledge of the historic evolutions of theories of multimedia, intermedia, and transmedia, as she aptly demonstrates in the piece below, someone who can move between avant grade experiments and the commercial mainstream in her consideration of examples, and someone who can have a model for a transmedia design document on one page and a discussion of renaissance theories of art on the next. Transmedia has become a place which attracts artists who are also theorists, designers who are also intellectuals, and it has emerged through conversation across all of these spaces. I have come to think of Dena as someone who consistently sharpens my own thinking, since she is unafraid to critique anyone but also knows of what she speaks. You can read her PhD dissertation here.

I recently learned that she is seeking crowd funding for an exciting new project -- AUTHENTIC IN ALL CAPS -- which explores the use of sound -- including something like radio drama -- as the center piece of a transmedia franchise. It is the kind of project that needs to be done as a thought/design experiment that will help us to better understand some of the potentials of transmedia, but it is also the kind of project that it will be difficult to fund through commercial or state sponsorship. The crowd funding scheme is in its final hours and they are painfully close to meeting their goals, so I'm rushing this post out today in hopes some of you will read it, help spread the word about an interesting project, and kick in a little cash to support a worthy cause.

Here's where you can go to help Christy meet her goals.

Everything below here is Christy Dena describing -- in her own words -- the thought process that led to the development of this project. Dramatically, she wrote this on a laptop with dwindling battery juice in a house that had lost its power somewhere in Australia. Or, at least, that's the story.

HOW SOUND CAN "UNIFY" TRANSMEDIA by Christy Dena

I’d like to take the opportunity with this guest post to talk about how my research into transmedia has greatly influenced my creative project AUTHENTIC IN ALL CAPS. Here's what I like about where transmedia is moving now -- we’re seeing both practitioners and researchers take on their own approaches more and more. Not everyone is thinking the same way about transmedia. While in the past this was a sign that no-one had a clue what was going on, it is now a sign that people are making it their own. There are universals that can help newcomers understand the area, but when transmedia is under your skin, once it is a relatively unconscious activity, we start to see personal difference. This is because people are bringing their own influences and experiences to the table. We’re seeing more of themselves in their works rather than the imitative approach that is necessary when learning. So this post is about some of the influences on my transmedia thinking.

One of the criticisms of transmedia that raises it’s head every now and then is the idea that fragmentation is bad, that transmedia does away with wholeness. So during my PhD research, I trekked back to look at the notion of “dramatic unities” -- an approach to theatre that began with Aristotle and was extended later by Italian scholars. Dramatic unities includes unity of action (plot), time, and place:

Aristotle argues that tragedy must have a “unity of plot” (Aristotle 1997 [c330B.C.], 16). What this unity of plot means is that not all “incidents in one man’s life” should be included, for they “cannot be reduced to unity” (ibid.).

Unity of time, on the other hand, was introduced by Cintio Giraldi in 1554 with his Discorso sulle Comedie e sulle Tragedie publication, where he “converted Aristotle’s statement of an historical fact”—that “Tragedy endeavours, as far as possible, to confine itself to a single revolution of the sun” (Aristotle 1997 [c330B.C.], 9)—“into dramatic law’ (Spingarn 1963 [1899], 57).

And then it was Ludovico Castelvetro in his 1570 edition of Poetics, who introduced the theory of unity of place based on the idea of the unity of time (ibid., 61). It was considered proper dramatics, that a whole month of actions should not be represented (performed) in two or three hours. “This principle,” Spingarn explains, “led to the acceptance of the unity of place”: “Limit the time of the action to the time of representation, and it follows that the place of action must be limited to the place of representation” (ibid.).

As Gilbert Highet further explains, the “action of the play must seem probable,” and it “will not seem probable if the scene is constantly being changed” (Highet 1985, 143). In the end, scholarship on dramatic unities was “an attempt to strengthen and discipline the haphazard and amateurish methods of contemporary dramatists—not simply in order to copy the ancients, but in order to make drama more intense, more realistic, and more truly dramatic” (ibid.). So the notion is that a performance will be better if it has a unity of action, time, and place -- and that means focusing on small events that are linked by probability, at a certain time, and place.

Anyone who has worked on a transmedia project -- whether it be an alternate reality game or book, TV, film, and console experience -- knows that it is difficult to have your audience or players engage with all the multiple texts or touch-points you create. I remember Evan Jones observing in the early days that we could expect about 10% of our audience to continue to each touch-point. And so for some, this difficulty is in some way associated with the notion of unity. People cannot experience unity if the media texts are fragmented across time and space (and probably include many plot elements). But I’ve chosen to see this as a design challenge rather than impossibility. How can we have unity across media?

To answer this question, the other research area I looked at was “intermedia”. In 1965, Higgins introduced the term intermedia to “offer a means of ingress into works which already existed, the unfamiliarity of whose forms was such that many potential viewers, hearers, or readers were ‘turned off’ by them” (Higgins 2001 [1965], 52). It is a significant notion to discuss because its introduction coalesced a long-standing aesthetic approach, as Jack Ox and Jacques Mandelbrojt explain in their introduction to the special issue on intermedia in Leonardo: “Higgins did not invent these doings—many artists before him had achieved ‘intermediality’—but he named the phenomenon and defined it in a way that created a framework for understanding and categorizing a set or group of like-minded activities” (Ox and Mandelbrojt 2001, 47). Now, as Fluxus artist and theorist Ken Friedman explains, Higgins coined intermedia “to describe the tendency of an increasing number of the most interesting artists to cross the boundaries of recognized media or to fuse the boundaries of art with media that had not previously been considered art forms” (Friedman [1998]). Intermedia works brought together what had been artificially estranged:

Much of the best work being produced today seems to fall between media. This is no accident. The concept of the separation between media arose in the Renaissance. The idea that a painting is made of paint on canvas or that a sculpture should not be painted seems characteristic of the kind of social thought—categorizing and dividing society into nobility with its various subdivisions, untitled gentry, artisans, serfs and landless workers—which we call the feudal conception of the Great Chain of Being. […] We are approaching the dawn of a classless society, to which separation into rigid categories is absolutely irrelevant. (Higgins 2004 [1965])

The creation of works that combine conventionally separate artforms and/or media is a somewhat political as well as aesthetic act:

Thus the happening developed as an intermedium, an uncharted land that lies between collage, music and the theater. It is not governed by rules; each work determines its own medium and form according to its needs. The concept itself is better understood by what it is not, rather than what it is. Approaching it, we are pioneers again, and shall continue to be so as long as there’s plenty of elbow room and no neighbors around for a few miles. (ibid.)

Not all practices that bring together different media and artforms are intermedia though. Higgins distinguishes between mixed media and intermedia according the degree of integration. Opera is an example of mixed media for it has “music, the libretto, and the mise-en-scene” which are “quite separate: at no time is the operagoer in doubt as to whether he is seeing the mise-en-scene, the stage spectacle, hearing the music, etc.” (ibid.). On the other hand, intermedia practices involve a fusion to the degree that elements cannot be separated.

In her essay discussing her father’s theory of intermedia, Hannah Higgins reinforces this notion of fusion with her argument that intermedia “refers to structural homologies, and not additive mixtures, which would be multimedia in the sense of illustrated stories or opera, where the various media types function independently of each other” (Higgins 2002, 61). An example she cites of fusion is the blending of musical and visual techniques in Jackson Mac Low’s A Notated Vocabulary for Eve Rosenthal (1978).

It is important to note too that the distinctions from opera are, among other functions, an attempt to distance intermedia from German opera composer Richard Wagner’s “gesamtkunstwerk” or “total work of art”:

The true Drama is only conceivable as proceeding from a common urgence of every art towards the most direct appeal to a common public. In this Drama, each separate art can only bare its utmost secret to their common public through a mutual parleying with the other arts; for the purpose of each separate branch of art can only be fully attained by the reciprocal agreement and co-operation of all the branches in their common message. (Wagner 2001 [1849], 4–5, original emphasis)

The difference between Wagnerian practices and intermedia has been further articulated by Jürgen Müller (Müller 1996). Since Müller’s writings on this topic are not in English, I refer to Joki van de Poel who, in his dissertation on intermediality, discusses Müller’s argument about the difference between the “multimediality” and “intermediality”:

He makes, like Wagner, a distinction between multimedia and intermedia along the lines of the functioning of media next to each other (Nebeneinander) and with each other (Miteinander). With Nebeneinander he means that the separate media function within a larger production but maintain there own qualities, concepts and structure, whereas in the Miteinander variant the different media function in an integrative way. The media take over each others structure or concepts and are changed in this integrative process. (Poel 2005, 36, original emphasis)

This notion of separation, or more appropriately retention of separation, is actually a key trait of transmedia projects. So what I surmised is that while transmedia projects do share a concern with bringing together media and artforms that are distinct, in transmedia projects each distinct media retains its manifest nature. Fusion does exist in transmedia projects, but it happens at an abstract level. It is characterized by a conceptual synthesis of separate media rather than an assemblage or transformation at the expressive or material level. The peculiar challenge of this approach is to bring together elements that are disparate, incompatible or isolated, in a way that retains their independent nature. This approach does not try to change that which is manifest, but tries to find connections at a level that reconfigures them conceptually. The objects change, but that change happens around the materials, within the minds of those who design and experience them. Unity is perceived, variety is manifest.

For a few years, I concentrated on this idea of abstract unity through the use of content techniques: how can we motivate activity across media with a call-to-action? What role does character and worldbuilding play in this activity? And so on. But then I had a moment when I suddenly realised there was another kind of abstract unity that can happen with media. I had also been researching simultaneous media usage or multitasking. I read novels that came with music CDs to be played at certain chapters; and read studies on what media combinations people find the most complimentary, such as having a documentary on TV when surfing the Internet. And then when I did the Da Vinci Code audio tour of The Louvre it hit me. Audio. Audio is this media element that has an intangible manifestation, it can be used in conjunction with other media and help bind them together.

I’ve since implemented that epiphany into a full-fledged creative project: a web audio adventure called AUTHENTIC IN ALL CAPS. I’m mixing together the apparently dead artform of radio drama, with web navigation and online storytelling. I’m playing with having an ensemble cast that guide players across fictional websites (multiple touch-points) with the use of humour. It is a mix of storytelling, gaming, radio drama, alternate reality gaming, and electronic literature. It is a mix of audio and vision. So we have a content and medial unity without disturbing the distinct nature of each of those websites. It is an experiment, it is exciting to me, and it is working. This is all, I guess, an example of how one can draw on research, critical reflection, theory, and practice all in one to produce something...and that something is for me both a project and an insight into how we can unify in a world of diversity.

Christy’s crowdfunding page for AUTHENTIC IN ALL CAPS: www.pozible.com/project/11529

References:

Aristotle. 1997 [c330B.C.]. Poetics. Mineola: Dover Publications.

Friedman, Ken. ([1998]). Ken Friedman’s contribution to “Fluxlist and Silence Celebrate Dick Higgins. Fluxus. http://www.fluxus.org/higgins/ken.htm (accessed Jan 26, 2008).

Higgins, Dick. 2001 [1965]. Intermedia. Leonardo 34(1): 49–54.

Higgins, Dick. 2004 [1965]. Synesthesia and Intersenses: Intermedia. UbuWeb http://www.ubu.com/papers/higgins_intermedia.html (accessed April 25, 2007).

Higgins, Hannah. 2002. Intermedial Perception or Fluxing Across the Sensory. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 8(4): 59–76.

Highet, Gilbert. 1985. The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman influences on Western Literature. New York, Oxford Univ. Press.

Müller, Jürgen E. 1996. Intermedialität. Formen modener kultureller Kommunikation. Münster: Nordus Publikationen.

Ox, Jack and Jacques Mandelbrojt. 2001. Special Section Introduction: Intersenses/Intermedia: A Theoretical Perspective. Leonardo 34(1): 47–48.

Poel, Joki van de. 2005. Opening up Worlds: Intermediality Reinterpreted. PhD diss., Universiteit Utrecht.

Spingarn, Joel Elias. 1963 [1899]. A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance. New York: Harbinger Books.

Wagner, Richard. 2001 [1849]. “Outlines of the Artwork of the Future,” The Artwork of the Future. In Multimedia: from Wagner to Virtual Reality, ed. Randall Packer and Ken Jordan, 3–9. New York: Norton

Christy Dena is a writer-designer who worked on global alternate reality games such as Nokia's Conspiracy for Good, Cisco's The Hunt, and ABC's Bluebird AR. She recently created a phone story for the pervasive gaming event Fresh Air Festival. Her web audio adventure for the iPad, AUTHENTIC IN ALL CAPS, was nominated for "Best Writing in a Game" at the 2012 Freeplay Independent Games Festival and is currently in production. Christy wrote her PhD on transmedia practice, and presents worldwide on transmedia writing, design, and philosophy.

What Transmedia Producers Need to Know About Comics: An Interview with Tyler Weaver (Part Two)

I was interested in your description of transmedia audiences as “absorptive.” Explain what you mean by that concept and describe some strategies by which producers might support these desires to absorb your story, especially as they seek to also maintain a relationship with more “passive” viewers who can feel overwhelmed by a dense mythology or elaborate story arcs.

An absorptive audience will seek out as many pieces of a transmedia experience as they can and absorb it into their lives somehow. Some will take it to the (wonderful) extreme of creating their own stories within the storyworld. This is different from a passive audience. Some people simply want to sit back and be entertained. Both have are essential. The key with transmedia design going forward will be to give both passive and absorptive audiences something to chew on.

In my own highly unscientific poll while I was researching the book, I found that there are two sticking points keeping a more passive audience member from becoming absorptive. One we can’t do anything about. The other we can.

The first sticking point is time. We talked about it a bit in the first question. Time is the unspoken transaction in a creator-audience relationship. Money is the secondary transaction, given when time is available.  A movie may ask two or three hours of your time in a single sitting. A video game anywhere from four to a hundred hours. A fully absorptive transmedia experience that may continue indefinitely? Who knows.

There is one thing that we can control, and I hate to belabor the point, but the story has to be worth absorbing. People will invest time and money if they are first emotionally invested in the story being told. I talk a lot about irresistible - not expectant - transmedia in the book. We have to give the audience a complete story within each medium so that they want to absorb more pieces of the story experience, not force them into a hunt for a complete story across media they may not normally use in their lives.

As you note, Superman went transmedia – or at least the character was appearing across multiple media platforms – within a few years of his first appearance in comics. What is it about the superhero genre which made such transmedia extensions a logical and compelling development?

The superhero genre is an iconic representation of being more than we are and of tapping into the best qualities of human nature, the mythological potential in all of us. With that in mind, there are aspects to the superhero genre that are more visceral in other media. There's nothing like seeing Superman fly on the big screen. I was giddy when I saw the new "Man of Steel" trailer and saw and heard him fly, a visceral, emotional experience that you don't get from turning the pages of a comic (usually). Even in his radio appearances, there was something “super” about Bud Collyer’s voice. He sounded like Joe Shuster’s drawings brought to life. The representation of superheroes in other media can inform our perspective of the ongoing adventures in comics - sometimes as a detriment, sometimes as a positive.

Extending a superhero into other media - in the best cases - utilizes the inherent characteristics of that medium to present the mythological potential of the superhero genre in its most visceral form, thus forming an emotional investment and bond. Comics can offer the wild and crazy, budget-free ongoing adventures and a deep fan community. Movies give us the chance to be the “man on the street” in the comics, experiencing the wonder that is inherent in the genre (much like Kurt Busiek’s masterpiece, Marvels). Video games give us the chance to be that hero - and be rewarded for it. Want to BE Batman? Play Arkham City, then read the accompanying comics to find out how things became what they became in the gap between Arkham Asylum and City - if you so choose. I would argue that the reason that all other Batman video game adaptations were so awful in the years prior to Arkham Asylum was that they failed to satisfy that urge to embody the hero, a hero that is actually human. Perhaps the reason Superman video games haven’t been that great is that there’s actually a possibility (no matter how remote) of us being Batman - much moreso than the possibility of us physically being Superman.

Comic fans are often obsessed with the ideal of a perfect “continuity,” yet comics publishers have found it difficult to maintain total consistency in a story which has extended over 40-50 years and which unfolds across multiple titles. What might other kinds of transmedia producers learn by looking more closely at the comics industry’s decades-long struggle with fan effort to police continuity?

As is often the case, reality interferes with the ideal. When something is explored and mined by human beings over the course of decades, hiccups are bound to occur. Chains are great in spurring creative solutions to problems, but when pulled too tightly, they can cut off circulation. One way forces you to be creative, the other makes you a prisoner (as I talked about in our first question).

As for what transmedia storytellers can learn about fan-policed continuity? Embrace it. Make it part of the experience. The Marvel Universe of the 1960s is the single best effort at a shared universe put to paper. The Marvel Universe was the superheroes yes, but it was more than that. It was a family that contained the fans and foragers of the second generation of comics fans. And Lee, Kirby, and the Marvel Bullpen, while they took the work seriously, never took themselves seriously - at least outwardly. Look at the brilliant No-Prize (in its early incarnation) for example. An empty envelope for spotting a continuity error. Simple, cheeky, but effective. Most importantly? Fun and engaging.

As you note, comics production involves deep collaboration between artists and writers, a situation which closely parallels the challenges transmedia producers are facing in bringing together artists who are used to work within very different media. What might producers learn by studying more closely the “Marvel Method” or some of the other strategies for collaboration developed within the comics industry?

The Marvel Method is a leap of faith in the abilities of your collaborator, sort of the creative (and less humorous) version of “trust falls” at corporate retreats. But we have to look at where and when the Marvel Method worked best: it arose out of a need to get comics released on a reasonable schedule with a small team. It didn’t hurt that the “small team” consisted of Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, John Romita, Wally Wood, John Buscema - all master comics storytellers.

Kurosawa had a saying that I love, and can be applied to any collaborative effort - not just film. It was something along the lines of “if it comes out just the way I envisioned it, I’m unhappy.” The point of collaboration is to work with great people and let your vision become more than you envisioned in the first place. Otherwise, what’s the point in collaborating?

The lesson for producers? Work with the best and let them do their job.

Right now, there’s a lot of buzz about Marvel’s plans to develop a television series based on S.H.I.E.L.D. as part of its ongoing effort to build out a series of franchises, all linked together through The Avengers. What do you think has worked about this strategy for Marvel? Are there any concerns you might have about this approach?

I’m intrigued by the S.H.I.E.L.D. series and hope that it’s successful. It’ll be fascinating to watch it play out - both as a critic and a fan. It sounds like they’re on the right track, though I do have a few questions, which I try to keep updating   as new information becomes available. http://comicstoryworld.com/whedon-and-shield/.

As a whole, Marvel’s done a lot of things right with their “Cinematic Universe.” They’ve brought the concept of a shared universe to the mainstream in a way that no other film company has. They’ve brought some fun to the superhero film genre. Plus, they FINALLY got The Hulk right.

There have been missteps along the way - Iron Man 2 being the most egregious. By having a shared universe and distinct continuity within a non-serialized medium, Iron Man 2 felt more like Avengers .5, setting up plot points necessary for The Avengers to the detriment of the film as a whole.

I’m curious if there’s an endgame in mind for this iteration of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. With a reliance on a tight continuity between films, the longevity of the respective individual film franchises is questionable unless they take the James Bond series continuity as an inspiration. The James Bond series is a perfect example of a series that has both endured and achieved longevity through a loose continuity, sliding time scale, and different actors taking on the role. In a way, the Bond series is approached like a comic book series, but instead of pencillers changing the look of the character, actors change. But then again, there’s always the magical reboot button somewhere down the road. Either way, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a fascinating experience and experiment that gave us Joss Whedon’s Avengers, so I’m in for the ride.

TYLER WEAVER is a writer of stories in (and across) books, comics, radio, and film. He is the author of Comics for Film, Games and Animation: Using Comics to Construct Your Transmedia Storyworld and the writer/co-creator of Whiz!Bam!Pow!  a story experience of family, forgery, death rays, secret codes, laundry chutes, and the Golden Age of Comics. You can find him on Twitter under the creative handle of @tylerweaver.

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For another perspective on the relationship between comics and transmedia, check out this video essay produced by Drew Morton as an expansion of his PhD Dissertation from the UCLA film school. Here, Morton offers a critique of transmedia storytelling (primarily based on the limits of The Matrix model) before delving deeper into the forms of remediation he associates with the comic book film. Using the translation of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World across media, he introduces the concept of transmedia style as a unifying factor, showing how aspects of comics, video games, popular music, and cinema merge to create a unique look and feel for this property. I was lucky enough to be on Morton's dissertation committee so I am proud to be sharing this video with you today. It's another great example of the kinds of video essays that UCLA faculty and students are exploring right now. Again, I think the compelling use of visual and audio evidence makes scholarly concepts more broadly accessible, and it produces something that can be taught in classes or as here, embedded into blogs where it will reach audiences that would never look at an academic journal.

What Transmedia Producers Should Know About Comics: An Interview with Tyler Weaver (Part One)

From the very start, one of the powers of the superhero has been the capacity to leap across media in a single bound. Part of what cemented Superman's role in the American popular imagination was the degree to which he came at consumers from multiple media at once -- as a character who moved from comic books to comic strips, radio, animated shorts, live action serials, all in a matter of a few years, and then, television series, feature films, and computer games. This process of extending the mythology by absorbing elements associated with these other media has refreshed the character over time and made it feel that much more vivid in the minds of its fans. We will soon be seeing yet another transmedia reboot of the Man of Steel with the release this summer of a new feature film and all of the other stuff that is being constructed around it. Tyler Weaver's new book, Comics For Film, Games and Animation: Using Comics to Construct Your Transmedia Storyworld represents the latest in a growing series of books that seeks to explain the still emerging and evolving practices associated with transmedia. In this case, Weaver combines a healthy dose of transmedia theory and production advice with a rich history of the American comics tradition (one primarily focused around the evolution of the superhero as the now dominant genre in mainstream comics production). The book also provides us with thoughtful analysis of specific transmedia products and franchises, including some that represent the movement of comics into other media (such as Batman: Arkham City or Batman: The Animated Series), some representing the movement of other media franchises into comics (such as Halo and Star Trek), some representing the attempts of other media to create their own superhero characters (The Incredibles), and finally, a few (such as The Fountain) which have sought to create and integrate original narratives across comics and other media. The result will be a treat for those of us who have been life-long comics readers, but it may also be a revelation for those who are just discovering how central comics have become to the operations of contemporary popular culture.

More than that, Weaver makes a strong case that many of the practices of contemporary transmedia were prefigured or had their origins in the ways that DC and Marvel have managed their extended universes over the past half decade or more. A better understanding of comics, for example, might help us to think through the shifting balance between continuity and multiplicity, the challenges of maintaining seriality over an extended period of time, the risks of balancing the veteran's fascination with mastery with the new comer's interest in accessibility. Over the course of this interview, Weaver speaks to each of these issues and much more.

You cite the adage, “every comic book is someone’s first,” several times across the book.  Yet, while comics publishers often acknowledge this truism, there are also wide spread complaints that many current comics are impenetrable to first time readers, since they assume a hardcore fan deeply immersed in the continuity and mythology of the publisher’s own fictional universe. What does this suggest about the challenges of transmedia design?

I’m not convinced that the impenetrability of continuity and mythologies is at fault for keeping “new readers” away from the experience of buying comics on a regular basis. First, there are more demands on time and greater competition for attention from other media. Video games are to this generation what superhero comics were to kids in the 20^th century, with many featuring deep continuities and mythologies with the added appeal of “you are the hero” immersion and the opportunity to demonstrate expertise through accomplishments, rewards, and completing the game on heightening levels of difficulty.

But the problem goes much deeper than demands on time. While continuity is a chain that produces longevity, unlocks story potential and gives fans something to dig into and a means to demonstrate expertise, it can strangle innovation and storytelling when it is wielded in the name of nostalgia and isn’t in line with the values and storytelling tendencies of the current generation. I think that’s what we’re seeing now. I’m a lifelong comics lover, and I hate to say it, but the story offerings of the biggest and most visible publishers (there are exceptions) aren’t that compelling.

A great continuity and mythology gives audiences something to dig into and a reason to hunt for back issues and return month after month. The only way stories — be it a transmedia story experience, video game, comics, television, novel –– inspire that sort of emotional and time investment is through incredible storytelling and characters that the audience wants to revisit again and again.

Your book includes an extensive history of the notion of seriality, a principle which I have long contended is central to understanding contemporary transmedia. Yet, it has been surprisingly absent from most accounts of the arts of comics and graphic storytelling, appearing no where, say, in the work of Scott McCloud and Will Eisner. What do we gain by emphasizing the serial nature of American comics publication and what might we learn by seeing the expansive and interlocking narrative structures of long-form superhero comics as an exemplar for what contemporary transmedia practice might look like?

Seriality is an essential component in a storytelling equation:

Seriality plus Elasticity (or, Evolutionary Ability of a Character) plus Craft equals Longevity.

Spider-Man just celebrated his 50^th birthday. Batman? Going strong at 74. Superman? 75.  Superman alone has been published regularly for nearly 900 months, usually more than once a month in a variety of books (in the 1990s, he was up to five solo books including the quarterly Man of Tomorrow). When something is published for that long on a regular basis, the confines of reality and human lifespan make it inevitable that the original creator won’t be with the character all those years. Again, there are exceptions, such as Will Eisner and The Spirit, though I would argue that The Spirit is more known for the craft and innovations Eisner brought to the medium through that character than the character himself.

But, in most cases - such as Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man - this is where the elasticity of a character - the evolutionary ability of that character - comes into play. Each creative team can build upon, pay homage to, deviate, stretch, and bring their own vision to the character because of the serialized nature of American comics and the reality of reality.

Seriality and elasticity require great storytelling craft to connect with an audience.  There has to be some sort of primal connection between audience and mythology. I would argue that in the case of Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man, it’s their simplicity. Orphan from doomed planet (shown most brilliantly in Grant Morrison’s All-Star Superman in the space of four panels), through the love of a kindly couple, becomes symbol of truth and justice and Earth’s protector. Boy witnesses murder of parents, vows that no one will feel the same pain, dedicates life to war on crime. High school nerd bitten by spider, with great power comes great responsibility. All are vibrant mythologies and iconic representations of popular culture created by simplicity and populated with memorable characters that connect to audiences on a primal level.

Transmedia storytellers should understand this equation and consider it in the construction of their stories. How long do they want the experience to last? Is it a finite experience? An ongoing one? How can they craft enduring characters that can evolve - both with technology and with the vision of new creators (like Halo and the leap from Bungie to 343 Industries)?

TYLER WEAVER is a writer of stories in (and across) books, comics, radio, and film. He is the author of Comics for Film, Games and Animation: Using Comics to Construct Your Transmedia Storyworld and the writer/co-creator of Whiz!Bam!Pow!  a story experience of family, forgery, death rays, secret codes, laundry chutes, and the Golden Age of Comics. You can find him on Twitter under the creative handle of @tylerweaver.

There She Blows! Reading in a Participatory Culture and Flows of Reading Launch Today

 

Today marks the release of not one but two closely related New Media Literacies publications. The first is a new print book, Reading in a Participatory Culture: Remixing Moby-Dick for the Literature Classroom, which is being published by Teacher's College Press in collaboration with the National Writing Project. I have not seen the completed book yet myself, but we are told that they will starting shipping copies as of Feb. 22.

The second is Flows of Reading, a digital book, which I have developed with Erin Reilly,the Creative Director of the Annenberg Innovation Lab, and Ritesh Mehta, a PhD candidate in the Annenberg School of Journalism and Communication here at USC. Flows of Reading is online and freely accessible, so check it out here.

This project started back when I was at MIT and these two release represent the culmination of more than six years of work. We tell part of the story in the opening chapter of the book, which you can read here. Here's an excerpt:

At first glance, playwright, youth organizer, and community activist Ricardo Pitts-Wiley might seem like a peculiar inspiration for a book about digital media and participatory culture. Although Pitts-Wiley is enthusiastic about the potential of new media, much of his work is distinctly low-tech.  He writes and produces remixed versions of such classics as Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for a traditional venue: the community stage.

But something magical—something participatory—happens on that stage. First, his plays’ universal themes are seasoned with immediacy, with issues that resonate with his community. His play Moby-Dick: Then and Now, for example, intermingles the themes of Captain Ahab’s obsessions, his fatalism, his willingness to place his crew in peril, with contemporary urban gang culture. In Pitts-Wiley’s retelling, Ahab becomes Alba, a teenaged girl whose brother has been killed by a “WhiteThing” a mysterious figure for the international cocaine cartel; she devotes her life to finding, and killing, those responsible for her brother’s death.

In Moby-Dick: Then and Now, Pitts-Wiley chose not simply to revise the story, but to incorporate aspects of Melville’s version in counterpoint with Alba’s quest for vengeance. As the young actors pace the stage, telling their story in contemporary garb, lingo, and swagger, a literal scaffold above their heads holds a second set of actors who give life to Melville’s original tale. The “then” half of the cast are generally older and whiter than the adolescent, mixed-race “now” actors. The play’s meaning lies in the juxtaposition between these two very different worlds, a juxtaposition sometimes showing commonalities, sometimes contrasts.

Reading in a Participatory Culture reflects an equally dramatic meeting between worlds. Project New Media Literacies emerged from the MacArthur Foundation’s ground-breaking commitment to create a field around digital media and learning. The Foundation sought researchers who would investigate how young people learned outside of the formal educational setting–through their game play, their fannish participation, “hanging out, messing around, and geeking out” (Ito et al. 2010). The goal was to bring insights drawn from these sites of informal learning to the institutions—schools, museums, and libraries–that impact young people’s lives. Right now, many young people are deprived of those most effective learning tools and practices as they step inside the technology-free zone characterizing many schools, while other young people, who lack access to these experiences outside of school, are doubly deprived because schools are not helping them to catch up to their more highly connected peers.

Project New Media Literacies—first at MIT and now at USC–has brought together a multidisciplinary team of media researchers, designers, and educators to develop new curricular and pedagogical models that could contribute to this larger project.  Our work has been informed by Henry Jenkins’ background as a media scholar focused on fan communities and popular culture and by the applied expertise of Erin Reilly, who had previously helped to create Zoey’s Room, a widely acclaimed on-line learning community that employs participatory practices to get young women more engaged with science and technology. Our team brought together educational researchers, such as Katie Clinton, who studied under James Paul Gee, and Jenna McWilliams,  who had an MFA in creative writing and teaching experience in rhetoric and composition, with people like Anna Van Someren, who had done community-based media education through the YWCA and who had worked as a professional videomaker. Flourish Klink, who had helped to organize the influential Fan Fiction Alley website, which provides beta reading for amateur writers to hone their skills, and Lana Swartz who had been a classroom teacher working with special need children, also joined the research group.  And our development and field testing of curricular resources involved us in collaborating both with other academic researchers, such as Howard Gardner’s Good Play Project at Harvard, with whom we developed a casebook on ethics and new media, and Dan Hickey, an expert on participatory assessment at Indiana University. We also worked with youth-focused organizations such as Global Kids, with classroom teachers such as Judith Nierenberg and Lynn Sykes in Massachusetts, and Becky Rupert in Indiana, who were rethinking and reworking our materials for their instructional purposes, and with scholars such as Wyn Kelley who had long sought new ways to make Melville’s works come alive in classrooms around the country.

Reading in a Participatory Culture is targeted primarily at educators (inside and outside formal schooling structures) who want to share with their students a love for reading and for the creative process and who recognize the value of adopting a more participatory model of pedagogy. Our approach starts with a reconsideration of what it means to read, recognizing that we read in different ways for different goals and with different outcomes depending on what motivates us to engage with a given text.  Literary scholar Wyn Kelley, Theater director/playwrite Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, actor Rudy Cabrera, and myself, writing as a fan and media scholar, each describe our complex and evolving relations with Moby-Dick, and encourage teachers and students to reflect more about their own experiences as readers. We use the idea of remix as a central concept running through the book, exploring how Pitts-Wiley remixed Moby-Dick, how Herman Melville remixed many elements of 19th century whaling culture, how other artists have remixed Melville's work through the years, and what it might mean for students and fans to engage creatively rather than simply critically with literary and media texts. Along the way, we provide a fuller explanation and assessment of what worked as we moved towards a more participatory culture oriented approach to teaching classic literary texts in the high school classroom.

Here's a few early responses to the book:

"In Reading in a Participatory Culture, Media Studies meets the Great White Whale in the English Classroom. This book is one of the most exciting and breathtaking works on English education ever written. At the same time it is must reading for anyone interested in digital media, digital culture, and learning in the 21st Century." — James Paul Gee, Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies, Arizona State University, and author of The Anti-Education Era

 ''An inspirational approach to democratizing the cultural canon and restoring classrooms to expansive educational purposes grounded in a participatory ethos. It explains in clear, accessible, and practically informative terms the New Media Literacies philosophy of reading and writing to prepare today's students for the world they must build -- together, collaboratively -- tomorrow. Reading in a Participatory Culture provides rich descriptions of experiences and perspectives of readers and writers, teachers, and learners who understand Moby-Dick as itself an instance of cultural remix and, in turn, a living creation to be remixed by all who take delight in it -- especially those who can come to take delight in it by being introduced to it as part of their education.'' -- Colin Lankshear, Adjunct Professor, James Cook University, Australia

Flows of Reading takes this process to the next level. We have created a rich environment designed to encourage close critical engagement not only with Moby-Dick but a range of other texts, including the children's picture book, Flotsam; Harry Potter; Hunger Games; and Lord of the Rings. We want to demonstrate that the book's approach can be applied to many different kinds of texts and may revitalize how we teach a diversity of forms of human expression.  We look at many different adaptions and remixes of Moby-Dick from the films featuring Gregory Peck and Patrick Stewart as Ahab to MC Lar's music video, "Ahab" and Pitts-Wiley's Moby-Dick: Then and Now stage production to works that evoke Moby-Dick less directly, including Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan and Battlestar Galacitca's "Scar."

We share videos produced by the Project New Media Literacies team dealing not only with Moby-Dick but a range of cultural practices, including cosplay, animation, graffiti, and remix in music, but we also share many other clips, including a great series of videos on fan bidding produced by the Organization for Transformative Works and others produced by the Harry Potter Alliance. Altogether, there are more than 200 media elements incorporated into Flows of Reading.

We share classroom activities which were part of the original curriculum and we share "challenges" produced using our new PLAYground platform.  The PLAYground platform is designed to allow teachers and students alike to produce and share multimedia "challenges" and to remix each other's work for new purposes and contexts. Think of it as Scratch for culture rather than code. In this case, it allows us to take the participatory pedagogy approach to the next level: this is not simply a book or a multimedia experience teacher's consume; it is a community of readers within which they can participate and we are creating a space where they can make their own contributions to this project.

This digital book was built using Scaler, a project of the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture at USC, and we are sharing the clips through Critical Commons, another USC initiative, which is intend to promote fair use of our shared culture for academic and creative purposes. We see this project as one which fuses traditional approaches to literature instruction with ideas drawn from Cultural Studies and Media Literacy, and we hope that the project provokes others to think about what can be learned at the intersection between high and popular culture.

And we also are using this project to explore how a classic work by a "dead white male writer" can contribute to multicultural education. Pitts-Wiley argues that Moby-Dick is already a multicultural work: as he explains, "everyone was already on that boat!" but we also show many different strategies for bringing alternative perspectives to bear on the book -- from a discussion of how artists and critics have responded to the absence of well-developed female characters in Moby-Dick to an exploration of contemporary Maori culture inspired by what Melville tells us about Quequeg's background. Along the way, we consider everything from the history of white appropriation of black music to the ways that Japanese and American subcultures build community and identity through cross-cultural borrowings.

Finally, we have some sections which deal directly with the representation of violence in literary and popular culture texts, recognizing that anxieties about media violence are concerns that teachers regularly must confront in their classrooms.  We hope that you will check out Flows of Reading and even more so, we hope that it offers practical models and resources that educators may use to remodel how they teach Moby-Dick and other texts in their curriculum.

This project remains a work in progress. There are still some elements we hope to add or fix in the coming weeks, but it is now open to business, thanks to the hard work of Erin Reilly, Ritesh Mehta, and the other members of their team. (See the acknowledgements section in the digital book itself.)

Check it out. Participate. Spread the word. Share your insights with us.

Before and After Mickey: An Interview with Donald Crafton (Part Four)

Much has been written in recent years about the persistence of racist stereotypes and caricatures in studio era animation, especially as we are encountering fuller versions of cartoons which had been re-edited to match more contemporary sensibilities when they were aired on television. What might a performance studies approach to animation contribute to our understanding of this issue?  

Well, again, the distribution of old cartoons was not that different from old mainstream movies that, when shown on TV or released on VHS, had minstrel, blackface, and race gags edited out. That such imagery and performances were racist is beyond doubt; the question revolves around whether its usage was "innocent" or hurtfully intended, which is complex. My thought is that racism is never benign, but may not have been instrumental, that is, intentionally hurtful. I also think that racism is a historical and cultural product and so must be contextualized.

In the book I discuss the racism in animation within the framework of the vaudeville aesthetic, which included acts, gags, and personae imported from minstrel shows. There are literal performances of race, as when Mickey "blacks up" to play a part in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (Mickey's Mellerdrammer).

And there are aspects of films that are racially performative in the sense that being a toon is itself a figure of otherness with potentially racist dimensions. (I pointed this out about Felix the Cat in Before Mickey too.) Race stereotypes, along with national, ethnic, gender, and sexual stereotypes, are excellent examples of figurative performances because these roles depict nonindividualized characters who stand-in for the entire group.

Characters like Betty Boop are often discussed alongside Greta Garbo as “stars” and they often got represented side by side in studio era cartoons. In what ways is this an appropriate or inappropriate description of the kinds of functions they play in the studio era?

Trying to explain stardom has left many distinguished scholars scratching their heads. I add another dimension to the debates by insisting that toons have the same claim to stardom as human movie stars like Garbo, or stars from stage and athletics as well. The reason, as I mentioned earlier, is that all star personae are media constructions. While theorists like to point out the tension between the on- and off-screen lives of movie stars, in fact, this is specious because those alleged off-screen lives are fictions as much as the on-screen lives. The humanness of stars actually is irrelevant, since the public creates stardom, not the actor, studio, or publicity machine.

Lots of cartoons, from Mickey's Gala Premier to What's Up, Doc?, give us intelligent critiques of the animated character within the star system and show how it was rigged against toons.

Donald Graham turns out to be a recurring figure across the book. Who was he and what role did he play in shaping studio era American animation?

While the credit for defining the new approach to animation in the 1930s rightly goes to the directors and animators, the conceptual and visual artists who inspired and taught them have been forgotten. That's the case with Don Graham at the Disney studio. In the late 1920s he was an art teacher at the Chouinard Institute of the Arts, the predecessor of Cal Arts. When Disney was beginning the process of retraining his animators in what would become the embodied approach, he brought in Graham and other instructors from Chouinard to set up art classes on the studio premises. Graham gave them the classical training that most had never had. There were lectures and classes on lighting, shadows, composing in space, perspective, and the relation of the character's psychology to its environment. Graham was also a big advocate of embodied personalities, telling the animators to think of the motives, story functions, and outcomes of an action before beginning to animate it. He insisted that the characters must appear to be thinking. I believe that it was Graham who was primarily responsible for realizing Disney's West Coast style, and since that was so influential, Graham became a major contributor, but unsung.

“Right Wing Talk Radio Duck” is a widely circulated remix of Walt Disney cartoon footage mashed up with Glenn Beck’s radio commentary, which re-opened debates about the kinds of “ideologies” at work within Disney animation. In the book, you use Three Little Pigs to explore the competing claims made about the political and social effects of cartoons in the 1930s. What roles have cartoons played in our ongoing debate about the politics of entertainment?

Thanks for alerting me to this brilliant piece. Hilarious! Actually, Beck’s response is also hilarious, since it basically confirms the satirical points made about his manic irrational outbursts in the cartoon. What fools these mortals be.

Cartoons have always been overtly or covertly produced to spread propaganda. Dziga Vertov wisely set up an animation unit in his Soviet film studio to produce propaganda cartoons, and all the American animation studios cranked out patriotic films for the war effort. WWII was truly Popeye and Donald Duck’s finest hour. Of course the Japanese had propaganda animation too, some of which we are just now seeing.

Disney, although the corporation resists it, has become “vernacular,” an element of our everyday lives. Therefore it’s also a target for all manner of parodies, satires, and counter-cultural attacks, as in the notorious “Air Pirates Funnies” comics that wound up in the courts for years.[2] As vernacular texts the studio’s output is susceptible to counter-readings by fans or anyone else.

Social theorists tell us that everything happens for ideological reasons whether we recognize them or not, and the "culture industry" is where political motives are the most pervasive and the most pernicious because they're readily disguised and misrecognized. Because they're so popular, Disney cultural products have always been prime suspects as proponents of ideology. There's the famous analysis of Disney's alleged efforts to shape the consciousness of Latin American comic book consumers called How To Read Donald Duck.^[3] The authors argue convincingly that the Spanish language versions of Disney comics in the 50s and 60s were doctored to promote the US and capitalism and to paint Communism in a bad light. In more recent animated features there are many viewers who have seen the studio’s efforts to define female adolescents by the portrayals of Wendy, Alice and eventually the princesses. Various other groups (who usually are against these things) perceive pro-gay, pro-sex, pro-feminist critiques hidden within modern Disney films. Simply asking such questions, especially when they're disseminated via the Internet, shows that consumers' readings have the power to ignore or re-write the producers' intended messages. It also reveals that ideology isn't easy to read. I show how The Three Little Pigs' reception from 1933 to the present has moved all over the political spectrum. Even now, what that film "means" and what secret agendas, if any, were hidden inside it remain open questions. (A riff on Pigs, appropriately, was the first installment in the “Air Pirates” comics series.) It turns out that it's hard to program ideology in mass cultural products because audiences can't be relied on to decode the subliminal meanings “correctly,” and tend to do their own programming.

With the release of the UPA cartoons on DVD, and the publication of books such as Cartoon Modern,[4] there has been a growing interest in the more stylized and abstracted cartoon spaces of the 1950s, which are often read in opposition to supposedly more "Classical” styles, especially that associated with Disney in the 1930s. What might your book contribute to our understanding of the relationship between studio-era animation and modernist movements in the art world?

Although the economic troubles associated with WWII usually are given as the cause of Disney’s troubles in the 1940s, I point out that the studio’s commitment to highly labor intensive and mechanically sophisticated apparatus succeeded in producing films that rivaled Hollywood, but the acting in these expensive ventures like Bambi didn’t please the public as in the old days. In fact, critics complained that the emotions were saccharine and over the top, especially the shooting of Bambi’s mother—which still sets my students weeping.

The embodied performances were becoming unsatisfying or even detrimental to the films’ popularity. At the same time, the simplified visual style of mid-century modern art is being picked up by art students and disseminated to the public through many outlets. Even in the Disney product, one sees infusions of “New York Style,” not only in Dumbo, but also in the compilation films released during and just after the war, starting with Saludos Amigos and Three Caballeros.

After the war, Disney films slowly start looking more like Warner Bros. cartoons and even UPA cartoons. I think that the studio realized that embodiment did not necessarily require massive engineering, and that visual minimalism could still generate emotional engagement and audience participation if the story was good.

The video game, Epic Mickey, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Kim Deitch's Waldo the Cat comics are among a much wider array of recent popular narratives which mythologize the history of American animation. Each acts as if animated characters were, in some sense, real personalities who exerted a strong influence on the production process. What do these contemporary works owe to a much older history of attempts to portray what you describe as the "agency" of animated characters?

Yes, toying with who has the agency, that is, the ability to control themselves and others, including their creators, or to resist control, is one of the original animation themes. I describe agency as a power grid, with the currents flowing from various sources—producers, creators, consumers, and the toon characters themselves to the extent that their animators and viewers imagine them as having it. Waldo takes the trope to an extreme and I love the mind-boggling complexity in Deitch’s comics. Another example you’d like is McCay: La quatrième dimension,[5] a graphic novel where Gertie the dinosaur is a living animal as well as Winsor McCay’s cartoon creation. There are lots of modern cartoons that play with the conflict between animator and animated, but one that’s especially wonderful is George Griffin’s Lineage (1980), an artistic autobiography that combines animation history, his animated character, and himself back to their common ancestry in the days when cinema was a vaudeville attraction.

I’m certain, Henry, that there’s a toon version of you out there, somewhere.

T-T-T-That's All Folks!

---

^[1] “The Veiled Genealogies of Animation and Cinema,” Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 6:2 (July 2011), 93-110.

[2] Bob Levin, The Pirates and The Mouse: Disney's War Against the Counterculture. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2003.

^[3] Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic. Amsterdam: International General, 1984.

[4] Amid Amidi, Cartoon Modern: Style and Design in 1950s Animation. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2006.

[5] Thierry Smolderen and Jean-Philippe Bramanti, McCay Volume 4: La Quatrième Dimension. Paris: Guy Delcourt Productions, 2006.

A specialist in film history and visual culture, Donald Crafton earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan, his master’s degree from the University of Iowa, and a master’s and doctorate from Yale University. He was the founding director of the Yale Film Study Center, and served as director of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. Crafton chaired the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at Notre Dame from 1997 to 2002 and 2008-2010, and the Department of Music from 2004-2007.

Crafton's research interests are in film history and visual culture. His most recent publications are Shadow of a Mouse: Performance, Belief, and World-Making in Animation (2013) and The Talkies: American Cinema's Transition to Sound, 1926-1931 (California, 1999). He was named Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2000 and was the recipient of an NEH Fellowship for 2003-04. The World Festival of Animation presented him in 2004 with an award for his contributions to animation theory. He received the University of Notre Dame's Presidential Award in 2007.

Before and After Mickey: An Interview with Donald Crafton (Part Three)

You write in the opening of the book that animation created a new kind of film performance, and you suggest throughout that it may seem radical or counterintuitive to discuss animation as a kind of performance. In what ways must performance studies be rethought in order to apply to animated film? And conversely, what might the study of film animation contribute to our understanding of live action performance in films?

So many questions, Henry! Good ones, too. I maintain that theatrical animation is a version of cinema and not some completely different form of expression or medium. As you know, it's trendy now to claim that all cinema is a subset of animation and now that cinema's dead, animation has made a phoenix-like return as digital fx and CGI.^[1] I don't think so. There have always been uses of animation techniques outside of cinema—for instruction, for avant-garde expression, scientific imaging, advertising, etc.—but for me "cinema" is a constellation of things. Things like a social experience (especially in the twentieth century), an entertainment enterprise (in the business sense of the word), storytelling and spectacle, a cultural barometer, and potentially an art, to name the most obvious. Borrowing an excellent term from Thomas Lamarre, cinema has always been a multilectical performance, capable of many readings and participating in various social orders. CGI may be subsumed inside that performance in films like The Life of Pi, or it may enable performances outside the cinematic experience as a video game, Internet avatar, or whatever. I really don't see a conflict here.

The discipline known as performance studies is almost unknown to most film studies specialists. And most performance studies scholars seem to be oblivious to or in denial of the possibility that movies, television, video games, virtual reality, etc. are also performances. (There are some enlightened exceptions, like Noël Carroll.) One of the devious schemes in Shadow of a Mouse is to break down the disciplinary walls between these two pursuits of knowledge. I'd like us to consider media performances and stage performances using the same tools and criteria. For example, I insist that human actors on stage or on film and toon actors in media are all fictive and imaginative constructions, and whatever can be said about one class of performer may be said about the other. I provocatively claim that toons are as "live" as any other movie actor. After you read it, I know you'll be convinced!

In Before Mickey, you suggest that the trope of the hand of the animator played important roles in explaining and foregrounding the process of animation for early film audiences. Yet, your examples throughout the book suggest that the relationship between the animator and his characters remains a central concern well in the 1930s. What kinds of meanings get attached to this relationship in these studio era works?

When I first conceived of animated cinema as a performance art (it was in a talk I gave at DreamWorks Animation about a dozen years ago), it became clear to me that the "hand of the animator" trope was much more pervasive and persistent than the rather short shelf life I originally had ascribed to it, and that it was best understood as a performative gesture and not some vague anthropological or psychological expression (although those are performances too). Actually, “the hand of the artist” is a figurative performance because it casts the animator or artist as a conventional symbol of the act of creation that is manifested in all cultures and times. Although the image of the hand endowing its creation with "life" has religious connotations, the trope doesn't have to be mystical or theological. Usually it's just a convenient artistic device, a stock way of starting a film. As a performance it serves two functions. It says, "I, the animator, am creating this toon being for your edification and so you should assume that I have godlike or artistic mojo." And it says, "Imagine that you, the movie watcher, are also an animator and you are bringing this being to life."

In the earliest films the hand of the artist-animator or his performing body often was shown literally making the film. Think of Winsor McCay and his Gertie, or Max Fleischer and Ko-Ko the clown. But this seldom happened during the classicizing of the cartoon that I mentioned earlier—although the literal hand motif never went away altogether. Instead the interventionist filmmaker became either an implied absence (invisible but making us aware of him/her) or a symbolic creative presence in the narrative. Quick examples would be the adaptation of the mainstream cinema convention of voice-over narration, as when the animator-narrator explains the faux-travelogue locales in Avery's The Isle of Pingo Pongo, or Bug's off-screen hanky panky in Duck Amuck.

As I read your book, I found myself thinking about the role of personification and anthropomorphization in 1930s animation. There are scenes in the Fleischer Brothers films where it seems every element on the screen has agency. How might our inability to separate figure from field impact an understanding of animation as performance?

This is very perceptive. As I think about it, your idea of universal agency in cartoons is another reason for regarding these films as performative. Unlike a non-animated film shot with actors before a camera, in animation nothing is an accident. Everything is motivated, even if its motive is to create the impression that it's unmotivated or accidental. The jokes in cartoons that the frame has slipped in the projector or that there's a hair in the film gate are carefully scripted and executed "accidents." So yes, everything has agency and participates in the show, even the reporter's pen in Betty Boop's Rise to Fame that grows a butt and starts dancing the hula along with Betty. That also suggests that everything has the potential to be anthropomorphic, which is another way of saying to perform as if human.

There is non-anthropomorphic animation to be sure, like industrial films showing how to assemble a motor let's say. But it's hard to imagine what a non-anthropomorphic cartoon or animated feature would look like, isn't it? As the great Robert Benchley short The Sex Life of the Polyp shows, even simple animated squiggles can be personified as human.

You write, "If Hollywood cartoons have a soul, it is vaudeville." What does screen animation take from vaudeville? Why do you think vaudeville images were so pervasive in studio-era animation?

My historical research revealed that vaudeville and studio animation were deeply intertwined. There were material connections. Cartoons, especially Paul Terry's Aesop's Fables series (which were funded by a vaudeville circuit), were regularly screened as "acts" on live programs. And vaudeville acts were frequently represented within cartoons. Mickey's early appearances often depict him as a stage entertainer. And the Fleischers filmed actual vaud performers such as Cab Calloway and the Royal Samoans.

But the connection also extends to animation's adherence to a vaudevillesque aesthetic (a concept I borrowed from you when you discussed early sound comedy. Thanks!). The short films pack a punch, they are structured like stage business (sometimes but not necessarily on an actual drawn stage), with repartee between figurative character types, slapstick, singing and dancing, and a "wow finish." The films assume that their viewers had either contemporary experience with vaudeville forms or a memory of them (perpetuated by the movies and radio as much as by studio cartoons).

A specialist in film history and visual culture, Donald Crafton earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan, his master’s degree from the University of Iowa, and a master’s and doctorate from Yale University. He was the founding director of the Yale Film Study Center, and served as director of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. Crafton chaired the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at Notre Dame from 1997 to 2002 and 2008-2010, and the Department of Music from 2004-2007.

Crafton's research interests are in film history and visual culture. His most recent publications are Shadow of a Mouse: Performance, Belief, and World-Making in Animation (2013) and The Talkies: American Cinema's Transition to Sound, 1926-1931 (California, 1999). He was named Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2000 and was the recipient of an NEH Fellowship for 2003-04. The World Festival of Animation presented him in 2004 with an award for his contributions to animation theory. He received the University of Notre Dame's Presidential Award in 2007.

Before and After Mickey: An Interview with Donald Crafton (Part Two)

Tell us more about the distinction you draw in the book between figurative and embodied performance. What assumptions about the nature of acting and spectatorship are implicit in these different styles of animated performance? What accounts for the shifting popularity of these different models over time?

 

Whether a performance is figurative or embodied stems from how the behaviors were intended by the animators and understood by the viewers (which often are not the same experience). They aren't opposites; they are registers that may overlap, like bass and treble adjustments. Figurative performances are given by cartoon characters (which I call toons, as used in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?) whose interest derives mainly from their exaggerated physical traits. These could be a funny walk, caricatural references outside the film, or a distinctive way of talking (like Goofy's “Uh-hyult, uh-hyult”).

Think of early Mickey or early Bugs. They were beings who were types (small-town boy and slick trickster, respectively). Their behavior was hostage to the collections of attributes, quirks and attitudes that constituted their actions. So Mickey was a caricature that blended recognizable traits borrowed from Charles Lindbergh and Buster Keaton; Bugs was hyperactive and nutty. Several have pointed out that he’s a schnorer, a friend or guest who takes excessive liberties. The repetition of their singular mannerisms was part of the humor. The figurative performance mode wasn’t limited to animation. Comedians like Harry Langdon, Jacques Tati, Roberto Benigni, Jerry Lewis, and Woody Allen in his first films exploited it too.

Embodied performance reflects animators' Stanislavskian goals and their expectations (or hopes) that viewers' empathetic understanding and belief in the temperament and uniqueness of the character would understand, accept, and “complete” it. The later 'thirties Mickey, say in Moose Hunters, integrates him into a believable environment. He responds to it as the viewer or any individual might, with some degree of unpredictability. He engages in banter and give-and-take with Donald and Goofy, who are foils with their own individuality. The animators and we spectators readily imbue them with characteristics that go beyond their simple existence. We care about the fate of the chums and the outcome of the story.

It may be too complicated to explain the mechanics of the change here, but the figurative and embodied modes complemented and competed all through the 1930s and 40s. Although Disney took his filmmaking far in the embodied direction, Langer shows that the figurative New York style could intrude even in that studio, as in the "Pink Elephants on Parade" number in Dumbo. Most of the Disney princes are figurative too—necessary placeholders in the plots in need of some "princeness" to redeem the princesses.

For various reasons, the public and critics grew tired of the embodied approach. The popularity of films from Warner Bros., MGM, and later from UPA avoided the embodied style or actively parodied it (Avery's Screwy Squirrel, Jones' What's Opera, Doc?).

It also became clear that the enormous investment in hardware (such as multiplane cameras) and the immense animation infrastructure of the Disney studio was not necessary to achieve empathetic characters. There’s Wile E. Coyote, naturally, but UPA's Gerald McBoing Boing might be the best example. Jones' geometric romance in The Dot and the Line, seen in this light, tested the minimal graphic investment needed to "embody" character.

Today there are plenty of examples of embodied acting in animation—Disney/Pixar's Up or Brave, for instance, which have a retro feel because of it, and despite their sleek digital surfaces.

The vast majority of animation, though, is figurative and exists in work for television and video games. These are stock characters in conventional roles doing conventional things. The personality is supplied imaginatively by the viewer/user, or programmed as a combination of preselected attributes.

Your titles call attention to the degree to which Walt Disney has dominated our understanding of American animation, even as your books make a concerted effort to discuss a much broader range of animators and studios. Why do you think animation history still remains so deeply under the shadow of the Mouse?

Having just done some holiday shopping at the Disney store, I’m inclined to say that it's all about character. The Disney formula for "toons" always has and continues to emphasize a certain definition of personality. There's limited individuality, meaning that certain expressive behaviors are allowed—let's say Ariel's rebellious actions—but never exceed the tightly enclosed limits of the character as a figure—those defining the role of "princess" in the mermaid's case. Another aspect that makes Disney characters eternal, to borrow the marketing lingo for a moment, is that they are believable versions of people, acting out childlike behaviors. We all know (or maybe are) someone like that. Peter Pan is one of those types. Disney films also are full of adolescent folks playing at being grownup—Ariel, Tiana, Wendy, and Snow White (and Remy, if rats have adolescence). But even that is regressive, since their behaviors are clearly childish. They’re playing house. They are not believable performances of adulthood (which can be relatively boring).

Cartoon characters, Disney's especially, succeed because they are designed to invite consumers to complete them imaginatively and to fully embody them. These characters often are diminutive versions of imagined selves. The possibilities are endless—aggressive, passive, maternal/paternal, sexy, smart, and even plush avatars. There was a stuffed Pumbaa in the store that I found particularly sympathetic…. Now conglomerate Disney enters our lives at some level almost daily, and whether these entertainment commodities are cinematic, or athletic in the case of ESPN, or the transcendental fantasies of the theme parks and cruises, or the plastic princesses, the company's in the business of selling mediatized bodies performing, whether real, simulated or virtual.

Of course, Mouse, as Variety calls Disney, has been perfecting the machinery for bringing this concept to consumers by way of various points of retail merchandizing for about 80 years. As for the animated films, the studio during its successful periods has been adept at anticipating and reacting to consumer interests. The immediate embrace of Winnie the Pooh as a collectible object and then the gradual acceptance of "Princess" as a desired existential category. On the contrary, we could cite the lack of traction for other franchises like Merlin and King Arthur (The Sword in the Stone), or "Kevin Flynn" (Tron). This suggests that animated filmmaking is like other Hollywood enterprises in the sense that box office trends ultimately are unfathomable because consumer response remains largely unpredictable.

A specialist in film history and visual culture, Donald Crafton earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan, his master’s degree from the University of Iowa, and a master’s and doctorate from Yale University. He was the founding director of the Yale Film Study Center, and served as director of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. Crafton chaired the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at Notre Dame from 1997 to 2002 and 2008-2010, and the Department of Music from 2004-2007.

Crafton's research interests are in film history and visual culture. His most recent publications are Shadow of a Mouse: Performance, Belief, and World-Making in Animation (2013) and The Talkies: American Cinema's Transition to Sound, 1926-1931 (California, 1999). He was named Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2000 and was the recipient of an NEH Fellowship for 2003-04. The World Festival of Animation presented him in 2004 with an award for his contributions to animation theory. He received the University of Notre Dame's Presidential Award in 2007.

Before and After Mickey: An Interview with Donald Crafton (Part One)

When I was in graduate school, I was lucky enough to be a teaching assistant to Donald Crafton. At the time, Crafton had recently published two important books on the history of animation -- Before Mickey (which explored the role of the cartoon in silent cinema) and Emil Cohl, Caricature, and Film, which dealt with one of the great animation pioneers from Europe. Taken together, the two books made a significant contribution to opening up the space of animation as a major field for scholarly research. Now, several decades later, Crafton has released a new book, Shadow of a Mouse: Performance, Belief, and World-Making. As the book's title suggests, Crafton's latest project expands the time line of his earlier work, allowing us to understand more fully how he might apply his analytic approach to think about sound era animation, especially the works of Walt Disney, but also a range of his contemporaries. Second, as the title suggests, Crafton's focus here is on what performance studies approaches might tell us about the study of animation and vice-versa. The result is contemporary genre criticism at its very best -- drawing on a broad corpus of works, combining history and analysis in imaginative ways, providing new ways to look at films we thought we knew well, and in the process, rejiggering the cannon to focus our attention on people and projects that have largely faded from view. As always, the writing is a pleasure to read and there is a sense here of someone bringing a career's worth of classroom insights into a form which can be shared with a larger public. I know because I had a chance to take Crafton's seminar in animation at the University of Wisconsin back in the day and came away with an appreciation of the work involved in plowing through multitudes of animated shorts and features to develop a deep appreciation of how the form evolved over time.

In this interview, Crafton offers us a guided tour of a diverse range of examples of classic studio-era animated works, helping us to see the core differences in how they think about the animation process -- especially the construction of character and the figuration of the cartoon body. Along the way, he offers us some insights into the ideological work that cartoons have performed and the ways contemporary popular culture, including games and comics, still lives under "the shadow of a mouse." Enjoy! Your earlier work Before Mickey recounted the first few decades of animation, while The Shadow of a Mouse takes us into the 1930s. What do you see as the major transitions (beyond the obvious one, sound) that take place in animation between these two periods?

The big change was in the performativity of 1920s and 1930s cartoons. I mean that just about everyone at the time understood that the basic concept of the films as performances was changing. Unlike in mainstream cinema, which accommodated the transition to sound over the thirties' early years and settled back into a modified "classical Hollywood" style, American animated cinema became transformed fundamentally. The earlier cartoons tended to incorporate characters that pre-existed in comic strips, like Krazy Kat, or that were simulacra of comics characters, like Farmer Al Falfa and Felix the Cat. I call these performances figurative because the characters are formulaic, caricatures, refer to characters outside the films, or behave as conventional stock characters. The films consisted of interchangeable gags—what you call "accordion" structures in What Made Pistachios Nuts?, Henry.

In the 1930s, though, this freewheeling approach began giving way to more complex cinema structures in which character depth, gags, pictorial space, and emotional engagement were unified. There was a classicism analogous to what had developed in mainstream non-animated filmmaking in the late 'teens. This was something new in cartooning.

Studio animators often spoke of the “personality” of animated characters. What did they mean by that term and what strategies did they use to give drawn figures “personalities”

"Personality animation"  was a phrase that emerged mainly from Disney's shop. I think the term embodied animation captures better what the animators were aiming for. The embodied character has distinctive features of expression and patterns of idiosyncratic movement—“personality”—but also develops individuality over the course of multiple film appearances through repetition and variation. He or she can think and act spontaneously, that is, have their own agency aside from the animator’s influence.

A good example is Popeye. He was imported from the comics too ("The Thimble Theatre"), and the cartoons had plenty of anarchistic gags, and his early performances were highly figurative. Eventually, however, Popeye came to have a complex character built around making the right ethical decision to change the outcome of the plot. Audiences came to learn of his quirks, idiosyncratic behaviors and surprising attitudes—like his dislike of children, but his paternal affection for baby Swee’Pea. But they also started appreciating his moral authority and the degree to which his lower-class “swab” character was capable of sophisticated ideas. Not to mention his fistic prowess. So his personality is just one aspect of the character's role in the stories. Not that these Popeye stories were always coherent; sometimes the narratives were pretty choppy.

Comparing a relatively fully embodied Popeye performance from the mid-to-late 1930s to figurative Ko-Ko the clown from the mid-1920s says it all about the evolution of personality outside Disney. Betty Boop's performances, in 1930-33, were transitional, as in Betty Boop's Bamboo Isle, from 1932, which is chockfull of eye-popping, show-stopping effects, but still tells a story—although it's a simple and rather perfunctory one. All three examples, I hardly need to mention, come from the same studio: the Fleischer brothers.

Historian Mark Langer has proposed that there was a geographical distinction between the two attitudes toward performativity (without using the word). He sees a more figurative New York Style in contrast to the embodiment trending West Coast Style. He characterized the filmmakers in the big NYC studios (Fleischer, Sullivan, Terry, Van Beuren) who worked mainly in a high-contrast black-and-white comic-strip style as continuing their graphic media connections to comics and popular illustration. The movement in such films was rubbery and gag-filled (redolent of the animators' love affair with vaudeville). These films also were surreal and fantastic.

Disney, once they settled in L.A. (the Silver Lake area specifically), exemplified the West Coast style, which evolved into the embodied performance approach. Although his roots were in Kansas City, not New York, he and his partner Ub Iwerks had begun drawing in this comics style in their 1920s silents and early sound films. But Disney wanted product differentiation and so began emphasizing storytelling, character development, and less "cartoony" constructions. The pictorial space of his films became more rational, often observing proper Renaissance perspective, lighting, and color for creating convincing depth. This was necessary to support a character-based approach to performance.

These beings in the Silly Symphonies, let's say the ones in Father Noah's Ark, moved more gravitationally and less rubbery. Sometimes, as with the dancing porkers in The Three Little Pigs, they moved with choreographic grace.

Most important, the Disney studio tried to transform the older style characters from caricatures and comic types (often inspired by minstrels) to individuals with uniqueness and psychological depth. There might have been some surreal fantasy, but it was kept in check within the story.

The most influential force on the emerging West Coast style was the Russian acting theorist Konstantin Stanislavsky, whose ideas about how the stage actor must "inhabit" the fictional body to bring life to it was a model for Disney animators as well as for other "live-action" film directors in the 1930s. Eventually these ideas would give rise to “The Method.” If you ask me, the 1950s Method acting of Dean, Brando, Monroe etc. is kind of cartoony. But that’s another blog.

After the talkies came in, there had to be a new attitude towards sound, as you say. Early 30s animation for commercial reasons had to be anchored in music performance. Hence the references to "tunes," "symphonies," "melodies" etc. in the 1930s series titles were tie‑ins with the music publishing industry. We should think of these films as intermedial because often they were structured around and animated to a pre-existing track, usually the instrumental version of a public domain melody in the case of Disney, or of a currently popular song in the cases of Fleischer and the Schlesinger studio (Warner Bros.). So the structure of the music interacted with the gags to create a new sensation.

These are the major transformations, to give a long answer to your short question, but all the different aspects boil down to changes in the underlying performances presented on screen. As for Disney, there was never any doubt about his motives: he wanted his films to be like Hollywood shorts and then features so he could rent them for more revenue, and he felt that cartoons had to have the look and feel of a big studio production if they were to compete.

A specialist in film history and visual culture, Donald Crafton earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan, his master’s degree from the University of Iowa, and a master’s and doctorate from Yale University. He was the founding director of the Yale Film Study Center, and served as director of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. Crafton chaired the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at Notre Dame from 1997 to 2002 and 2008-2010, and the Department of Music from 2004-2007.

Crafton's research interests are in film history and visual culture. His most recent publications are Shadow of a Mouse: Performance, Belief, and World-Making in Animation (2013) and The Talkies: American Cinema's Transition to Sound, 1926-1931 (California, 1999). He was named Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2000 and was the recipient of an NEH Fellowship for 2003-04. The World Festival of Animation presented him in 2004 with an award for his contributions to animation theory. He received the University of Notre Dame's Presidential Award in 2007.

Announcing Transmedia Hollywood 4: Spreading Change

UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television,and USC Annenberg School of Communication & USC School of Cinematic Arts

Transmedia, Hollywood 4: Spreading Change

Presented by The Andrew J. Kuehn, Jr. Foundation

Friday, April 12, 2013 James Bridges Theater, UCLA

9:00 am – 6:00 pm

Transmedia, Hollywood is a one-day public symposium exploring the role of transmedia franchises in today's entertainment industries. Transmedia, Hollywood turns the spotlight on media creators, producers and executives and places them in critical dialogue with top researchers from across a wide spectrum of film, media and cultural studies to provide an interdisciplinary summit for the free interchange of insights about how transmedia works and what it means. Transmedia, Hollywood is co-hosted by Denise Mann and Henry Jenkins, from UCLA and USC, two of the most prominent film schools and media research centers in the nation.

Transmedia, Hollywood 4: Spreading Change

Transmedia entertainment has been advanced within the Hollywood system primarily through a logic of promotion, audience building, and engagement, offering the ideal tools for capturing the imagination of networked audiences through the creation of immersive and expansive imaginary worlds. As transmedia has spread around the world, especially to countries with a much stronger tradition of public media, these same practices have been embraced as a means not of building fictional realms but of changing the world:

• As advertisers seek to construct their own “brand communities” as a way of forging strong affiliations with their consumers, many are embracing cause-based marketing. In the process, these brand marketers are recognizing young viewers’ capacity for civic engagement and political participation, one of the hallmarks of the millennial generation. While sometimes these brand messages end up advancing cultural movements, in other instances, they simply coopt these shared generational concerns.
• Educational approaches to entertainment, popular across the developing world, are now extending across multiple media platforms to allow fans to develop a deeper understanding of health and social policy issues as they dig deeper into the backstories of their favorite characters. Alternative reality games, which seek to encourage grassroots participation as a marketing tool, have shifted from solving puzzles to mobilizing players to confront real world problems.
• Fan networks, organized to support and promote favorite media franchises, are taking on the challenge of training and mobilizing the next generation of young activists, using their capacity as thought leaders to reshape the attention economy by increasing public awareness of mutual concerns.
• Nonprofit organizations are increasingly thinking like entrepreneurial start-ups and vice-versa, as young people are starting organizations which embrace the notion of the “consumer-citizen,” modeling ways that social-change efforts can be embedded within the everyday lifestyles of their supporters.

Each of these productive, participatory, community-based activities have been facilitated over the past decade by a widening web of 2.0 social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. The millennial generation’s mastery of “play” has now expanded to include a growing number of apps, casual games, short-form digital entertainment experiences, and expansive alternate reality games. Millennials, who have been acclimating themselves with the tools of connectivity in times of play, now have at their disposal the means to harness a global community to solve such pressing issues as global warming, ethnic, racial or religious genocide, labor unrest, the inequities associated with class, and countless other modern-day assaults. Many of today’s thought leaders—baby boomers that witnessed an earlier social revolution during the late sixties—marvel over the subtle but pervasive shift that is underway in the web 2.0 era and beyond as social connectedness is becoming reframed as a means for large-scale community action.

Transmedia producers in Hollywood have much to learn from a closer examination of these other forms of entertainment and educational discourse, which we might describe as “transmedia for a change.” When is it appropriate for the big media companies to incorporate such themes and tactics into their pop culture franchises? And when should they tolerate, even embrace, the bottom up activities of their fans which have used their content as vehicles for promoting social justice and political change? What does it mean to produce entertainment for a generation which is demanding its right to meaningfully participate at every level — from shaping the stories that matter to them to impacting the governance of their society?

For more information, see http://www.liquid-bass.com/conference/

For conference Registration, see : http://transmediahollywood4.eventbrite.com/#

Also, that same weekend, 5D Institute, in association with University of Southern California, invites you to join us in The Science of Fiction, our first Worldbuilding festival. This groundbreaking event will take place on April 13, 2012 in honor of the unveiling of the new USC School of Cinematic Arts Interactive Media complex. For more information, see http://5dinstitute.org/events/science-of-fiction

9:00—9:10 am: Welcome and Opening Remarks – Denise Mann & Henry Jenkins

9:10—11:00 am: Panel 1 Revolutionary Advertising: Cultivating Cultural MovementsIn the web 2.0 era, as more and more millennials acquire the tools of participatory culture and new media literacy, some of this cohort are redirecting their one-time leisure-based activities into acts of community-based, grassroots social activism. Recognizing the power of the crowd to create a tipping point in brand affiliation, big media marketers, Silicon Valley start-ups, and members of the Madison Avenue advertising community, are jumping on board these crowdsourcing activities to support their respective industries. In other words, many of the social goals of grassroots revolutionaries are being realigned to serve the commercial goals of brand marketers. In the best-case scenarios, the interests of the community and the interests of the market economy align in some mercurial fashion to serve both constituencies. However, in the worst case scenario, the community-based activism fueling social movements is being redirected to support potato chips, tennis shoes, or sugary-soda drinks. Brand marketers are intrigued with the power and sway of social media, inaugurating any number of trailblazing forms of interactive advertising and branded entertainment to replace stodgy, lifeless, 30 second ads. These cutting edge madmen are learning how to reinvent entertainment for the participatory generation by marrying brands to pre-existing social movements to create often impressive, well-funded brand movements like Nike Livestrong, or Pepsi Refresh. Are big media marketers subsuming the radical intent of certain community-based organizations who are challenging the status quo by redirecting them into unintentional alliance with big business or are they infusing these cash-strapped organizations with much needed funds and marketing outreach? Today’s panel of experts will debate these and other issues associated with the future of participatory play as a form of social activism.Todd CunninghamFormerly, Senior Vice-President of Strategic Insights and Research at MTV Networks. Denise Mann (Moderator)       Co-Director, Transmedia, Hollywood / Associate Professor, Head of Producers Program, UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television Rob Schuham CEO, Action Marketing Michael Serazio      Author, Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing Alden E. Stoner      VP, Social Action Film Campaigns, Participant Media Rachel Tipograph Director, Global Digital and Social Media at Gap Inc.

11:10 am—1:00 pm: Panel 2 Transmedia For a ChangeHollywood’s version of transmedia has been preoccupied with inspiring fan engagement, often linked to the promotional strategies for the release of big budget media. But, as transmedia has spread to parts of the world which have been dominated by public service media, there has been an increased amount of experimentation in ways that transmedia tactics can be deployed to encourage civic engagement and social awareness. These transmedia projects can be understood as part of a larger move to shift from understanding public media as serving publics towards a more active mission in gathering and mobilizing publics. These projects may also be understood as an extension of the entertainment education paradigm into the transmedia realm, where the goal shifts from informing to public towards getting people participating in efforts to make change in their own communities. In some cases, these producers are creating transmedia as part of larger documentary projects, but in others, transmedia is making links between fictional content and its real world implications.  Panelists Henry Jenkins (Moderator)      Co-Director, Transmedia, Hollywood / Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts, USC Annenberg School for Communication Katerina Cizek      Filmmaker-in-Residence, National Film Board, Canada Katie Elmore Mota      Producer, CEO of PRAJNA Productions Sam Haren Creative Director, Sandpit Mahyad Tousi      Founder, BoomGen Studios

1:00—2:00 pm: LUNCH BREAK

2:00—3:50 pm: Panel 3 Through Any Media Necessary: Activism in a DIY CultureA recent survey released by the MacArthur Foundation found that a growing number of young people are embracing practices the researchers identified as “participatory politics”: “interactive, peer-based acts through which individuals and groups seek to exert both voice and influence on issues of public concern.” These forms of politics emerge from an increasingly DIY media culture, linked in important ways to the practices of Makers, Hackers, Remix Artists and Fan Activists. This panel will bring together some key “change agents,” people who are helping to shape the production and flow of political media, or who are seeking to better understand the nature of political participation in an era of networked publics. Increasingly, these new forms of activism are both transmedia (in that they construct messages through any and all available media) and spreadable (in that they encourage participation on the level of circulation even if they do not always invite the public to help create media content). Panelists Megan M. Boler      Professor and Associate Chair, Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Social Justice Education OISE/University of Toronto Marya Bangee Community Organizing Residency (COR) Fellow, OneLA, Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) Erick Huerta      Immigrant’s rights activist Jonathan MacIntosh Pop Culture Hacker and Transformative Storyteller Sangita Shreshtova (Moderator) Research Director of Media Activism & Participatory Politics (MAPP) project, USC Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism Elisabeth Soep      Research Director and Senior Producer at Youth Radio-Youth Media International

4:00—5:50 pm: Panel 4 The e-Entrepreneur as the New PhilanthropistNonprofit organizations are increasingly thinking like entrepreneurial start-ups and vice-versa, as young people are starting organizations which embrace the notion of the “consumer-citizen,” modeling ways that social-change efforts can be embedded within the everyday lifestyles of their supporters. While the boomers treated the cultural movements of the late sixties as a cause, today’s e-citizens are treating their social activism as a brand. They are selling social responsibility as if it were a commodity or product, using the same strategies that traditional business men and women used to sell products. Sarah Banet-Weiser Professor, USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism and Department of American Studies and Ethnicity Sean D. Carasso Founder, Falling Whistles Yael Cohen Founder/CEO, Fuck Cancer Milana Rabkin      Digital Media Agent Sharon Waxman (Moderator) Editor-in-Chief, The Wrap

6:00—7:30 pm:RECEPTION

Let Us Now Praise Famous Monsters: A Conversation (Part Three)

Studying Monster fandom places a new emphasis on issues of collecting, which have remained marginal to the studies of fan culture, but which are a very large part of the phenomenon itself. What existing work do you think provides the best insights into collecting cultures and what questions do you think still need to be addressed?

Mark: I think that matters of collecting have been tangential in part because the background so many media scholars have in Marxist /Frankfurt School criticism still makes a lot of us reticent to look at conspicuous consumption as anything other than totally negative--I know I’m leery of being accused of false consciousness or bougie-ness when making a case for collecting as a form of amateur cultural preservation. That said, I’ve been relieved to encounter an increasing number of writings which take a more complicated approach to the consumption of commercial product. I would specifically mention Sara Gwenllian-Jones’s essay “Phantom Menace,” Alan McKee’s “How to Tell the Difference between Production and Consumption,” and Matt Hills’s concept of performative consumption, presented in Fan Cultures, and which I apply to Chaney fans in my essay. I’m also interested in the idea of creative consumption proposed by Jean Burgess and Joshua Green in their book on YouTube, although I wish they would have developed the concept for the reader a little more. I think Jose van Dijck has many interesting ideas about material culture and collecting in Mediated Memories, and I just discovered a book by Richard Cox on the practice of personal archiving that looks promising and is on my reading list. As far as questions that still need to be addressed, I’m interested in distinctions between the physical object and the digital--is downloading digital artifacts collecting in the same sense as “having” tangible objects? There’s been work done in this area in museum studies, which may provide an inroad for looking at this matter in media studies.

Bob: A great list, Mark -- I’m making notes! I’d add Baudrillard’s System of Objects and, less abstractly, Jonathan Gray’s Show Sold Separately as ways of understanding collectors and collecting in conversation with mass media marketing. Lincoln Geraghty’s upcoming book with Routledge on “cult collecting” will also be useful, I’m sure.

Matt:  As a collector of Silver Age comic books and vinyl records, the issue of collecting is rather personal to me.  In terms of questions to pursue re: collecting, I’m particularly interested in issues of commodity value and “collectability” of an object.  I have a friend who is intensely proud of his collection of early Silver Age issues of The Justice League of America.  They are all of very high grade (virtually untouched warehouse copies in some cases) and are “slabbed.”  For him, they retain a nostalgic value (he owned copies as a kid) but he mostly values them as a financial investment.  On the other hand, my collecting has always been motivated by a desire to read or listen to something and am much less concerned about condition.  In fact,  I frequent comic book conventions looking for “reader copies” of old comic books in part because they are much more affordable but also because  I’m very interested in objects that bear traces of their use-histories.  Usually with comic books this comes in the form of a signature of ownership on the cover or the first page but sometimes there are surprising traces left behind, such as an attached personal object.  I once found a nearly incoherent response to a ‘Dear John’ letter tucked inside an LP.  It provided a strange resonance to the love songs on the record.

Natasha: As a former product developer who designed collectibles, I am very compelled by this question.  I’m shocked there hasn’t been more work done on collectibles in relation to fan studies.  Enormous amounts of time, capital and passion are put into collecting.  I believe that closely studying the motivations, desires, patterns, and strategies of fan based collectors can provide valuable insights and new ways to think about fan cultures.   A couple of edited volumes I’ll add to the list are: Acts of Possession: Collecting in America (ed. Leah Dilworth) and The Cultures of Collecting (ed. Roger Cardinal).

A key claim here is that Famous Monsters and its fans shaped the canon of which older films mattered and also informed the ways we made sense of those movies. What are some of the films or performers that got reappraised thanks to being featured in this publication?

Matt: More than anything, I think FM is notable for spotlighting special effects artists, especially Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen, and make-up artists like Jack Pierce.  Ackerman’s narratives regarding individual artists foregrounded the tactile labor involved in filmmaking that inspired so many readers to create their own make-ups and make their own films.  The visible traces of these artists translated to the visible traces of the artist(s) of the amateur film.

Mark: Certainly FM played a major role in making Chaney appear intriguing to a generation of monster fans who may have never actually seen any of his films, and in shaping his remembrance as a star of horror films rather than as a more versatile character actor. FM was particularly instrumental in keeping one of Chaney’s lost films, London After Midnight (Browning, 1927), in memory, and of touting it as a masterpiece of horror. Ackerman may have been one of the last surviving people with a clear memory of having seen the film, and he spoke glowingly of it to the end--as he did at a Monster Bash convention Matt and his brother and I attended in 2006. In doing research for this essay, I was also fairly amazed at some of the stills and information found in the pages of FM on obscure, foreign, and/or avant-garde films like Dreyer’s Vampyr, the 1930s French version of The Golem (even now hard to find), and non-western films like Kwaidan.

Ackerman, as several of you note, was an important bridge figure -- between fans and the industry, but also between fandom and a range of other alternative cultural movements, and perhaps between childhood and adulthood. What kind of role model did Ackerman provide for what a mature fan identity might look like?

Matt:  Ackerman’s liberal attitudes about life are, I believe, quite relevant to his fannish affections for science fiction.  I am particularly intrigued by how certain aspects of his life are very problematic for some fans (in particular his practice of nudism in the 1950s and 1960s).  More than anything, Ackerman modelled tolerance and the necessity to think about new ways of living with one another.  Interestingly, this model is seemingly lost on some fans, who reduce Ackerman to the status of “grand collector” and nothing more.

Mark: In addition to the inclusivity and progressive perspectives Matt refers to, I think Ackerman also modelled sincerity, generosity, and kindness. One of the things I discovered while looking through old issues of FM was a series of announcements by Ackerman about an upcoming cross-country road trip he was taking, with the offer to readers that if their parents gave permission, he would visit them en route and show them some of the monster memorabilia he had with him. Imagine that! Ackerman also demonstrated a respect for children that is admirable. While I still find his sense of humor hard to take, he seems like he would have been a genuinely nice person to know.

Bob: Actually, it’s Ackerman’s sense of humor that most appealed to me as a kid; it set up a lovely counterpoint to the horrific imagery the magazine often featured, and went a long way toward “defanging” some of the primally upsetting stuff that I was drawn to, but disturbed by, in other formats (cf. the 1974 Exorcist coverage I mention above). In addition to signalling geniality and likeability, as Mark points out, Ackerman’s prose voice also delighted in its own corny panache, and encouraged me -- not always for the better -- to emulate his punning, Mad-magazine-style in my own writing.

Natasha: Ackerman’s quest to promote respect, understanding and acceptance of all people regardless of their gender, race, sexual orientation or age is what I have always admired most about his cultural legacy.  Not only was Ackerman a prominent and outspoken supporter of female-produced science- fiction work, but he was also a stanch advocate for gay rights.  He was dubbed an honorary lesbian by Daughters of Bilitis, the first lesbian rights organization in the U.S. He believed that monster films and science fiction had the capacity to take viewers out of their comfort zone and imagine alternative realities that could challenge existing sexist, racist, sexist, and ageist thinking.  Ackerman had the foresight to know that fan participation is not whimsical and irrelevant, but can be a very powerful thing that can change the way people see and interact with each other.  Best of all, he always did this with a sense of humor.

Matt was lucky enough to have had a chance to interview Ackerman before he died. If the rest of us had a chance to ask “Uncle Forry” a question, from beyond the grave (of course), what would you most like to know about his life, his magazine, or its cultural impact?

Mark: I’m curious as to how conscientiously he promoted his social politics in the pages of FM: he absolutely influenced genre fandom and formation of a canon of stars and films, but was he also trying to influence readers’ perspectives? More than asking him specific questions, though, I would’ve really liked to just talk about horror films with him, and get more of that first-hand view of London After Midnight.

The recent film, Super 8, offers some glimpses into the world of amateur filmmaking and model building which Famous Monsters inspired. To what degree do you think the film adequately captured the cultural milieu we are documenting through these essays?

Matt: Super 8 overwhelmed its superficial take on 1970s monster kid culture with sci-fi spectacle.  Joe Dante’s Matinee, while not a great film, is more successful at capturing the spirit of horror fandom because it shows us why kids loved this culture.   Super 8’s computer-generated spectacle is absent of the trace evidence of an artisan and thus distances us from the affective connections we make with classic horror and science fiction films.  In the end, the film’s nod toward kids’ amateur films of the period feels just like that, a nod.  There’s nothing substantive behind the title reference to home movies/amateur films or the storyline of the kids making a movie, no clear reason as to why they want to make a monster movie.

Bob: Funny, when I gave a talk based on my article recently, I started with a clip from Super 8: it shows the young protagonist at work painting one of Aurora’s Hunchback of Notre Dame kits. I wanted to contrast the plastic monster’s humble cameo against the movie’s CGI “star,” which was -- and here I agree with Matt -- a dispiriting genuflection to the state of the art. (If only J. J. Abrams and crew had had the guts to give us an actual creature of late 70s special effects -- a Rob Bottin or Carlo Rambaldi creation of latex and servomotors.) Its false notes aside, I respect Super 8 for what it’s trying to do (and be), and in the film’s enshrining of an earlier moment in the evolution of fantastic media -- the late 70s/early 80s golden age of Spielberg and Lucas -- heard curious nested echoes of other, prior golden ages: the late 50s-early 60s monster culture in which Spielberg, Lucas, Cameron, Zemeckis, Dante, and others came of age, as well as the period 20-30 years before that, when the classic Universal horror films were first released. Famous Monsters bridged at least three generations in this fashion, and overgrown “monster kid movies” like Super 8 are to me a way of carrying that tradition forward: revisiting and rearticulating shared, nostalgic pleasures while driving the continued industrial production of fantastic media.

Mark: Super 8 is nostalgic, in the way David Lowenthal uses the term to describe “memory with the pain removed.” There’s an implication that the young filmmakers/adventurers are misfits, or aren’t performing masculinity “correctly,” and that this somehow lends itself to their shared interest in monsters. But even though they’re misfits, they are in a group of friends, and all appear to be in a position of class privilege (except the Elle Fanning character, but she’s the exception in multiple ways). The film doesn’t really address the isolation, loneliness, ostracization, or queerness that has led many a young person to interest in fantasy, monsters, science fiction, role playing games, ancient mythology, the goth subculture, the occult, etc. But of course, isolation, loneliness, and queerness aren’t topics one sees addressed too often in big-budget Hollywood action films.

Mark Hain is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, and is currently working on his dissertation, which is a historical reception study looking at star image and how audiences interpret and find use for these images, with a specific focus on Theda Bara.

Bob Rehak is an Assistant Professor in the Film and Media Studies Program at Swarthmore College. His research interests include special effects and the material practices of fandom.

Natashia Ritsma is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University. Her research interests focus on documentary, experimental and educational film and television.

Matt Yockey is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theater and Film at the University of Toledo. His research interest is on the reception of Hollywood genre films.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Monsters: A Conversation (Part Two)

Reclaiming historic models of fan practices has proven challenging, so I am hoping we might take some methodological insights from the ways you each approached this project. What were some of the challenges and opportunities in reconstructing monster fandom as a historical phenomenon?

Matt:  I found it essential to foreground the nature by which FM presented and remediated fan practices.  As such, FM offers a wonderful model of how fandom can be presented to itself.  This was, of course, key to my analysis of Ackerman as an intermediary who would liberally revise letters sent to the magazine, speak for the fan, and shape fan desires.  Ideally, I would have liked to include in my essay examinations of fan films that could not be represented in the magazine outside of stills.  There are a couple of very good compilations of “monster kid” amateur films available on DVD that would be a very good resource for this work (even if one cannot make a direct connection to FM in all cases).  Bob’s essay in particular did a good job of considering the actual film production in very productive ways.

Bob: I never think of myself as practicing anything so organized as a methodology, but certainly this project’s method hinged on having access to the text and texture of Famous Monsters itself, in particular the Captain Company advertising pages where so much of monster culture’s material practices were on explicit display. To today’s eye, FM’s ads might seem like simple commercial hype (as Mark mentions below), secondary to the editorial content. But along with other fixtures of the magazine like contests, fan clubs, and classifieds, FM’s ads were extremely busy sites of social and material exchange -- invitations to participate, nodes of interactivity in the magazine’s paper network of publishing and the U.S. Postal Service. And excitingly, through those pages thread names, titles, products that connect to larger histories of fan creativity and cult media, like Jim Danforth and Dennis Muren and their movie Equinox. My “archive,” by the way, was a DVD containing the entire run of FM in the comics-reader .CBR format, purchased online. No libraries nearby have FM in their holdings, and my personal collection is a handful of favorites cherry-picked over the years from eBay. Admittedly, then, that “texture” I mentioned earlier is a pallid, pixelated ghost of the weighty stacks of beautiful pulpy newsprint and vivid covers that constitute FM’s own material being. But without the digital archive’s ease of access, comprehensiveness of content, and ability to do screen captures, I wouldn’t have been able to write the essay.

Mark: I’m particularly interested in diachronic studies of fan responses to celebrities, and methodologically this means lots of time spent reading through letters to the editor of various old publications, hoping to stumble across those little gems that communicate something about audience reactions and responses in their historical contexts. For this essay, I wanted to chart the continuities and discrepancies of reception of Lon Chaney’s star image from the 1920s to the present. I find it fascinating that Chaney was one of the biggest stars of the silent era, but at some point in time interest in him became something “specialized,” and he also became an idol for boys rather than a star appreciated by a broader audience. FM is a really valuable source for researching this shift--in part because of Ackerman’s much-proclaimed love for Chaney, but even more because of the ways, as Matt put it, that FM presented and modelled fandom to fans. Primarily, though, FM is fairly unique in the sheer amount of reader-generated content, which at least theoretically provides greater access to “the people” in their own words. But this also raises a caution as far as methodology. I hadn’t realized that, as Matt mentioned, Ackerman would tinker with readers’ letters before they were printed. It just goes to show, with historic reception studies one always has to be on guard, both in granting too much credence to the evidence, and in being alert to ways in which you might be making presumptions or “thinking for” the historical audience through a 21st-century mindset.

Natasha: Like Bob, my primary archive consisted of a DVD (purchased online) that contained the entire run of FM.  Access to every issue of the magazine in a digital format was crucial in allowing me the opportunity to trace a female fan presence in the magazine spanning 25 years.   I was able to borrow a sampling of paper issues of FM from the 50s, 60s, and 70s, however, echoing Bob’s point,  it would have been impossible for me to write this essay without access to the entire digital archive.  Being able to access a comprehensive collection of the magazine was essential in conducting a diachronic study and tracing Ackerman’s steadfast and consistent support for a female fan presence in the pages of F.M. Digital access to a whole range of historical documents that used to demand time-consuming and expensive visits to archives provides a rich ground for re-examining cultural assumptions, generalizations and creating a more nuanced and multidimensional understanding of historic fan practices.

Most work in fan studies has centered around mostly female-centered forms of fan culture. In what ways does studying Famous Monsters give us a way into talking about the relationship of fandom to masculinity?

Matt:  Of course, Mark’s essay is an excellent model for this and Natasha’s essay offers an exemplary model of how to consider female fandom in the context of male fandom.  For me, both of these essays have inspired much thought and reflection on the gender politics of superhero fandom.

Mark: I think FM is very useful in the ways it complicates what we think we might know about childhood and adolescence in the 1950s and 60s, in that it provides a historical record of things not “spoken” elsewhere--or at least not spoken as directly. You can find readers talking about feeling alienated from their peers, or of paying some price for non-conformity, which often means not conforming to normative masculinity. For another project, I spent quite a bit of time looking at old Boy’s Life magazines, and the contrast between the stereotypically uncomplicated, all-American, Leave it to Beaver image of 1950s/60s boyhood found therein and the more fraught relationship to masculinity evident in FM is pretty remarkable (although I must add I love Leave it to Beaver). I also want to voice my admiration for Natasha’s essay--not just for her valuable work, but for those girls and young women who sent their letters and photos in to FM, which in the 1950s was probably a pretty daring, brave move for many of them. They were pioneers!

Bob: I’m definitely interested in the boy culture reflected in FM’s pages, and the magazine’s larger function as a kind of primer in certain modes of fandom (the “affirmational” as it’s sometimes called, to distinguish it from the “transformative”) conventionally associated with the male gender. However, I take seriously the caveat that no fannish activity or orientation is exclusively the province of one gender or another, and that FM’s readership was a diverse collection of boys, girls, and presumably transgendered individuals outside that limiting binary. But the skills and predilections we discover as children are the roots of those we take into adulthood, so certainly I see FM as an important player in the acculturation and encouragement of behaviors that later come to seem “innate” or “essential” aspects of fanboys -- in particular, the accumulation of knowledge about make-up and visual effects that marked my own fascination with FM and most subsequent fan objects. So in short, while boys aren’t a priori horror fans who build model kits or collect action figures, being a horror fan who builds and collects arguably seeds the kind of subjectivities later associated, if only through self-identification, with being a boy/man.

Natasha, you turn the lens in the other direction, identifying the ways women were included or excluded from this fan culture which had historically been male-dominated. What roles do you think Ackerman and his magazine played in this process? What kinds of evidence did you find that helped you to reconstruct the history of female participation in monster fandom?

Natasha: Ackerman was extremely influential in creating an inclusive fan culture around his magazine.  As Matt’s interview with Ackerman reaffirms, he had total control over the content of F.M.  Not only did Ackerman strategically print captions such as “Guys and Gals Behind the Ghouls’ and ‘Girls will be Ghouls’ on the covers of the earliest issues of F. M., but he also insured that women held a variety of key roles in the magazine’s production.  Ackerman was highly aware of the way horror and science fiction fan cultures historically structured themselves as exclusive boyzones.  In 1946, Ackerman proposed an all-female guest-of-honour list for the Fourth World Science Fiction Convention, the Pacificon. This proposition was immediately shot down by his colleagues.  Ackerman used his agency at FM as a way to showcase that monster fandom wasn’t just for boys.  Pictures and letters by female fans were incorporated into the magazine’s regular features such as ‘Fiendom’s Finest’ or ‘Fan Mail.” With a circulation of 2.4 million in the 1970s, FM made a significant impact on American culture.  Ackerman’s influence on female monster/horror fans is still evident today.  Jovanka Vuckovic, director of The Captured Bird (2012) and editor-in-chief of Rue Morgue counts Ackerman as one of her key inspirations for pursuing her career path.

There’s a strong focus throughout these essays on the ways fandom translated into material cultural practices. What are some of the practices Famous Monsters inspired and supported? And what might the study of such practices contribute to a fuller understanding of the nature of participatory culture?

Matt: I’m intrigued by the notion of curatorial consumption.  I recently came across a fan’s posting of his FM collection that was quite detailed in terms of how he catalogued and stored his issues.  It was a museum level of archival care that provoked some counter-responses from other FM readers about denying the pleasure of simply reading your old FMs.   Further along these lines, a lot of these middle-aged ‘monster kids’ have transformed their homes into modest facsimiles of the Ackermansion.  Again, the notion of being a curator for a museum of one’s childhood passions is fascinating.  Such spaces are interesting because they typically remain these abstractions presented visually on the web and in competition with each other.

Mark: It’s a blast to look at the copious advertisements in those old issues, with all the “Scare your parents! Amaze your friends!” hype, for what turned out to be tawdry cardboard bats or “ghosts” made of vinyl sheeting (I know, for I was a victim of the come-on). Matt and Bob both have done really interesting work on fan consumption as a form of identity work, and as a form of archiving. I think it’s worth re-emphasizing that a lot of the material cultural practices prompted by the magazine were of a DIY nature--putting together and painting models, making films, using creating monster makeups, etc., and of consuming supplies in the interest of making a finished product.

Bob: I have little to add to Matt and Mark’s excellent thoughts, except to say that I’m increasingly dubious that fandom exists except in material cultural practices -- that is, fandom manifests in activities, objects, and spaces -- and that fan studies has traditionally been a bit narrow in approaching fandom primarily through what we might call its textual technologies and traces, such as reading, writing, rereading and rewriting, poaching, etc. While these are material practices as well, the temptation is to elevate them over the more bluntly material “things” of fan culture, since those things are so often damned through ties to commercialism or their positioning as amateurish, crude, or flawed. In future projects I hope to focus on the object forms of fandom as dynamically expressive practices, simultaneously social and private, that intersect with the commercial and the mass-produced in messy but significant ways.

Mark Hain is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, and is currently working on his dissertation, which is a historical reception study looking at star image and how audiences interpret and find use for these images, with a specific focus on Theda Bara.

Bob Rehak is an Assistant Professor in the Film and Media Studies Program at Swarthmore College. His research interests include special effects and the material practices of fandom.

Natashia Ritsma is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University. Her research interests focus on documentary, experimental and educational film and television.

Matt Yockey is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theater and Film at the University of Toledo. His research interest is on the reception of Hollywood genre films.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Monsters: A Conversation (Part One)

This December, a new academic publication, The Journal of Fandom Studies (senior editor: Katherine Larsen), debuted, which should be of interest to some of my regular readers.  The very first issue focuses on Famous Monsters of Filmland and its editor, Forest K. Ackerman. So much work in fan studies has dealt with science fiction fandoms, yet there's much we do not know about the "monster fan culture" of the 1960s and 1970s. As this issue suggests, digging into old monster magazines gives us a rich glimpse into the participatory culture of the period, including a range of material practices (such as model building, make-up and costume production, and Super 8 filmmaking) that have so far received limited attention by academics. Monster fan culture gives us a glimpse into what was at the time a predominantly male fan community, though, as we will see, there's also some important dimensions of female fan history to be reclaimed from the margins of this publication. And, we soon discover that Ackerman was not only a model for today's "fan boy auteur" but he also had a strong commitment to the politics of diversity and social acceptance, not exactly values we associate with American popular culture of the period. I was honored to be asked to be a respondent for this issue, and in doing so, I ended up writing a heavily autobiographical essay about my own memories of being a preteenage monster fan during the 1960s. I am sharing the opening of my essay below in hopes that it may entice you to track down this issue. I invited the editor of this special issue, Matt Yockey, and the other contributors to participate in an informal online conversation, exploring their own relationships with the topic, and also suggesting some of the ways their work might help us to further broaden the domain of fan research.

I cherish this invitation to my tenth birthday  which my mother carefully and lovingly packed away with other artifacts of my childhood.  The text, written in a quivering scrawl associated with old horror film posters, was accompanied by photographs of Boris Karloff’s Monster, Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera, Frederic March’s Hyde, and oddly, given my own strong preference for Lon Chaney Jr., Oliver Reed’s werewolf. The pictures had been cut from the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland, almost certainly by my mother’s hands, given how precise the borders are, and then, attached with Elmer’s Glue, under my instructions, onto typing paper. The invitations were reproduced using a crude home photocopier machine my father used for his work, and then mailed to the other boys in the neighborhood.

I dug the invitation out of storage recently when I returned from seeing “The Art of Tim Burton” exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Amidst concept art and film props, the exhibit devoted a room to his juvenaila,  including a childhood sketch of the Creature of the Black Lagoon (mostly likely drawn from the Aurora monster model) and  stop motion home movies (inspired by Ray Harryhausen). I was most taken with a collage (image 2), which mixes Burton’s own hand-drawn renderings of Frankenstein’s Monster, the Phantom of the Opera, and various space aliens, with pictures, including Lugosi’s Dracula, King Kong, and this time, appropriately, Lon Chaney Jr.’s Wolfman, almost certainly cut from Famous Monsters.  Burton chose Lugosi, his face partially wrapped by his cape, where-as I went with an image where the vampire’s hands are clutched, ready to strike an unsuspecting victim, but both were part of the image bank we shared with so many other boys and girls, around the country,  growing up in the mid-1960s.

Burton and I were born a little over two months apart, though his Burbank and my suburban Atlanta were on the opposite ends of the country.  What we shared -- with a good chunk of our generation -- was a series of powerful cultural influences, as described in the LACMA exhibit’s accompanying coffee table book:

“He revered the legendary Vincent Price and identified with such maestros of classic horror as Lon Chaney Sr. and Jr., Boris Karloff, Peter Lore, and Bela Lugosi....He was swept up by the magic of the stop-motion animation of Ray Harryhausen’s animated sequences and the unique color pallete of Basil Gogo’s illustrations on the covers of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazines (one of the few publications he avidly read).” (Frey, Gallo, and Kempf, 2009, p. 8)

For all our self perceptions of eccentricity, Tim Burton and I had more or less the same childhood. We read the same magazines, watched the same movies, admired the same artists, and fetishized the same images. As Bob Rehak writes in this issue, “Facilitated by Famous Monsters and shared by a subculture of baby boomers in their preteen and teenaged years, the constructive activities of 60s horror fandom laid both a generational and physical groundwork for today’s transformative, franchised, materialized media culture.”...

I read these historical accounts from the perspective of someone who, unlike the other authors, was part of the 1960s monster culture they are seeking to reconstruct. This is not to say my account is somehow more “authentic” or “unmediated” than theirs. As Erica Rand (1995) has suggested, we selectively rewrite our personal narratives about our childhoods to reflect our adult conceptions of ourselves, creating an aura of personal inevitability rather than reflecting the contingency of emerging identities. What we and our parents chose to box and save are not necessarily any more a part of who we are than those many things that were tossed in the trash. The LACMA curators were no doubt drawn to those childhood artworks suggesting the gothic sensibility we associated with Burton’s films; I am drawn to childhood artifacts which reflect my subsequent academic interests in film history and fan culture.  All of these accounts involve acts of interpretation and speculation, whether recovering the perspectives of Ackerman’s young fans from the photographs and letters in Famous Monsters or reconstructing my ten year old self from fading memories and yellowing party invites. So, I am writing this first person account to add another layer to our understanding of the period’s fan sensitivities and subjectivities.

As a starting point, we might add collage art to the mix of creative and performative activities, including model-making, super 8 filmmaking, costuming and make-up, that grew up around Famous Monsters. Cutting out and gluing down pictures to create a birthday party invitation may seem pretty banal -- not as transgresive as writing a homoerotic fan story or as transformative as posting a political remix video on YouTube. But, these material practices embody a similar expectation that consumers have the opportunity and right to meaningfully reshape their culture.

The fact that my parents sanctioned this bit of appropriation and remixing tells us something about Famous Monsters’ cultural status: my parents would not have allowed me to cut pictures from books or encyclopedias, they would happily allow me to cut pictures from old catalogs or newspapers, and magazines fell into a space in between -- National Geographic or Hightlights (no), Famous Monsters (yes).  The growing accessability of photocopying (first prototyped in 1959 and introduced to home consumers in the mid-1960s) supported the easy reproduction of such images, paving the way for the DIY zine culture Stephen Duncombe (1997) documented. Such cut and paste collages would become characteristic of the 1980s punk and 1990s riot grrl zines, for example. These practices also extend a much older history of children’s scrapbooking, a practice, as historians (Tucker, Ott, and Buckler, 2006; Garvey, 2004) note, that has often mixed personal (family photographs, drawings) and mass produced images (magazines and newspaper clippings).

The overlap between Burton and my respective choices reflects the degree to which Famous Monsters helped define a canon of works its most hardcore readers were expected to know. The images we selected were shared culture (in that Burton and I draw on almost identical repertoires) and personal culture (in that Burton and I would have no doubt had different personal preferences -- my strong identification with Dracula, his fascination with Vincent Price and giant Japanese monsters). The magazine helped to set a syllabus of sorts for my adolescent efforts to educate myself about the history of American movies (and still informs my dvd collecting).  I can draw a direct link from Famous Monsters  to my decision to focus my Seventh Grade term paper, several years later, on the history of American movies. My father used to joke that I had been rewriting that term paper throughout my educational and professional life.  My graduation from an elementary school monster movie buff to an undergraduate film snob was mirrored by the fact that George Ellis, the fright host for the Atlanta market, also owned the Film Forum, one of the city’s two major retro houses.

As Kevin Heffernan (2004) documents in Ghouls, Gimmicks and Gold, the Universal monster movies had been part of the large package of “Shock Theater” Screen Gems sold to television stations in the 1950s and still in active use on second tier local stations in the 1960s. After school, my friends would race home to check out which movies were playing, staying in doors if it was one featured in Famous Monsters, and otherwise going outside, often to play act those very same monster movies. At ten, we were not allowed to stay up for the “Friday Night Frights”, except in the summer time or over Christmas break, and then, often, with the carefully negotiated stipulation (shared by many of the neighborhood households) that we could stay awake only until we got to see the monster in action. This rule, designed to avoid conflicts over bedtimes, actually resulted in endless quiblings over whether a shadow or a movement in the branches really counted or in the case of The Wolfman, whether Lawrence Talbott counted as a monster before the moon turned full.  As David Bordwell (2011) has noted, the tendency of vintage film audiences to show up when they could and watch through until the point where they entered the theater surely complicates claims about narrative structure and closure. Something similar could be said of my childhood viewing practices, which put such a strong emphasis on the monster’s first appearance and meant that we almost never saw any form of containment. Much like the superheroes, who occupied our imagination around the same time, the neighborhood kids could have told you the primary “powers” and vulnerabilities of each monster (Dracula could transform into bats or fog and command wolf packs; he could be destroyed by a stake to the heart, by cutting off his head, by being exposed to sunlight), but not the plot of any particular film.

Our love for “classic” horror movies gave us a certain distinction among our classmates, many of whom raced home from school to watch Dark Shadows. We had a running battle around the school lunch table over the relative merits of Lugosi’s Dracula (never Christopher Lee’s) and Dark Shadow’s Barnabas Collins. Tom Patterson, sometimes friend, sometimes rival, held his own monster birthday party a few months later, adopting the persona of Collins, as much to cross my tastes as anything else. Ackerman’s magazine fostered a immediate and personal link between his young readers and the grand old men who had helped to create the monster movies decades earlier. When I learned that Lon Chaney Jr. was struggling with cancer, I sent him a hand drawn get well card and received a photograph of the Wolf Man, signed with his own quivering hand....

Famous Monsters contained a wealth of information about these old films and the people who made them, but it was above all a picture magazine, and our favorites often reflected what we imagined from those images.  I had seen few of the movies represented on the birthday invitation. For example,  I had not seen the original Universal Dracula by age ten; I knew the character almost entirely from the magazine, the Aurora monster models, and my Famous Monsters Speak record. Several years later, I saw the 1930 Bela Lugosi film and found it surprisingly dull. I was even more frustrated (and bored) by my aborted attempt to read Bram Stoker’s novel. The blood curdling account of Dracula in Famous Monsters, much like The Princess Bride, contained only the “good parts”. So, the Dracula I loved and admired was largely a product of my own imagination, what I extrapulated from and mapped onto the stills Ackerman published.

Matthew, perhaps you can get us started by sharing how this special issue focused on Famous Monsters of Filmland came about.

Matt:  This project began to percolate in the fall of 2007.  I had just moved to southern California and visited Ackerman at the “mini-Ackermansion” during one of his Saturday open houses.  I lingered after the official visiting hours were over and found that, with just me as his audience, Ackerman wanted to talk about his life - not just his work on FM or his life as a fan, but his family history, his relationship with his brother, etc.  This first conversation quickly evolved into regular visits with prepared questions.  Over the course of six months I accumulated about 20 hours of recorded conversation.  At the same time I began to purchase 1960s-era issues of FM on Ebay with the idea of writing something scholarly about FM, as this was a subject near to my heart and which had been almost completely overlooked in academia.  Around this time, I met you for the first time and seeing an Aurora model kit in your office felt like a bit of serendipity. This led to the SCMS panel with you, Mark, and Natasha, which was received so positively that finding a home to publish this work seemed the logical and inevitable next step.   In another bit of serendipity, these essays crossed paths with Katherine Larsen, who was very receptive to the idea of an FM-theme for the debut issue of The Journal of Fandom Studies.

As I note in my essay, there’s a certain generational difference in experience represented within this group. I was a first generation Famous Monsters fan reading the magazine growing up in the 1960s, where-as most of you are quite a bit younger. How did each of you first encounter the magazine?

Matt: I have a vivid memory of being 4 years old in 1970 and seeing FM #80 at the local supermarket.  The cover image was from Beneath the Planet of the Apes and I was absolutely transfixed.  My aunt, whom I was with, refused to buy it for me and I had to wait a painfully long time before I actually purchased my first issue (#95 in late 1972).   I loved FM but could only afford an issue every so often.  I would look longingly at the gallery of back issue covers in each issue and wish I could have them all.  It was a longing matched by my desire to see many of the films featured in every issue.  Reading FM directed my weekly investigation of the latest issue of TV Guide to see if any of these films were going to be broadcast on the local station that had a Friday night horror show.

Bob: Matt and I are the same age, and my first encounter with Famous Monsters and subsequent experience of Monster Culture are similar to his. I came across FM at an Ann Arbor comic book store called the Eye of Agamotto, on a rack with other Warren publications such as horror comics Creepy and Eerie, and “mature” content like National Lampoon and Heavy Metal. At 9 or 10 I was too young to be drawn to those magazines, but FM, which my parents indulged me in buying, formed the nexus of my love of monster movies new and old, which I took in both at film society screenings on the University of Michigan campus, and on TV through creature features with hosts like “The Ghoul” on WKBD-50 and WJBK’s Sir Graves Ghastly. While I don’t remember the first issue of FM I owned, I do recall the first issue whose cover I found too frightening to look at directly: #111, October 1974, which bore a Basil Gogos portrait of Linda Blair in Dick Smith’s Exorcist makeup.

Mark: I’m a couple of years younger than Matt and Bob, and I didn’t really like FM that much or read it regularly, although I do have a strong memory of reading an issue while in the hospital (the negative associations are hard to shake). At the risk of sounding like a snobby little kid, I didn’t like FM’s irreverent tone and all the pun-based captions, although I did wear a T-shirt printed with an FM cover on the first day of third grade. Right before the class recited the Pledge of Allegiance, the teacher looked over at me and said “everyone put your hands over your monsters” (not surprisingly, he was one of my favorite teachers). Around that age, I was more drawn to books like Ed Naha’s Horrors from Screen to Scream and William Everson’s Classics of the Horror Film than to FM. My parents--my dad in particular--were very indulgent of my monster-mania, and would take me to see age-inappropriate films and let me stay up late on the weekends to watch old movies. I grew up in Omaha, where the local NBC affiliate broadcast Dr. Sanguinary’s Creature Feature every Saturday. I recall being absolutely livid when it was preempted by the appearance of Saturday Night Live.

I think in terms of generational difference in reception, by the time we were old enough to be interested in monster culture and horror films, there were simply more options to explore: more publications, more books, more toys, more ways to actually see some of the films. Undoubtedly, FM paved the way for this, but it may also be the reason my own response to FM was so cool. Interestingly, my partner, who is roughly a generation older than I am, has a big stash of FMs from when he was a kid.

Mark Hain is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, and is currently working on his dissertation, which is a historical reception study looking at star image and how audiences interpret and find use for these images, with a specific focus on Theda Bara.

Bob Rehak is an Assistant Professor in the Film and Media Studies Program at Swarthmore College. His research interests include special effects and the material practices of fandom.

Natashia Ritsma is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University. Her research interests focus on documentary, experimental and educational film and television.

Matt Yockey is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theater and Film at the University of Toledo. His research interest is on the reception of Hollywood genre films.

The Visual Linguistics of David Mazzuchelli

I periodically get a chance to teach classes on comics and graphic storytelling. I was able to teach such a subject in Spring 2012 at USC and hope to teach it again here next year. I shared my syllabus for the class at the time. Early on in the class, the challenge is to get students to think more deeply about the range of different devices which comics artists might use to communicate meaning. We were lucky this most recent time to have a really rich essay on this topic which Randy Duncan wrote for Critical Approaches to Comics, which was our principal textbook. Duncan's essay uses David Mazzuchelli, Asterios Polyp as its primary example. This book turned out to be an eye-opener for many of my students, because of its diverse range of visual symbols, its expressive use of color, and its diverse ways of deploying typefaces to capture the different communication styles of the various characters. Mikhail Skoptsov, then a Cinema School graduate student who was taking the class, was inspired to dig deeper into David Mazzuchelli's work and developed an argument about the persistent interest throughout many of his stories in exploring the challenges characters face in communicating with each other. Skoptsov, now a student in the Media and Cultures program at Brown, has continued to revise this essay and I am delighted to have a chance to share it with you today.  My own sense is that it sheds some important light both on Mazzuchelli and on the "language" of comics more generally. Enjoy.

The Visual Linguistics of David Mazzuchelli

by Mikhail Skoptsov

After working on a number of high-profile projects, such as Batman: Year One and Daredevil: Born Again, David Mazzuchelli broke away from superhero comics to self-publish the magazine Rubber Blanket. Despite lasting only three issues, the publication showcased works that Mazzuchelli had fully scripted and illustrated all by himself, forming some of the recurring techniques, themes and motifs he would later apply to his co-adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass (1994) with Paul Karasik and his original masterpiece Asterios Polyp (2009). I would argue that these three works evince that Mazzuchelli is a modern graphic novel auteur, who repeatedly explores issues of language and communication. To prove this, I will examine the aforementioned two novels and the short story Big Man from Rubber Blanket #3.

I will begin by analyzing a scene from Big Man, whose titular character is a mysterious giant that washes up on a riverbank, one day, to the consternation of a rural farming community. When Peter, a farmer, tries to unsuccessfully speak with Big Man, he realizes that the giant doesn’t understand English. In the first of the two bottom panels on page 23, Peter says to Big Man: “If you can understand me, we want to know where you come from.” (23). In the next panel, Peter tries to use hand gestures to clarify the meaning of his words. This time he speaks slowly, placing pauses between his words: “Where… do you… come from?” On the first panel of page 24, the Big Man responds with the sound “Hhhn?”, while mimicking with his hands the action of writing. By doing this, he physically expresses a desire to have something to write with.

Subsequently, we see Peter hand him a file clipper and a pencil in the next couple of panels, evincing that he understood the gesture. Big Man then begins to write. When panel 6 reveals the Big Man’s text, it turns out that Big Man’s writing is indecipherable, as it appears in the form of signs that resemble hieroglyphics, which Peter, the other farmers and the readers cannot understand. This establishes that Big Man normally speaks and writes in a language that is unfamiliar to normal people.

Thus, this series of panels juxtaposes the Big Man’s ability to communicate physically through gesture with his inability to communicate verbally and through writing. Through the juxtaposition, Mazzuchelli proposes the idea that language can be physical, that it does not necessarily have to consist of spoken words and written text. In other words, he espouses an alternate way of communicating. Supporting this idea is the fact that Big Man never utters a word via ‘speech balloons’ or ‘word bubbles’, which represent the traditional means of visualizing dialogue between characters in comics. This is clearly visible in panel 8 on page 34 and panel 2 on page 35, where the little speech-impaired girl Rebecca successfully communicates with Big Man without verbally forming words and sentences.

Instead, as we can see in panels 3 and 4 on page 35, both of them utilize the nasal sound “Snrrt!” to speak to each other. Though they pronounce the same noise, Rebecca’s appears within white speech balloons, designating it as ‘dialogue’, while the Big Man’s “Snrrt” appears outside of a balloon, placing it in line with other noises such as the “THUD” in panel 6. The fact that “Snrrt” appears as both dialogue and noise illustrates that noise can have the same communicative function as dialogue. This positions noise as a viable means of communication, an alternative to speech and writing.  Another possible interpretation could be that noise functions as a language, where a single sound can stand in for entire words or sentences.

One could construe the fact that Big Man and Rebecca converse using only “Snrrt” as them speaking a language only they understand. One doesn’t know exactly what Big Man and Rebecca mean by pronouncing “Snrrt!”, but the two apparently understand one another, as they use the sound repeatedly. As such, language becomes intrinsic not just to the plot and story of Big Man, but also to the perception of the titular character by the other characters and by the readers. Language essentially defines Big Man as a character, portraying him as an ‘other’ to the farmers and a familiar to Rebecca.

Language similarly defines the character of Peter Stillman, the reclusive billionaire of City of Glass, who hires main character Daniel Quinn to investigate Peter’s abusive and insane father. Quinn learns that Stillman Senior’s insanity apparently came about as a result of his research on language and religion. As Quinn’s narration indicates, Stillman believed that the fall of man from Paradise brought about the fall of language. After the fall, language “…had been severed from God.” (Karasik and Mazzuchelli 39) The idea of creating a new language or recovering the old language became a driving force for Stillman Sr., which he confirms to Quinn in a park conversation in the last panel on page 69. Thus, Mazzuchelli portrays language in City of Glass as part of one’s identity, as well as a source of character motivation. It can function not just as a means of communication, but as an extension of the characters.

Strengthening this view is the author’s visualization and foregrounding of communi-cation though an expressive utilization of text and word balloons, as well as the combination of words with abstract images. City of Glass first creates the impression that it abides by the traditional visualization of dialogue in graphic novels, wherein all the letters appear in the same font and the same size. For example, in the second panel of page 28, Quinn asks Stillman’s wife Virginia: “How was Peter finally discovered?” Virginia responds: “There was a fire”. Both lines of dialogue appear in spherical speech balloons with all letters in uppercase and in the same font. The majority of conversations within the novel utilize this style.

On the one hand, this establishes the font and speech balloon format Quinn and Virginia speak in as the ‘common’ format of the novel. On the other, this serves to distinguish the sequences, where conversations diverge from this format, which the scene that introduces Stillman Jr illustrates perfectly. When he begins to talk on page 15, the reader should immediately notice that Peter’s dialogue is visually different from that of the other characters. For one thing, his words mix lower and uppercase letters. The word “Peter” for example, capitalizes the “P” and the “T” while leaving the rest of the letters in lowercase. Such an amalgamation suggests that Peter speaks in an inconsistent, disorderly manner, in comparison to the other characters, who speak normally.

For another, Peter’s word balloon reaches deeply into his mouth, in stark contrast to the previous word balloons in the book, all of which appear at a distance from the mouth of the character, whose words they are conveying. This distinct visual presentation gives the impression that the balloon is a part of Peter himself, a natural extension of his character. Compounding this impression are the subsequent panels, which continue to display the word balloons literally emerging from inside Peter, each new panel closing the distance between Peter’s mouth and the frame. The second panel moves towards a medium close-up, the third to a close-up. This continues until the ninth and final panel has literally entered deep inside the throat of Stillman, which resembles an endless black-and-white spiral.

The word balloon continues to emerge from inside the spiral, the pattern making it appear, as if the panels have been following the spiral to its source. This continues in the 3x3 panels from pages 16-23, which display various surreal and abstract images, including a puddle of water (16), a gondolier (17), a grate (19), a bird (20) and a guitar (21). Multiple panels sometimes display the same image, only at different angles, with the gondolier occupying 15 panels from pages 16 and 17. All of the panels feature Peter’s word balloon emerging from the image and resuming his dialogue.

For example, Peter says in panel 9 of page 15: “…They say mother died.” On the next page, the frame displays the word balloon, reaching below the frame, continuing: “I say what they say because I know nothing.” The next panel shows the balloon coming from a puddle, continuing: “There was this. Dark. Very dark…” This combination of images signifies that Peter is the one speaking at all times. He remains the source of the dialogue. However, the reader sees different visual representations of the source/Peter. Thus, the use of multiple visual sources implies a continuous shift in Peter’s manner of speaking. The order of the images seems random and the lack of an identifiable pattern indicates that Peter has no control over what he says, his words essentially transmitting a stream of consciousness.

Additionally, Peter’s sentences can come off as incoherent, full of sudden changes of subject without a logical reason. As the aforementioned three lines of dialogue attest, after talking about the death of his mother, he suddenly and inexplicably shifts towards speaking about the dark room he was in as a child. Altogether, the mixing of uppercase and lowercase letters, the incoherent sentences and the different visual representations of Peter speaking express the idea that Peter is mentally unstable. He himself confirms his instability when he says: “I know that all is not right in my head” (21) As such, Mazzuchelli ultimately depicts communication expressionistically to visualize a character’s interiority to the reader.

Peter’s unique way of speaking/communicating distinguishes him from everyone else within the context of the novel. Thus, the image of the word balloon reaching literally inside him connotes that language is a part of him, an extension of his self. The plot confirms this by positioning Stillman Sr.’s search for language as the cause of his insanity. It compelled him to lock his son alone in a room for 9 years (Karasik and Mazzuchelli 27), ultimately leading to Peter’s mental instability.

Mazzuchelli expands on the idea of language functioning as one’s extension in Asterios Polyp by depicting every single character with a particular text font and speech balloon. To illustrate this, I present Figure 1, which features a sequence from the book between Asterios and his wife Hana, as they try to tell a story to a group of unseen interlocutors in a restaurant. Asterios’ text appears in all six panels in rectangular polygons, while his words are always uppercase, never lowercase, italicized or bold. The rectangular form of his speech balloons reflects his status as a professor of architecture and his preference for, as well his interest solids and rectangular flats. Meanwhile, while the use of solely uppercase letters reflects his aversion to change and his preference for rigid order and structure.

Hana, by contrast, speaks in spherical word balloons and her dialogue uses both uppercase and lowercase letters. This places her in direct opposition to Asterios visually, reflecting her down-to-Earth personality, her openness to change and her interest in non-rectangular figures, such as circles and straight lines, as she herself mentions towards the end of the book. Like in City of Glass, the text frame also functions in an expressive manner. For instance, the third panel portrays Asterios’ hexagonal speech box in the foreground, relegating Hana’s spherical speech bubble to the background.

As Hana describes how “…this one big guy tries to push…”, Asterios interjects with his addition: “Before that though, a couple of women squeezed in front of him.” Instead of telling the viewers via narration that Asterios interrupts Hana, Mazzuchelli depicts this through image and composition by visualizing Asterios’ box over Hana’s bubble. Through this, he additionally conveys Asterios’ egocentrism, his belief that he knows better than Hana. Hence, the text font and the text frame visually define and contrast the characters’ personalities, as well as convey how the characters speak, as opposed to just what they say.

By portraying everyone in the novel with his/her own particular text font and/or frame, Mazzuchelli illustrates that every person has an individual manner of speaking. Thus, the manner of speech becomes an extension of the character. This goes in hand with how the author describes language in Figures 2 and 3. Figure 2 opens with a narration. It states: “What if reality (as perceived) were simply an extension of the self? Wouldn’t that color the way each individual experiences the world?” The images on Figure 2 depict numerous people in a variety of art styles. Thus, the association of word and image indicates that the art styles all represent the different ways that individuals can experience the world.

If one’s perception of reality is an extension of one’s self and one’s manner of speaking is an extension of the self, then, by illustrating how every individual has a distinct manner of speaking, Mazzuchelli conveys that every individual has a different manner of perceiving reality. In Figure 3, the narration continues: “That might explain why some people get along so effortlessly…”. Images of men and women, drawn in an identical art style, appear next to it. In conjunction with the previous figure, the identical art style indicates that these men and women experience the world in a similar manner. The narration indicates that the images represent the people that get along easily, evincing that people who have similar perceptions of reality can effortlessly get along with one another.

Conversely, the characters in the next two images appear in different styles and the narration concludes with: “…while others don’t.” The association of these words with the images signifies that these characters perceive the world differently. So, they do not get along easily. Finally, the author presents two different characters speaking in one overlapping speech bubble. The words inside all say “Hello” in three different languages: English, Hawaiian and Hebrew. The narration below the image refers to the previous statement of people getting along: “Although people do keep trying.” Mazzuchelli associates the act of speaking, the act of verbal communication with individuals getting along or finding a common way of experiencing the world, as the overlapping speech bubble indicates.

This means that if language is key to verbal communication between different individuals, then language can be a means for people to find a common way of experiencing the world. While every character in the novel possesses a distinct style of speech and a unique perception of reality, the English language remains the one constant between them all. So, language becomes an extension of every single character within Asterios Polyp, functioning as an intermediary bet-ween the various individuals’ different perceptions of reality, allowing them to arrive at a unified perception. Together with the examples from Big Man and City of Glass, this proves that Mazzu-chelli is an auteur that visually foregrounds language and communication in comic form.

Overall, we can see that Mazzuchelli emphasizes language and communication throughout his body of work. By expressively using the text, the author helps define his characters through their manner of speech and their use of language. In addition, he raises various questions about how and why people communicate, about what language is and what its functions are. If communication is usually an unobtrusive and inexpressive element of mainstream graphic novels, it is a visible and distinguishing characteristic of the oeuvre of Mazzuchelli. So it isn’t surprising that Mazzuchelli and co-author Paul Karasik compared the adaptation of the novel City of Glass into a graphic novel to “… a translation from one language to another” (Kartalou-polos). In this regard, one could consider Mazzuchelli a graphic novel linguist.

Citations

Karasik, Paul and Mazzuchelli, David. City of Glass, The Graphic Novel. Picador, New York 2004. Revised version of Neon Lit: Paul Auster’s City of Glass, Avon Books, 1994. Based on the novel City of Glass by Paul Auster, Sun and Moon Press, 1985.

Kartaloupolos, Bill. “Three Questions for David Mazzucchelli” in Indy Magazine, Spring 2004. http://www.indyworld.com/indy/spring_2004/mazzucchelli_interview/index.html

Mazzuchelli, David. Asterios Polyp. Pantheon Books, New York, 2009

Mazzuchelli, David. “Big Man” in Rubber Blanket #3. Ed. David Mazzuchelli and Richmond Lewis, Rubber Blanket Press, Hoboken NJ, 1993, 17-64

Mikhail Leonidovich Skoptsov is currently a second semester PHD student at Brown University's department of Modern Culture and Media. He has a BA in Cinema Studies from New York University and an MA in Film Studies from the University of Southern California. His current research interests include: postmodernism in cinema, media piracy, fan productions, serialization in cinema and television, as well as trans-media storytelling.

The Cultural Context of Chinese Fandom: An Interview with Xiqing Zheng(Part Three)

You suggest that Chinese fans often see themselves as belonging to an elite group. In some other parts of the world, fans are considered anything but because of the low cultural status of the materials they embrace. In what ways have Chinese Otaku sought to legitimate their interests and activities through appeals to elite cultural status?

This situation is resulted from the specific history of current fan culture in China. This fan culture, however hard people try to make a connection with the older “rewriting” fiction tradition, or older tradition of appreciating a fiction on a community level, is for its majority, an import from Japan. This fact has two results: first, Chinese fan culture was at first highly restricted to a group of comparatively well-educated people, but second, the Japanese heritage of this culture is often neglected, replaced by a lineage reconstructed by Chinese fans between Chinese fandoms and canonical high art literature.

When fandoms began to emerge at the end of the 20^th century in China, people having access to such cultural environment and cultural practices are highly restricted to the young, urban, highly-educated and well-informed people such as college students, or young urbanites that were at least wealthy enough to afford a computer and internet surfing fees when both of them were comparatively difficult to have in the 1990s China. Of course, universities usually have better technological condition than other places, and young students were the major target consumers of the internet cafes when they were in a fad at the turn of the century. Such condition put a restriction on the people who were able to access fandom. Comparing to the condition right now, the major difference was that the hardware difficulty stopped most young teenagers and children from entering the fandoms. And the content centered on Japanese anime further restricted the age of participants to the urbanites who were born after the late 1970s. Fan fiction created during this period is of good quality both in content and style, while many fan authors paid close attention in making their products fit the elite image. Both the age span and the social origin of the fans have enlarged in fandoms now, but the early elitism still continues.

The other aspect that I mentioned above is the self-constructed lineage of the fandoms to the elite, avant-garde literature. This is exceptionally observable in the case of slash fiction, in which fangirls try to establish a lineage between their writings with traditional Chinese literature with homoerotic contents, and also, between slash fiction and avant-garde literature with queer materials. Even though in fact Chinese slash fiction / yaoi culture has little to do with either the pre-modern homoerotic novels, nor does it bear many resemblances with avant-garde literature except both of them are standing on a marginal position in the society, and both of them present something taboo of the mainstream society. Yet still, such a self-claimed lineage constitutes a good position of self-defending, and a good way of self-disciplining.

I think the elitism of Chinese fans, and the generally mild reaction towards the fan culture from the public has another crucial reason. In both pre-modern and modern Chinese literature, there are various types and forms of fan-fiction-like literary products. For example, there were dozens of sequels dedicated to The Dream of Red Chambers 红楼梦, usually considered the greatest traditional Chinese colloquial novels, which was written in the 18^th century. The novel Jin Ping Mei 金瓶梅 (written around the 16^th century) can be considered as an elaboration of a comparatively small segment in another great novel Water Margins 水浒传 (possibly written in the 14^th century). Indeed, such rewritten stories and sequels can be seen as the remnant of the folk literature tradition in pre-modern Chinese literature, but similar things happened in the 20^th century also. At the turning of the 19^th and the 20^th century, when the first wave of translation of Western literature into Chinese started, genre literature such as detective fiction and science fiction attracted much attention from the translators and readers. And the first wave of “new fiction” writing in the genre of science fiction, which directly imitated the Western sci-fi, often presents a science Utopia through rewriting old novels. For example, Wu Jianren 吴趼人, in his New Tale of Stones 新石头记, puts the protagonist from Dreams of Red Chambers into the contemporary Chinese society as an observer and commentator. During the 1920s to the 1940s, many authors created so-called “re-written fiction,” including the single most important writer in modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun 鲁迅. His Old Tales Retold 故事新编 is a collection of parody of various old Chinese legends. Other similar stories involve, for example, Shi Zhecun’s 施蛰存 “Shi Xiu” 石秀, a short story in which the author retells the story of the character Shi Xiu from The Water Margins, using psychoanalysis to explain his motivation.

I am not claiming that the present Chinese fan fiction has a direct relationship with this trend, yet after some fan fiction stories started to become famous in the 21^st century, many people explains the idea of “fan culture” to their curious friends by using the example of canonical literature. I have seen several cases in which people explain the definition of “fan fiction” with the example of Lu Xun’s Old Tales Retold. Even though the current fan culture does not have a directly heritage from this tradition, this “rewriting of old canon” tradition is in the large social background both for the creation and for the circulation of Chinese fan fiction. I also want to add, that such “rewritten” stories are widely seen around the world; it is never a China-only phenomenon. But I haven’t seen any scholarship trying to establish this literary tradition with popular fan culture.

One last issue I have to stress here is: there hasn’t been a hierarchy that clearly distinguishes “high culture” and “popular culture” in Chinese fiction; fiction was considered low-brow in general before the end of 19^th century, when a group of literati called on a literary revolution. The historical reasons for this condition are complicated, which I will not explain in detail here. Even the word “genre literature” has only existed in Chinese language for less than two decades. Consumers of media products such as Japanese anime, especially those who are no longer young enough to be considered an appropriate consumer for anime, are generally viewed in a biased perspective. And people who love Hollywood blockbusters are despised by those who love European art films. But the bias has not yet supported a deep grained stereotype for popular fans. These might be the ultimate reason for the comparatively high status for fans in China.

You write particularly about female fans of slash or Yaoi. How might these young women use this genre to negotiate around tensions surrounding the status of women and female sexuality in China?

Another question that I am personally very interested in. Of course the popularity for slash or yaoi is a very complicated issue. But if we consider specifically the topic of gender and female sexuality, I want to stress the issue of gender equality. (The word choice between slash and yaoi is again a difficult one. In China the term for this genre has another name: danmei 耽美, also with a complicated history. It is originally the Japanese translation of the word “aestheticism,” yet after being imported to China, its meaning shifted. Only for the convenience, I will use the term yaoi here.)

To understand the rapid fad of yaoi culture, one has to understand the population that takes part in reading and writing yaoi fan fiction and original stories. In all of the three areas that I am examining, the rise of female created and female oriented homoerotic stories is directly associated with the issue of female autonomy and independency. In the US, the slash fiction reading and writing is not only a “women’s enterprise” outside the market economy, it also signals women’s rebellion against the dominant social norms of sexuality. In Japan, the emergence of yaoi culture eventually came from the female manga artists who was blocked out of the manga industry because of their gender, started their career in amateurish market of dōjin manga publication, which, ultimately led to their professional career as revolutionary shōjo manga artists. In China, however, the case is different. As I have already mentioned, Chinese contemporary fan culture was marked by its exceptionally elitism. In the case of yaoi culture, the case is more obvious. The first generation of Chinese fangirls, in this case the ones who are active around the year 2000, usually self-considered as the social elite. There was a very famous quote by a yaoi forum titled “Lucifer”: “Fangirls have the responsibility to be more civilized than others.” The claim holds true considering the situation that many fangirls of that age are the ones who go to good universities or high schools, well-educated in Chinese and Western literature, and have excess to the internet before many others in the country. Even though with the internet technology enters more and more people’s household, the existence of the fangirls community and yaoi culture is no longer a secret among young women students in a handful of best universities in China, the tradition of elitism still lingers.

For many girls of the one child generation, their family, especially their parents have exceptional expectation on them. The traditional patriarchy thoughts still persist in some way, especially the older tradition in a family that girls have to sacrifice for boys, that only sons are considered important, but these thoughts lose their meaning and survival environment in the generation when every family has only one child. A predictable consequence is that the only daughters are treated with all attention from their families. Some girls are raised as boys to earn fame and fortune for the family, especially to earn more success than their male cousins. To my own knowledge, most urban girls of my age have the experience of being educated that women are no worse than men, and what a man can do, can certainly be done by a woman. Being inculcated with such words, most girls of this generation, especially the ones that have gained their success according to the mainstream criteria, i.e. those who achieve high academic success and the ones who find well-paid jobs, will ultimately be forced to face with the still highly unequal gender relationship in China. Within the long tradition of women-oriented romance in Sinophone area persists, in which no matter how a woman character is successful, has to finally become an obedient daughter, a loyal wife and a responsible mother, and be restricted again into the family trivial, and to rely on the marriage to determine the success of one’s life. Then any attempt of creating a strong female character risks the danger of falling into the stereotypes of de-feminized female characters of Maoist Socialist Realism. The new possibility in recent popular fiction, though, is turning the female characters into those that encourage over identification and self-projection, i.e. Mary Sue. Mary Sue characters are too easy a role for female readers to identify with; the readymade identification choice is largely degraded in the fan community as an unhealthy indulgence. Many argue that Mary Sue as a fan fiction may not even invite female audience, because the character may bear too much characteristics of the fan fiction writer and as a consequence prevents a general identification. Recently, some new types of romance written for the young women audience and teenager girls, such as Twilight series in English speaking areas, and the time-travel fiction (chuanyue xiaoshuo 穿越小说) in China are considered Mary Sue, even if they do not necessarily fall in the category of fan fiction.

Considering the easy pitfalls for the original female characters, the retreat into yaoi material for the female readers of this generation is a logical result: if you cannot find a solution to the current male-female relationship, then get rid of the female characters all together. At least in between male characters, there can be the possibility of an equal love relationship, in which there is no such thing as one has to subject to the other. This is a temporary and escapist retreat, and probably not a healthy one, because in one way or another, one has to come back to the reality to deal with the male-female relationship. Yet still, the popularity of the yaoi material, from a special perspective, shows the current crisis in gender relationship in Chinese society.

Yet the tendency of surpassing the issue of male-female gender relationship sometimes ends in misogyny in yaoi writings online. While celebrating the pure love between two male characters, the female characters who develops a romantic relationship with one of the male lovers in yaoi materials usually have very tragic ending: for the sake of the two male characters who love each other, female characters have to get away ultimately, so they either die or being tragically dumped by the male character, and also, should never has the importance of the other male character to her ex-husband or boyfriend. I will explain this situation with the reason of jealousy, but I also want to point to the complexity and ambiguity of ideology expressions in Chinese yaoi culture. Even though the explanation of gender equality issue holds true to me and many of my friends around, it might not work on every fangirl. Even if fangirls are attracted to the gender equal expression in certain slash fiction, they might not always stick to this norm when reading other pieces of slash fiction.

Most recent writings in English on Chinese fan communities have emphasized the phenomenon of fan subbing. What roles do fan subbing practices play in promoting other kinds of fan productivity?

I personally feel that fansubbing is the core and root for many fan activities in China, especially in media fandoms. And as you have mentioned in the question, it has become one of the most observable aspects of Chinese fan culture as a whole since more than six or seven years ago, both domestically and internationally, with little of other aspects of Chinese fan culture widely mentioned (I believe the earliest occasion that brought fansub to the foreground was the unintended popularity of the US series Prison Break in China, which was largely in debt to the online fansub groups. Even New York Times had this story covered.). A fansub group is not only a volunteer that translate certain foreign texts into Chinese; it plays the role of raw material selector, the role of linguistic translator, and at the same time, the role of cultural introducer. The final function usually cannot be served in the “official” translations of foreign materials. Because of the informal nature of fansubs, fansubbers are free to add notes, comments and detailed background information introduction for cultural details in order to facilitate the audience in understanding the media materials. Besides, since the fansubbers have a general idea of the identities of their audiences (usually young fans who stay online all the time), fansubbers are able to target the direct concerns and questions of their audiences more accurately.

Fansubs are sometimes the only choice for the Chinese audience to get access to foreign media products. Because Chinese government has a strong restriction on media product imports, and also because there is no rating system in China, imported media products are very limited in number, and even if they are imported, many of which have to go through a thorough censorship first. This censorship is much more on explicit reference to sex, than on politically sensitive issues. (A famous example would be the American sitcom Friends. Despite its tremendous popularity in China, it never was able to appear on TV in China. According to certain rumors—which I believe is true—it was only because there are so many sex-related jokes that after censorship, some episodes would have little left. And as we all know, Friends is so much milder than many US series). Then in order to get access to foreign media products, audiences are forced on to an illegal way. Therefore p2p download and online streaming becomes necessary. Even though students are required to learn English from a young age, the language barriers set by media products are daunting. Because “official subtitles” are usually hard to find for TV series, not to say Chinese dubbing, it is mainly the fansub groups that translate and introduce the foreign media products to the Chinese audience. Though I do not have too much information of the fansubs in English speaking countries, from what I read and heard from conferences on fan activities, fansubs in China have a surprisingly high quality. Many fansub groups require interviews and tests before accepting new members. Some fansub groups on Japanese materials even directly ask the prospective members for their levels and grades for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (is a standardized test to evaluate and certify Japanese language proficiency for non-native speakers, held internationally twice a year). Fansubs depend highly on reputation to thrive in a fandom. I have to emphasize that fansubbing is totally voluntary, not for profit, and open to the general public. But since fansubbers are doing this totally because of their love and interest for the original texts, they usually would do the translation with their best effort. Therefore once a fansub group has established its fame, people tend to believe in it even more than “official subtitles,” if there is any, because after all, fansubs are made “by people of our own community.”

Fan subbing is the starting point of every fan activities on certain media products, therefore it is very crucial. For example, it is not rare to see fan fiction written in Chinese that directly use dialogues in a media product translated by a favorite fansub group. Besides, since Chinese fan culture is especially open to foreign media materials, the role of fan subbing becomes even more significant under this condition.

Again, I am standing on the position of a “native informant” here. I have worked in various fansubbing and fan translation groups, including one on a Japanese radio program (named “Dear Girl~ Stories~,” hosted by two famous Japanese voice actors Kamiya Hiroshi and Ono Daisuke), another on the BBC TV series Sherlock, and I am still an active translator and subber of a fan group on J.R.R. Tolkien’s writings. The last fan translation group I am working in is based on a “little site” on a Chinese SNS website Douban (豆瓣, which is a very unique SNS site for people to exchange information on books, films, music, etc. and to post their reviews), called “Red Book of Middle Earth” 中土红皮书, a fan created and fan maintained site that introduces and updates everything about and around The Lord of the Rings trilogy and other Tolkien’s writings. If you have interest, here is the link to it: http://site.douban.com/120385/. Right now we are working on news and videos on the Hobbit films. The collection and translations of related materials do require English proficiency (and good Chinese language skills also), and much time and effort. But besides a dozen central figures that participate in the actual translation process, the fans of the fan translation group actually are able to form a small and active fan community.

Author's Bio: As an academic fan from China, I entered the fandom around 2003 when I was still an undergraduate student of Chinese Literature at Peking University. I am currently a PhD candidate at the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Washington. My dissertation topic is Chinese online fan culture, as well as its relationship with the media and fandoms from Japan and the English speaking areas. I have done several presentations on Chinese fan fiction and fan culture in conferences, but up to now I do not have any publication in English. By the way, I am now translating Professor Jenkins's Textual Poachers into Chinese, not as a voluntary fan translator, though.

The Cultural Context of Chinese Fan Culture: An Interview with Xiqing Zheng (Part Two)

Fandom constitutes a particular form of leisure. How does it fit within the exam culture which so shapes the lives of Chinese youth?

I do not feel in a confident position in answering this question. Basically I have personal experience to draw upon on all other questions, save this one. I myself had passed the age of being afflicted by the most tediously part of the exam culture when I entered the Lord of the Rings online fandom as a collective community for the first time; I was a sophomore in college then. Before then, yes, I was a fan, but I didn’t know there is something called fandom (and the fandom before 2003 did have much less observable a presence in Chinese society).

Fandom activity is a very good complimentary to the tedious exam culture for the youth in China, especially when exams are not consuming all time of the students. It is difficult for fandom to take much of their time, but leisure times? Very possible. I often find a fan fiction author explaining his/her slow update with the reason “I am a senior in high school, and you know, I don’t have time at all.” Or “I am a high school student living on campus and can only be back home to use the computer on weekends…” or “I live on campus and I can only use my cellphone to update my fic! Please forgive me for the problems on the format.” etc. Some young students may post on fan forums their art products or doodles made in their classrooms, at the back of an exam paper, in a lined notebook; in some online chat, some young fans express their excitement when they encounter anything relevant to their beloved products in a classroom situation. Fandom activities do find a way squeezing into their busy life. However busy the students are, there is always some time left for themselves.

Fan culture has actually existed in Chinese high schools for a long time. I have heard of people who started to write fan fiction with pen and paper in high school years to communicate with other fans, even before the internet is available to average urban families, but such sporadic phenomena cannot be compared to the current situation, when more and more young students are at least aware that there are fandoms for them to participate if they are interested in. We can see that the fan culture is really becoming a major choice for leisure time activities for the busy students in China, and probably a type of convenient refuge for them. Yet I am also reluctant to claim that it is unique comparing to other types of leisure time activities and hobbies for young people in China. After all, even if the fandoms are more and more widespread and observable in Chinese society right now, fan culture still belongs to a small audience and remains a comparatively marginal community.

What are the dominant modes of fan cultural production and participation in China?

I guess that fan fiction is still one of the dominant modes of fan cultural production and participation, and of course, fan art and fan video are also immensely important. The fan fiction I discuss here, which is characterized by female perspectives and commercial consumptions, started around the mid-1990s, and has been prosperous since then. Considering fan art, it is now not only restricted to originally created paintings, but sometimes involves technical manipulation on screen grabs to make them present certain effects. There was not a VHS age for Chinese fan videos so far as I know. The earliest ones I encounter were produced around the turn of the century and are directly circulated online. The earliest ones are usually flash video files; then the production shifted to other formats when online streaming sites become popular. Fan music exists, but the creation of which is more restricted to certain groups of people. Yet even though only a limited number of people participate in fan music writing, these people are very prolific. There are other types of fan activities, for example, fan game designing. But video game designing requires technical expertise of quite a high level, and therefore is very rarely seen. But if created successfully, fan video games are highly welcomed by fans. I have also seen friends who participated in designing fan board games. Fan translation is another type of activities that are able to connect and gather fans of a certain media product. Fan translation is not restricted to subbing a video of reports or interview or other media products related to the original material; it also involves translating certain news and interviews, and even fan fictions, fan arts and fan videos. Another fan activity online recent called “language-cosplay” cannot be categorized in any of the types I stated above. It is an activity for a group of people, with each of them role-plays a character in the original media and interacts with one another online in dialogues as if s/he is the characters.

Fan books and fanzines started later than fan fiction and fan arts in China, and in early 2000s, digital versions of fanzines were more frequently seen than printed ones. Recently the trend changes: fanzines and fan books in printed forms are becoming popular. One reason is the easy access to direct online merchandize with the emergence of platform website such as Taobao 淘宝, and the rapid development of convenient private postal delivery systems, thus direct one to one merchandizes have become possible. Nowadays most fan books and fanzines are planned and pre-ordered online. There is a website called Tianchuang lianmeng 天窗联盟 (Alliance of Roof Windows), which is the largest online search engine of any Chinese language fanbooks and fanzines. Tianchuang, meaning roof windows, is a jargon in the fan community: if a fan artist or fan author is not able to finish his/her work on time, the fanzine or fanbook will not be available for the proposed cons. Then it is called “roof windowed.” (And this jargon is originally from a slang in the publish industry.) This is the link to the website in case that you are interested: http://doujin.bgm.tv/. From this website we can see clearly that the production and circulation of materialized fan products now still has direct connection to the digital media.

For the activities in the “real world,” cosplay and cosplay photography are of the most eye-catching and prevalent phenomena in the fan communities, and have attracted attention in the mainstream media. These activities often take place in fan conventions, though cosplay photography also takes place outside the conventions. The number of conventions is rapidly growing each year and has spread from several major cities to almost all large cities in China. For example in the year 2011, there were more than 100 fan conventions across the country, though the size varies (most conventions register on Tianchuang Lianmeng, you may want to explore that website to see). Sales of fan books and fanzines are one of the major functions of fan conventions in China. Comparing to the conventions held in the US, Chinese conventions are totally supported by the fan artists and fan writers who bring their works to the conventions to sell, since it is usually impossible to invite media celebrities or producers in the media industry for panels and autography—because a large portion of the original materials that the fans consume do not even have a legal distribution channel in China (though, celebrities’ participation is not totally impossible, Chinese manga authors, writers, illustrators, and most recently, celebrities as Japanese voice actors begin to attend conventions). Since there has not been such a tradition for holding panels and discussion sessions in cons, many Chinese fan conventions usually look exactly like flea markets with sellers and customers all dressed up in costumes. Smaller fan gatherings have been a longer tradition from before the 21^st century, but such gatherings usually are much smaller in scale, usually turn out to be a dinner, a Karaoke party, or an afternoon spent together in a board game café.

I personally feel that concerning the types of fan activities, fandoms around the world are very similar to each other. Even though some details may vary because of different social historical context, in the end all fan activities are about consumption, interpretation and appropriation. Indeed there are cultural differences, but fans’ communities around the world share astonishing amount of similarities. Because of the possibility of instant interaction and communication brought by the internet, the fan communities around the world is gradually breaking the language boundary, which is more observable in a third world country as in China, as people volunteer translating and reposting the fan products in other languages they like. But sadly, in most cases, it is still a unidirectional process.

Are there distinctive forms of fan production which have originated in China?

Since it is hard to determine all the fan production forms in other culture, I am not sure whether there is some form that is authentically “made in China.” But I feel that fan sub, or more broadly speaking, fan translation is specifically important in China, much more so than in many other countries. One reason is of course, the imported media products have from the beginning held special significance to the development of Chinese fan culture. The original media products are not the only things that Chinese fans translate; but also foreign fan productions, including fan fiction, fan art and other relevant periphery productions and news surrounding the original media products. I am not sure whether it is the condition of all fandoms in other third world countries, but just as I mentioned above, you do feel the powerful existence of globalization in fandoms. Even in the case of fandoms on pure Chinese materials, we find interactions and communications among different Chinese speaking regions (I have encountered fans from Malaysia in several fandoms I participate in). Again, I am not claiming that it is exclusively “made in China,” but fan translation is something that makes Chinese fandom more complicated than the fandoms I see in the US and in Japan, but beyond my scope, it is still hard to say.

Author's Bio: As an academic fan from China, I entered the fandom around 2003 when I was still an undergraduate student of Chinese Literature at Peking University. I am currently a PhD candidate at the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Washington. My dissertation topic is Chinese online fan culture, as well as its relationship with the media and fandoms from Japan and the English speaking areas. I have done several presentations on Chinese fan fiction and fan culture in conferences, but up to now I do not have any publication in English. By the way, I am now translating Professor Jenkins's Textual Poachers into Chinese, not as a voluntary fan translator, though.