Spring Break....

This is just a notice to my regular readers that I am now officially on Spring break and will return to regular blogging duties in another week's time. It's painful to log off now as I have lots of cool ideas planned for this space but my wife and staff are both insisting that I take some down time. Something about all work and no play makes Henry a very dull boy.

Transmedia Storytelling 101

I designed this handout on transmedia storytelling to distribute to my students. More recently, I passed it out at a teaching workshop at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. I thought it might be of value to more of you out there in the community. Much of it builds on the discussion of that concept in Convergence Culture, though I have updated it to reflect some more recent developments in that space. For those who want to dig deeper still into this concept, check out the webcast version of the Transmedia Entertainment panel from the Futures of Entertainment Conference.

Transmedia Storytelling 101

1. Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes it own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story. So, for example, in The Matrix franchise, key bits of information are conveyed through three live action films, a series of animated shorts, two collections of comic book stories, and several video games. There is no one single source or ur-text where one can turn to gain all of the information needed to comprehend the Matrix universe.

2. Transmedia storytelling reflects the economics of media consolidation or what industry observers call "synergy." Modern media companies are horizontally integrated - that is, they hold interests across a range of what were once distinct media industries. A media conglomerate has an incentive to spread its brand or expand its franchises across as many different media platforms as possible. Consider, for example, the comic books published in advance of the release of such films as Batman Begins and Superman Returns by DC ( owned by Warner Brothers, the studio that released these films). These comics provided back-story which enhanced the viewer's experience of the film even as they also help to publicize the forthcoming release (thus blurring the line between marketing and entertainment). The current configuration of the entertainment industry makes transmedia expansion an economic imperative, yet the most gifted transmedia artists also surf these marketplace pressures to create a more expansive and immersive story than would have been possible otherwise.

3. Most often, transmedia stories are based not on individual characters or specific plots but rather complex fictional worlds which can sustain multiple interrelated characters and their stories. This process of world-building encourages an encyclopedic impulse in both readers and writers. We are drawn to master what can be known about a world which always expands beyond our grasp. This is a very different pleasure than we associate with the closure found in most classically constructed narratives, where we expect to leave the theatre knowing everything that is required to make sense of a particular story.

4. Extensions may serve a variety of different functions. For example, the BBC used radio dramas to maintain audience interest in Doctor Who during almost a decade during which no new television episodes were produced. The extension may provide insight into the characters and their motivations (as in the case of websites surrounding Dawson's Creek and Veronica Mars which reproduced the imaginary correspondence or journals of their feature characters), may flesh out aspects of the fictional world (as in the web version of the Daily Planet published each week by DC comics during the run of its 52 series to "report" on the events occurring across its superhero universe), or may bridge between events depicted in a series of sequels (as in the animated series - The Clone Wars - which was aired on the Cartoon Network to bridge over a lapse in time between Star Wars II and III). The extension may add a greater sense of realism to the fiction as a whole (as occurs when fake documents and time lines were produced for the website associated with The Blair Witch Project or in a different sense, the documentary films and cd-roms produced by James Cameron to provide historical context for Titanic).

5. Transmedia storytelling practices may expand the potential market for a property by creating different points of entry for different audience segments. So, for example, Marvel produces comic books which tell the Spider-man story in ways that they think will be particularly attractive to female (a romance comic, Mary Jane Loves Spiderman) or younger readers (coloring book or picture book versions of the classic comicbook stories ). Similarly, the strategy may work to draw viewers who are comfortable in a particular medium to experiment with alternative media platforms (as in the development of a Desperate Housewives game designed to attract older female consumers into gaming).

6. Ideally, each individual episode must be accessible on its own terms even as it makes a unique contribution to the narrative system as a whole. Game designer Neil Young coined the term, "additive comprehension," to refer to the ways that each new texts adds a new piece of information which forces us to revise our understanding of the fiction as a whole. His example was the addition of an image of an origami unicorn to the director's cut edition of Bladerunner, an element which raised questions about whether the protagonist might be a replicant. Transmedia producers have found it difficult to achieve the delicate balance between creating stories which make sense to first time viewers and building in elements which enhance the experience of people reading across multiple media.

7. Because transmedia storytelling requires a high degree of coordination across the different media sectors, it has so far worked best either in independent projects where the same artist shapes the story across all of the media involved or in projects where strong collaboration (or co-creation) is encouraged across the different divisions of the same company. Most media franchises, however, are governed not by co-creation (which involves conceiving the property in transmedia terms from the outset) but rather licensing (where the story originates in one media and subsequent media remain subordinate to the original master text.)

8. Transmedia storytelling is the ideal aesthetic form for an era of collective intelligence. Pierre Levy coined the term, collective intelligence, to refer to new social structures that enable the production and circulation of knowledge within a networked society. Participants pool information and tap each others expertise as they work together to solve problems. Levy argues that art in an age of collective intelligence functions as a cultural attractor, drawing together like-minded individuals to form new knowledge communities. Transmedia narratives also function as textual activators - setting into motion the production, assessment, and archiving information. The ABC television drama, Lost, for example, flashed a dense map in the midst of one second season episode: fans digitized a freeze-frame of the image and put it on the web where together they extrapolated about what it might reveal regarding the Hanso Corporation and its activities on the island. Transmedia storytelling expands what can be known about a particular fictional world while dispersing that information, insuring that no one consumer knows everything and insure that they must talk about the series with others (see, for example, the hundreds of different species featured in Pokemon or Yu-Gi-O). Consumers become hunters and gatherers moving back across the various narratives trying to stitch together a coherent picture from the dispersed information.

9. A transmedia text does not simply disperse information: it provides a set of roles and goals which readers can assume as they enact aspects of the story through their everyday life. We might see this performative dimension at play with the release of action figures which encourage children to construct their own stories about the fictional characters or costumes and role playing games which invite us to immerse ourselves in the world of the fiction. In the case of Star Wars, the Boba Fett action figure generated consumer interest in a character who had otherwise played a small role in the series, creating pressure for giving that character a larger plot function in future stories.

10. The encyclopedic ambitions of transmedia texts often results in what might be seen as gaps or excesses in the unfolding of the story: that is, they introduce potential plots which can not be fully told or extra details which hint at more than can be revealed. Readers, thus, have a strong incentive to continue to elaborate on these story elements, working them over through their speculations, until they take on a life of their own. Fan fiction can be seen as an unauthorized expansion of these media franchises into new directions which reflect the reader's desire to "fill in the gaps" they have discovered in the commercially produced material.

Bring Me the Head of Henry Jenkins... (Part Two)

Yesterday, I began the strange saga of how a prosthesis of my head ended up in a glass case in an art gallery in New York City. If you missed that post, you probably want to go back and read it, since the rest of this will make even less sense than usual otherwise. Some months later, I was sent several pictures of the people on the set of the movie, interacting with my decapitated head, including filling it with blood and guts needed for the gross out elements of the film. I have to say that there's something uncanny about seeing your head oozing blood onto the asphalt, even if, as many people have pointed out, there isn't that strong a resemblance to me in the end.

Once they were done making the movie, the head found its way into the art exhibition and it has been touring galleries in both Europe and North America. I still haven't seen it myself but I have talked to a number of people who have. And I have started to encounter some of the other "body parts" as I travel around the conference circuit. So far, I have met an arm and a leg.

My head is a featured attraction in the press release for the exhibit:

For the creation of The Violence of Theory, 2006 Jankowski set out to find a horror production interested in collaboration and discovered filmmakers in the early stages of filming a straight-to-DVD werewolf movie. By bringing professional CGI studio effects and custom-made horror prosthetics to the bargaining table, Jankowski negotiated a new film project within their production.

Jankowski scoured the film's script and located the pivotal moments in which the characters, in the vernacular typical of the genre, undergo fantastic transformations or meet their untimely demise. He then intervened into the script with quoted observations on the philosophy and nature of horror generated from conversations with high-profile academics and cultural historians working in the field. Each actor was paired with a theorist "alter-ego," and while their character's actions remain identical to the original script, surprising phrases emerge without warning: seconds before being devoured, one victim protests, "Cannibalism is not attractive, it is repulsive... but there may be an attraction to that repulsion. I once lost a piece of skin from my big toe and roasted it to see what it tastes like. It didn't taste good, but I was curious." (Linda Williams, Professor of Film Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley) In another scene the werewolf wonders aloud, "If the horror film looks dead, horror is alive and well. It is precisely the seemingly tired genre elements that, when combined in new configurations, like bits of DNA, produce new and powerful monsters, which, much like Frankenstein's monster, acquire a life of their own and develop in ways that no-one can predict." (Marc Jancovich, Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of East Anglia)

Jankowski has also fabricated prosthetic body parts from the same theorists and critical thinkers who supplied the quotations. While these lines will most likely only make it in the art piece, the prosthetics will remain in the final version that is distributed to 9,000 Blockbuster Video stores; the decapitated head of Henry Jenkins, Director of Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, will roll across countless television screens throughout the United States. In both the film and the accompanying sculptures shown in the exhibition, the surreal intervention of the theorists destabilises the viewer's sense of reality and adds a macabre comic dimension while simultaneously presenting philosophical discourses relating to the horror genre. The Violence of Theory works in that place between loving the visceral experience of horror and trying to make sense of it through words.

I recently had a chance to see the more experimental film that emerged from this process, Lycan Theorized. It is a curious work -- one where characters spout some of the most arcane theoretical prose before getting hacked to bits by the monster, thus giving new meaning to the concept of deconstruction. My lines were given to a beefy thug who tries to battle the werewolf with a chain and ends up loosing his head. (indeed, the head used in the film looks much more like him than like me, though people have said that the one in the display case bears an uncanny resemblence to moi.)

His bosom companion is mouthing lines from Vivan Sobchack who donated the impression of her leg to the cause. (Ironically, Vivian already has a prosthetic leg. They wanted to create a prosthesis of a prosthesis but she's pretty protective of her leg for good reason, given it is very expensive, as she explained in one of her essays.) Much of the dialog in the film is incomprehensible -- removed from the context of the original theoretical works being quoted -- I won't comment on whether some of those works were comprehensible to begin with. I felt proud that my lines sort of made sense even in this context, given how much work I put into trying to make theory more accessible.

What follows is the transcript of the interview I did with Jankowski about my perspective on the horror film. The quotes used in the movie have been underlined.

What is the origin of your own interest in the horror genre?

Horror was a very active presence in my boyhood. My friends and I stayed up late to watch Creature Features on television. We read monster magazines and built Aurora models of the classic Universal monsters. We had haunted house themed birthday parties and would play around with stage makeup trying to make ourselves look like Frankenstein, Wolfman or Dracula. I would beg my father to take me to the drive in to see Roger Corman movies and I would fall asleep on his shoulders almost as soon as I arrived, knowing he would recount the plots to me the next day. More than anything, I wanted to buy a movie camera so I could make my own monster movies. We used to practice the various walks -- the stiff leged straight armed Frankenstein walk, the Mummy shuffle, and the Wolfman Limp, basically inspired as much from the poses of the monster models as anything else. I used to pray for nightmares just so I could spend more time in the company of vampires and werewolves. I have written very little about horror as an adult -- I do teach a class from time to time -- but I find that I still get really worked up just thinking about what a hold it took on my boyhood imagination.

What are is the most relevant or interesting question(s) to be addressed right now in the field?

Horror is such a disreputable genre, yet it is also the space where we explore some of the most disturbing elements in our own culture. Right now, our horror films seem to be circling around issues of torture and terror -- a perfect counter to the culture's own preoccupation with such matters since 9/11. A film like United 93 has to be handled with such kid gloves, while a film like Saw and its sequels can just get dumped into the theatres with no fanfare.

Horror right now is also so connected to questions of globalization. We have all of these horror films arriving from Japan -- in some cases directly, in other cases remade for an American audience. I will never forget the first time I watched a Japanese horror film. it was like riding a roller coaster blindfolded. I had no idea where it was going to take me. I didn't know where the rails were or when it was going to pull away from a controversial topic. It got under my skin in a way few other films do.

Beyond that, I think horror ups the ante about the relationship of low culture and high culture. It is a site of constant experimentation, often racing above the most extreme avant garde artists, and it is a space where the most radical ways of seeing the world can be accepted. It is at the same time a space where emotional intensity is the primary criteria of evaluation and therefore where there is no patience for the various postures of distance which shape high art discourse.

How does idea theft play a role in horror film? Is authorship important?

I think the relationship between genre and authorship is key here. Most of the core elements of horror are positively archiac -- they go back to our oldest stories, our most primitive beliefs, our basic folk traditions. At the same time, to work, the films have to make these elements relevant for a contemporary viewer. They have to work through our resistance, overcome our rationality, get us to believe in the boogeyman again, or at least to suspend our disbelief long enough to get swept up in the show.

Increasingly, horror films also build on other horror films. They assume that the modern viewer has seen many such films before, that they know they are watching a film, and even the characters in the film seem to know we are watching a film. So there's plenty of room here for pastiche, for spoof, and for homage to earlier works. At the same time, the space demands innovation and experimentation. If it is all the same old, same old, it doesn't have the necessary emotional impact. So it is always looking for artists with a fresh perspective, a new way of looking at the old elements, and it is very kind to kooks and goof balls. It is where the avant garde meets popular culture.

What do you think about the theft of "low culture," or a trashy aesthetic, by "high culture"?

The word, theft, here is problematic in both cases. Let's think of it as a dialog or exchange. High and popular artists borrow from each other all of the time. The popular artists are looking for something fresh which will revitalize the tired old formulas; the high culture artists are looking for something intense which will cut through the intellectual anemia which surrounds the art world at the present time. They are both looking for something that will shock and provoke. And so they end up borrowing constantly from each other. The popular artists borrows avant garde formal elements and weaves them into their genre formulas, where they become signs of madness or the supernatural. The high culture artists borrows shocking elements from popular culture, often slowing them down and flattening out their affective impact so we can contemplate them as things of beauty in their own terms. Or at least that's what I discovered in looking at the work of Matthew Barney.

What is your stance on horror fan culture?

Horror produces its own intelligensia -- people in the know, people committed to archiving its past, annotating its present, and analyzing seemingly every frame. I don't see such people as blood-thirsty fiends. They are perhaps even less likely to commit violent acts than the next guy. They do look at horror with an aesthetic sensibility. They can look at creatures who provoke horror and experience desire or empathy. They can look at things which some would find horrific or ugly and see there their own kind of beauty. They can move past what is represented to explore how it is represented and thus they develop a technical vocabulary to talk about make-up and special effects.

Bring Me the Head of Henry Jenkins.... (Part One)

Coming soon to an art gallery near you: My decapitated head. Don't worry if you don't live in a major cultural center -- my head will also be rolling around in a pool of blood in a straight to video horror movie that you can rent at your local Blockbuster. Well, this is another fine mess I've gotten myself into. In this entry, I will be sharing some images of the process by which the experimental artist Christian Jankowski transformed my head into an art object as part of a work known as "The Violence of Theory."

For me, this all began when I was asked by the folks at MIT's List Gallery to give a talk about the intersection between popular culture and high art. (I have for a number of years served as part of the advisory group for the gallery, though I have been relatively inactive lately.) I decided to present a talk based on my essay about Matthew Barney's relationship to the horror film, an essay which appears in my new anthology, The Wow Climax. In the course of the talk, I moved pretty fluidly from clips and images from Barney's Cremaster series to clips and quotes from such popular horror artists as David Cronenberg, Wes Craven, and Clive Barker. This paragraph cuts to the heart of my argument:

The modern horror genre was born in the context of romanticism (with authors seeking within the monster and his creator powerful metaphors for their own uneasy relationship with bourgeois culture) and the horror film originated in the context of German expressionism (with the studios demanding that madness or the supernatural be put forth as a justification for the powerful feelings generated by that new aesthetic sensibility.) The popular aesthetic's demand for affective intensity and novelty requires that popular artists constantly renew their formal vocabulary. Representing the monstrous gives popular artists a chance to move beyond conventional modes of representation, to imagine alternative forms of sensuality and perception, and to invert or transform dominant ideological assumptions. Historically, horror filmmakers have drawn on the "shock of the new" associated with cutting edge art movements to throw us off guard and open us up to new sensations.

From the start, horror films have required a complex balancing between the destabilization represented by those avant garde techniques and the restabilization represented by the reassertion of traditional moral categories and aesthetic norms in the films' final moments. There is always the danger that these new devices will prove so fascinating in their own right that they will swamp any moral framing or narrative positioning. For many horror fans, the genre becomes most compelling and interesting where narrative breaks down and erotic spectacle and visual excess takes over.

If the horror film has a moment of original sin, it came when the producers of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari inserted, at the last moment, a frame story that recontextualized the film's expressionist mise-en-scene as the distorted vision of a mad man. Through this compromise, they created a permanent space for modern art sensibilities within popular culture but only at the price of them no longer being taken seriously as art.

Among those people in the audience for the talk was Christian Jankowski, then in residence at MIT, as he was setting up an exhibition, "Everything Fell Together," in the gallery. Some months later, Jankowski contacted me again, this time to talk about his newest project, a series of artistic explorations of the culture around the contemporary horror film. Jankowiski had found a low budget horror film production which was willing to work with him to create a parallel work: he wanted to interview some of the leading theorists of the horror genre and incorporate their insights into the dialogue of the film. And while he was at it, he wanted to take "impressions" of us and transform them into prosthetic body parts, which would be deployed in gorey ways in the film and then displayed under glass in the installation.

Little did he know that he was tapping one of my boyhood fantasies. I was a horror film fan from the crib. I received a subscription to Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine for my thirteen birthday and spent hours flipping through the pages. My favorite bits were when they showed us the process which transformed Lon Chaney into the Wolfman or Boris Karloff into Frankenstein. I had clipped articles from Life magazine about the aging of Dustan Hoffman for Little Big Man and about the process that transformed Hal Holbrook into Mark Twain for his famous television special. At one time, I could have told you what Lon Chaney had in his make-up kit and how long it took them to turn Roddy McDowell into a chimp for Planet of the Apes. My mother had given me a make up kit and book when I was in my tween years and I spent horrors dribbling fake blood from my mouth or making synthetic scars using mortuary wax. So, it didn't take much to convince me to sit in the chair and have professional horror film makeup artists take an impression of my head.

My mother always told me to leave a good impression. My father always said that I should have my head examined. As it turns out, they both got their wish.

They started by wraping my upper body with a plastic garbage bag and then making a skull cap. They proceeded by coating my beard and my hair with vasaline which is supposed to prevent the rubber from sticking to my folicules. Then, they coated the area around my nose with an hideous orange goop, clearing out an area around the nostrels into which they inserted straws so that I would be able to breathe throughout the rest of the process. From there, they proceeded to coat my entire face with this orange substance. As it starts to dry, it becomes more like rubber but at first, it felt a bit like dunking your face in a vat of cold oatmeal. To hold the rubbery stuff in place as it dries, they wraped my head with bandages and finally covered the whole with plaster. For me, the biggest surprise was how much weight all of this placed on my shoulder and chest.

I had been warned that many people experience claustrophobia while undergoing this process: I went into a kind of hybernation and found the whole thing very relaxing up until the final few moments. For some reason, as we were approaching the end of the process, I suddenly found myself starting to sweet and felt some mild forms of panic. It was an enormous relief when the whole thing was removed -- not the least because I was finally able to speak again. I had so many puns and one-liners built up that they just exploded out of me once I got a chance to talk again. The whole process took about two hours -- and we did it in the main lobby of the CMS headquarters -- so you can imagine the startled looks of people walking in to pick up forms or what not.

The dried rubbery mask came off surprisingly easily and the technicians carried away with them a mold which perfectly captured the contours of my face. They said it would take about two weeks worth of work to transform it into a full reproduction of my head. While they were there, they took an extensive series of photographs of my face with various expressions, including asking me to imitate the lax jaw expression which we associate with death.

Just Men in Tights (Part Three)

Today, I offer up to readers the third and final installment of my essay in progress on the superhero genre. In this installment, I continue friday's discussion of the different strategies adopted by three recent graphic novels -- JLA: Year One, The Final Frontier, and Unstable Molecules -- in trying to encourage a revisionist perspective on the Silver Age of American comics, the period that more than any other defined the American superhero tradition. For those of you who are not comic buffs, the Wikipedia offers this definition of the Silver Age:

The Silver Age of Comic Books is an informal name for the period of artistic advancement and commercial success in mainstream American comic books, predominantly in the superhero genre, that lasted roughly from the late 1950s/early 1960s to the early 1970s. It is preceded by the Golden Age of Comic Books.

During the Silver Age, the character make-up of superheroes evolved. Writers injected science fiction concepts into the origins and adventures of superheroes. More importantly, superheroes became more human and troubled, and since the Silver Age, character development and personal conflict have been almost as important to a superhero's mythos as super powers and epic adventures.

DC: THE NEW FRONTIER

Darwyn Cooke's DC: The New Frontier depicts the transition between the scientific and military teams of the early 1950s and the Silver Age Superheroes who emerged by the end of the decade. In doing so, Cooke takes a creative risk, centering so much of the book on groups like The Losers, the Suicide Squadron, The Challengers of the Unknown, and the Black Hawks, who are less well known to contemporary readers. Many fan critics have suggested that the first part of the book, dominated by these characters, is less satisfying than the second half, when the Justice League characters come into their own. The climax comes when all of the superheroes of the Silver Age join forces to battle alien monsters. Along the way, however, we kill off many of the characters associated with the previous decade or, in the case of the supernatural figures, they retreat from direct involvement in earthly affairs. The book's first part is fragmented, built up from eclectic materials, since it must deal with the generic diversity in postwar comics, where-as the second part narrows its focus into a tauntly drawn superhero comic.

In the opening sections, we see war stories (Hal Jordan's experiences during the Korea War, Lois Lane's perspective as a military correspondent), detective stories (a film noir style interlude as J'ohn J'onzz takes up his secret identity as a beat cop and goes on some of his very first cases), science fiction (The Loser's deaths on a lost world full of dinosaurs, a subplot involving a secret military mission to send men to Mars), and romance (a moonlit date between Hal Jordon and Carol Ferris). Darwyn Cooke captures these genres in lushly colored images - more interested in evoking a mood or a milieu then digging in deep into the characterizations. His artwork borrows little from actual postwar comics, tapping the popular futurism associated with magazine ads and the technicolor images of Hollywood movies. A chase along the rooftops borrows from the opening of Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), while a wartime sequence in which Hal Jordon finds himself in arm-to-arm combat with a North Korean quotes from Harvey Kurtzman's Two-Fisted Tales (1950-1955).

In particular, Hal Jordan (Green Lantern) emerges as a key transitional figure: a hot shot test pilot with a military background, he could easily have served on one of the postwar teams and yet instead, he gains superpowers when he rescues a dying alien in the dessert and becomes the Green Lantern. Cooke depicts Jordan through the lens of Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff (1975), starting with a sequence where Hal as a boy tracks down Chuck Yaeger and gets his autograph, which foreshadows his involvement in the aerospace industry and his secret training for a potential space mission. Cooke's Green Lantern evaluates his new powers with the eyes of a test pilot: "It's like my heart's eye come to life - perfect, immaculate, pure - flight. The kind of light that fills your spirit in a way only a dream can....I become intoxicated with this glorious new destiny." (Book Five)

Cooke seeks to resituate the fictional history of the DC superheroes in relation to actual historical personalities and events which would have occurred simultaneous to the release of the original comics. There is a compelling sequence when many of the alter egos of the early DC superheroes and their girl friends visit Los Vegas, watching an early bout by Casuius Clay and a performance by Frank Sinatra. Another sequence involves a visit to a Motorama trade show where the protagonists admire the wing-tailed automobiles, hinting at the fascination with aerodynamic and streamlined forms that would influence the design of their costumes. In each of these cases, the links are evoked through the visual style rather than directly stated. Superman's battle with a giant robot in postwar Tokyo is represented through screaming neon lights, while Hal Jordon's arrival at Ferris captures the painted colors of the southwestern desert and the wild patterns of 1950s Hawaiian shirts. Acute observers may notice, for example, the Paul Klee prints hanging in the background as The Martian Manhunter watches black and white television in his apartment.

Cooke's fascination with 50s Americana goes beyond matters of style, linking the earlier action teams with the Eisenhower era and the formation of the Justice League with the first stirrings of the New Frontier. If some of the characters - notably Hal Jordon -embody the rugged individualism and square-jawed masculinity one associates with Cold War America (even as he questions the establishment every chance he gets), others struggle with the issues of their times. The Martian Manhunter is constantly investigating how America deals with issues of racial and cultural difference, trying to figure out how much acceptance he would receive if Earthlings knew of his alien origins. At one point, he goes to the movies to see Invaders from Mars (1953), hoping to learn what Americans knew and thought about his native planet. Before the film starts, he is intrigued to see the open support for Superman who makes no secret of his origins on another dying planet: "Lucky fellow. He's from another planet but his face doesn't scare people to death. It must be so easy for him. I can feel the crowd's love for him. It's like that of a parent." (Book Three) Yet, once he gets into the feature film, he doesn't know whether to laugh or cry: "I could feel their fear of the unknown, their hatred of things that they can't control or understand." Later, he is moved by an Edward R. Murrow style newscast depicting Steel's attempts to strike back at the Klansmen who murdered his family: "If Americans react this violently to people for a difference in skin color, then I fear they'll never be ready to accept me." (Book Four)

Similarly, Cooke uses Superman and Wonder Woman to debate America's involvement in IndoChina (Book 2). In a scene which could have come straight from Appocalypse Now (1979), Superman has been sent up river to find Wonder Woman. The Amazon has liberated a group of rebel women who have been held in tiger cages and then looked the other way as they slaughtered their captors. We see Wonder Woman surrounded by the revolutionaries, standing atop a table, and lifting a glass to their victories. Superman wants to hold her accountable to U.S. rules which prohibit direct intervention in these women's struggles for liberation. She has been sent there for propaganda purposes, to build up morale or as she puts it, "hand them a smile and a box of flags," whereas she has taken it upon herself to "train them to survive the coming war." When Superman urges her to set a better example, Wonder Woman responds, "Take a good look around. There are no rules here, just suffering and madness." Later, when she returns to the United States, she wants to share with Nixon and Eisenhower what she observed but they have no interest in hearing the truth. She is quickly sent back to Paradise Island. Superman is unable to understand why Americans would force her into retirement because he sees truth as central to the American way; the more world-weary Amazon urges him to fight for ideals and not put his trust in any given administration. The debate is a classic one: whether the superhero should act above the laws of any given nation and in pursuit of higher values or be subordinate to Earthly authorities even if they have flawed judgments and faulty morals.

The climax links the formation of the Justice League with the emergence of a more youthful and proactive administration as if the superhero alliance could be read alongside the formation of NASA or the launch of the Peace Corps. The final pages weave together Kennedy's "New Frontier" speech, images of superheroes battling evil and rescuing people and scenes of humans working together to overcome "ignorance, hate and fear." In Kennedy's words, the Justice League embraces not simply a "set of promises" but a "set of challenges," including "uncharted areas of science and space, unresolved problems of peace and war, unconquered pockets of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus." (Book Six) If Cooke has previously used the superheroes to question America's cold war and civil rights era policies, he now uses Kennedy's powerful rhetoric to express the ideals which defined the Silver Age heroes as a product of their times.

If we can see Mark Waid's work as reconstructing the superhero mythos to satisfy contemporary expectations, we might see Cooke as recontextualizing the genre, creating a new awareness of the historical forces which shaped its development. If early Silver Age comics seem strangely isolated from the political debates and social changes of the early Kennedy era - at least on the surface, Cooke suggests the way that they nevertheless embody the ideals and aspirations of that post-war generation.

UNSTABLE MOLECULES

James Sturm's Unstable Molecules is the most radical of these three projects - a fusion of the content of the superhero comics with the thematics and style of alternative comics. As Sturm puts it, "I feel like I went to the Marvel universe, kidnapped some characters, brought them back to my side of the street." Like Cooke's New Frontier, Unstable Molecules situates the origins of the superhero team - in this case, the Fantastic Four - in its historic context - the early 1960s. Sturm's book constantly revisits problems of inspiration and origins, never allowing us to have a stable or coherent perspective on the narrative. Whereas Cooke embraced the ideals of the Kennedy era as something to which we should return, Sturm sees the ideals - and lived experiences - of the earlier era as fundamentally inadequate as a basis for heroic action - something to escape from. For all of its play with multiple genres and historical perspectives, New Frontier ultimately falls into line with the core genre conventions while Unstable Molecules remains, well, unstable.

Much as Cawelti wrote about Chinatown, Unstable Molecules "deliberately invokes the basic characteristics of a traditional genre in order to bring its audience to see that genre as the embodiment of an inadequate and destructive myth." If the blurring of the lines between alternative and mainstream comics production is a key factor in the current moment of genre multiplicity, Unstable Molecules may be one of the most accomplished and spectacular examples of that process at work.

Unstable Molecules presents itself - from the cover of its first issue forward - as "the True Story of Comic's Greatest Foursome." The cover, designed by Craig Thompson (Blankets), combines iconic Jack Kirby era images of the Fantastic Four with a more realistic, less powerful depiction of Reid Richards. Richards is seated next to an American flag, yet his posture - hunched over, eyes turned upward - is anything but heroic. Other covers similarly contrast the Four as depicted in the comics with the characters as they might be depicted in the pages of an alternative comic.

In the notes at the end of the issue, Storm sets up his central conceit - that the author stumbled onto yellowing newspaper clippings about Johnny and Sue Sturm while flipping through a family scrapbook, was surprised to discover that the Fantastic Four comics had some relation to these actual historical figures, and tracked down documents via the Freedom of Information Act in order to reveal who they really were: "However wonderful the Kirby/Lee version of the Fantastic Four was, there was often stringent restrictions upon what could and could not be told. Scripts had to be approved by the Fantastic Four's public relations office and, on several occasions, the U.S. government... My intention with this cartoon biography is to revisit the Fantastic Four's beginnings with a historian's eyes." (Book One) In a later issue (Book Two), Sue Sturm is described as one of the primary architects of the Fantastic Four's public persona. Strangely, Sturm also provides a fictional bibliography full of nonexistent books studying one or another member of the team and their place in American history. The "real" Fantastic Four were at once unknown and often researched. As Reid Richards remarks in the book's opening, "If anything, I know far less now than when I began. The Closer I look, the greater the confusion." (Book One)

At some points, it is suggested that Sue Sturm is already part of comic book history - a neighbor, who is a comic book artist, has a crush on her and has used her as an inspiration for the Vapor Girl comics which run through the story. At other points, it is implied that the Fantastic Four took shape during a riotous party, the emotional climax of this narrative, which was attended by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and most of the rest of the Marvel bullpen. At another place, Mantleman, the overweight fanboy who is Johnny's best friend, explains, "In June of 1983, during a particularly manic episode, I was convinced that it was me, not Stan Lee or Jack Kirby, that had created the Fantastic Four. Don't misunderstand me. I knew I didn't draw or write the comic, I just believed that my brain, my memories, were being scanned and used by Marvel." (Book Three). And the issue of inspiration does not end there, since the story (Book Three) also suggests that Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique was inspired in part by an encounter with Sue Sturm. Sturm thus depicts a world without clear origins or stable truths, a world constructed through quotation, allusion, and delusion.

Interestingly, this sequence about Mantleman's delusions is the only place other than the covers where we see the Fantastic Four in their superhuman form. This story never depicts any heroic aspects of their personalities whatsoever. In an interview with Comics Journal, Sturm explains that he was strongly encouraged to link his characterizations more directly to the superhero tradition but found himself unable or unwilling to do

so:

Initially, [Marvel's] Tom [Brevoort] asked me to explore the idea that at some point these people actually get superpowers. And I was trying to wrap my brain around that. Maybe I could do six issues and I'll have them get their powers. And I realized that, the whole conceit is that they never get their powers. These aren't the same people....I don't think I can write a superhero book but there is that correspondence with what people imagine they'll become. But really, Sue Sturm is not Sue Storm. They're different but Lee and Kirby's fictional foursome are imbedded in mine, or vice-a-versa.

Sturm's characters are like the Fantastic Four, may have inspired or been inspired by the Fantastic Four, but at the end of the day, they are not the superheroes who have fascinated comics readers since the 1960s.

What fascinates Sturm is this notion of the superhero team as dysfunctional family; he depicts the four as living in fundamentally different realities with different aspirations and values. In the comics, they are able to work together despite these differences, whereas in Unstable Molecules, they are unable to understand or even tolerate each other and they are destined to self-combust. As such, they are emblematic of the forces which would fragment and divide America in the 1960s. Johnny Sturm is depicted as a kind of Holden Caufield figure who is awakened by the end of the book when the beat poet whispers in his ear "Johnny, it is the fiery night and you are a holy flaming flower" in a moment which is ripe with homoerotic overtones (Book Three).

Reid Richards is depicted as a cool, distant man, who has somehow attracted a much younger fiancé, but who never understands or satisfies her desires. Far from elastic, Richards is someone who expects her simply to obey him and put his career above everything else. And by the end of the book, it is clear that he has never fully trusted her, calling her "promiscuous", "amoral," "a harlot" and perhaps most damningly, "beneath my distinction." (Book Four) In the final images, we see Richards contemplating his life through a microscope but unable to understand the "chaotic" forces driving him away from the people he thought he knew and loved (Book Four). Professionally, he lacks the intellect or the drive which makes Kirby's Richards one of the greatest thinkers of all time. Instead, he is someone whose research interests are more pragmatic than imaginative: "A theory is only valuable if it has practical applications. Science is about textiles, not time travel." (Book One). Even when more or less ordered to give up his own research to contribute to the early NASA program, he is reluctant to embrace a higher purpose.

Ben Grim is, as Richards describes him, "a train wreck of a man" - a down and out boxer, a sloppy drunk, a misogynist, and an abuser of women, who makes a move for his best friend's fiancé. At one point, he is trying to convince a Marvel artist that he would be a suitable comics protagonist. Upon being told that Boxer comics don't sell and that horror is the rage, he confesses that his ex-girlfriends all see him as a monster and that he could be depicted as "the Thing from the Black Hole" (Book Four). If the Thing who is beloved by comics readers is a gentle man embittered because he is trapped in a monstrous body, Unstable Molecules shows him to be a brute even without the rocky form who would be unhappy no matter what happened to him.

Perhaps the most powerfully drawn character is Sue Sturm, who has been neglected in most other versions of the Fantastic Four. She is a young woman who has recently lost her mother and is trying without much success to take on her roles and responsibilities, to mother her brother who shows her no respect, to integrate into a community of small minded women, and to hold onto a fiancé who shows her little interest. She struggles to maintain some sense of herself and to preserve some notion of her sexuality while everyone around her is trying to mold her to their expectations. On the surface, she is compliant; underneath, she is beginning to rage.

Her conflicting feelings are most vividly depicted through the Vapor Girl comic she is reading throughout issue. Sturm juxtaposes images of her showering, shaving her underarms, plucking her eyebrows, putting on a slip, with the more adventuresome images of her comic book counterpart; at the same time, the text of the comic offers ironic commentary on her own feelings - "A second blast will separate her mind from her physical form," "One final blast and my mind will control Vapor Girl's Body," etc (Book Two). The notes compare her struggle to maintain some sense of identity in these numbing circumstances with the early tremors of second wave feminism. One might connect R. Sikorak's pastiche superhero comicbook images with Ray Lichenstein's appropriations of images from romance comics of roughly the same era: Lichenstein's canvases are often read as depicting the banality and emptiness of the world prescribed for middle class women in an age of domestic containment. It is no wonder that a tipsy Sue Sturm gives in to temptation when a drunken but still attentive Ben Grimm comforts her. She is not, as Reid calls her, "promiscuous" so much as she longs to be "seen" as a woman. There is a precedent for these feelings in Sue's ongoing romantic entanglement with Namor, the Submariner in the Lee-Kirby originals. In the comics, Sue ultimately returns to her husband but there remains a hint that she sometimes fantasize about how her life would be different if she had become Queen of Atlantis. Lichenstein's images work because they are decontextualized, speaking to broader feelings of cultural discontent, where-as the Namor analogy anchors the depicted actions within comics continuity. As Sturm explained, "I think there's a lot for hard-core FF people to get into, but I also think that if you don't know anything about the FF, you might enjoy it just from this 50s domestic drama." Either way, we find a Sue Sturm who is deeply unhappy about her invisibility.

Unstable Molecules is much more interested in emotional dynamics than high adventure: the only fisticuffs thrown constitute various forms of domestic violence, dysfunctional families can not be magically transformed into superhero teams. Lee and Kirby sought to introduce elements of melodrama into the superhero genre, depicting their heroes as imperfect human beings; Sturm and his collaborators pushed that interpretation a bit further, destroying the ties that bind those characters to each other, and showing how these same people would have become losers in the real world. It is that core pessimism and skepticism which makes this an alternative comic even though it was published by the most mainstream of companies.

CONCLUSION

I hope the above discussion has moved us beyond thinking of revisionism as simply a phase in the development of the superhero genre. We have seen that from the beginning, the superhero comic emerged from a range of different genre traditions; that it has maintained the capacity to build upon that varied history by pulling towards one or another genre tradition at various points in its development; that it has maintained its dominance over the comics medium by constantly absorbing and appropriating new generic materials; and that its best creators have remained acutely aware of this generic instability, shifting its core meanings and interpretations to allow for new symbolic clusters. Through all of that, I have shown that comics are indeed more than "just men in tights."

Just Men in Tights? (Part Two)

Today, I am running part two of the serialized version of my essay, "Just Men in Tights?" This segment takes us on a historical survey of how the superhero tradition emerged, suggesting that the characters we know today emerged through borrowings from a range of pulp genres, including swashbuckler, science fiction, and hardboiled detective traditions. Again and again as we study the history of American comics, superhero writers and artists have returned to their roots in these various pulp traditions -- not to mention melodrama, courtroom drama, newspaper stories, fantasy, gangster crime fiction, horror, and political drama, to cite only a few of the other influences. Near the end of this installment, I discuss the first of three recent graphic novels which have sought to re-examine the Silver Age of the superhero genre in relation to the history of the 1950s and 1960s.

REVERSE-ENGINEERING SUPERMAN

This mixing, matching, and mutating of genre categories has a much longer history within popular culture. As Rick Altman notes, ""Genre mixing, it now appears, is not just a postmodern fad. Quite to the contrary, the practice of genre mixing is necessary to the very process whereby genres are created." Our current tendency to describe works retrospectively based on the contemporary genre they most closely resemble has the effect of repressing the more complex process by which new genres emerge from existing categories of production. Altman concludes,

"The early history of film genres is characterized...not by purposeful borrowing from a single pre-existing non-film parent genre, but by apparently incidental borrowing from several unrelated genres....Even when a genre already exists in other media, the film genre of the same name cannot simply be borrowed from non-film sources, it must be recreated."

The superhero comic, in fact, undergoes this process of recreation not once but multiple times: first, in the early Golden Age, when the superhero genre takes shape from elements borrowed from pulp magazines and second, in the early Silver age, when superhero comics re-emerge from the generic soup which characterized comic production in the post-war era.

The most common accounts for the emergence of the superhero genre stress the fledgling comics industry's response to the commercial success of Superman. In The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier & Klay (2001), Michael Chabon vividly depicts the process by which comics creators sought to reverse engineer Superman to generate new characters:

"If he's like a cat or a spider or a fucking wolverine, if he's huge, if he's tiny, if he can shoot flames or ice or death rays of Vat 69, if he turns into fire or water or stone or India Rubber. He can be a Martian, he could be a ghost, he could be a god or a demon or a wizard or a monster. Okay? It doesn't matter because right now, see, at this very moment, we have a bandwagon rolling."

Yet, a somewhat different picture emerges within Gerard Jones's account of early superhero comics. Jones uncovered a handwritten note from Joe Simon and Joel Schuster, the teenage boys who created Superman, suggesting they were rehearsing possible publicity slogans:

"The greatest super-hero strip of all time!... Speed-Action-Laughs-Thrills-Surprises. The most unusual humor-adventure strip ever created!... You'll Chuckle! You'll Gasp! It must be seen to be believed!"

Superman is already being read against a larger genre tradition ("the greatest super-hero strip of all time!") and at the same time, the comic is being promoted through a diverse range of emotional appeals ("Speed-action-laughs-thrills-surprises.", etc.)

Siegel and Schuster correctly describe their creation ('the most unusual humor-adventure strip ever created!") as, in effect, bounding over the walls separating various genres. Thomas Andrea has, for example, noted that the superhero figure emerged from a range of different science fiction and horror texts. Gerard Jones cites even more influences - including Popeye in the comic strips, the pulp novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and the Scarlet Pimpernell. We might note the ways that masked heroes from the pulp magazines, including The Shadow, the Phantom, The Spider, and Zorro, modeled the capes and masks iconography and the secret identity thematic of the subsequent superhero comics. The pulp magazines have been described as developing and categorizing many 20th century genres yet the economics of pulp magazine production also meant that the same writers worked within multiple genre traditions and in the many cases, the same story was revised slightly in order to be sold to several different publications. In early comics, a writer - say, Jack Kirby - might produce work across the full range of pulp genres in the course of their career and thus would be able to draw on multiple genre models in their superhero work. The intensity of comics production - new stories about the same characters every month and in some cases, every week - encouraged writers to search far and wide for new plots or compelling new elements while the openness of comics, where you draw whatever you need, made it cheap and simple to expand the genre repertoire.

The titles of the publications which gave birth to the earliest superheroes have become dead metaphors for later generations of readers who have taken for granted that Detective Comics (1937) is where Batman stories are found, Action Comics (1938) plays host to Superman, and Marvel Mystery (1939-1949) is where the Human Torch first emerged. Yet, each of those titles defines a somewhat different genre tradition. As a result, Superman, Batman, and the Human Torch, while all read as superheroes today, were originally understood in somewhat different contexts.

The Silver Age restored the relations between the superhero genre and other closely related traditions. The superheroes had been so over-used for patriotic purposes during the Second World War that they seemed dated by the post-war era. At the same time, GIs had found comics a light weight and portable means of popular entertainment and were continuing to read them as they returned home, creating a strong pull towards adult content. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, superhero books competed with horror, romance, science fiction, western, true crime, jungle adventures, swordplay, and so forth. This push towards more mature content provoked backlash and moral panic (best embodied by Frederick Wertham's Seduction of the Innocents) as reformers struggled to make sense of the presence of adult themes in a medium previously targeted to children. The Comics Code cleared away many of those emerging genres, paving the way for a re-emergence of the superhero by the end of the 1950s at DC and in the early 1960s at Marvel. Or so the story is most often told.

Yet, again, this story simplifies the ways that the superhero comics of the Silver Age emerged from a more diverse set of genre traditions. As Gerard Jones and Will Jacobs note, for example, the 1950s saw the rise of a range of books like Challengers of the Unknown (1958-1971), Mystery in Space (1951-1966), the Sea Devils (1961-1967), and Black Haw (1957-1968); their teams of scientists, soldiers, and adventurers were prototypes for the later superhero teams such as the Justice League, The Avengers, The Defenders, or the Fantastic Four. It is no accident, given DC editor Julius Schwartz's history as a science fiction fan and as an agent for important writers in that genre, that the first significant superhero to emerge in almost ten years was the Martian Manhunter. When Schwartz began to retool and relaunch such established DC characters as The Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, and the Atom, he first tested the popularity of these characters through anthologies which cut across multiple genres: The Flash first appeared in Showcase (1956-1970) while the Justice League emerges in The Brave and The Bold (1955-1983).

Similarly, Marvel had a distribution contract with DC which limited how many books could be issued each month and somewhat restricted their use of superhero content. The earliest issues of the successful Marvel franchises situate these protagonists in relationship to other genre traditions with the heroes dwarfed on the original Fantastic Four (1961- ) cover by a giant green monster, with the Incredible Hulk (1961-1962) depicted as a "super-Frankenstein" character, with Iron Man built around the iconography of robots and cyborgs, and Spider-man first appearing in the pages of Amazing Fantasy (1962). While these characters today are viewed as archetypical superheroes, they had previously been read - at least in part - in relation to these other genres.

These various franchises carry traces of those other genres even as they are reread within a now more firmly established superhero tradition. Jonathan Letham, for example, writes:

"Kirby always wanted to drag the Four into the Negative Zone - deeper into psychedelic science fiction and existential alienation - while Lee, in his scripting, resolutely pulled them back into the morass of human lives, hormonal alienation, teenage dating problems and pregnancy and unfulfilled longings to be human and normal and loved and not to have the Baxter Building repossessed by the City of New York."

By the same token, as Jason Bainbridge has noted, the two companies which dominated superhero production, then and now, have chosen to pull towards different genre conventions with DC embracing action-adventure stories with their focus on plot and Marvel embracing melodrama with its focus on character. What I am describing here as the era of multiplicity exaggerates and extends the generic instability which has been part of the superhero comic from the start.

HISTORICAL FICTION, FICTIONAL HISTORY

There are so many different forms of generic restructuring going on in contemporary comics that it would be impossible to discuss them all in this essay. I hope to flesh out this argument across an entire book in the not too distant future. For the moment, I will restrict myself to one important way that contemporary superhero comics are playing with genre history in the context of this new era of multiplicity. If one factor contributing to the multiplicity of superhero comics is a growing consciousness of genre history, then it is hardly a surprise that this historical reflection occurs often within the pages of the superhero comics themselves. An important subgenre of superhero comics might be described as a curious hybrid of historical fiction (seeking to understand the past through the lens of superhero adventures) and fictional history (seeking to understand the development of the superhero genre by situating it against the backdrop of the times which shaped it.) For example, Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen constructs an imaginary geneology of the superhero team, seeing 19th century literary figures (The Invisible Man, Dr. Jeckyl, Quatermain, Mina Harker, Captain Nemo) as prefiguring the 20th century Justice League. Matt Wagner's Sandman Mystery Theater (1995-1999) revives an obscure golden age protagonist to examine historic constructions of race, gender, and class, resulting in what Neil Gaiman describes as "a strange and savvy meeting between the fictive dreams of the 1930s and the 1990s." Michael Chabon's Cavalier & Klay has inspired a series focused on the Escapist (2004- ), which not only pastiches comics at a variety of different historic junctures but also has a running commentary situating the stories in an imaginary history of the franchise.

As Jim Collins wrote about the Batman comics of the mid-1980s:

Just as we can no longer imagine popular narratives to be so ignorant of their intertextual dimensions and cultural significance, we can no longer presuppose that the attitude towards their antecedents, their very 'retro' quality can be in any way univocal. Divergent strategies of rearticulation can be discerned not only between different 'retro' texts, but even more importantly, within individual texts that adopt shifting, ambivalent attitudes towards these antecedents.

In what remains of this essay, I want to examine three recent attempts to re-examine the Silver Age (JLA:Year One, DC: The New Frontier, and Unstable Molecules), each representing a somewhat different balance between historical fiction and fictional history, each deploying the "retro" appeal of its caped protagonists to different effect, and each demanding different degrees of knowledge and knowingness on the part of its readers.

Here, the current logic of almost unlimited multiplicity builds upon details and events which were well established in the continuity era. Certain events had to occur within these universes - say, the death of Bruce Wayne's father, the destruction of Krypton, or the formation of the Justice League - but we are invited to read those events from different perspectives. The plays with genre and history I am describing are only possible because the "actual" history of these events is well-known to long-time comics readers who want to return to these familiar spaces and have fresh experiences.

JLA: YEAR ONE

As Cawelti notes, the wave of revisionism and genre transformation which hit the American cinema in the 1970s was accompanied by enormous nostalgia for Hollywood's past:

"In this mode, traditional generic features of plot, character, setting, and style are deployed to recreate the aura of a past time. The power of nostalgia lies especially in its capacity to evoke a sense of warm reassurance by bringing before the mind's eye images from a time when things seemed more secure and full of promise and possibility."

Deconstructionist approaches to genre provoke a sense of insecurity which in turn makes us long for what is being critiqued. Cawelti argued, "A contemporary nostalgia film cannot simply duplicate the past experience but must make us aware in some fashion of the relationship between past and present." Often, this takes the form of exaggerating or transforming those traits which defined genre production in an earlier period.

In his introduction to Astro City: Life in the Fast Lane (1999 ), Kurt Busiek argued for a reconstruction of the superhero genre:

"It strikes me that the only real reason to take apart a pocket watch, or a car engine, aside from the simple delight of disassembly, is to find out how it works. To understand it, so that you can put it back together again better than before, or build a new one that goes beyond what the old model could do. We've been taking apart the superhero for ten years or more; it's time to put it back together and wind it up, time to take it out on the road and floor it, see what it'll do."

One author who followed Busiek's call was Mark Waid. Across a series of books, Waid has sought to recapture the spirit of the silver age DC comics, tracing the friendship between the Flash and the Green Lantern in The Brave and the Bold (2001), mapping the trajectory of the Barry and Iris Allen romance in The Life Story of the Flash by Iris Allen (1998), and showing how the Justice League came together in JLA: Year One.

When I read Waid's books, I have the sense of returning home - of re-encountering the comics I remembered from my boyhood. And that is perhaps the best way to put it since in fact the mode of storytelling here is very different from actual Silver Age comics, having more in common with the ways these characters were fleshed out in our backyard play or in our tree house speculations than anything one would find in the pages of an actual Silver Age comic. As Busiek explains,

"The original JLA tales, for all that they are crisply drawn, deftly plotted, and full of inventive twists and turns, were creations of their time --and it was a time that emphasized plot over characterizations....Today's readers want their plot twists and bold heroes -- but along with that, they also want to get to know their heroes, to see what makes them tick, what goes on beneath the heroic facades."

Rather than simply retelling a favorite plot, the book charts a twisty path "through, between, and around existing JLA history, preserving as much of the work of their predecessors as they could, while exploring that history and those character in a new way."

Indeed, Year One books - starting with Frank Miller's influential Batman: Year One in the mid-1980s - have a paradoxical mission: on the one hand, they want to strip down encrusted continuity so that they can introduce the classic characters and plots to a new generation but at the same time, these books are going to be avidly consumed and actively critiqued by the generation of comics readers who grew up with these figures. In many ways, the emotional impact of Year One stories depends on our knowledge of what is to follow (or more accurately, what has already happened in earlier books). To cite a few examples, JLA: Year One explores a potential romance between the Flash and the Black Canary, which longtime readers know is doomed, because Barry Allen needs to return to his faithful fiancée Iris and the Black Canary will soon fall under the devil-may-care spell of the Green Arrow. (After all, the Flash was one of the very first superheroes to get married and we know it wasn't to a woman wearing black leather and fishnet stockings.) Or the book has the boyish Hal Jordon and Barry Allen, fresh from an early success, gush that they will both live to "ripe old ages" (p.85) cuing the hardened fan to recall how they each died. The book rewards this kind of fan expertise by tossing in background characters without necessarily explaining how they fit within the DC universe. Most readers will know who Lois Lane, Clark Kent, and Bruce Wayne are, fewer will know Vickie Vale and Oliver Queen, and even fewer, Ted Kord, Maxwell Lord and Snapper Carr. The book overflows with "first times" including, perhaps, most powerfully the scene when the heroes reveal their secret identities to each other, which works because the readers are all already invested in those alteregos. Year One stories are never about creating first impressions even though they are often fascinated with documenting the first encounters between various characters.

Waid does critique some of the ideological assumptions which shaped the earlier books, using a press conference, for example, to subject the hero team to some serious challenges about their nationalistic rhetoric and establishment politics. Yet, the criticisms remain mostly on the surface. Waid respects what these men and women stand for and wants those values to be passed along to another generation. Elsewhere, Waid has spoken of his affection for these Silver Age characters and admiration for the men who created them:

"I am very reverent towards the characters of the past, but not just because of nostalgia. It's logical; these characters, as interpreted in the forties, fifties, and sixties, sold a hundred times more comics than they sell today. They appealed to a much wider range of readers and were targeted more towards a healthier, younger audience, which we have a potential to reach and grow with. Frankly, the guys back then knew what the hell they were doing and we don't any more."

Such affection comes through in running gags and inside jokes - a series of pranks pulled at the expense of the humorless and often perplexed Aquaman, Black Cannary's growing frustration with the way that the male protagonists always want to rescue her when she's not in any real distress, or the absurdity of Green Lantern's inability to deal with anything yellow (Black Canary wonders at one point whether this extends to blondes.) One of the funniest moments comes when the Martian Manhunter who has not yet revealed to the group his shapeshifting powers passes himself off as Superman. His startled and amused teammates, then, want him to imitate a range of other popular culture icons, "do Yoda!" (p. 89.)

As the reference to Yoda suggests, Waid has little interest in placing these stories in the historical context of the early 1960s; locating these events within the continuity of the superhero's careers is central to his efforts to revive the spirit of the Silver Age but situating them in a precise historic period is not. The title of one chapter "Group Dynamics" (p.52), suggests the book's overarching concern. We watch the superhero team evolve from "a garish gang of well-meaning amateurs" (as Batman calls them on p.67) into "five brave champions" (as Clark Kent declares in the book's final passage on p. 316) and in the process, we see special partnerships or leadership styles emerge which we recognize from the classic books. Critics have often stressed DC's distanced and god-like perspective; Waid wants to take us inside their clubhouse. Waid, for example, lets us see the various superhero's excitement and anxiety about finally having a chance to interact with fellow capes. For some, trusting the other heroes come easily, while others - notably the Martian Manhunter - has more difficulty letting down his guard. We watch a team of Alpha males jockey for position with the Green Lantern convinced he is the leader of the pack when everyone else has long since decided that the Flash has won the right to command.

At the same time, Waid enacts the passing of the torch from one generation to another, primarily through the figure of Black Canary whose mother held that same identity in the original Justice Society and who has thus grown up thinking of its members as so many aunts and uncles. At the start, Black Canary keeps comparing her new comrades negatively against the original team and the Flash is awe-struck by her access to the idols of his youth. Canary discovers that her mother had an affair with another masked hero, damaging her respect for the entire group. By the end, the Justice League seeks the help of the Golden Age characters, the JSA overcomes "any concerns we may have had about handling the baton to you youngsters" (p.315) and Black Canary declares herself liberated from her mother's oppressive shadow.

Just Men in Capes? (Part One)

The following essay is being serialized here in part in response to a request from my friends, Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman, fantasy writers and key players in the Interstitial Arts movement. They heard me give a talk based on this research at Vericon, the Harvard University science fiction, fantasy, comics, and games event last year. They had shared their notes with the readers at their site and have wanted ever since to a way to link to it since it seems so relevent to their ongoing discussion of forms of popular fiction which straddle genre categories. I am going to be running this essay, which remains, as they say, a "work in progress" in the blog in three installments. Basically, in the passage that follows, I will see what happens when we apply genre theory to the challenges of understanding superhero comics. What's the problem? Most often, we use genre theory to define and chart differences between genres (as in the case of literary, film, and television studies) but as I argue here, the superhero genre has so dominated the output of American comics in recent years that we need to develop a form of genre analysis that speaks to difference within the genre. Those who don't read comics might imagine that all superhero comics are more or less the same. But in fact, there is a continual need to generate diversity within the superhero genre to retain the interest of long-standing readers and to capture the interest of new ones.

In this first section, I suggest that there has been a shift in recent years in how the comics industry looks at the superhero genre -- a shift away from focusing primarily on building up continuity within the fictional universe and towards the development of multiple and contradictory versions of the same characters functioning as it were in parallel universes. In effect, the most interesting work here could be described as commercially produced fan fiction -- that is to say, it involves the continual rewriting and reimagining of the established protagonists. One can find here parallels to many of the kinds of fan rewriting practices I discussed in Textual Poachers, although in this case, this rewriting operates within the commercially produced content. Producers often claim that fans disrupt the coherence of the narrative because they generate multiple and contradictory versions of the same characters and events. The case of comics suggest, however, that readers are interested in consuming alternative visions of the series mythos.

"A creation is actually a re-creation, a rearrangement of existing materials in a new, different, original, novel way." - Steve Ditko

In late 2004, Warren Ellis (Transmetropolitan, Global Frequency, Planetary) launched an intriguing project - a series of one shot comics, each representing the first issue of imaginary comics series. Each was set in a different genre -- Stomp Future (Science Fiction), Simon Spector (supernatural), Quit City (aviator), Frank Ironwine (detective). In the back of each book, Ellis explains:

"Years ago I sat down and thought about what adventure comics might've looked like today if superhero comics hadn't have happened. If, in fact, the pulp tradition of Weird Thrillers had jumped straight into comics form without mutating into the superhero subgenre we know today. If you took away preconceptions about design and the dominant single form....If you blanked out the last sixty years."

Ellis's fantasy, of a world without superhero comics, is scarcely unique. Several decades earlier, Alan Moore's Watchmen (1986-87) constructed a much more elaborate alternative history of comic genres. In a world where superheroes are real, comic fans would seek out alternative genres for escapist entertainment. Moore details the authors, the storylines, the rise and fall of specific publishers, as he explains how the pirates' genre came to dominate comics production. Passages from the imagined DC comic series, Tales of the Black Freighter, run throughout Watchmen, drawn in a style which closely mimics E.C. comics of the early 1950s.

Would a filmmaker conjure up an imagined history of Hollywood in which the western or the musical never appeared? Would a television creator imagine a world without the sitcom? Why would they need to? In both cases, these genres played very important roles in the development of American popular entertainment but they never totally dominated their medium to the degree that superheroes have overwhelmed American comic book production.

In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud demonstrates what we would take for granted in any other entertainment sector - that a medium is more than a genre: "When I was little I knew EXACTLY what comics were. Comics were those bright, colorful magazines filled with bad art, stupid stories, and guys in tights....If people failed to understand comics, it was because they defined what comics could be too narrowly....The world of comics is a huge and varied one. Our definition must encompass all these types."

I fully support McCloud's efforts to broaden and diversify the content of contemporary comics. I fear that what I am about to say might well set back that cause a bit. But what interests me in this essay is the degree to which comics do indeed represent a medium which has been dominated by a single genre. After all, nobody really believes us anyway when we say that comics are "more than just men in tights." So, that if we accepted this as a starting premise - "you got me!" - and examined the implications of the superhero's dominance over American comics.

Understanding how the superhero genre operates requires us to turn genre theory on its head. Genre emerges from the interaction between standardization and differentiation as competing forces shaping the production, distribution, marketing, and consumption of popular entertainment. A classic genre critic discussing most other media provides a more precise description of the borders and boundaries between categories that are already intuitively understood by media producers, critics, and consumers. Genre criticism takes for granted that most works fall within one and only one genre with genre-mixing the exception rather than the norm. The genre theorist works to locate "classic" examples of the genre - primarily works which fall at the very center of the space being defined - and uses them to map recurring traits or identify a narrative formula.

Comics are not immune to industrial pressures towards standardization and differentiation yet these forces operate differently in a context where a single genre dominates a medium and all other production has to define itself against, outside of, in opposition to, alongside that prevailing genre. Here, difference is felt much more powerfully within a genre than between competing genres and genre-mixing is the norm. The Superhero genre seems capable of absorbing and reworking all other genres. So, The Pulse (2003- ) is about reporters trying to cover the world of the Marvel superheroes, 1602 (2003) is a historical fiction depicting earlier versions of the superheroes, Spiderman Loves Mary Jane (2004- )is a romance comic focused on a superhero's girlfriend, Common Grounds (2003-2004) is a sitcom set in a coffee house where everyone knows your name - if not your secret identity, Ex Machina (2004- ) deals with the Mayor of New York who happens to be a superhero, and so forth. In each case, the superhero genre absorbs, reworks, accommodates elements of other genres or perhaps we might frame this the other way around, writers interested in telling stories set in these other genres must operate within the all-mighty Superhero genre in order to gain access to the marketplace. And alternative comics are defined not simply as alternative to the commercial mainstream but also as alternative to the superhero genre. As Brian Michael Bendis explains, "In comics, if it don't have a cape or claws or, like, really giant, perfect spherical, chronic back-pain-inducing breasts involved, it's alternative." Yet, to be alternative to the superhero genre is still to be defined by - or at least in relation to -- that genre.

FROM CONTINUITY TO MULTIPLICITY

Writing about Chinatown in 1979, John Cawelti described a crisis within the Hollywood genre system. Classic genres were being deconstructed and reconstructed, critiqued and parodied, mixed and matched, in films as diverse as Chinatown (1974), Blazing Saddles (1974), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), and The Godfather (1972).. These films, Cawelti argues, "do in different ways what Polanski does in Chinatown: set the elements of a conventional popular genre in an altered context, thereby making us perceive these traditional forms and images in a new way."

What happened to film genres in the 1970s closely parallels what happened to superhero comics starting in the early 1980s. Geoff Klock's How to Read Superhero Comics and Why, for example, identifies what he calls the "Revisionary Superhero Narrative" as a "third moment" (after the Golden and Silver Ages) that runs from Dark Knight Returns and Watchman (both 1986) through more recent works such as Marvels (1994), Astro City (1995), Kingdom Come (1996) and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999), among a range of other examples. Starting with Miller and Moore, he argues, comic books re-examined their core myths, questioning the virtue and value of their protagonists, blurring the lines between good guys and bad guys, revisiting and recontextualizing past events, and forcing the reader to confront the implications of their long-standing constructions of violence and sexuality. Caweti's description of what Chinatown brought to the detective genre might easily be describing what Dark Knight Returns brought to superhero comics: "Chinatown places the hard-boiled detective story within a view of the world that is deeper and more catastrophic, more enigmatic in its evil, more sudden and inexplicable in its outbreaks of violent chance."

Underlying Klock's argument is something like the theory of genre evolution which Cawelti outlines:

"One can almost make out a life cycle characteristic of genres as they move from an initial period of articulation and discovery, through a phase of conscious self-awareness on the part of both creators and audiences, to a time when the generic patterns have become so well-known that people become tired of their predictability. It is at this point that parodic and satiric treatments proliferate and new genres gradually arise."

We might see the Golden Age as a period of "articulation and discovery," the Silver Age as one of classicism when formulas were understood by producers and consumers, and Klock's "third age" as one where generic exhaustion gives way to a baroque self-consciousness. Yet, subsequent genre critics have argued for a much less linear understanding of how diversity works within genres. For example, Tag Gallagher notes that the earliest phases of a genre's development are often charged with a high degree of self-consciousness as media makers and consumers work through how any given genre diverges from other and more established traditions. Cawelti himself acknowledges that the forces of nostalgia hold in check any tendency to radically deconstruct existing formulas.

Rather than thinking about a genre's predetermined life cycle, we might describe a perpetual push and pull exerted on any genre; genre formulas are continually repositioned in relation to social, cultural, and economic contexts of production and reception. Genres are altogether more elastic than our textbook definitions suggest; they maintain remarkable abilities to absorb outside influences as well as to withstand pressures towards change, and the best authors working in a genre at any point in time are highly aware of their materials and the traditions from which they came.

That said, there are shifting institutional pressures placed on genres which promote or retard experimentation. David Bordwell has described those pressures as the "bounds of difference" noting that even moments in production history which encourage a high degree of standardization (understood in terms of adherence to formulas and quality standards) also are shaped by countervailing pressures towards novelty, experimentation, and differentiation. Bordwell notes, for example, that the Hollywood system always allowed what he calls "innovative workers" greater latitude for experimentation as long as their films enjoyed either profitability or critical acclaim and preferably both. The so-called revisionist superhero narratives reflected a growing consumer awareness of authorship within the medium. Historically, comics publishers imposed limits on that experimentation in order to preserve the distinctive identities of their most valuable characters in a system in which multiple writers work on the same franchise and there was constant and rapid turnover of employment. Here, the mainstream publishers loosened those constraints for at least some creative workers. Rather than looking for a period of revisionism, we might better be looking for how far creators can diverge from genre formulas at different historical junctures.

Painting with broad strokes, we might identify three phases, each with their own opportunities for innovation:

1) As the comic book franchises take shape, across the Golden and Silver Ages, their production is dominated by relatively self-contained issues; readers turn over on a regular basis as they grow older. Franchises are organized around recurring characters, whose stories, as Umberto Eco has noted in regard to Superman, get defined in terms of an iterative logic in which each issue must end more or less where it began. Under this system, creators may originate new characters or totally recast existing characters (as occurred at the start of the Silver Age) but they have much less flexibility once a comic franchise starts.

2) Somewhere in the early 1970s, this focus on self-contained stories shifts towards more and more serialization as the distribution of comics becomes more reliable. Readers have, by this point, grown somewhat older and continue to read comics over a longer span of their lives; these readers place a high value on consistency and continuity, appraising both themselves and the authors on their mastery of past events and the web of character relationships within any given franchise. Indeed, this principle of continuity operates not just within any individual book but also across all of the books by a particular publisher so that people talk about the DC and Marvel universes. The culmination of the continuity era might well have been Marv Wolfstein's Crisis of Infinite Earths (1985), a 12 issue "event" designed to mobilize all of the characters in the DC universe and then cleanse away competing and contradictory continuities which had built up through the years. Instead, as Geoff Klock notes, the "Crisis" led to more and more "events" which further splintered and fragmented the DC universe but also accustomed comic readers to the idea that they could hold multiple versions of the same universe in their minds at the same time.

3) Today, comics have entered a period where principles of multiplicity are felt at least as powerfully as those of continuity. Under this new system, readers may consume multiple versions of the same franchise, each with different conceptions of the character, different understandings of their relationships with the secondary figures, different moral perspectives, exploring different moments in their lives, and so forth. So that in some storylines, Aunt May knows Spider-man's secret identity while in others she doesn't; in some Peter Parker is still a teen and in others, he is an adult science teacher; in some, he is married to Mary Jane and in others, they have broken up, and so forth. These different versions may be organized around their respective authors or demarked through other designations - Marvel's Ultimate or DC's All Star lines which represented attempts to reboot the continuity to allow points of entry for new readers for example. In some cases, even more radical alterations of the core franchises are permissible on a short term and provisional basis - say, the election of Lex Luther as president or the destruction of Gotham City. Beyond the two major companies, smaller comics companies - Image, Dark Horse, Top Cow, ABC, etc. - further expand upon the superhero mythos - often creating books which are designed to directly comment on the DC and Marvel universes by using characters modeled on comic book icons. And beyond these direct reworkings of the DC and Marvel superheroes, there are, as noted earlier, any number of appropriations of the superhero by alternative comics creators.

In each case, the new system for organizing production layers over earlier practices - so that we do not lose interest in having compelling stories within individual issues as we move into the continuity era nor do comics readers and producers lose interest in continuity as we enter into a period of multiplicity. Even at the present moment, DC remains more conservative in its efforts to produce a coherent and singular continuity across all of the books it publishes, and Marvel is more open to multiple versions of the same character functioning simultaneously within different publications.

Writing in 1991, Roberta Pearson and William Uricchio use the Batman as an example of the kinds of pressures being exerted on the superhero genre at a moment when older texts were continuing to circulate (and in fact, were recirculated in response to renewed interests in the characters), newer versions operated according to very different ideological and narratalogical principles, a range of auteur creators were being allowed to experiment with the character, and the character was assuming new shapes and forms to reflect the demands of different entertainment sectors and their consumers. They write, "Whereas broad shifts in emphasis had occurred since 1939, these changes had been, for the most part, consecutive and consensual. Now, newly created Batmen, existing simultaneously with the older Batmen of the television series and comic reprints and back issues, all struggled for recognition and a share of the market. But the contradictions amongst them may threaten both the integrity of the commodity form and the coherence of the fans' lived experience of the character necessary to the Batman's continued success." The superhero comic, they suggest, may not be able to withstand "the tension between, on the one hand, the essential maintenance of a recognizable set of key character components and, on the other hand, the increasingly necessary centrifugal dispersion of those components." Retrospectively, we can see Pearson and Uricchio as describing a moment of transition from continuity to multiplicity.

DO SUPERHEROES GET EXHAUSTED?

In his Chinatown essay, Cawelti identifies three core factors leading to the genre experimentation in 1970s cinema:

"I would point to the tendency of genres to exhaust themselves, to our growing historical awareness of modern popular culture, and finally to the decline of the underlying mythology on which traditional genres have been based since the late nineteenth century."

Each of these pressures can be seen as working on the superhero genre during the period that Uricchio and Pearson were describing. Individually and collectively, these forces led to the current era of multiplicity.

For example, comics writer Ed Brubaker falls back on a theory of "generic exhaustion" to explain Gotham Central (2003- ), his series depicting the everyday beat cops who operate literally and figuratively under the shadow of the Dark Knight. Brubaker argues that by shifting the focus off the superhero and onto these everyday men and women, he can up the emotional stakes:

"Batman is never going to get killed by these guys, and he's not going to allow them to kill the ballroom of people they're holding hostage. Because Batman, by the rulebook you're given when you're writing it, has to be infallible. He can't get frozen solid and broken into pieces and have Robin become the next Batman. But you can have a Gotham city cop frozen and broken into pieces in front of his partner, and suddenly Mr. Freeze is scary again."

Kurt Busiek, on the other hand, has stressed the elasticity of the superhero genre, arguing that superheroes can take on new values and associations as old meanings cease to hold the interest of their readers:

"If a superhero can be such a powerful and effective metaphor for male adolescence, then what else can you do with them? Could you build a superhero story around a metaphor for female adolescence? Around midlife crisis? Around the changes adults go through when they become parents? Sure, why not? And if a superhero can exemplify America's self image at the dawn of World War II, could a superhero exemplify America's self image during the less-confident 1970s? How about the emerging national identity of a newly-independent African nation? Or a nontraditional culture, like the drug culture, or the 'greed is good' business culture of the go-go Eighties. Of course. If it can do one, it can do the others."

We can see this process of renewing the core meanings attached to the superhero figure in such recent books as the Luna Brother's Ultra (2004-2005), which depicts superheroes as celebrities whose relationships become the material of tabloid gossip magazines (with its central plotline clearly modeled after the Ben Affleck/Jennifer Lopez romance), or Dr. Blink, Superhero Shrink (2003- ), where superheroes are neurotics who need help working through their relationship issues and suicidal tendencies (including a suicidal superhero doomed to disappointment since he is invincible and flies whenever he tries to throw himself off tall buildings). In both cases, we see the genre's building blocks being attached to a new set of metaphors.

Second, Cawelti argues that the Hollywood's generic transformations were sparked by a heightened audience awareness of the history of American cinema through university film classes, retro-house screenings, television reruns, and serious film criticism. More educated consumers began to demand an acknowledgement of genre history within the newer movies they consumed. Similarly, Matthew J. Pustz contends that the fan's interest in comic continuity reflected a moment when older comics became more readily accessible through back issues and reissues. A focus on continuity rewarded fans for their interest in the full run of a favorite franchise, though it might also act as a barrier to entry for new readers who often found continuity-heavy books difficult to follow. The contemporary focus on multiplicity may similarly reward the mastery of longtime fans but around a different axis of consumption.

More and more, fans and authors play with genre mixing as a way of complicating and expanding the genre's potential meanings. Writing about television genres, Jason Mittell has challenged the claims made by postmodernist critics that such genre mixing or hybridity leads to the dissolution of genre; instead, he suggests that these moments where two or more genres are combined heighten our awareness of genre conventions: "the practice of generic mixture has the potential to foreground and activate generic categories in vital ways that 'pure' generic texts rarely do." Mittell's prime example is the merging of horror and teen romance genres within Buffy the Vampire Slayer but he could just as easily be talking about DC's Elseworlds series, which exists to transform the superhero genre through contact with a range of other genre traditions. For example, The Kents (2000) is almost a pure western linked to the Superman franchise through a frame story where Pa Kent sends a box of family heirlooms to Clark so that he will understand the history of his adopted family. Red Son (2004) deals with what might happen if the rocket from Krypton had landed in Russia rather than the United States and thus works through how Superman would have impacted several decades in Russian history. Superman's Metropolis (1997) mixes and matches elements from Fritz Lang's German expressionist classic with the Superman origin story. As the series is described on the back of each issue,

"In Elseworlds, heroes are taken from their usual settings and put into strange times and places - some that have existed, or might have existed and others that can't, couldn't, and shouldn't exist. The result is stories that make characters who are as familiar as yesterday seem as fresh as tomorrow."

The Elseworld books read the superheroes as archetypes which would assert themselves in many different historical and generic contexts; they invite a search for the core or essence of the character even as they encourage us to take pleasure in their many permutations. If we can tinker with his costume, his origins, his cultural context, even his core values, what is it that makes Superman Superman and not, say, Captain Marvel or Captain America? Speeding Bullets (1993) pushes this to its logical extreme: fusing the origins stories of Batman and Superman to create one figure - which is bent on using its super powers to exert revenge for his parent's deaths.

Third, Cawelti reads the genre transformations of the 1970s cinema in relation to a declining faith in the core values and assumptions which defined those genre traditions half a century earlier. Alan Moore made a similar argument for the cultural importance of the revisionist superhero comics: "As anyone involved in fiction and its crafting over the past fifteen or so years would be delighted to tell you, heroes are starting to become rather a problem. They aren't what they used to be...or rather they are, and therein lies the heart of the difficulty. We demand new themes, new insights, new dramatic situations. We demand new heroes."

This search for "new heroes" is perhaps most spectacularly visible if we examine how the comics industry has responded to the growing multiculturalism of American society and the pressures of globalization on its markets. So, Marvel has created the "mangaverse" series focused on how their established characters would have looked if they had emerged within the Japanese comics industry: the Hulk transforms into a giant lizard and Peter Parker trains as a ninja. Similarly, Marvel released a series of Spider-Man: India (2004) comics, timed to correspond with the release of Spider-Man 2 (2004) in India and localized to South Asian tastes. Peter Parker becomes Pavitr Prabhakar and Green Goblin becomes Rakshasa, a traditional mythological demon. Marvel calls it "transcreation," one step beyond translation. Such books appeal as much to "pop cosmopolitans" in the United States (fans who are seeking cultural difference through their engagement with popular culture from other countries) as they do to the Asian market - indeed, Spider-Man India appeared in the United States more or less simultaneously with its publication in South Asia.

At the same time, the mainstream comics industry has begun to experiment with giving alternative comics artists a license to play around with their characters. For example, David Mack, a collage artist, has ended up not only doing covers for Brian Bendis's Alias (2001-2004) series but also doing his own run on Daredevil (2003). Peter Bagge, whose Hate (1990-1998) comics epetimized the grunge influence on alternative comics, was hired to do The Monomaniacal Spiderman (2002) in which Peter Parker reads Ayn Rand and gets fed up with the idea that he has any kind of "great responsibility" to look after less powerful people. DC comics, on the other hand, has published a series of Bizarro (2001, 2005)collections where alternative artists tell their own distinctive versions of the company's pantheon of superheroes with the framing device that these are what comics look like in the Bizarro world where everything is the exact opposite of Earth. In no other medium is the line between experimental and commercial work this permeable.

An Interview with Comics Journalist Joe Sacco (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first part of a two part interview with comics journalist Joe Sacco (Palestine) as conducted by CMS Masters student Huma Yosef (herself a former professional journalist from Pakistan). Today, I continue this interview. It occurred to me as I was putting this together that it represents a fascinating contrast to the interview I ran a week or so back with comics Creator Rob Walton (Ragmop). Both artists are very interested in using comics to explore political issues but they approach these issues from very different vantage points: Sacco creates realist comics that document the everyday lives of people from war-torn countries while Walton uses fantasy and comedy to encourage us to reflect on the American political process. Between them, they suggest some of the ways that comics may function as civic media. I now turn you over to Huma for the rest of her interview.

In what ways is your method of working akin to that of a journalist?

I conduct lots of rigorous, sit-down interviews, one after the other. Lots of things happen that aren't part of the interview process, and I'm often in situations where I can't take notes. In those instances, I duck behind a wall and frantically take as many notes as I can. In the evenings, I translate all my notes into a journal.

I also take photographs whenever I can. I'm currently doing a book about the Gaza Strip for which, after interviewing someone, I'd take his or her photograph. If someone refused to have a picture taken, then I'd try to quickly draw an image of the person in the margin of my notebook. Sometimes, there are things I realize I need to draw only after I start working. In that case, I visually research places later on. When I was working on Palestine, I wasn't aware of a lot of things and had to draw a lot from memory. With Safe Area Gorazde, my process has evolved. Now, if anything, I take too many pictures.

On the job in Palestine, I also started following stories as they unfolded. Like any reporter who has a little freedom, you follow your nose and try to cover the stories that you don't think anyone else will tell. For example, Gorazde opened up while I was there - I didn't know I would write about it until I arrived in Bosnia. Once I identified my subject, I conducted preliminary interviews about what happened, then broke it down into component parts. No doubt, the second time around was a more methodical process as I was a little more self-conscious about what I was doing.

What extra measures do you have to take given the visual nature of your work?

I have to ask a lot of visual questions about what a street or a camp looked like. Still, you're not always aware in the field of what visual stuff you'll need when you start drawing. Over time, my method has been honed, and I'm more aware of what I'll need later on.

I also need to do extra research sometimes. For example, the work I'm doing right now is sent in Gaza in 1956. I've made trips to United Nations archives to gather photographic evidence of Gaza city at that time. When I was interviewing people about what happened, I spent a significant amount of time talking about the visual details. I had people taking me around and showing me old houses, some of which had been built over, but still gave me a sense of how things looked.

Do you struggle with issues of journalistic integrity when drawing something that you haven't seen or been able to find photographs of?

I've never had a situation where I couldn't visualize something to some level of accuracy. I may not know exactly if there were trees or a hill there, but I'm not going to drop material because of details like that. I like to compare myself to a film director who's making a movie about the 1700s: you just have to recreate something to the best of your ability sometimes. Granted, not every twig is going to be in the right place, it won't literally be the same thing. But I'm clear about the fact that my work is an artistic rendition of something, a mixture of art and journalism. If I start obsessing about the details, I may as well be a photographer.

How do you respond to critics who argue that your work cannot be considered journalism because of its artistic dimension?

It's perfectly valid to argue against what I do and wonder whether it can be considered journalistic. I describe my work as comic journalism, other people call it documentary journalism, but these are all just labels to me. The fact is that no one can tell an entire story, everyone concentrates on what they want to, details are cropped out of photographs, stories go through an editing process. Every portrayal is to some extent a filter, and on that level something that someone might find problematic. Ultimately, I try to be as accurate when putting down quotations and describing things. I'm not making things up even though there is an interpretive element to my work.

You told The Guardian that you do "comics, not graphic novels". Could you elaborate on that distinction?

A novel to me is fiction. I think of myself as working in the non-fiction world and don't like my work being considered fiction. I think of the term 'graphic novel' as a marketing moniker geared towards adults who are scared of comics. But it doesn't bother me to talk about my work as comics. I consider myself a comic book artist. The notion of comics still has an underground feel to it, which is fun.

Have you had trouble explaining the medium that you work in to interviewees who may not be familiar with comics?

The main problem I've had is with myself. When I was working on Palestine, I would tell people I was working on a 'project' because I felt sheepish and unsure about what I was doing. By the time I was in Bosnia, things were different. Younger people were more open to me as they have a history of comics there. Moreover, by some weird coincidence, someone in Sarajevo reviewed my work just before I got there, so people were greased for it.

During my last few trips to Gaza, I would bring my book along and show it to people. Especially with older people, having my work with me worked to my advantage since they don't speak English but can recognize the streets or camps that I've drawn. Different cultures might be different, but in the Middle East they can get their head around the idea of drawing and depicting historical events. In Iraq, when I was with marines, there was no getting around what I was doing because they could easily google me and find out exactly what I was up to. So I did meet some lieutenant colonels who were skeptical about my method but were willing to give it a shot because I had press credentials.

Do you manipulate comic conventions such as framing to express meaning?

Yes. My drawing is a very conscious process. The choice of frames, the decision to put captions in little bursts, each angle is very thought out. In Palestine, I feel I overdid some things and have since learned how to discipline my drawing. While working on Palestine, I'd get tired of drawing the same angle so I'd change angles. But now I know to stick with something if I need to maintain a tone.

Does your process involve much revision?

I try not to revise much. I write the script of the comic first and spend a while on this stage. Most of the editing occurs when I realize that I don't need to write out something because I can draw it instead. Other than that, I try to keep the script as it is. In the drawing, on the other hand, I let myself be loose and problem solve as I'm working. I don't story board the whole comic, which makes the process a little more lively and spontaneous. If it were a matter of connecting the dots, I don't think I could carry on working without losing interest.

Where and how were you introduced to comic books?

I grew up in Australia where I read British war comics and some American western comics. I didn't read many super hero comics, other than perhaps strips about The Phantom. It became a hobby because I'd draw my own little figures, mimicking the ones I saw in the comics I was reading.

Do you think working in the medium of comics liberates your journalism from the constraints of the 24-hour news cycle?

I don't think the freedom from the conventional news cycle is peculiar to comics. Herr's Dispatches, for example, is liberated from the constraints of time. I think it's about the approach rather than the medium. With my work, it has to be about the approach. I look for stuff that people will respond to even if the material is dated. That said, I try to make my shorter pieces for magazine publication timelier.

What can traditional print journalism learn from your work?

I

've been trained in classic American objective journalism, but I feel like a reporter should not treat a reader like a repository for facts, rather as someone you're talking to across a table. When I'm reading about a place, I want to know what it's like, what it feels like to be there. I think American journalism lacks the human element that is a bit more prevalent in the British press.

When I'd be sitting with US correspondents in Jerusalem, they'd tell me a story about something that happened to them, but would never write about it. They're so focused on getting all the right quotes, telling this side of the story, that side of the story, interviewing the right spokesperson, and working by the numbers, that they end up doing a disservice to their readers by being objective. They're so focused on being balanced, they don't tell you what they know themselves. It's difficult to maintain objectivity when you start writing that way, but I think reporters should be human beings with an opinion. Why can't a reporter tell me exactly what he or she thinks? Why is all the talking left up to pundits who never leave their desks in DC?

How do you decide which events to cover?

The hardest thing about this kind of work is how much time you spend on the desk. There's that impulse to always see more, but I have to choose the things that matter to me personally for whatever reason. To some extent, it used to be a financial thing. But it's ultimately about what hits you in the gut. The Palestine issue really hit me in the gut. When you start thinking about it, you realize what a disservice has been done to the issue by its media coverage in the US, you realize how many tax dollars go into perpetuating the situation. Similarly, I felt compelled to go to Bosnia. And when I had the gut instinct to go to Iraq, I started calling up agents to see if anyone would be interested in my work about the war.

Of course, there are other things that I'm compelled to do, but if you spend three, four, or even five years on a book, the years start to go by and you can't get to everything, even if it is compelling and interesting.

You also need to prepare yourself before you go, and it can take years of reading to learn the ten per cent you need to know so that you can be open to what's happening there and not waste time asking the simple questions. That basic historical context is important, even though you learn the rest when you get there. That said, I now want to do some shorter pieces for magazines and get out more.

Do you consider returning to the territories you've covered in order to keep your work up to date?

I feel I've already gone pretty deep into the places I've covered. Ultimately, I don't think I can really go much further than I've gone without becoming an Arabist. I think I'd need an academic base to go much further. But then question arises: am I a cartoonist or an Arabist? Also, I feel the urge to cover new ground and be creative for my own sake.

Do you think you've created a market for comic journalism that didn't exist when you started working?

I just tried to do what I wanted to do and didn't think about whether it would work out commercially for me. I thought I was committing commercial suicide with Palestine. Then, half way through Safe Area Gorazde, I had no success at all and was about to give up. But it's always been about doing what I want to do and so I stuck with it. Other people have come to see value in it. It's been a long road and it has taken many years for it to happen, but now I can pick and choose a lot more than I ever imagined possible. It helps that there's been increased interest in comics too.

Does your methodological approach change as you cover topics as varied as rock bands and the Balkan war?

With most of my work, I try to draw relatively realistically, and that's been a struggle since I've largely self-taught myself. When doing the rock band book, then, I've got a looser style and I enjoy doing it more. When doing funny work, I'm less worried about accuracy, the stakes are lower, and I can have more fun with the material.

Has there been a political backlash to your work?

Not really. Once in a while a store won't put my work on the shelves, but I've never had to deal with anything I've been bothered about. When Palestine came out, it was under the radar. My next book may not be under the radar, but we'll just have to wait and see what happens with that.

Given that your work reflects a political stance that is uncommon in the mainstream media, are you concerned about broadening your audience?

I probably get a bigger audience now, in this medium, than I would otherwise. No other medium is going to publish or broadcast this stuff. I also feel that if you popularize the material, you have to dumb it down. Overall, I think if I was to try any other tactic, I wouldn't have gotten done what I have managed to do.

If You Attended Our Session at South By Southwest...

On Monday, danah boyd and I had a conversation in front of a packed room at South By Southwest in Austin about youth, participatory culture, the politics of fear, wikipedia, Second Life, YouTube, and a range of other topics which will be familiar to those of you who regularly read this blog. Since we are seeing an influx of first time readers about now, I figured I would provide a key to some of the blog posts which touch on issues that cropped up during the session -- a kind of one stop shopping to the best of Henry Jenkins (or at least some of the better posts I've made since this blog launched last June.) On YouTube and User-generated Content

YouTube and the Vaudeville Aesthetic

Taking the You Out of YouTube?

How to Watch a Fan-Vid

Astroturf, Humbugs and Lonely Girls

Oreos, "Wal-Mart Time" and User-Generated Advertising

On Second Life

The Great Jenkins/Sharky/Coleman Debate Pre Round 1 Round 2 Round 3 Aftermath

Should I Cornrow My Beard? (About my appearance with Global Kids)

On New Media and Democracy

From Participatory Culture to Participatory Democracy Part One Part Two

Democracy Big Brother Style

National Politics in Game Worlds: The Case of China

On the Future of Education

From YouTube to YouNiversity

on New Media Literacies

White Paper for MacArthur Initiative

on DOPA and the Politics of Fear

The Only Thing We Have to Fear...

What DOPA Means For Education

Four Ways to Kill MySpace

MySpace and the Participation Gap

Joint Interview with danah boyd

on Fans and Intellectual Property

The Magic of Back Story: The Mainstreaming of Fan Culture

In Yoyogi Park (on fans and globalization)

Fan Fiction as Critical Commentary

My Secret Life as a Slasher

Fan Activism in a Networked Culture

In Defense of Crud

Getting Lost

Can One Be a Fan of High Art?

So What Happened to Star Wars Galaxies?

On Wikipedia and Collective Intelligence

Collective Intelligence vs. The Wisdom of Crowds

An Interview with Comics Journalist Joe Sacco (Part One)

Every year, I ask students in my graduate proseminar on Media Theory and Methods to apply what we are learning in the class and do an interview with a media maker. The goal is to pull to the surface their "theory" of the medium in which they operate -- the often unarticulated, sometimes well considered, assumptions they make about their audience, their creative context, their techniques, their technology, their cultural status, and so forth. I will be getting a chance this week to see what my students have produced. I knew going into the process this year that I would be interested to see what Huma Yusuf produced. Huma Yusuf graduated from Harvard in 2002 with a degree in English and American Literature, and returned to Pakistan to work as a journalist. She specializes in writing about social trends as represented in media and media and society issues, in addition to addressing subjects such as low-income housing, 'honor' killings, gang wars and the state's ineffective prosecution of rape cases. Her writing garnered the UNESCO/Pakistan Press Foundation 'Gender in Journalism 2005' Award and the European Commission's 2006 Natali Lorenzo Prize for Human Rights Journalism. Yusuf is interested in investigating the interface among media, local politics and global trends - an intersection that she will explore through sites such as community radio, trends in media consumption, and online environments. With the support of the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan, she is currently launching a first-of-its-kind webzine, the goal of which is to provide an alternate forum where journalists, academics, and media students can examine and critique the Pakistani media industry at large.

I knew because Huma is an interesting person with a journalist's impulses but also because she was connecting with Joe Sacco, the journalist who has used comics as a vehicle to capture the perspectives of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Occupied Territories and to tell the story of the Bosnian War. We had been lucky enough to have Sacco as a speaker at a CMS colloquium event several years ago (alas, before we started our podcasts!) and I thought interesting things might happen if the two of them got on the phone together. When I heard she was doing the interview, I asked if we could run it on the blog.

Everything from here comes from Huma's account of the interview:

Working as a reporter in Karachi, Pakistan, I was often frustrated by the limitations imposed on my work by the parameters of traditional journalism. When I filed an interview with the Police Surgeon of Karachi, the man who oversees all forensic evidence gathering and related medico-legal issues in the city, I hated that I couldn't describe the homophobic graffiti that had been scratched onto the surface of his desk and filing cabinet, the best indication of the kind of pressure under which his team operated. While reporting on a horrific rape case, I would have given anything to describe the self-satisfied way in which the police official I interviewed scratched his crotch using a fly swatter throughout our conversation. That one crude yet probably unconscious gesture said more about the sense of physical entitlement that Pakistani men enjoy than anything I ever wrote. Similarly, if I could have admitted in print that I found myself throwing up in a back alley after visiting the sewage-ridden tin shacks of hundreds of homeless Karachiites, perhaps more people would have been outraged by a government scam that denied access to low-income housing.

I wasted many evenings arguing with my editor about the value of first-person narrative journalism and the shortcomings of objectivity. Unfortunately, neither of us could conjure a reporting template that would be considered appropriate within the standards set by the mainstream media, yet simultaneously capture everything that was raw and repulsive about the reality I was documenting.

Enter Joe Sacco. At the Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism in Boston last fall, soon after my arrival in the US, I happened upon Palestine, Sacco's comic journalism tour de force. Although conference participants had spent the weekend brainstorming ways in which to make journalism more textured, insightful, and human, no one had come close to suggesting a technique that could rival the satirical, brutally honest, and profoundly immersive experience that is Sacco's work.

Often compared to Art Spiegelman's Maus, Sacco's award-winning Palestine: In the Gaza Strip (1996) has been hailed for setting new standards in the genre of non-fiction graphic novels, or, as Sacco terms it, comic journalism. With his follow-up effort Safe Area Gorazde: The War In Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995, Sacco established himself as a journalist to be reckoned with. He has since covered all manner of "compelling" events from Ingushetia to Iraq, from rock bands on the road to raids in Ramallah. Each comic is reportage at its best, daring to go behind-the-scenes of journalistic objectivity, using alternating visual chaos and clarity to render a reporter's all-encompassing experience of a situation. Even better, Sacco's frames are replete with the adrenaline and anxiety, humor and humanity that are never granted any column inches.

While it would be inappropriate for me to compare Pakistan to Palestine, I do believe that there are some realities so absurd that they demand new ways of telling. Sacco's work serves as a reminder to all journalists that they should strive to recount the reality that drives their investigations by whatever means necessary. Sacco is currently working on another comic on the Gaza Strip. Until that hits bookstores, we can content ourselves with some thoughts from the cartoonist:

You've been described as a pioneer in the field of comic journalism, yet one could argue that your work is part of a long tradition, an evolution of the political cartoon. How do you contextualize your work?

I primarily think of myself as a cartoonist, but also as someone who is interested in political matters and what's going on in the world. I know there's a long tradition of illustrators dating back to the London Illustrated and Harper's coverage of the Civil War as well as another tradition of artists who deal with political matters, political cartoons, and editorializing news through pictures. In the end, though, my interests have just come together. I wanted to be a journalist and then fell back on an intense hobby to make a living. I don't think too much about where I place myself and I never really had a theory about what I was doing. People keep asking me about my work, so I'm coming up with something to say post-fact. But the truth is, it's quite accidental. If you've done something for 15 years, you need to build some theory around it, but I wasn't aware of what I was doing when I started doing it

.

Who or what has influenced your work?

George Orwell, Robert Crumb, Hunter S. Thompson, and Michael Herr's Dispatches. I really care about journalism and it's very important to me to get the facts. But I also like getting the taste of something in my mouth, being a part of the same swirl that the writer is in. Herr's work, for example, is more atmospheric and so tells more about war from a universal standpoint that can be accessed in different ways.

Given your influences, do you consider your work to be in line with that of the New Journalists?

I hesitate to make the direct connection. I studied standard American journalism and wanted to write hard news. I only wrote feature material later on. I discovered Herr half way through college and Thompson long after graduating. Other people have assigned me a place among the New Journalists, whatever that means. In my work, I'm just trying to create the flavor of a place I've been.

Did the New Journalists influence your decision to insert yourself into the narrative?

My work process has always been organic so I never made the conscious decision to appear in the narrative. When I started doing comics, I was doing autobiographical material. When I went to the Middle East, however, I wasn't exactly sure what I was going to do. But it wasn't such a stretch to think that I would reflect my own experiences in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, along the lines of a travelogue.

Looking back, I think having myself in it is a strong part of the work, not because I want to be a character, but because I want to point out that this material isn't objective, this is my point of view, these are the impressions I got. I'm interested in the facts, but that's not the same as being objective. My figure represents the personal pronoun 'I' and emphasizes that this isn't 'fly on the wall' journalism.

By inserting yourself in the narrative, you can also write the stuff that journalists don't, for example, about how people interact with you. I want to get away from the pretense of the reporter as artificial construct. Reporters have feelings about a situation and that impacts the way they write. My work is a way to demystify a process that may otherwise seem strange to people.

How Second Life Impacts Our First Life...

After having written so much about Second Life during my recent exchanges with Beth Coleman and Clay Shirky, I swore to myself that I would not write about this virtual world for a bit and let reality catch up with some of my theories. No such luck. I recently heard from digital theorist Trebor Scholtz suggesting that there had been some interesting responses to the Shirkey-Coleman-Jenkins exchanges over at the iDC (Institute for Distributed Creativity) mailing list. Scholtz asked politely if I might weigh in on some of their arguments (always a dangerous thing since I am not on the list and not fully following their conversations) and clarify my position. I asked if I could cross-post my response here on the blog.

The question which Scholtz posed to me was deceptively simple:

My main question to Jenkins and all of you concerns the relationship between this virtual world and "first life." Do these virtual worlds merely provide an inconvenient youth with a

valve to live their fantasies of social change (elsewhere), or do they, in some measurable way, fertilize politics in the world beyond the screen?

The last several decades of observation of the digital world teaches us that the digital world is never totally disconnected from the real world. Even when we go onto the digital world to "escape" reality, we end up engaging with symbolic representations which we read in relation to reality. We learn things about our first lives by stepping into a Second or parallel life which allows us to suspend certain rules, break out of certain roles, and see the world from a fresh perspective. More often, though, there are a complex set of social ties, economic practices, political debates, etc. which almost always connects what's taking place online to what's going on in our lives off line.

Here, for example, is a link to the webcast of a session of the 2005 Games, Learning, and Society conference at Madison, Wisconsin. (Check out the session called Brace for Impact: How User Creation Changes Everything). It was one of the first places that I heard extensively about the kinds of educational uses of Second Life. One of the stories there which caught my imagination dealt with the ways people were using this environment to help sufferers of autism and Asperger's syndrome to rehearse social skills and overcome anxieties that can be crippling in real world social interactions. (They call their island, Brigadoon). Those who are undergoing therapy in Brigadoon are able to interact through Second Life for several reasons, as I understand it: first, because it creates a buffer between the people lowering the stress of social interaction; second, because it reduces the range of social signals through the cartoonishness of the avatar, helping them to learn to watch for certain signs and filter out others. Ideally, participants then return with these new social skills and apply them to their interactions in their First Lives. But even if that is not possible for all of those involved, they have had a chance to interact meaningfully with other human beings -- even if through a mediating representation.

For me, Brigadoon offers both a demonstration of the value of having a Second Life that operates in parallel to your First Life and as a metaphor to think about the ways we can try things out, learn to think and act in new ways in virtual worlds of all kinds, and then carry those skills back with us to our everyday reality.

In some cases, the Second Life opens up experiences that would not be possible within the constraints of the real world. My former student and friend, John Campbell, wrote a book, Getting It On Online: Cyberspace, Gay Male Identity, and Embodied Identity . His research primarily centered on much earlier forms of chatroom technologies rather than Second Life per se, but much of what he found there is still very relevant to our present conversation. One of the things I took away from Campbell's book was the idea that these chartrooms played important functions for queers who lived in small towns or in conservative regions of the country where there were little or no chances to socialize with others who shared their sexual preferences. Entering into a virtual world (even one as simple as the early chat rooms) allowed them to begin to explore aspects of their sexual identity that they could not yet act upon in their First Lives. Through this process, they developed the self confidence necessary to come out to their friends and family, they felt some connection to the realm of queer activism, and they made a range of other life-changing choices. I wanted to bring this into the conversation because I see from time to time academic theorists who want to dismiss the kinds of sexual experimentation that occurs in Second Life as interactive porn. Such language shows a limited understanding of what such spaces can and often do mean to the people who participate in these sexual subcultures in virtual worlds.

Those who have read my blog know how much I respect the work that Barry Joseph is doing through his Global Kids organization in Teen Second Life. Joseph has a strong commitment to using the virtual world to educate and empower young people and redirect them towards dealing with problems in the real world. Consider, for example, their recent collaboration with the U.S.Holocaust Memorial Museum to make images of the genocide occurring in Darfur visible to young visitors to Teen Second Life. The Museum was already projecting these photographs onto its own facade in the real world. The Global Kids group worked to showcase these same images within the virtual world, in the process learning more about real world suffering, and using Second Life as a platform to educate their contemporaries about a world problem that might otherwise have escaped their attention. By all reports, this was a transformative experience for the teens involved, resulting in them putting greater energy into trying to change the real world. Perhaps, Barry, who is a regular reader of this blog, will share more about his experiences.

How far might we push this? Consider the case of Kristofer Jovkovski, one of the readers of this blog, who wrote me recently to describe his proposal to construct a Virtual Macedonia through Second Life. Jovkovski's argument appeared in a Macedonia Arts and Culture magazine, Art Republica:

Macedonia is country of spiritual and profound people, having its culture originating from a deep tradition and culture. However, by implanting extremely materialistic culture and values that even the most developed capitalistic countries are revising and varying, the country is gradually losing its spirit.

Radical virtualization of reality would turn us back to our own natural needs. That would be the final, strongest slap in our own face, as radical immersion into the cyberspace would produce the opposite effect, at the same time, along the immersion path, would make us integrate, instead of enforce, the democratic and open values of the medium, process which would finally lead to reconciliation between the spiritual (i.e. cyberspace) and material world

It is essential to make space for the young people to create their individual and collective reality....

Macedonian government would accredit Virtual Macedonia as a legal state extension in the cyberspace and would give rise to virtual institutions and legal rights to the citizens, thus recognizing the first virtual sovereign state act that would make precedence in the international politics and instant popularity. Promotion of the first virtual state would incite knowledge and information revolution, changing the face of Macedonia. Everybody willing to embody themselves with a virtual identity, or Avatar, would have rights and possibility to create, own and trade virtual objects, thus empowering himself. Virtual Macedonia would be introduced to the older Macedonians in a nostalgic manner that would evoke ideological enthusiasm from their youth. Young people would, of course, be riding enthusiastic energy wave of even greater intensity.

Virtualization of reality would help us relive traumatic politization and transformation of everyday life. Experiences from the virtual reality would affect our real reality. We could help ourselves, and maybe most important, by taking more proactive part in creation of their own reality, young people could break the karma of cynicism and pessimism of elders.

Virtual Macedonia could be practical model of virtual state with its own territorial sovereignty, functional economy and community rights and regulations, opened to the world....

He has not yet tried to build a Virtual Macedonia. I don't want to get into this specific politics of the Macedonia situation but I was moved by this vision of how a virtual nation might revitalize a real one (which is in any case in the process of trying to reinvent itself after a complex history of struggles over national identity).

Might we imagine, for example, the construction of virtual homelands within Second Life that brought together disaporic communities and helped to cement their cultural and political ties to their mother countries? Might this result in new kinds of political alliances and affiliations that straddle between the real and virtual world? Could we use a similar structure to create a common space for interaction between groups which have very little face to face contact in the real world, even groups who have a history of conflicts over geographic space?

All of these examples work because Second Life does not perfectly mirror the reality of our First Lives, yet we could point to countless other more mundane and everyday ways that Second Life and other multiverses can and are being used to facilitate meetings in real world organizations, including those which result in all kinds of real world political effects.

That said, as Steven Shaviro notes on the iDC discussion list, there are some limits to the kinds of politics that can be conducted through Second Life at the present time:

Overall, Second Life is connected enough to "first life," and mirrors it closely enough in all sorts of ways, that we can pretty much do "there" the same sorts of things -- especially collaborative, social things -- that we do "here."...

A protest against the Iraq war in Second Life is little more than an empty symbolic gesture; but one might cynically argue, especially given the tendency of the media to ignore them, that

real-world protests against the war , however many people they draw, are at this point little more than empty symbolic gestures either.

On the other hand, I don't think that one could find any equivalent in Second Life of political organizing that takes place in "first life": if only because the people in Second Life are a fairly narrow, self-selected and affluent, group.

This goes back to the debate we've been having here about whether Second Life participants constitute a niche or an elite. Either way, the inhabitants of Second Life certainly are not a representative cross section of the society as a whole and there are many people who are excluded through technological or economic barriers to being able to participate in this world. These factors limit the political uses that can be made of SL: they make it hard for us to insure that a diversity of opinions are represented through the kinds of political deliberations that occur here; they makes it easy for participants to ignore some real world constraints on political participation, starting with the challenges of overcoming the digital divide and the participation gap; they make it hard to insure the visibility of online political actions within mainstream media.

That said, I don't think we can discount the political and personal impact that these online experiences may have on the residents of SL. We simply need a broader range of models for what a virtual politics might look like and need to understand what claims are being made when we debate the political impact of these virtual worlds.

Another list participant, Charlie Geer, goes a lot further in dismissing the value of Second Life. He takes issue with my claim that the participatory culture represented on SL is worth defending. Here's part of what he wrote:

It would seem to me obvious that trying to make some sense of and find ways of mitigating the violence and injustice in the complex world and culture we already necessarily inhabit, not least bodily, is far more pressing and considerably more worth defending than any supposed capacity to 'design and inhabit our own worlds and construct our own culture'. This seems to me to be at best a license for mass solipsism and at worse something like the kind of thinking that undergirds much totalitarianism, as well as an evasion of our responsibilities to the world as we find it. Such a fantasy seems to be at play in both the relentless construction and assertion of identity', a drive that militates against proper social solidarity, and thus plays into the hands of those sustaining the status quo, as well as the fantasy entertained by the Bush

government that the Middle East can just be redesigned as if in some video game

Apart from anything culture is not something that can simply be constructed. It is something we are thrown into and which we can only at best try to negotiate our relationship

with. Culture necessarily involves other people and prior existing structures. Has Jenkins considered what it would mean if everyone felt free to 'construct their own culture'. Even if

such a thing were possible, it is certainly not desirable, especially if we have any hope to produce a properly participatory culture.

Frankly as far as I am concerned SL is really just a kind of cultural pornography, and is to the real business of culture what masturbating is to sex with another person. I like

masturbation as much as the next man, or indeed woman, but I don't make the error of mistaking for something it isn't. Apart from anything else it lacks precisely the element

that sex has, that of involving a proper, embodied, responsibility to someone else and to the potential consequences of the act itself.

There are lots of misperceptions embedded in these comments. To start with, I was not suggesting that we should be concerned with SL to the exclusion of concern with the real world. But I do see the struggle to preserve participatory culture as a fundamental political struggle in the same way that the right to privacy or the efforts to defend free speech are foundational to any other kind of political change. We are at an important crossroads as a society: on the one hand, we have new tools and social structures emerging that allow a broader segment of the population than ever before to participate in the core debates of our time. These tools have enormous potential to be used for creative and civic purposes. On the other hand, we are seeing all kinds of struggles to suppress our rights to deploy these new tools and social structures. Even as we are seeing a real promise of expanding free speech, we are seeing real threats to free speech from both corporate and governmental sources. We should be working to broaden access to the technologies and to the skills and education needed to become a full participant rather than having to defend the new communication infrastructure against various threats from government and business.

Gere understands what's going on in Second Life primarily in individualistic rather than collaborative terms. It would indeed be meaningless to describe a world where everyone constructs their own culture. Culture by definition is shared. But it is not absurd to imagine a world where everyone contributes to the construction of their culture. It is not absurd to imagine different projects in SL as representing alternative models for how our culture might work. Indeed, the virtual world allows us not only to propose models but to test them by inviting others inside and letting them consider what it might feel like to live in this other kind of social institutions. I think of what goes on there as a kind of embodied theory. And I think what is interesting is that these are intersubjective models that are indeed being taking up and tested by communities large and small.

In each of the examples I cited above, participants are learning how to work together with others through the creation of a shared virtual reality. We certainly need to spend more time exploring how we can connect what happens in these worlds back to our everyday lives but that doesn't mean that what occurs in a symbolic space is devoid of a real world social and political context.

Often, real world institutions and practices constrain our ability to act upon the world by impoverishing our ability to imagine viable alternatives. This is at the heart of much of the writing in cultural studies on ideology and hegemony. SL offers us a way to construct alternative models of the world and then step inside them and experience what it might feel like to live in a different social order. I think there are some very real possibilities there for political transformation.

GDC 2007 Coverage (Part Four of Four)

This is the last installment of Eitan Glinert's account of the Games Development Conference. Glinert is a graduate student working for GAMBIT.

Friday

For the past four days I've brought you coverage of GDC and tried to focus on different aspects of the conference, starting with serious games, then independent game development, followed by coverage of the "big" companies out there including Sony and Nintendo, and then women in gaming. Today, on my last day, I'm going to get into news related to my own research in game accessibility. But what is "Game Accessibility"? It seems to be one of those terms getting thrown around a lot in the industry, especially over the past week. Simply put, there are a huge number of disabled people out there; according to the 2000 American census, 19% of individuals aged 16 - 64 had some form of disability, be it physical or mental. Accessibility refers to games that are designed with this large group in mind, so that they can play along with everyone.

Actually creating accessible games is a task easier said than done, though. There are many forms of disabilities, ranging from sensory impairments (i.e. blind), to physical disabilities, to mental disabilities such as dyslexia, to medical conditions like arthritis. So how can you make a game that is accessible to all of these people? That's a great question that Dr. Dimitris Grammenos would like to try to answer. Grammenos has created Game Over!, the most frustrating, hilarious, and thought-provoking game I have seen in quite some time. Game Over! has 20+ levels, each of which displays a different accessibility deficiency that makes the game impossible to play. That's right - you can't win this game. Play advances when you either die, or self destruct, three times in any given level. Lighthearted enough to keep you from breaking your computer in frustration, playing through really gets you thinking about how the "bugs" that prevent you from winning could have been avoided. If you are developing software, I *strongly* suggest checking it out.

There are some games, though, that do a great job of being accessible. One notable example is Terraformers, winner of the innovation in audio award at the 2003 independent games festival. Terraformers features a rich world in which you need to make an alien planet habitable for humans (hence the name.) What's really impressive about the game, though, is that you don't need to be able to see to play the game. Through the novel use of 3D sound and a handy futuristic sonar system, players can navigate and interact with the world without ever seeing a thing. If the concept sounds interesting but you think you want something more action packed, you might want to check out AudioGames.net, a website devoted entirely to games for the visually impaired. Two of the more interesting offerings on the site (in my opinion) are Drive and Shades of Doom, though the list of some 200 games available should give you plenty to choose from.

Also present at GDC were games that took pains to provide useful closed captioning, to allow the user to adjust the speed and difficulty level of the system and a meaningful way, and a wide array of controllers that would allow users with one hand, or even paraplegics, to play games. The latter controller, which was controlled through a set of three puff straws, was truly an impressive feat, though I don't know of any plans to mass produce such items. If anyone does know of where to get such a device, it would have to be Game Accessibility, the best site around for what's new in the accessibility field. Along with links to dozens of games (some of which can be downloaded on the site) there are many useful tools for developers such as papers and testimonials on how to make these types of games.

That about wraps up my coverage of the Game Developer's Conference. Before I go though, a plug: check out The Education Arcade, a lab here at MIT that focuses on the creation of new engaging educational games, like Labyrinth. There's lots of great stuff on the site, including some particularly enlightening blogs. Ok, so mine aren't all that enlightening, but the other ones are. Check it out!

Have comments on Eitan's coverage of GDC? Feel free to contact him at glinert-at-mit-dot-edu and tell him what you really thought of his posts

GDC 2007 Coverage (Part Three of Four)

Thursday

If I had to sum up Playstation's GDC message in one sentance, it would be: "The PS3 really is super awesome, check out all this cool stuff we have in the pipeline!" If you asked me to do the same for Nintendo, though, it would probably be "We're friends - let's talk about our design philosophy so you can learn from it." Personally, I find the latter message a bit more appealing as it is more tangible, and, quite frankly, the Wii has more credibility in my book at the time being (though I do want the PS3 to succeed on the same level as it's predecessor.)

That said, it wouldn't have killed Nintendo to make a *few* more announcements. With the exception of a multiplayer playable demo of the new Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, I didn't see or hear anything truly exciting. As for Phantom, while the single player game certainly looks like a fun DS version of the Wind Waker, the multiplayer part wasn't terribly impressive. At it's core a fun "hide-and-seek" concept, it is strictly one on one, and damningly has NO ELEMENT OF ZELDA GAMEPLAY. There are no swords, no boomerangs, and no dive-rolls with a pleasurable "HAA!" In fact, you could replace link and all the other objects in the game with kittens and dogs, the game would look the same. As a result, the functionality seems tacked on, and makes me wonder why they didn't take more time to really get that Zelda feel that we fans love so much.

Nintendo's biggest newsmaker of the day was the keynote delivered by the company's creative director Shigeru Miyamoto. Miyamoto, the mastermind behind Mario, Zelda, and Donkey Kong, talked somewhat informally about the design principles of Nintendo, and then his own personal take on game creation. The keynote was not nearly as announcement heavy as the previous day's; indeed, only a brief video was shown of the upcoming Super Mario Galaxy, which was not very different than the one shown last year. In my opinion, though, Miyamoto more than made up for this with interesting anecdotes and an engaging narrative that followed through his career from a non-gamer point of view. Specifically, through a dynamic wife-o-meter, which showed his wife's (growing) interest in games as time went on and technology and game design improved.

I personally felt this wife-o-meter was an apt analogy, as it touched on the important issue of the growing female demographic. More and more, women are playing and buying video games, and are shattering the notion that women are only "casual" gamers. As I sat in various conference halls, I noticed (anecdotal evidence alert!) that there were more women playing with their DS's than men! And they weren't just playing "fluffy" games like Nintendogs either, but "hardcore" ones like Final Fantasy 3 and Mario Kart.

This shift is reflected in the changes being seen in industry. Development teams, typically mostly or entirely male, are beginning to realize that they can't just make games for themselves anymore, but have to design games that appeal more to a broader user base (which is always a good design practice in general.) Likewise, as women dive into gaming more than they have historically, more women get jobs in the field, which then in turn helps the design process and pushes innovation, something desperately needed in an industry dominated by sequels.

Tomorrow I'll conclude my coverage of GDC with a segment on the often overlooked area of game accessibility. In the mean time, how did my friend Kristina fare on her mission? Well, she tried everything; flattery, intimidation, humor, threats, and bribery, but unfortunately walked away without the Miyamoto-signed DS she had her heart set on. Will there be happy ending to her story?

No, probably not.

GDC 2007 Coverage (Part Two of Four)

The following is the second of a four part series of observations on the Game Developers Conference by graduate student Eitan Glinert. I am flying to Chicago today to attend the Society for Cinema Studies conference.

Wednesday

GDC proper kicked off today, with all the commotion and fanfare you'd expect from some ten thousand plus obsessed gamers. Phil Harrison, the president of Sony Worldwide Studios, started the show with a memorable keynote on what's next for the currently ailing PS3. Not just a preview of some cool games, Phil announced a company shift to focus on user-centric entertainment in the vein of YouTube, Second Life, or MySpace. But how does Sony hope to get people involved?

The first way is through the addition of a new service to the PS3 Xross Media Bar called Home. Similar to Second Life in many ways, users control a customizable avatar in a world where they interact with other players (no word yet on whether you can play as a furry.) You also own an apartment which you can decorate to your liking as in The Sims. Don't like the wallpaper? Change it. Don't like the selection of wallpapers you can use? Buy premium wallpapers from the Sony store. In fact, that seems to be the crux of the service; the free stuff is nice, but if you want the *really* cool stuff, you're gonna have to pay.

So what's cool in this world? Well, you can hang out with others in common spaces and play games, ranging from pool to old-school arcade games. You can watch trailers for upcoming movies in Hi Def - though I do have to wonder how they will manage to play them without either requiring long download times or terrible buffering. But perhaps most compelling is your personal trophy room, which displays badges of honor you earn in games by accomplishing certain goals in PS3 games. Kill 10,000 zombies? That's a trophy! Get 5 stars on Jordan in expert mode? Trophy! Figure out what the ending of Metal Gear Solid 2 Means? Trophy!

While a nice feature and a welcome addition, Home doesn't seem to be the killer app that Sony is looking for. But LittleBigPlanet just might be it. Where Home fails to allow for user generated content, LittleBigPlanet (which I will call LBP from now on because it sounds cooler) shines. Less a game than a toolbox, LBP allows users to create their 2D platformer with 3D objects in a simple and straightforward way. Once created users can play through the levels they've made, and invite their friends along for the ride.

So why is LBP so impressive? Well, for one thing, the game looks beautiful. The textures in the game are vivid and lifelike, and evoke a "realistic" feeling. Furthermore, the user interface seems pretty clean - scroll through nested lists to select what you want to create, then place them in the world using a lasso. But what is most impressive, in my opinion, is what Harrison focused on the least: The game has realistic, working soft body physics! In other words, users no longer have to settle for unsquishable bowling balls, they can now make nerf balls. It's unclear to me why this point wasn't stressed more. I hope it was a matter of the subject matter not fitting the audience, rather than the demo being a Wizard of Oz type "man-behind-a-curtain" thing, where the soft body physics are faked, and don't really work like in the demo.

If a game is going to center on user content, you'd better believe there's going to be a way to upload your creations and download other people's creations. LBP does it with a slick interface that allows people to search, post comments, and rate their favorites. Sure, it's a YouTube knockoff, but if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

In addition to the PS3 announcements, there were excellent talks on two other games that I am greatly looking forward to. The first is Valve's upcoming game Portal, one of the more original twists to come out of the puzzle genre in a while. Based on the Half-Life 2 engine, Portal features a wormhole generating gun that allows you to connect two points in space and then pass easily from one to the other. Don't get it? Take a look and you will.

The other game I was excited to see was Sega's Crush. Players alternate through a traditional 3D platform landscape, which they can "crush" (flatten) at any point into a 2D variant based on camera angle. This redefinition allows the user to traverse obstacles that would normally be impossible to get past. Sound cool? It is.

Kristina found a sharpie and has her Pink DS ready. Will she succeed in getting Miyamoto's coveted John Hancock? Tomorrow we'll find out.

GDC 2007 Coverage (Part One of Four)

This week, a large group of CMS students and faculty/researchers are spending time in San Francisco at the Games Developer's Conference. I was unable to attend this year due to other speaking commitments. In the next week, I will be speaking at the University of Minnesota, at the Society for Cinema Studies conference in Chicago, and at South By Southwest in Austin. I asked one of the students who is attending the Game Developer's Conference, Eitan Glinert, to share with my readers some of his impressions. Glinert recently arrived at MIT as a graduate student in Computer Science having worked with the Federation of American Scientists on the development of games for learning. We quickly snatched him up to contribute to the launch of GAMBIT, the Singapore-MIT Games Innovation Lab, and he has just as quickly become a familiar face at our community gatherings. What follows is some of his impressions of the first two days of the conference. Day One

For five days, Game Developer's Conference is a zoo of exciting discussion, innovative ideas, and social networking that becomes the focal point of many gamer's lives, including my own. I'm Eitan Glinert, and for the next week I'll be covering the conference from warm, sunny San Francisco.

Most people at such conferences might focus on a genre or a platform, be it first person shooters or the Wii, but today we're going to focus on an entire field of gaming, Serious Games. It's the market segment that involves all the games that your education obsessed aunt bought for you when you were little; the ones that made you roll your eyes and think "Great, another one of those games." The area runs the gamut from "Carmen Sandiego" and "Flight Simulator" to Captain Novolin. The trait that all these games share, though, is a desire to teach the user or elicit some sort of behavioral change through game play.

Who's making Serious Games? A growing number of people from myriad institutions - there's military instructors who want training simulators for their troops, educational companies trying to bring new learning technologies into the classroom, and non-profits that want to bring about social change and political activism. These games are fine, but (with the exception of government funded military simulators) they are generally smaller games on smaller budgets, and aren't aimed at or aren't successful with the mainstream market. This reputation is what causes most gaming companies to avoid serious gaming like the plague - they make games for the general public, and they're a guaranteed money loss. Right?

Wrong. Serious games are beginning to become serious money. In the past year, 5 of the top 20 games for the Nintendo DS in Japan have been serious games, including two variations of Brain Age, and English teaching game, and the ever popular "Cooking Navigation." And some companies are beginning to take notice. Last year, Square Enix (of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest fame) announced the opening of a new offshoot called SGlab , created to capitalize on this newly discovered market. The company plans to work with both game developers and Japanese schools and libraries to deliver educational gaming products - however, as of yet, I have seen no news about upcoming releases.

This year, Ichiro Otobe, Chief Strategist of Square Enix, delivered the keynote at the Serious Games Summit section of GDC and spoke about some of the new projects they were working on. While it still remains unclear what, if anything, will come out of SGlab, it is more than apparent that the parent company is dedicated to making games in the field, as was seen during the demonstration of a new game unceremoniously code named "Project GB." Running on the DS, it displayed some very impressive game capabilities: design, create, and play your own sprite based 2D games. The bottom screen serves as an editor in which the user "codes" the various objects that will comprise his game; meanwhile, the objects are displayed on the top screen and behave according to the proscribed rules. The demo featured a user-created version of Galaga, and displayed how easy it was to create new objects and change settings. I must say, it was rather enticing; I know I certainly wouldn't mind recreating a newer, better Marble Madness and then passing it around to my friends to try.

If the model works (and I hope it does) then I suspect these games, and more importantly their profit margins, will open the flood gates and we'll see many, many more serious games in the near future. The Wii and DS seem especially suited to such offerings, as the platforms are, at their heart, designed to draw in users that might be interesting in non-standard gaming options. After all, wouldn't you pay $50 to learn algebra from Mario?

Day Two

Making video games isn''t easy. Well, that's not entirely true; if you''re EA or Microsoft, and you have a huge number of developers and producers, and you have a money vault filled with gold coins you can swim through a la "Ducktales," then it's actually not that difficult. But for the rest of us, for the "Indie" developers out there, making games is a Herculean task. Frequently, independents have to work with a minimal or non-existent budget, a team that is too small and too inexperienced for the task, and usually have to take time off from development to spend time on other distractions, like classes or a job.

Here at GDC, these developers are getting a voice, and for good reason, as they are responsible for the majority of the games out there (even if many of them you haven''t heard of.) A small number of the games, like Second Life, manage to take hold and become a phenomenon. More of them graduate to "casual" online games, and if they''re lucky get linked to by a portal website and make a modest return on a few hundred/thousand downloads. The majority, though, never see the light of day. That''s why the conference has such as focus on making sure that the independents out there can learn what they need to know to at least help their chances of success.

So what advice was given? Innovate! Or, don''t innovate, but make a small change to something that exists and do a good job with that! Or do tons of self promotion, and make sure that you have a good market strategy! Get help from professionals in the field! Better yet, do all of the above, and then come and give advice at the following year's conference!

The truth of the matter is, there''s lots of good advice that can be given, and different things have worked for different people, though most agree that being "at the right place, at the right time, with the right idea" certainly helps. One of the more interesting teams to come out of the independent game field in the past two years is thatgamecompany, a company started by several USC graduates including Jenova Chen and Kellee Santiago, both of whom I had the pleasure of talking to at the conference. We discussed their new games Cloud and flOw (both of which are available for download through the = company website), and the thinking behind their creation. Instead of simply trying to design a game based on that one "good idea", they tried to identify an area that games were ignoring - in this case, they felt there weren''t enough games out there that promote feelings of relaxation and tranquility. Both games, especially Cloud, are designed around promoting these emotions, and the results are spectacular. When was the last time you played a game and the word "Zen" came to mind?

Certainly, their philosophy seems to work for them. But that''s only one way for independents to make games. Another great way is through contests, and here's one you might be interested in if you are a college student looking to get into game development. It's called Hidden Agenda, and at stake is $25,000 for the best educational game that is exciting and engaging, and teaches something on the side. But maybe educational games aren''t your thing, and you are interested in more basic, "fun" games? Consider making a game for One Laptop per Child, a new nonprofit trying to get cheap, durable laptops to children in third world countries. They''re really looking for talented, dedicated people to help them make games, and it will likely be a great way to get your name out there.

Tomorrow GDC proper starts, and we'll see if my friend Kristina is successful in her lifelong dream of getting Miyamoto''s signature on her DS.

From Participatatory Culture to Participatory Democracy (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first part of the text of my keynote address to the Beyond Broadcast conference. I conclude the text in today's installment.

Vote Naked

An advertisement for the Webby Awards, given in recognition for outstanding contributions to digital culture, depicts a pair of feminine bare feet with what would seem to be a blurry bed in the background. Its slogan was "vote naked." Ever since I first saw that advertisement, I have been intrigued by what it might mean to "vote naked." Might this be what democracy looks like? The advertisement suggests that the computer now allows us to conduct the most public of actions within the privacy of our own home in whatever state of dress or undress we desire. More than that, the image and slogan invites us to imagine a time when we are as comfortable in our roles as citizens as we are within our own skins, when politics may be a familiar, everyday, and intimate aspect of our daily lives much the way popular culture is today. We watch television in our underwear; we dress up to vote. All of this is to say that we too often treat American Democracy as a special event (organizing around elections, bemoaning the outcome, and then crawling back into our holes for another four years) rather than as a lifestyle. Redrawing the lines between participatory culture and participatory democracy might give us a way to revitalize citizenship, making it a meaningful aspect of our everyday lives, rather than as something we try to ignore as long as possible. This is an idea that I flesh out more fully (no pun intended) in the final chapters of Convergence Culture.

Here are a few other key concepts that we might draw from Convergence Culture into the current discussion of Democracy:

1. Convergence is a cultural rather than a technological process. We now live in a world where every story, image, sound, idea, brand, and relationship will play itself out across all possible media platforms. As such, the system creates many points where it is vulnerable to intervention, appropriation, repurposing, and recontextualizing its contents towards political purposes.

2. In a networked society, people are increasingly forming knowledge communities to pool information and work together to solve problems they could not confront individually. We call that collective intelligence. The political potential of collective intelligence might be recognized through a closer examination of the Wikipedia movement. Wikipedia has developed strong ethical standards that enable people with wildly divergent beliefs to work together towards a common project; they focus on the shared infrastructure that they all need in order to achieve their aims rather than on the individual points of disagreement; the Wikipedia movement provides them with meaningful mechanisms that allow for the reconciliation between competing truth claims and the co-existence of differing perspectives.

3. We are seeing the emergence of a new form of participatory culture (a contemporary version of folk culture) as consumers take media in their own hands, reworking its content to serve their personal and collective interests. It will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that I consider Second Life to be one of the most powerful embodiments of this new participatory culture -- a whole world that is being constructed bottom up through the collective and individual efforts of participants.

In the white paper we wrote for MacArthur, I offer the following definition of a Participatory Culture:

1. there are relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement

2. there is strong support for creating and sharing what you create with others

3. there is some kind of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced gets passed along to newbies and novices

4. members feel that their contributions matter

5. members feel some degree of social connection with each other at least to the degree to which they care what other people think about what they have created.

Not every member needs to contribute but all need to feel that they are free to contribute when they are ready and that what they contribute will be appropriately valued if they do.

In such a world, many will only dabble; some will dig deeper; and still others will master the skills that are most valued within the community. But the community itself provides strong incentives for creative expression and active participation.

In the white paper, my focus was primarily on various communities of fans, gamers, and bloggers, many of whom are involved in creative expression, yet this description might also apply to various projects that are designed to promote real world civic engagement.

Don't let anyone tell you that participatory culture is new or that it has not made earlier contributions to the evolution of American democracy. We know, for example, that teenagers were using toy printing presses to produce what we might now call zines during the Civil War period, using them as vehicles to debate abolitionism and secession in publications that they circulated through an Amateur Press Association. We might similarly point to the various kinds of civic activities that young people were engaged with during the early history of American radio at a time when it was expected that there might be as many transmitters as receivers. Youth groups, such as the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, embraced amateur radio as a site of community service and civic engagement. The Radio Merit Badge was one of the very first created and was once central to what it meant to be a Scout. When the Federal Communications Commission sought to shift radio towards a medium of corporate broadcasting, they did so by vilifying the "boys in short pants," suggesting that young people had misused the public airwaves and that the experiment with participatory media had failed. Today, both of these earlier experiments in participatory culture have been written out of the history of American politics but they offer us valid historical antecedents for today's blogs, podcasts, and video-blogs. (For a useful history of the amateur radio movement, check out Susan Douglas's Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922.)

4. We are acquiring skills now through our play, which we will later apply towards more serious ends. Indeed, we are again and again seeing examples of entertainment technologies being repurposed for more citizenly ends. So, no sooner did the game, The Movies, hit the market with its promise of allowing players to create their own cinema than it was picked up by student activists in Paris and used to explain to the world their particular vision of French Democracy. Moveon's "Bush in 30 Seconds" contest took its model from the reality television series, Project Greenlight, and took advantage of the skills that young people had developed through the years putting together fan or skateboarder videos. Meetup was created as a vehicle for trading beanie babies and is today deployed by all kinds of interest groups, but it has also become a staple of political campaigns and was a hallmark of the Howard Dean effort in 2004.

YouTube may be the distribution channel for Lonelygirl15 and for college kids around the world who want to lip-sync with boy band songs, but it has also been a system by which amateur news footage of incidents like the tasering of the UCLA student by the campus police may gain much greater visibility and circulation. Indeed, we are just beginning to see the kinds of grassroots documentary work that can emerge in a world where almost everyone has both a camera and a video recorder built into their mobile phones and thus carries media production equipment with them where-ever they go. We can already point to the ways that these mobile cameras have changed public perceptions of the Bush administration's handling of Katrina. Early news reports were largely favorable since reporters were embedded in the teams of rescue workers but a different image of the events emerged as refuges started to tell their stories and upload amateur images of the same events. Others used Flickr and other photosharing sites to deconstruct and critique news media coverage of the incident, showing for example the different kinds of language used to describe the same actions taken by white ("finding bread and soda") and black refuges ("looting a grocery store.") These new communication platforms taught many of us to read past the official accounts and led to a significant decline in Bush's public support.

The Downsides of Participation

Of course, we should also look critically at some of the ways that these emerging models of participatory culture are being used in ways that are destructive to civic engagement. In many ways, as I discuss in the book, the candidates lost control of their own campaigns in 2004 to "truth squads" and bloggers who were often willing to be more negative than the official party spokesperson were willing to go. The result was an increasingly brutal campaign process, marked by partisan divisions that are very difficult for us to resolve once it comes time to actually govern this country. If participatory culture offers us a sense of empowerment as citizens take media in their own hands, there are also risks that it will prove more divisive as everyday people get sucked into the most negative aspects of the campaign.

An interesting case in point might be the use of photoshop collages as a form of political satire. We might see such transparently manipulated images as a kind of modern equivalent of editorial cartoons, translating political events into vivid, compelling, and amusing images which insure their wider circulation. In a high number of cases, these cartoons deploy images from popular culture to help the public understand the stakes of the political process. Already we are seeing images start to emerge of the candidates for the next campaign. A strikingly high percentage of them appeal to sexism (in dealing with Hillary Clinton) and racism, not to mention Xenophobia, (in dealing with Barack Obama). Some of these images are too offensive to be circulated in the mainstream media (though I wouldn't bet on it: the new Fox comedy news show had a skit about "B.O. [Barack Obama] Magazine" as part of its sample reel!) but they appeal to the urge towards politically incorrect speech that shapes so much of the participatory culture online. We will benefit as a society by broadening the range of perspectives on political life through tapping this new participatory culture but only if, at the same time, we foster civility and mutual respect as a cornerstone of our political discourse.

What We Should Fight For...

In the aftermath of the last presidential campaign, one widely circulated cartoon depicted America as divided -- more or less permanently -- between "Jesusland" and "The United States of Canada." At some point, we need to move beyond the cultural divide between Red and Blue States and try to provide some shared framework of values, some common social contract upon which democracy can function. I have personally found inspiration in the widely circulated image of the results of the 2004 elections not in terms of red and blue states but rather as a series of different shades of purple and maroon that reflect the mix of Republican and Democratic voters state by state.

Ideally, a participatory democracy supports the formation of coalitions across parties and across political categories, allowing people to work together to support those things which are absolutely essential if Democracy is going to thrive. We need, in other words, to work together to insure for the survival of participatory culture itself. (There will, of course, being other debates that are more divisive, debates which deploy the tools offered by participatory culture to try to sway voters in opposing directions, and this too is at the heart of a democratic culture.)

If privacy was in many ways the central political struggle of the late 20th century, manifested in a range of different political debates (from Gay Rights to Abortion), then participation may be the core battle of the early 21st century. Our right to participate in our own culture is being held hostage both by big government and by big industry and we need to adopt a multiple front strategy that will allow us to hold open a space for participation. The current media reform movement is focused on empowering the government to regulate media concentration but has had much less to say about the ways that the government itself encroaches into our rights to participate. This struggle manifests itself in a variety of different debates. On the one hand, we might point to struggles over the regulation of youth access to digital media in the face of regulatory efforts, such as the Deleting Online Predators Act or its revamping as The Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act. We might point to struggles to redefine copyright law in terms which enable us to comment upon and debate core aspects of our contemporary culture. We might point to the debates around Net Neutrality as centering around preserving the technical infrastructure necessary for allowing all perspectives to be heard and the ongoing struggle against the Digital Divide (understood in terms of technical access) and the Participation Gap (understood in terms of access to core social skills and cultural competencies) as one which allows all citizens to fully participate in the new media landscape.

As we do so, we need to challenge the culture war discourse and the politics of fear which disempowers many from political participation by dismissing core aspects of their cultural identities. For many of us, popular culture offers us the most meaningful language for talking about our political identities and it may offer us a space for conversations across ideological and cultural differences in part because these conversations don't come precoded in partisan terms. To paraphrase Obama, we watch 24 in the Blue States and The Daily Show in the Red States and by discussing these programs together, we may start to identify common values and frames of references out of which we might achieve important political compromises. So, for example, we might deploy Survivor as the focus for a conversation about race in America or 24 to talk about the ethics and effectiveness of torture in the war on terror. Some activist groups have already seen such cultural events as key rallying points for political activism as when the environmental movement used the release of The Day After Tomorrow to educate people about global warming. We have seen a range of voter registration votes, such as MTV's Rock the Vote or the World Wrestling Entertainment' s Smack Down Your Vote, prove effective at getting young people registered and engaged with electoral politics. We are seeing the emergence of a range of other groups, such as Games for Change, The Entertainment Consumers Association, and The Video Game Voters Network, tap our identities as gamers to mobilize us for political action.

As we do so, we need to recognize the value of fantasy for empowering political action. In my book, I discuss Muggles for Harry Potter, a free speech organization that emerged to rally opposition to the censorship of the Harry Potter books in schools and public libraries. I also suggested, however, the irony of this effort, given how many of the young people involved felt compelled to recant their fantasies as "meaningless" in order to demonstrate that the books had no "effect" on them. Instead, we need to value fantasy as part of the process of political transformation and respect the kinds of cultural politics which emerge from the fan community. Consider, for example, the ways that Sequential Tart, an organization of female comics readers, has helped to impact both comics production and retailing practice by providing a space where women regularly discuss what they like and dislike about the comics they read.

There is real political power in this new participatory culture. We know this because of the emergence of Astroturf, fake grassroots media, created by major political groups or advertisers but circulated through bottom-up media channels. A classic example of this was the attempt of Al Gore's Penguin Army to debunk An Inconvenient Truth: the video tried to pass itself off as coming from amateurs when it was in fact produced by a major advertising firm which regularly worked for major oil companies and the GOP party. The story teaches us two things:

1) a decade ago, these groups would have taken advantage of their greater access to the channels of broadcast media to reach every American with a common message. Today, they are recognizing that many of us put greater trust in grassroots media than in mainstream media and so they feel the need to pass themselves off as powerless.

2) in an era of collective intelligence, citizens are becoming more effective at seeing through these Astroturf strategies, alerting the larger public to these frauds. And the public is becoming increasingly outraged by such efforts seeing Astroturf as morally akin to spam, an abuse of the participatory channels of communications.

Ask a Ninja?

If I was asked to identify a group which had been the most imaginative at seizing the potentials of politics in the age of participatory culture, it would be the movement to promote the concept of Net Neutrality. For starters, this effort attracted supporters from a range of different political traditions and encouraged them to suspend their disagreements long enough to work together to achieve a common cause -- that is, to protect the diversity of the internet. The Save The Internet organization provided a space for video makers, both commercial and amateur, to generate new works that helped to educate the public about these core debates. Many of these videos mobilized images from popular culture to help people to understand the stakes in this policy discussion and to capture the sense of the little guys banding together to battle major corporate interests. These videos move us beyond the policy wonk language that has frequently surrounded media regulation discussions and instead embraced a playful discourse that encouraged more widespread participation. We get some sense of what this politics looks like by examining some of the videos that were produced behind these efforts by groups such as Ask a Ninja and Rocketboom. I suspect we will be studying these efforts for some years to come as we try to imagine new relationships between participatory culture and participatory democracy.

Want to know what democracy looks like in the 21st Century? Ask a Ninja!

From Participatatory Culture to Participatory Democracy (Part One)

The following is my attempt to provide a written record of the remarks that I presented at the Beyond Broadcast conference that we hosted at MIT the other week. I would strongly recommend watching the webcast version of the talk to achieve the full effect since the talk depended very heavily on the visuals and I am not going to be able to reproduce very many of them here. You might also want to check out the interview I did for Thoughtcast in advance of the event. This post is intended, however, to provide links to all of the examples I presented during the talk. Getting Too Close to Reality

Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, my recent book, opens with the curious story of Bert and Bin Laden:

Dino Ignacio, a Filipino-American high school student created a Photoshop collage of Sesame Street's Bert interacting with terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden as part of a series of "Bert is Evil" images he posted on his homepage. Others depicted Bert as a Klansman, cavorting with Adolph Hitler, dressed as the Unabomber or having sex with Pamela Anderson. It was all in good fun.

In the wake of September 11, a Bangladesh-based publisher scanned the web for Bin Laden images to print on anti-American signs, posters, and T-shirts. Sesame Street is available in Pakistan in a localized format; the Arab world, thus, had no exposure to Bert and Ernie, but were very aware of a blue chicken who serves as one of the series mascots in Arabic-speaking nations. The printer thus didn't recognize Bert, but he must have thought the image was a good likeness of the al-Qaeda leader. The image ended up in a collage of similar images that was printed on thousands of posters and distributed across the Middle East.

CNN reporters recorded the unlikely sight of a mob of angry protestors marching through the streets chanting anti-American slogans and waving signs depicting Bert and Bin Laden. Representatives from Children's Television Workshop spotted the CNN footage and threatened to take legal action: "We're outraged that our characters would be used in this unfortunate and distasteful manner. The people responsible for this should be ashamed of themselves. We're exploring every legal option to stop this abuse and any similar abuses in the future." It was not altogether clear who they planned to sic their intellectual property attorneys on - the young man who had initially appropriated their images or the terrorist supporters who deployed them. Coming full circle, amused fans produced a number of new sites, linking various Sesame Street characters with terrorists.

From his bedroom, Dino sparked an international controversy. His images crisscrossed the world, sometimes on the backs of commercial media, sometimes via grassroots media. And, in the end, he inspired his own cult following. Ignacio became more concerned and ultimately decided to dismantle his site: "I feel this has gotten too close to reality.... "Bert Is Evil" and its following has always been contained and distanced from big media. This issue throws it out in the open."

In the context of the book, I am interested in the ways that this story illustrates the ways that contemporary media culture is being reshaped by the intersection of top-down corporate media and bottom-up grassroots media. Here, though, I want to invite us to reconsider what it might mean for citizens in a participatory culture to get "too close to reality" and whether this is a new kind of political power that we could deploy to transform society.

This is What Democracy Looks Like

One place to starting addressing this question would be to consider the case of This is What Democracy Looks Like, a feature length documentary that emerged from the Indie Media Movement in the wake of the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999. 100 media activists were issued camcorders and dispersed across the protest, each recording their own perspective on the action. The finished documentary shows us the experience in the street by pooling together the best of their footage into a 72 minute film, which was in turn intended to be a rallying point for further community building and activism. We might see the project as an example of the kinds of politically committed grassroots media production that was showcased throughout the Beyond Broadcast event.

Yet, I also want us to pause for a minute and consider the question posed by its title. What does Democracy look like? As Americans, we have a rich image bank to draw upon -- dating back to the founding days of our nation, so often, when we depicted Democracy, we fall back upon images of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, various protest activities such as the Boston Tea Party, or various national icons such as the American Eagle or The Spirit of 76. More recently, the Popular Front movement of the 1930s revitalized many of these images, offering us new icons of American democracy from Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to the paintings of Norman Rockwell. Yet, today, when we represent democracy, the images we construct have a vaguely and often an explicitly retro feel to them. It is as if democracy in this country has a past but not a future.

But, we might well ask what Democracy could look like for the 21st Century? It might, for example, look like the kinds of protest activities which are occurring within game spaces, such as Velvet Strike, a conceptual art project which involved "spray painting" any war graffiti inside Counter Strike, the recent gay pride march inside the World of Warcraft, or the massive protest rallies that took place in the Chinese multiplayer game world, Fantasy Westward Journey, or a broad array of activist uses of Second Life As someone who lives in Boston, it is worth recalling that the Boston Tea Party involved people adopting alternative identities (might we see the Native American garb as an early form of avatar?) and engaging in symbolic acts of political violence.

Democracy in the 21st century might look something like "George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People." A Houston-area hip hop group, The Legendary K.O., used their music to express something they were hearing from the refuges that were pouring into their city. Randle lives near the Astrodome and Nickerson works at the Houston Convention center. Both found themselves listening to refuges tell their stories: "Not till you see these people face to face and talk to them can you appreciate the level of hopelessness. The one common feeling was that they felt abandoned, on their own little island." They found their refrain while watching Kanye West accuse Bush of being indifferent to black Americans during a Red Cross Telethon being broadcast live on NBC. The juxtaposition of West's anger and comedian Mike Myer's shock encapsulated the very different ways Americans understood what happened. The Legendary K.O. sampled West's hit song, "Golddigger," to provide the soundtrack for their passionate account of what it was like to be a black man trying to make do in the deserted streets of New Orleans. They distributed the song, "George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People" as a free download and it spread like wildfire. The song has been perhaps the most powerful demonstration to date of Chuck D's prediction that free downloads could turn hip hop into "the black man's CNN," offering an alternative perspective to mainstream news coverage and thus enabling communication between geographically dispersed corners of the Black America. Within a few weeks time, the song had in effect gone platinum,

achieving more than a million downloads, largely on the back of promotion by

bloggers. And soon, people around the world were appropriating and recontextualizing news footage to create their own music videos.

Democracy in the 21st century might look like some of the ways that citizen journalists have deployed photosharing sites like Flickr to circulate ground-level images of public events such as the London subway bombings.

Democracy in the 21st Century might even look like some of the activities surrounding the selection of the American Idol. As I noted here last summer, critics who claim more people voted for the last American Idol than voted in the last presidential election are confused. More votes were cast for American Idol to be sure but then, the system allows and even encourages people to vote as many times as they want. The Vote for the Worst movement around American Idol, on the other hand, does represent an interesting model for how people might pool knowledge and deploy shared tactics to shape the outcome of the selection process, trying to negate the expectations of mass media companies and use their power to select to keep bad contestants on the air.

Escaping the Culture War Rhetoric

These new forms of activism may not look very much like the classic images of democracy. Indeed, there has been a tendency for activists to look down upon these kinds of activities, seeing them often as distractions from rather than incitements towards civic engagement. The result has been a kind of culture war between old style activism and the emerging participatory culture. We know more or less the kinds of images which cultural conservatives -- and indeed, the mainstream mass media deploys to dismiss and often demonize the new participatory culture. On the one hand, there are images of tarnished innocence -- wide-eyed children staring slack jawed at the television or computer screen, being imprinted by its toxic content and on the other hand, there are images of savages, youth run wild, and the feral children of the boob tube. Indeed, as Justine Casell pointed out to me recently, these fears are heavily gendered with a tendency for us to fear for our daughter's innocence and to fear our son's savagery. What strikes me, though, is that the images promoted by the Media Reform movement and by the Culture Jamming/Ad Busting world of progressive activism falls back on almost entirely the same kinds of images to condemn young people for their interests in popular culture. Once again, there are images of young people being brainwashed by television or driven wild by the seductions of popular culture; the content they consume gets described as "bread and circuses" or "weapons of mass distraction"; brand messages are written more or less directly onto their hearts, minds, and bodies; the public is depicted with faceless conformity; consumers are described as "idiots" who lack any critical judgment and told to "get a life." Such images grossly overstate the power of mass media and underestimate the agency of media consumers. The result is a politics focused on victimization rather than empowerment.

I have never quite understood how we are supposed to found a democratic movement on the premise that the public as a whole is stupid and has poor taste. And I am reasonably convinced that such images and rhetoric has the effect of turning off many people who might otherwise support many of the policies being advocated by the Media Reform movement. What I want to do in this talk is suggest ways that we might reimagine the relationship between participatory culture and participatory democracy, embracing new political language and images that mobilizes us as fans as well as citizens.

To understand what such a politics might look like, I would suggest picking up a new book by NYU professor Stephen Duncombe -- Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy. Duncombe's previous work has included Notes from the Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture and The Cultural Resistance Reader, work that has offered a range of models for how popular culture can be deployed for democratic activities. In his new book, he argues that the left has seemingly lost the ability to construct a utopian vision for the future or convey such a vision through popular fantasy. The left, he suggests, has developed a powerful critique of what Noam Chomsky calls "the manufacture of consent" but it has not developed any fresh models for the "manufacture of dissent." He urges us to reconsider our relations to popular culture before it is too late:

Progressives should have learned to build a politics that embraces the dreams of people and fashions spectacles which gives these fantasies form - a politics that employs symbols and associations, a politics that tells good stories. In brief, we should have learned to manufacture dissent.... Given the progressive ideals of egalitarianism and a politics that values the input of everyone, our dreamscapes will not be created by media-savvy experts of the left and then handed down to the rest of us to watch, consume, and believe. Instead, our spectacles will be participatory: dreams that the public can mold and shape themselves. They will be active: spectacles that work only if the people help create them. They will be open-ended: setting stages to ask questions and leaving silences to formulate answers. And they will be transparent: dreams that one knows are dreams but which still have power to attract and inspire. And, finally, the spectacles we create will not cover over or replace reality and truth but perform and amplify it.

I found Duncombe's description of what a progressive popular culture might look like to be inspirational, though I might be inclined to describe this as a democratic popular culture since many of these traits he is discussing might also be embraced by at least some conservative groups as well and we would have a better society if these virtues were shared by both the right and by the left. We might sum up his key claims through the following terms:

Participatory: Dumcombe's example of this new kind of playful activism is Billionaires for Bush, a group which showed up in costumes and staged street theatre during Bush's appearances in the last presidential campaign, trying to remind reporters and citizens of what they saw as links between the Republican Party and corporate greed. Another example might be the Sorry Everybody website where many individuals posted snap shots and messages to the planet after the results of the election as a way of acknowledging what they saw as the damage Bush was doing to America's image around the world.

Active -- We might consider the ways that Alan Moore's graphic novel, V for Vendetta emerged as a response to Thatcherism, was produced as a film in time to be read as expressing dissent against the Bush administration, and has been literalized within participatory culture through a series of YouTube videos that link the film's dystopian future with the rhetoric and tactics of the current War on Terror. V offers progressives both a dystopian fantasy of where today's policies might logically lead (thus providing the basis for a critique of the manufacture of consent) and a fantasy of resistance (thus offering some idea of how we might manufacture dissent.)

Open-Ended -- Consider the kinds of political dialogue being sparked by comedy news shows such as the Daily Show, Politically Incorrect, or Colbert Report, which often call attention to topics that have been under-covered by the national news and encourages viewers to reflect on the mechanisms by which the news constructs our understanding of the world. I wouldn't turn to such programs for answers but I would see them as posing questions that might lead to further reflection and inquiry. The politics of this style of news comedy is clear at that moment when Colbert spoke truth to power at the Washington Press Club Dinner, directly confronting the president of the United States with what many see as fundamental contradictions in his world view. This style of news comedy has proven so effective at manufacturing dissent that Fox News has decided to create its own right wing alternative, The Half Hour News Hour.

Transparent -- Here, we might cite, for example, the kinds of progressive fantasies of an alternative America constructed on The West Wing. I wrote for Flow a few years ago about the ways that the program's construction of an alternative presidential campaign between essentially a maverick Republican in the John McCain mold and a progressive minority candidate of the Barack Obama school gave the program a chance to model what an alternative framing of the two parties might look like.

Transformative -- My example here was the work of JibJab, a group of animators who use borrowed and manipulated images to spoof the political process.

If we put all of these pieces together, the resulting organization might look something like True Majority, the pro-Democratic Party group created by Ben Cohen (of Ben and Jerry's fame), which is perhaps best known for circulating a video during the last election during which The Donald fires George W. Bush as if this were an extra-special episode of The Apprentice. As I discuss in Convergence Culture, this group embraced the concept of "serious fun" as a form of progressive activism, designing videos that people wanted to pass along not simply because of what they said but how they said it.