January 25, 2013

Scrapbooks and Army Surplus: C. Tyler’s You’ll Never Know

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For those of you who live in the Los Angeles area, I wanted to call attention to a special event I am hosting at the USC campus on the evening of Jan. 31, featuring noted underground cartoonist C. Tyler. Here’s the details.

And for those of you who do not live in Los Angeles, I will still encourage you to check out her remarkable three part graphic novel series, You’ll Never Know, published by Fantagraphic Books, and just completed at the end of last year. I plan to write an extended essay about this book as part of my new Comics…and Stuff project. Below is an abstract I wrote describing why I find this graphic novel so rich and interesting:

“And like I said, I knew he had been to war. Mom told me. He didn’t tell me. It’s not something He wanted to talk about EVER. He had buried Europe 1944-45 under tons of mental concrete. Exactly what happened — the details we never knew. Of what value would this information be anymore? That’s what he figured. And with no evidence around the house — well, why not forget it. Except for this one scrapbook album of army pictures, carefully mounted photos with no dates or information. I never knew what they recorded specifically. No text. Maybe that’s what intrigued me: a parallel world where my Dad looked like he was having fun.” — C. Tyler

One night, the underground cartoonist C. Tyler received a phone call from her usually taciturn 90 year old father, a World War II veteran, who suddenly wants to dump on her memories of long-ago experiences which up until that moment fell into “the category of ‘leave it the hell alone’ or ‘it’s none of your goddamn business.’” This phone call triggers an extended artistic practice as Tyler tried to capture her father’s memories first with a video camera and later through the panels of a trilogy of graphic novels, which in the process expand to tell the story not only of her father but of several generations of her family’s history.  If the father is stingy with the personal memories he is willing to share, even within the privacy of the family, his daughter fits within an exhibitionist streak in graphic storytelling which was partially initiated by the pioneering work of her husband, underground cartoonist Justin Green: she uses comics as a vehicle to work through personal issues and break down the culture of silence that informed her childhood. Ultimately, the books are designed as a tribute to the “greatest generation,” but they also speak with empathy about what happens when you bottle up so many powerful emotions, allowing them to come out only through actions and not through words and images.

The published books are shaped like a scrapbook album and when she tells her father’s story, she adopts a panel structure that reproduces the pages of a scrapbook, complete with rubber stamped page numbers and dates on each panel.  She adopts a much broader array of styles, some realistic, some cartoonish, some iconic. Sometimes, she uses the printed book like a scrapbook, incorporating a yellowed news clipping documenting the childhood death of her sister, or wartime letters from her father to the woman whom he would marry. She incorporates maps, charts, graphs, designed to explain aspects of her family’s experience, though often used in a less than naturalistic manner, as when she offers a diagram on blue print paper of the surgery her father would undergo in his struggles against cancer.

Ultimately, the finished product, You’ll Never Know, a Graphic Memoir, is, as Tyler told one interviewer, about “the stuff that gets passed down to the next generation,” with stuff here meant to describe material culture (including what she describes as “O.D. anomalies” (for “Olive Drab”) stored away in the basement or the buckets of acids and corrosives that she has to convince her pack-rat father to dispose of when he wants to move across the country, or the tools and nails shown in a detailed drawing of her father’s work area) but stuff also refers to the emotional baggage, equally toxic, which her repressed and sometimes overbearing father passed down to her generation. The two are brought together powerfully in a scene involving a box of old photographs and birth announcements which finally provokes her mother to talk for the first time about the death of her sister. Throughout the book, we learn about the characters through their interactions over stuff, such as the time when her father, jealous of the attention his wife is receiving, walls up several hundred carefully addressed Christmas cards behind a dry wall he is constructing, or a powerful story about what happens to the father’s old army jacket.

This video shares a segment from her interview with her father and shows how she has been able to convert this raw material into a rich autobiographical comic.

C. Tyler’s work on the graphic novel has brought her into closer contact with many veterans — not only of the Second World War but more recent armed conflicts. Tyler has been helping veterans to learn how to produce comics as a vehicle for sharing some of their memories and working through some of their emotions in the aftershock of their time under fire. Here’s a video about her work.

Filed Under: book shelf, Comics Culture, favorite things, University of Southern California
January 14, 2013

Spreading Independent and Transnational Content

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As we count down to the wide spread release of our new book, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture, which I co-authored with Sam Ford and Joshua Green, we are rolling out this week five more essays — in this case, dealing with core issues from the book’s chapters on independent media and transnational media flows. One final crop of essays from the project will go on-line next week. By now, some of you may well be receiving copies of the book advanced ordered through Amazon or New York University Press. We’d love to know what you think. I was lucky enough to be able to share some thoughts about this project this past week with faculty and students at Concordia University.

This post is available in Czech language (provided by Alex and Nora Pozner from bizow reviews team).

 

The Long Tail of Digital Games

In the raging debate over the legitimacy and consequences of the “Long Tail” theory (Anderson 2006), few markets have received more attention than those dedicated to digitally distributed video games. Proponents of the Long Tail have argued that digital distribution will finally turn the historically hit-driven game industry on its head—that future revenues will be driven by consumer activity distributed across a huge catalog of video games developed, in large part, by independent game developers as opposed to titanic publishers; that it will prove consistently more profitable to focus on niche audiences in this new world of digital game distribution, rather than to focus on the development of broadly appealing hits; and (for those of us interested in the spreadability model) that a new generation of empowered consumers will actively seek and promote the highest-quality content, driving revenues to the most deserving game developers and leading to a healthier and more vibrant video game ecosystem overall.

There can be no doubt that encouraging signs of this development have begun to crop up everywhere. Many now-prominent independent game developers, such as The Behemoth and 2D Boy, have leveraged console-based digital distribution platforms such as Xbox LIVE, Wiiware, and the Playstation Network (PSN) to reach markets that were previously only accessible via the long arm of a traditional publisher. These developers have not only created award-winning games that have generated significant amounts of profit. They have, in many cases, retained the rights to their intellectual property (IP) and operated with near-total independence, an unthinkable situation for small console game developers only a few years ago. And, while digital distribution on the console typically generates the most buzz, independent developers have made equally great strides on mobile devices, the web, and the PC thanks to a wide variety of channels (stores such as iTunes, Android Market, and Steam; portals such as Kongregate.com; and more generalized distribution through social network sites such as Facebook, to name just a few). Savvy observers have noted that in mobile ecosystems in particular, independent developers have consistently had greater success than traditional publishers in cracking into the “top 10.”

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(Sp)reading Digital Comics

Comic books—especially single issues, or “floppies”—have always been spreadable. As kids in the 1980s, my friends and I would head into our local comic shop, each emerge with an armful of floppies, then spend the afternoon first reading through our own haul and then each other’s. Usually, at least one of my friends’ floppies would be from some larger multipart story arc, and, if it was any good, I’d either go digging through my friend’s collection or thumbing through the store’s back issues to find out what was going on. Sharing, recommendation, drillability, and vast narrative complexity were all part of our everyday lives long before we could even drive.

Webcomics have emerged as an alternative form of publishing that makes such practices even easier. Many webcomics use RSS feeds to deliver new installments via email or RSS reader applications, and many webcomics offer forums where fans can chat and bicker and share their favorite comics with one another, much as my friends and I did in person so many years ago. Now, I can recommend comics to friends around the world either by emailing them a link to a webcomic’s site (and thus the latest comic) or a “permalink” to the archived page or, more commonly now, by texting, IMing, or Facebook messaging them such a link. Many webcomics, such as Emily Horne and Joey Comeau’s A Softer World, include built-in widgets for fans to recommend them on online services such as Digg, Facebook, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Technorati, and Twitter. Scott Kurtz’s PVP includes widgets to share each strip on twenty different services.

Unlike traditional print comics, for which most writers and artists labor under “work for hire” contracts for large publishers such as Marvel and DC, webcomics are typically owned and operated by their creators and rely on revenues generated by advertising, fan subscriptions/memberships, or sales of ancillary merchandise. As a result, for creators, getting individuals to purchase a single instance of their work (such as a traditional print floppy) is less important than establishing an ongoing relationship, aggregating a large recurring audience over time. The simplicity of the URL system supports this—when recommending a comic to a friend, I could copy and paste an image of the comic itself into an email, stripping out the context, ads, and links to the related merchandise, but why bother when sharing a link is so easy?

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The Use Value of Authors

A key dilemma for both media consumers and producers in today’s media environment is discoverability: with so much media spreading, and even more desperately wanting to be spread, how do we choose what to consume? Consequently, consumers need highly effective filters to direct them to the media they are most likely to enjoy and away from that which they are unlikely to enjoy; producers, meanwhile, need to develop techniques to ensure that their content enjoys safe passage through such filters and finds the audiences most likely to enjoy their work. Herein lies the importance of, and the use for, authors.

As compared to creative figures—producers, writers, artists, designers, and a wealth of other terms in common parlance to describe those who make media—an “author” is someone to whom we attribute a heightened level of authority and autonomy over the item of media in question. Most consumers operate on the assumption that a vast amount of media isn’t worth personally consuming, either because it is corporate hackery written by committee just to make a fast buck, because it is amateurish and incompetent, or simply because it doesn’t appeal to any of their interests. An author, though, is a totem of sorts that signifies a certain level of skill and singularity of vision. To talk of authors for professionally produced content is to assert creativity and self-expression in what can too often be characterized as a faceless, paint-by-numbers industry, while to talk of authors for amateur-produced content is to attribute artistry in what can too often be characterized as a world full of everyone’s uploaded cat videos. Discussing authors can be a way to validate the product of said authors, and hence to allow ourselves to discuss art, meaning, and depth in some popular media without attributing artistry or depth to all popular media.

At the same time, precisely who the author is can be hotly contested and variable, as the content industries may pose one author, while fans may look to others, sometimes working to uncover who the “real” author is. For instance, while The Simpsons is often popularly spoken of as Matt Groening’s, many fans have nominated other individuals in the show’s production as the true source(s) of the show’s perceived brilliance, and hence as its author(s). The fact that people would bother to argue over who the author is should signify how much the title of author matters, and it offers an initial sign of the importance of authors.
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The Swedish Model

Sweden is a small country, yet it has one of the world’s biggest and best-selling music scenes. You might think ABBA, and you wouldn’t be wrong, but they’re just the best-known starting point of a very long tail, with thousands of bands spanning every genre and degree of success. Sweden is also home to The Pirate Bay, the world’s top torrenting site, which ABBA songwriter Björn Ulvaeus has decried as made by and for those who are lazy and stingy and don’t understand that, if creators can’t anticipate payment, they will never release music (“ABBA Star” 2009). Since the advent of recording in the early twentieth century, recorded music has been the central economic good of the music business. Hence, it is no wonder that the mainstream industry has been so vociferous in its efforts to demonize and sue uploaders and to support national policies that limit the ability of listeners to spread music.

Further down the tail, though, Sweden is home to many artists and labels trying to forge a new way through this thicket, one that rejects the notions that certain payment is a precondition for artistic expression or that file sharing detracts from the economics of their business. The attitudes and actions of The Swedish Model, a consortium of seven independent labels committed to a more optimistic dialogue on music’s future, and other Swedish labels and musicians put spreadability at the center of their hopes for the future of the music business. The tiny label Songs I Wish I Had Written, headed by Martin Thörnkvist, who also heads The Swedish Model, shared an office with a Pirate Bay cofounder, and Thörnkvist uploads his label’s catalog in the highest quality to Pirate Bay. Labrador, another Swedish independent label, gives away annual samplers through Pirate Bay and posts all its singles for free download on its website.

These entrepreneurs have taken to heart that if their music doesn’t spread, it may as well be dead. The logic goes like this: We are small and have minimal budgets. There are few mainstream venues that will promote our music, so few people will have the opportunity to hear it through mass media. The more people who hear it, the larger the audience will become. Even if most of that audience does not pay for CDs or mp3s, the slice that does will be bigger than the entire audience would otherwise have been. And the slice that doesn’t pay to buy music may well pay for other things. As Thörnkvist put it when addressing the music industry audience at MIDEMNet, “I’d rather have one million listeners and one hundred buyers than one hundred listeners and one hundred buyers” (2009).

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Transnational Audiences and East Asian Television

Consider a clip from the Japanese variety show Arashi no Shukudai-kun that recently made its way onto YouTube in early 2009: a small group of Japanese pop singers are challenged to eat a “surprisingly large” hamburger named after a city in the Ibaraki prefecture and are joking about how “Super American” the situation is. They suggest that the burger inspires them to don overalls and grow “amazing” chest hair, while Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” blares in the background. The clip was then subtitled in English by two fans based in Australia and circulated based on its appeal to English-speaking audiences of the “J-pop” performers in the video as an embodied spectacle of Japanese popular culture. Various versions of the clip were distributed online through fan communities on LiveJournal, a Russian-owned social blogging platform with offices headquartered in San Francisco, and other forums, and fans shared the links through their blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, and other social media channels. In the process, the Arashi no Shukudai-kun clip was recontextualized, reformatted, resubtitled, and diverted to new (and sometimes unexpected) audiences at every step along the way. Far from exceptional, there are countless clips like this one on YouTube: in the global spreadable media environment, its crisscrossing path back and forth across multiple national, linguistic, and cultural boundaries is becoming perfectly common.

Not only is the transnational movement of media becoming increasingly pervasive; it has also become significantly more—and more visibly—multinodal. Thus, we must go beyond the use of Bruce Springsteen in the background of a Japanese variety show as part of a parody and indigenization of Western cultural materials to consider its subsequent movement as it is taken up, translated, and circulated by grassroots intermediaries, passing through divergent and overlapping circuits, often outside the purview of established media industries and markets. In short, we must look beyond sites of production and consumption to consider the practices of transmission and the routes of circulation—the means and manner by which people spread media to one another—which are increasingly shaping the flow of transnational content.

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Filed Under: book shelf, branded entertainment, Comics Culture, fan culture, games culture, globalization watch, Spreadable Media, University of Southern California
September 21, 2012

Batman and Beyond: An Interview with Will Brooker (Part Three)

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As you note, there has always been space within the Batman canon for some kinds of alternative interpretations of the character, for “What If?” or Elseworld stories, for alternative histories and authorial differences. Do you see the space for multiplicity within the superhero comics narrowing as Hollywood interests exert greater control over the future of these characters? If so, why?

I don’t, because I think comics are currently and will probably remain a niche interest.

That Morrison’s run on Batman — an extended, fannish love letter to the character’s seventy-year continuity, including obscure, one-panel references to specific archival stories and reworkings of previously-repressed comic narratives – took place at exactly the time Nolan was helming his own separate and distinctly authored Batman franchise, demonstrates that comic book continuity remains relatively independent from the Hollywood version.

There are overlaps and crossovers – Nolan’s franchise borrowed from specific graphic novels, and Morrison incorporated references to the Nolan Batman into his own story –  but comics run on a parallel track, for a different (and far smaller) audience than movies, and no doubt also far smaller than the video game market.

It is certainly possible to identify a Nolan influence within Batman comics of the last seven years. Lucius Fox is now both regularly written and drawn to evoke Morgan Freeman. Joker is now commonly depicted with knife scars up both cheeks.  A rougher, more cockney Alfred, clearly inspired by Michael Caine, features in one recent graphic novel. Batman regularly appears as a more armoured character, and the Tumbler, his tanklike Batmobile from Nolan’s movies, has frequently appeared on the pages of comics. Characters like Riddler, Penguin and Killer Croc have been re-imagined, within certain titles at least, in a more ‘Nolanised’ style. A new title called simply The Dark Knight was launched in 2010.

However, I would characterise this as ‘influence’ rather than ‘control’. Nolan’s interpretation of Batman and his world has joined the matrix of Batman texts and images, as Adam West’s did in the late 1960s, and facets of the ‘Nolanverse’ will inevitably appear within other Batman stories, just as the comic books became more flat, Pop and cartoonish during the TV show’s successful run. That was a fad, and it faded, and I think the influence of Nolan’s specific Batman will also fade in time, though it will remain part of the broader kaleidoscopic matrix, or mosaic, of what Batman is, and will continue to crop up now and then.

One of the underlying arguments of my book is that meanings occupy places on a spectrum, rather than binary oppositional positions, and that they flow, change places and cross over like energy running around a circuit, rather than like light switches that are either on or off.

So there are constant overlaps and internal contradictions throughout Batman’s history that undermine any sense of clear boundaries and definitions.

The Dark Knight Returns, which is held up as one of the key texts of the ‘purist’, dark, military Batman, and also regarded as ‘faithful’ in tone to Kane’s original, is itself an Elseworlds story and a possible future. The 1970s Batman of O’Neil and Adams is believed to have rebooted the character from the sillier, more playful aesthetic of the 1960s, but it is surprisingly easy to find elements of camp and queerness in those supposedly ‘gritty’ adventures of the ‘Darknight Detective’ and Robin, the Teen Wonder.

And while the New 52 of October 2011 ostensibly reboots Batman into a more contained storyline and space after the complexity and ambiguity of Morrison’s previous run – we are told now that Batman has only been active for five years, which clearly rules much of his history out of continuity – it retains the official line that there are 52 multiple universes, including several in-continuity alternate versions of Batman. So while the New 52 reboot seems to be a move towards control and ‘straightness’, in every sense, at the same time it embraces multiplicity and a sense of possibility.

The dynamic between multiplicity and control in Batman’s universe is not a matter of off/on, then, but push-pull; a constant tension between energies in different directions, rather than a binary which clicks all the way to one extreme, then all the way back to the other


As someone who has written a lot about the meanings of the Joker, especially in relation to Nolan’s film, I wanted to get you to reflect a bit about the Joker/Obama phenomenon. What do these images suggest about the connections you draw between the Joker and folk cultural logics and practices?

 

I would be tempted to see the Joker/Obama images as an example of the state of contemporary folk culture epitomised by the Joker in modern comics – a distorted, limited, unfunny version of the older folk culture Bakhtin describes, which genuinely belonged to the people and the marketplace, and roamed freely, generously, with healthy mockery of official rituals and structures.

The posters of Obama in the guise of Ledger’s Joker do not strike me as witty or even meaningful. They seem to have no particular conviction behind them; no clear message or purpose.

The first instance of the Jokerised Obama was defended by the Republican students who designed it as simply a pop culture image to get attention, rather than a political statement.

The creator of the most famous Joker/Obama image, Firas Alkhateeb, also claims no political purpose and has said he simply produced it because he was bored. The ‘socialism’ caption was added by someone else, who downloaded Alkhateeb’s image from Flickr. Even with this addition, the poster strikes me as having very little focused meaning. The combination of Ledger’s Joker, Obama’s portrait from the cover of Time and the word ‘socialism’ do not seem to cohere into any resonant message. The racial connotations of the image also seem to be accidental, rather than intended by Alkhateeb, who claims he was simply experimenting with a photoshop technique.

So I would associate this image with the expression of closed-down, contained carnival that Bakhtin tells us evolved from the seventeenth century onwards; a reduced carnival-grotesque, an ‘individual carnival, marked by a vivid sense of isolation… laughter was cut down to cold humour, irony, sarcasm. It ceased to be a joyful and triumphant hilarity. Its positive regenerating power was reduced to a minimum.’

Mockery and foolishness have a useful social purpose, whether we agree with their political aims or not, but to my mind, the Jokerised Obama says nothing positive or helpful, whether for the left or the right; it only offers sneering, empty sarcasm and ugliness. ‘The result,’ as Bakhtin says, ‘is a broken grotesque figure.’

This is very much the Joker of recent, ‘dark’ Batman comics, whose jokes trail off without punchlines, who seems lonely, cold and barren, rather than a joyful, ‘gay devil’, who wants to spread his playful energies across the city.

If it does have a value is, it is perhaps that – like Ledger’s Joker – it destabilises meaning and questions oppositions.

Arguably, the Jokerised Obama image problematises our expectations of political propaganda posters– that they should have a clear intention and carry a coherent message – and works to question and interrogate political oppositions based around personality, celebrity and iconic individuality, through the creator’s stated indifference and lack of any motivation beyond playful experiment. We assume that the combination Joker + Obama must be meant as either celebration or criticism; inherently, though, as far as the creator’s intentions go, it is neither.

The slippery refusal of this image to carry any obvious meaning – its refusal to make sense, its obstinate unwillingness to be readily decoded, despite the fact that it fits the conventional icon + slogan pattern that we are so used to understanding immediately and reading competently in advertising and propaganda – does perhaps have a certain subversive power.

Nolan’s Joker claims to be an agent of chaos, empty of any political agenda or intention, rather than a ‘schemer’, but the fact that his terrorism is clearly carefully planned subverts even this idea of meaningless, motiveless crime. He denies the forces of order the opportunity to classify him as ‘chaotic’; that would be a category in itself.

The Jokerised Obama, by contrast, is assumed to have an agenda and political intention, but in fact, in its original form, was created genuinely without motive, for the sake of appearance alone – an exercise in photoshop that could presumably have been applied to any photograph of any face – rather than parody or propaganda.

As such, the Joker/Obama image, like the other artefacts that swarm and circulate around the film, from news stories to viral marketing to fan-made Bane memes, adds an interesting intertextual echo to the network of meanings that make up The Dark Knight, and the broader Dark Knight trilogy as a whole.

Will Brooker is currently Director of Research in Film and Television at Kingston University, London, and incoming editor of Cinema Journal. His books include Batman Unmasked, Using the Force, Alice’s Adventures, The Blade Runner Experience, the BFI Film Classics volumeStar Wars, and Hunting the Dark Knight (I B Tauris, 2012).

Filed Under: book shelf, Civic Paths, Comics Culture, interviews
September 19, 2012

Batman and Beyond: An Interview with Will Brooker (Part Two)

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Your book seems to be as much focused on working through some core theoretical debates in media studies using Nolan and the Dark Knight as it is on using theory to explicate this particular franchise. What makes this film series such a good vehicle for asking these kinds of theoretical questions?

 

The longevity of Batman as a cultural icon and his visible role in popular culture for several decades, across various media, means that recent articulations of Batman are particularly rich examples for considering the role of authorship and the nature of adaptation. I draw various comparisons in the book’s first two chapters, which focus on these questions, between Batman and other popular texts, to demonstrate the extent to which Batman is a broader and more diverse archive of images, interpretations and variants than other stories and franchises.

Batman has been circulating for fifty-eight years longer than Harry Potter, for instance. Unlike other pulp heroes such as Tarzan and the Shadow, he has remained popular throughout every decade since 1939, by changing and adapting to fit the cultural concerns, the audience and the new media of each period. Unlike, say, George Orwell’s novel Coming Up For Air, which was published at around the same time as Batman’s first appearance, Batman cannot be pinned down to a single primary text or definitive version, but exists as a shifting, fluid, multiple figure (within a fixed template of identifiable features).

So the idea of adapting ‘Batman’, this seventy-three year-old archive of stories across various media forms into a feature film, raises more questions than usual about the role of the author and the nature of translation.

It challenges the notion of the director as author, and suggests instead that Nolan’s creativity lies in his role as editor or ‘scriptor’, collaging and compiling existing Batman stories and imagery into a new form.

It also problematises the straightforward, one-to-one relationship that is often assumed between primary text and adapted text, as Nolan’s trilogy adapts from several graphic novels, is shaped by previous Batman films and TV series, and in turn influences Batman in other media such as comics and video games.

I am not treating Nolan’s franchise as exceptional though, but suggesting that it provides a particularly visible and vivid example of the way all texts operate within a ‘matrix’, and offers us a way of seeing, with particular clarity, the dialogic process of  authorship and adaptation.

 

As you note, the core comic book readership is too small to successfully open a major Hollywood film (witness what happened to Scott Pilgrim) so the producers need to  expand the market to more casual viewers, some of whom may be anxious that they lack the basic background knowledge to fully understand a film about a character with a long history in other media. Do concepts like fidelity, continuity, and consistency have any negative consequences for expanding the viewership?

 

Not in this case, because the ‘fidelity’ of Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy to the existing mythos of Batman was extremely selective, and therefore easy for producers to manage and for a broader audience to understand.

Grant Morrison’s run on the main Batman titles from 2006-2011 is more ‘faithful’ to Batman in that it engages with, interrogates and re-incorporates every key articulation and incarnation of Batman from 1939 to the present day. Morrison’s Batman RIP does capture a mosaic cultural icon, and it’s a complex, fragmented narrative that I think would be difficult for a broader, non-fan readership to understand.

By contrast, Nolan’s Batman was ‘faithful’ to a small group of titles from a relatively narrow period, within a specific aesthetic and approach. His films are directly informed and shaped by Denny O’Neil’s short origin story ‘The Man Who Falls’ and his Ra’s al Ghul tales from the 1970s, by Miller’s Dark Knight Returns and Year One from the mid-to-late 1980s, by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s The Long Halloween and Dark Victory, and by a handful of other 1990s storylines such as No Man’s Land and Knightfall.

A movie adaptation that was truly faithful to ‘Batman’, even in terms of his diverse depiction in comics alone, would result in a kaleidoscopic, encyclopaedic film that might be extremely interesting but would be more of an art project – and perhaps more suited to another medium rather than cinema.

The discourse of ‘fidelity’ at work around Nolan’s movies, particularly Batman Begins – which needed to establish his approach – was more about stressing a distinction between this reboot and the previous Schumacher films, and using ‘fidelity’ as an anchor to a certain tradition within Batman comics. This tradition – dark, tough, masculine, ‘realistic’ – is only a specific strand of what Batman is and has been.

The Dark Knight series had to initially overcome negative perceptions of some earlier media versions of the character, especially the 1960s Batman television series and Joel Schumacher’s Batman and Robin. The problem in both cases had to do with their camp aesthetic and thus anxieties surrounding homosexuality in relation to the character. So, what are some of the ways the filmmakers signaled a new approach?

The widespread use of the term ‘reboot’ alone helped to signal that Batman Begins was a new approach. ‘Reboot’ is a complex term, and one that media scholar Billy Proctor has been working to define and explore in a series of recent articles, but there is a general understanding that it implies a new, clean start within the existing system. The essential Batman template remains, but the previous characterisation and story are overwritten (though I argue that the older content always shows through).

The producers circulated the distinction between Nolan’s Batman Begins and the late-1990s Joel Schumacher movies (which in turn were broadly associated with the 1960s TV series) in a variety of ways, through publicity materials, interviews, previews and trailers; and these meanings were embraced and confirmed by journalists and fans, creating a powerful discourse that separated Nolan’s project from the previous Batman films.

My book discusses in detail the way this forceful, coherent message of a new, ‘dark’ Batman was articulated – through the visual materials such as shadowy poster designs and a logo based on a rust-coloured throwing-knife, through leaked details such as Bale’s rigorous physical training regime and the focus on actual hardware and stunts rather than CGI, through specific disavowals of the Schumacher approach in interviews with Nolan and his colleagues, and through the tough, no-nonsense tone and language used in reviews and features.

The producers were aided in this approach by the fact that this ‘dark’ Batman was an already-established construction – within fandom, certainly, and to an extent in the broader popular consciousness –  and was already set up in opposition to what I call the ‘Rainbow Batman’, an incarnation of the character associated with play, camp, queerness and colour.

The filmmakers were not creating a new set of meanings but rearticulating an existing distinction between ‘dark’ and ‘camp’ which had been played out between the 1960s TV show and the 1970s Denny O’Neil and Neil Adams Batman, and then the 1960s TV show (again) and the 1986 Frank Miller Batman.

As such, then, the producers could harness the idea of ‘fidelity’ (to the 1970s O’Neil and 1986 Miller Batman, which in turn claimed fidelity to Bob Kane’s 1939 Batman) to insist that they were going back to the ‘original’ and that their version had the benefit of authenticity.

My own view is that the ‘Rainbow Batman’ is equally authentic, ‘pure’ and valid, and that it can equally be evidenced as ‘faithful’ to the comic book texts –  albeit of a different period, and by different creators.

Indeed, I argue that the ‘dark Batman’ consistently defines itself in relation to the camp version, and always brings that brighter, Day-Glo variant back to light when it tries to bury it – in repressing it, it makes it visible again – and further, that every version of Batman exhibits a dynamic struggle between these tendencies towards camp and control, play and seriousness, queerness and containment.

Will Brooker is currently Director of Research in Film and Television at Kingston University, London, and incoming editor of Cinema Journal. His books include Batman Unmasked, Using the Force, Alice’s Adventures, The Blade Runner Experience, the BFI Film Classics volumeStar Wars, and Hunting the Dark Knight (I B Tauris, 2012).

Filed Under: book shelf, branded entertainment, Comics Culture, interviews
September 17, 2012

Batman and Beyond: An Interview with Will Brooker (Part One)

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Since 2001, Will Brooker has emerged as one of Great Britain’s top thinkers about cult media, having tackled Star Wars (Using the Force: Creativity, Community and Star Wars Fans), Alice in Wonderland (Alice’s Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture), Bladerunner (The Blade Runner Experience: The Legacy of a Science Fiction Classic) , and Batman (Batman Unmasked: Analyzing a Cultural Icon).

Brooker’s work starts where Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott’s Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero (1987) or Roberta Pearson and William Uricchio’s The Many Lives of the Batman (1991) left off. Both of these earlier works sought to explore difference and continuity in the ways “popular heroes” or “migratory characters” evolve over time, across media, and across media audiences. Brooker’s work has pushed this tradition to a whole new level — his writing moves fluidly between history, textual analysis, media theory, and audience ethnography, tracing the ways media franchises (old and new) have left their traces upon popular culture. Such an approach is interested in issues of authorship and fandom, in both how formulas emerge and how elastic they are in responding to shifting tastes and interests. For me, this represents one powerful model for how we can take a comparative media studies approach towards the texts which matter most in our lives.

This summer, I ran into Will Brooker in London where we were both speaking at the Symposium on Popular Media Cultures: Writing in the Margins and Reading Between the Lines, which was being hosted by the Center for Cultural and Creative Research at the University of Portsmouth and by Forbidden Planet, London’s best known comic book shop. Brooker shared some reflections on the construction of Christopher Nolan as an author around the then impending release of The Dark Knight Rises. Anticipating the cultural significance of the film, I asked him if he’d be willing to conduct an interview around the release of his new book, Hunting the Dark Knight: Twenty-First Century Batman, and he agreed. Will being Will has been tweeting to the world about the difficulty of my questions, so now you have a chance to see for yourself what I asked him and how he has risen to the challenge.

What neither of us could know at the time we started this process was the degree to which the opening of this new film would be linked to an act of unspeakable violence. So, this first part of the interview offers some of his thoughts about the tragedy, while subsequent parts will dig deeper into the theoretical issues around multiplicity and seriality in the Dark Knight series.

Let’s start with the elephant in the room. In what ways did the Aurora shooting impact the meaning of the Dark Knight film franchise? Conversely, how did the intertextual construction you discuss in the book play into the ways that this news story was covered?  

 

It’s hard to say, a month after the shooting (at the time of writing), how that event has affected the way Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy is framed and discussed. The intertextual nature of Batman, as a ‘mosaic’, did shape the news response to the Colorado events, in that reporters dug back through the archive of Batman texts to find any possible echoes or precursors that could be foregrounded as ‘causes’ of the violence. So a single page from Frank Miller’s 1986 Dark Knight Returns, depicting a shooting in a cinema, was identified as a possible influence.

It’s ironic and unfortunate, I think, that it takes a violent tragedy to prompt reporters to treat comics seriously and study them so closely.

My sense is that the Colorado shootings are currently seen as a footnote to discussion of the third and most recent movie, and that this news story serves as a kind of tag or hypertext link, a postscript that is still pulled into view when we talk about Dark Knight Rises.

It would be impossible not to acknowledge that the shooting is now part of the broader intertextual matrix of meanings that both surrounds and constitutes the Dark Knight trilogy.

That trilogy is essentially a construction and circulation of texts, including the feature films themselves, the stories about Ledger’s death and the ‘Jokerised Obama’ images, the comic book adaptations and the DVD extras. The Colorado shootings, on one level, join that cluster of meanings around the three films.

I think the question is how closely this story will stick and how significant it will seem, over time: whether it will drift to the wider outskirts of what Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy signifies, as a more distant footnote, or whether it will play a more major, longer-term role in shaping how the film is discussed and remembered.

I’m hoping for the former, for a range of reasons.

Firstly because I would rather not see a criminal given the notoriety he seeks; second, because the discussion around the shootings and the film seems to fall into a ‘media effects’ category, which I don’t find especially useful; and third, because I think those involved in the Colorado event, and their families, would probably rather not have their loss trivialised as a ‘Batman shooting’, and have their own personal tragedy permanently associated with a movie.


The shootings were not the first tragedy associated with these films. In what ways did the death of Heath Ledger become part of the meaning of the Dark Knight franchise and how have the producers sought to manage the morbid associations with Ledger’s death in handling this current situation?

 

My impression is that these two tragedies were managed by the film’s producers in very different ways. Ledger’s death can be understood within the already-established context of Brandon Lee’s accidental death during The Crow and Oliver Reed’s during Gladiator, and if anything I think it was seen as adding poignancy and mystery to Ledger’s performance and his role as Joker, and in turn, did the film’s publicity no harm.

I don’t believe any connection was explicitly made in reviews and production materials, but the rumour (circulated by fans and journalists) that Ledger’s intense preparation for and immersion in the role led him to emotional torment, drug abuse and possible suicide echoes the movie’s association with brutal ‘realism’ that was articulated in production discourses through foregrounding of Bale’s physical training regime, the dangerous stunts, the avoidance of CGI, and the military hardware.

I don’t think there was any attempt on the part of the producers to exploit Ledger’s death, but I equally don’t recall any obvious attempt to contain or limit the stories surrounding it, whereas my sense is that the producers aimed to disassociate the film text from the Colorado shootings, and to short-circuit the interpretations of negative cause-and-effect between the two, as quickly and efficiently as possible.

The idea that The Dark Knight could have been so ‘realistic’ and absorbing that it consumed and possessed one of its lead actors was, I think, allowed to circulate because of its exceptional, isolated nature and because of the way we perceive Hollywood stars as unique and distinct from ourselves.

That it could have influenced a previously unknown individual to murder other ‘regular’ people in a suburban cinema carries quite a different meaning, because it is too close to the everyday lives of the average viewer and comes across as a reproducible event, rather than an isolated exception.

Will Brooker is currently Director of Research in Film and Television at Kingston University, London, and incoming editor of Cinema Journal. His books include Batman Unmasked, Using the Force, Alice’s Adventures, The Blade Runner Experience, the BFI Film Classics volumeStar Wars, and Hunting the Dark Knight (I B Tauris, 2012).

Filed Under: book shelf, branded entertainment, Comics Culture, fan culture, interviews, transmedia entertainment
August 20, 2012

How I Spent My Summer Vacation (Part Three): England and Ireland

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England has always felt like a mother country to me — not simply because (depending on who you ask) Jenkins is either an Irish or Welsh name, but also because Birmingham is the intellectual birthplace of the Cultural Studies tradition from which my work on participatory culture can claim its intellectual roots. So, while most of the other legs of the trip took me to places I had never been before, the British leg was a chance to reacquaint myself with old friends and especially to meet the next generation of British scholars who are working on fan studies or transmedia topics.

London

Our visit to London fell just about a month before the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and a few months before the city would host the Summer Olympics. As this photograph of a British street scene suggests, she was already spruced up and flying her colors.

 

 

On May 15th, I delivered a talk about our forthcoming Spreadable Media book  in the Regent’s Street Cinema, which has been hailed as the Birthplace of the British Cinema, since it was the location of the first public exhibition of motion pictures in London.

 

The talk was hosted by David Gauntlett, whose work on grassroots creativity I showcased on this blog not long ago. Gauntlett’s  critiques of media effects arguments had helped to inform my writings around the Columbine Shootings more than a decade earlier. We had corresponded off and on through the years but this was the first time we met in person.  While the official video from the event has not yet been posted, someone in the audience captured and has posted the second part of the talk, including the question and answer session with the audience, and it will give you a good taste of how well Jenkins and Gauntlett played opposite each other. Here’s a blogger’s take on the event.

Immediately after the talk, I went backstage where I was interviewed by an Irish radio reporter, and you can again got some taste of the presentation from the version he shared through his podcast.

 

Nottingham

Cynthia and I then traveled by train to Robin Hood country — Nottingham, for a conference, Contemporary Screen Narratives: Storytelling’s Digital and Industrial Contexts, which was organized by Anthony Smith.  Jason Mittell and I were the two keynote speakers for the event. Jason gave a really provocative presentation, drawing on his current book project dealing with complex television narratives. In this case, he used Breaking Bad to elaborate a theory of television characters. Jason has been posting chapters from the book via Media Commons for feedback, and so you will find the text of his remarks here, and given the interest in my readership in all things transmedia, here’s a link to his chapter on transmedia entertainment, which discusses Lost and again, Breaking Bad. My own remarks centered around “Engagement, Participation, Play: The Value and Meaning of Transmedia Audiences,” and was a dry run of sorts for the presentation I gave at the Pompidou Center in Paris a week or so later. (Watch for video of the Paris version).

For me, the highlight of this event was getting to sample the rich strands of work on fandom, cult media, games, and transmedia entertainment being done by the emerging generation of British and European academics, many of whom were students of my many old friends here:

  • Bethann Jones (Cardiff University), a contributor to our issue of Transformative Works and Culture, shared her perspectives on the fanmix as an emergingcreative practice: the fanmix is a compilation of songs (something like a mix tape) which is intended to explore the psychological journey of a particular character (or character relationship), sometimes inspired by a work of fan fiction, sometimes informed by the fan’s reading of an episode or the series as a whole.
  • Matthew Freeman (University of Nottingham) provided an important historical corrective to a day heavily focused on contemporary transmedia experiments, exploring the kinds of commercial intertexts and paratexts constructed around Superman in the late 1930s and 1940s. For comic buffs, some of the examples used was familiar ground, but what made the talk exceptional was the ways  he examined the specific industrial contexts of each of the production companies involved in developing Superman for comics, radio, live-action serials, and animation, and the contractual relations  the publishers deployed to insure some degree of integrity and consistency across them.
  • Aaron Calbreath-Frasieur (University of Nottingham) traced the history of meta-media and transmedia explorations by the Jim Henson Corporation and the Muppets franchise, suggesting the ways that our awareness of the characters and their personalities inform our response to their performances across multiple media platforms.
  • Feride Cicekoglu, Digdem Sezen, and Tonguc Ibrahim Sezen (Istanbul University/Istanbul Bigli University) reflected on the ways transmedia could be deployed to generate civic awareness and political participation, including both examples from the highly topical Valley of the Wolves series for Turkish television and recent efforts to use alternate reality games for social change, such as the British Red Cross’s Traces of Hope and Play the New .

 

Sunderland

Our next stop was Sunderland, an industrial city in North East England. Sutherland  is the home of British comic book artist and author, Bryan Talbott, whose graphic novel, Alice in Sunderland, will be the focus of a chapter in my planned Comics…and Stuff book project.

Reading Bryan Talbot’s Alice in Sunderland is an overwhelming experience — not simply because of its epic scale whether judged by its 300 plus page length or by its historical scope, which traces the history of a town in Northwest England from the Age of Reptiles and the era of St. Bede through to the present moment.  Talbot shows how Sunderland has functioned as a crossroads for many of the cultural currents that have shaped British history. But, even on the level of the single page, Sunderland is overwhelming because of the way that Talbot has built it up primarily through techniques borrowed from photocomics and especially through the use of collage.


Each page may feature dozens of images Talbot has collected from archives — old photographs, documents, woodcuts, carved marble, stained-glass windows, film stills, cartoons, and printed books, all jockeying for our attention, each conveying separate bits of information relevant to the historical narrative he is developing, but each gaining far greater meaning when situated within the book’s gestalt.   At the center of this narrative, as its title might suggest, is the story of Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland, who lived for a time in Sunderland and met Alice Liddell, his young muse, for whom his fairy story was dedicated. On the surface, the book can be read as an obsessive argument for the priority of Sunderland over Cambridge as the site from which to understand the origins of Carroll’s Wonderland. In the process of making such claims, Talbot goes further, linking Alice and Carroll to a much broader array of stories (from ancient mythology to music hall comedy) which have sprung from the same geographic and cultural roots.

Sunderland, thus, is a project in radical intertextuality, forging links between dispersed narratives drawn from both history and fiction, mapping them onto a highly localized geography. For all of its historical expansiveness, the core structure of the book is a tour, walking up and down the streets of Sunderland, pointing out various monuments and landmarks, and linking them into the emerging narrative of British history. And on yet another meta-level, Talbot is trying to link his own medium, comics, to a much broader history of artistic practices which combined words and pictures to construct narratives, including a consideration of Carroll’s relations with his illustrator John Tenniel, the Bayeux Tapestry, William Blake, and William Hogarth, as well as patches of many different comics genres.

 

Given the book’s focus on the local history and geography of Sunderland, I was eager to visit some of the depicted sites myself, and to try to get a better understanding of the context within which Talbot works. I was lucky to have established contact via email with Billy Proctor, a scholar of comics and popular narrative who is based in Sunderland, and through him, I made contact with Bryan and his wife, Mary, who invited us to pay them a visit. There, we shared thoughts about our shared fascination with vaudeville and music hall, and I got the chance to see some of the work in progress towards the next book in his Grandville series (which combines steampunk with the funny animal tradition).

 

 

While I was there, I found myself being interviewed for a documentary being produced about Talbot and his work (as well as by a local newspaper reporter eager to find out what would bring an “American visitor” to their city). The documentary producer Russell Wall has since shared with me this short film promoting Dotter of Her Father’s Eye. Dotter was Bryan’s first creative collaboration with his wife, Mary Talbot, a noted feminist scholar, who uses the graphic novel form to explore two father-daughter stories: the first is an autobiographical account of her troubled relationship with her father, a noted Joyce scholar, and the second is the account of Joyce’s relationship with his daughter, Lucia.

 

And this video documents Talbot’s involvements to get young people more invested in the expressive potentials of comics as a medium.

 

 

After our visit with the Talbots, Proctor and his colleague, John-Paul Green, took me on a brief, brisk walking tour of Sunderland on what had turned out to be a rainy, misty afternoon.

Here, you see a picture of Proctor and myself standing next to a Walrus sculpture which figures prominently in Alice: a stuffed walrus was brought back to England by Captain Joseph Wiggins (an associate of Carroll’s Uncle) and may have been the inspiration for the Walrus and the Carpenter.

 

Here are a few other stops along our walk, each of which plays a central role in the graphic novel:

 

The giant chess pieces in a children’s playground in Mowbray Park, which celebrates Carroll’s ties to the city

 

 

 

The Empire Music Hall, where such legendary British performers as Vesta Tilley, Guy Formby, and Sidney James once played.

 

The Statue of Jack Crawford, a British sailor, known as the “Hero of Camperdown,” who “nailed his colors to the mast” of the H.M.S. Venerable when it shattered during a battle with the Dutch.

Proctor, and his colleague Justin Battin, rode with us by train back to London, and we spent most of the trip totally geeking out about contemporary comics, science fiction, and fantasy franchises.

 London (Round 2)

We were all going to attend the Symposium on Popular Media Cultures: Writing in the Margins and Reading Between the Lines, which was being hosted by the Center for Cultural and Creative Research at the University of Portsmouth and by Forbidden Planet, London’s best known comic book shop.  The event was held in the Odeon Cinema near Covent Gardens.

 

 

 

Organized by Lincoln Geraghty, the conference brought together a who’s who of the top British academics working on cult media and fan cultures, including:

  • Joanne Garde-Hanson and Kristyn Gorton speaking about the online reactions to Madonna as an aging female pop star
  • Cornel Sandvoss examining  the ways that reality television series, such as The Only Way is Essex and Made in Chelsea, played into the local imagination,
  • Mark Jancovich tracing the initial critical response to the Val Lewton horror films,
  • Stacey Abbott analyzing  the title sequences for such series as American Horror Story and True Blood,
  • Will Brooker exploring the construction of authorship around the Dark Knight trilogy,
  • Matt Hills sharing  insights about spoilers and “ontological security” within Doctor Who fandom,
  • Roberta Pearson mapping a new project she is developing about the popular resurgence of interest in Sherlock Holmes.

My talk, “Beyond Poaching: From Resistant Audiences to Fan Activism,” sought to locate my current work on fan activism as a form of participatory politics in relation to much older debates about whether fan culture can serve as a springboard for “real political change”.  Amusingly, during my talk, Will Brooker asked me a question proposed via Tweet from Alexis Lothian, one of my graduate students back at USC, a symptom of the number of friends and associates who were following some of these adventures online.

Here’s a picture of some of the participants, hanging out in a local pub, following the event.

 

 Dublin

The following morning, Cynthia and I flew to Dublin, where I had been asked to speak at the Institute of International and European Affairs, a notable think tank which brings together business leaders, journalists, and policy leaders to discuss some of the challenges confronting the modern world.  Here, I offered some critical perspectives on the ways “content” is being reshaped in the contemporary media environment. As I noted, the word, “content,” has classically been defined as “that which is contained,” as in the contents of a bottle or the table of contents of a book. But, a key characteristic of our current moment is that content (as defined by the “content industries”) is not contained, but rather content flows very fluidly across media platforms, across national borders, often shaped by unauthorized acts of circulation which intensify its meanings and may or may not increase its value.

Don’t miss the question and answer session which followed my talk, including some forceful challenges from business leaders and lawyers who felt threatened by the manipulations and appropriations of intellectual property I had depicted and by those eager to understand what Irish media makers might have to gain by embracing spreadable media.

Earlier that day, I had wandered over to a comic book shop, near my hotel, which had a display of Irish comics in the window. When I brought an armful of titles to the cash register, I discovered that the owner of the shop, Robert Curley, wrote and published most of the books I was buying through his Atomic Diner imprint. I thoroughly enjoyed my purchases, which included Jennifer Wilde, a supernatural mystery set in Paris in the 1920s and involving the ghost of Oscar Wilde; Rossin Dubh, which is set in the world of Irish theater in the 1890s and involves the return of an ancient demonic force,  Black Scorpion, a superhero saga set during the first world war; and the League of Volunteers, which created a team of superheros to reflect Ireland’s national identity.  The writing is lively, the characters are well developed, the attempts to tap into local history, politics, and mythology are distinctive, and the artwork is compelling.  Check out their website. http://www.atomicdiner.com/

 

 



 

Everywhere we looked in Dublin, we saw political posters, speaking to the ongoing debates around the European economic crisis and the austerity moves the government was seeking to impose.   Needless to say, almost every conversation we had in Europe turned sooner or later to the current political moment. The fact that we were traveling to Greece near the end of our tour often raised graveyard humor, speculating about what currency the Greeks would be using by the time we reached there and whether it would still be part of the European Union. It became clear that much of Europe was unified behind at least one core idea – their anger towards German banks and institutions which they saw as seeking to impose their will on the other countries. This image offers a sample of the political signage debating these issues.

 

 

 

 

 

And this one reduces the debate to its most basic terms.

Cynthia and I spent many hours wandering around the streets of Dublin, and found ourselves utterly charmed by the city, its architecture, and its local culture.

 

 


Along the way, we visited the Trinity College Library to see the Book of Cells, a beautifully illuminated version of the Gospels produced by Celtic monks around 800 A.D., and regarded as one of the real treasures of the country’s cultural heritage.

 

 

Coming Soon: Paris!

Filed Under: Comics Culture, fan culture, globalization watch, television, transmedia entertainment
August 7, 2012

How I Spent My Summer Vacation (Part One): Germany

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This is the first of a series of blog posts which will share images, videos, and impressions from my extensive lecture tour this summer across Europe. I think of these posts as the equivalent of a scrapbook. For me, they are a way of consolidating my impressions on what were truly transformative experiences and encounters. I am hoping for the reader they will function as one part travel guide and one part overview of some key figures and developments in Europe around the topics which I regularly cover here.

 

The Journey Begins

Over the course of ten weeks, I ended up giving more than 30 talks and visited 12 European countries at a moment of tension and transition within the European Union. As someone commented on my Facebook page near the end of the trip, “Now everyone in Europe has had the chance to hear Henry Jenkins speak at least twice.”

In almost every case, it was the first time my wife and I had visited those places and so we engaged with each with curiosity and excitement. I had never really been able to spend significant amounts of time in Europe before, having not had the resources to be a foreign exchange student in high school, to do the Junior semester abroad programs as an undergraduate, or to hitchhike across Europe after graduation, all the stereotypical ways Americans get to know Europe.

As Convergence Culture began to be translated into many European languages, I felt a very strong desire to visit Europe in a more substantial and systematic way, to engage in conversation with the people who were reading the book, and to learn more about how its themes were playing out in a European context. But, the trip kept getting put off as I struggled with my decision to leave MIT and then dealt with the transition to USC, and so this summer was the first time I could make this dream into a reality.

The timing could not have been better, since I could also now use the trip to talk about a range of forthcoming projects, each of which build on the foundations of ideas introduced in Convergence Culture, including a special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures on fan activism (which I co-edited with Sangita Shreshtova and the members of my Civic Paths team), Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture (Co-authored with Sam Ford and Joshua Green, and due out in January), the 20th anniversary edition of Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (coming out from Routledge this fall), and Reading in a Participatory Culture (co-edited and co-written with a group of former students and researchers associated with the New Media Literacies Project, due out from Teacher’s College Press by the end of 2012.) For me, these projects represent the finalization of many ideas and projects started at MIT and now reaching completion.

Finally, this summer represented a moment of transition as I start really working on book projects which represent the conceptual breakthroughs I have made since starting work at USC, and thus, the summer was a way of clearing my head, refocusing my thinking, as I prepare for some new ventures.

This trip would not have been imaginable without the hard work of Amanda Ford, my ever-resourceful assistant, who coordinated with my hosts at each of these cities to resolve the many, many details involved in pulling off a trip on this scale, certainly the most extensive, exhaustive, and exhausting trip I’ve ever tackled. I also could not have done it without the partnership of my wife, Cynthia, who acted as the “official photographer” on the trip (almost all of the images I will be running in this series are hers) and also helped to puncture my ego whenever needed to prevent too much swelling of the head.

Marburg

Our trip began in Germany and I recall those first few days through a deep haze — one part end of term exhaustion, one part jet lag. But one of the more surreal aspects of our first leg was waking up from my sleep in the middle of the afternoon on the first day to the sounds of hail hitting the balcony outside my room and looking down into the streets below, more or less covered with ice. Keep in mind that this was the first week of May and that no one in Marburg could recall having seen a hail storm this late in the year before.


 This is not the best of pictures, but it gives you some sense of what we saw  from the hotel window. I think back on the hail storm as ironic in several senses. First, as any American will tell you, Europe suffers from a severe shortage of ice otherwise. Even when you beg waiters for ice, they return with one or two small slivers, not convinced that it is really healthy to have ice in your drinks. So, the travel gods delivered most of the ice we’d see the whole trip in one dump. And second, by the time the trip was ending, the weather in Europe was sweltering and we were on the verge of melting into the asphalt, so the move from a hail storm in Marburg to 100 degree days in Athens or Rome, says something about just how long we were on the road.

Marburg is a classic medieval German city — narrow, winding streets, buildings with lots of “gingerbread” decorations — and it feels as if it were a location in the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. This is no accident since the Brothers Grimm spent a portion of their lives here and that many of their visits into the country side to collect local folk tales which form the basis of their narratives were in the region around this town.


As a consequence, my second really surreal encounter in Marburg was seeing this statute of our Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man hanging outside a very old world looking comic shop.

 My host for this leg of the journey was Malte Hagener, who has recently published (with Thomas Elssasser) Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses , which offers an approach to classic problems in cinema studies through a framework that is highly appropriate to those of us working in Comparative Media Studies. I plan to use some of its chapters in my course on Medium Specificity this fall.

First, there was a lively informal conversation with a room full of bright undergraduates (many of whom were doing projects dealing with transmedia entertainment or fan studies or game studies). They had been asked to read my recently published essay on the Harry Potter Alliance and fan activism, which gave me a chance to talk more generally about our work on new media, youth, and political participation, and exchange perspectives on everything from the Arab Spring movement to the ways Occupy Wall Street had impacted current debates around the European economic crisis. Later that night, at the University of Marburg, I delivered the first of the trip’s formal lecture dealing with the ideas from Spreadable Media.

After,  Hagener and his colleagues took my wife and I on a walk through the old sector of the city and to dinner. We had arrived at the height of Germany’s “cult of the white asparagus,” which meant that for a few weeks each year a good chunk of the menu was dedicated to this distinctive vegetable, which was served in various soups or stews, cooked into various pastas, served as the main dish with many different kinds of sauce, or served with ham and other local meats. I had never had white asparagus before but by the time this leg was done, we would have enjoyed it for a number of meals. It is larger than the green asparagus we mostly have in the States, but it was surprisingly not at all tough or fibrous, more or less melting in your mouth, and also very sweat tasting.

Gottingen

From Marburg, we traveled by train to Gottingen, where I was greeted by Jason Mittell, who has been spending his sabbatical year in residence at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, where he has joined a group of researchers working on contemporary and historical forms of serial entertainment. I have known Jason since he was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and we’ve worked together many times, especially through the Futures of Entertainment Consortium, and he runs one of the very best academic blogs in media studies, Just TV. Below you can see a photograph of the two of us walking through the streets of his temporary home town.

 Jason, for example, took us for our first of many visits to cathedrals in Europe — in this case, the St. Jacobikirche (St. Jacoby), which is unexpectedly decorated with candy cane red and white stripes inside. St. Jacoby is called the “dancing cathedral” because the architects used a variety of optical effects in its design which created a strange “buzz” or warping effect on the eye.

 

Here, you see the window of Cron und Lanz, a truly phenomenal bakery and candy shop. There had been a German Bakery in Atlanta near where I grew up, which carries enormous sentimental importance in my childhood memories. I especially associate it with these great gingerbread man cookies which we would get every year at Christmas. I still seek them out if I have reason to be in Atlanta this time of year, and my friend Laurie Baird, until recently with Turner Broadcasting, will bring me a box if we have a chance to meet. I was having fantasies of tasting authentic German gingerbread, but even though it is available year round in Atlanta, it seems to be a seasonal treat here, so no such luck.

 But, Jason introduced us to another seasonal delicacy — chocolate Maikäfer or May Bugs, which are associated with the celebration of May Day in this part of Germany. It’s hard to see them in the window of the bakery, but there was another whole window displaying various sized chocolate bugs. This is a close up of one such creature who I bought at the shop and later consumed in my hotel room (with the apples used just to give you a sense of scale).


 Here we see the two of us, alongside many of Jason’s students and colleagues, who were all part of the the Research Unit for “Popular Seriality — Aesthetics and Practice”, shortly after an intense afternoon bull session.




 The discussion was organized around a chapter we shared from Spreadable Media , which dealt primarily with the ways the television industry understands the concept of “engagement”, its struggles to adequately measure and capitalize on the value of audience participation in its franchises, and the ways these trends have shaped the push towards transmedia storytelling. But, our discussion was far reaching, covering many different points of intersection between our research projects. This was the first time I had encountered a very German academic practice. Rather than clapping after the end of a presentation, here and elsewhere in Germany, the audience rapped their knuckles on the table top.

Below you see some members of the very engaged audience at my evening public lecture, based on my new book project, Comics…And Stuff, which deals with the ways contemporary graphic novels are helping us think about our relations to material culture and the practices of collecting in an era of eBay and other forms of networked consumption.


 This project combines formal and thematic considerations of the works of nine contemporary comics artists from the Anglo-American world. This was the first time I had done a public presentation of these ideas, which are still very much taking shape in my head, so the talk had an exploratory and improvizational tone (i.e. I was partially making it up as I went along). Gottingen turned out to be the ideal audience for such an early presentation of these ideas, since there were people in the audience from my diverse fields, many of whom were doing work on popular representation, art history, popular memory, material culture, networked consumption, and above all, a surprising number doing work on comics and graphic storytelling.  Among them were Daniel Stein and Alexandre Starre.) The audience was generous and generative in sharing their reactions to my ideas and helping me think out loud about this project which will dominate much of my writing time for the coming year.

Frankfurt

From there, we traveled to Frankfurt by train. Below is the Frankfurt train station, the site of an especially memorable moment of transcultural misunderstanding. As I was walking through the train station, I spotted a sign advertising Berliners. I have always been bemused by the story of John F. Kennedy’s trip to Berlin where he sought to express solidarity with the German people by claiming he was also a Berliner, but ended up, via a mistranslation, announcing to the world that he was a jelly doughnut. So, I had to have a Berliner, and my wife wanted them too, so I went to the counter, only to find that the sales woman did not speak any English and I spoke no German. So, I pointed at the doughnuts and held up two fingers. She spoke very fast in German and held up three fingers. But, I only wanted two doughnuts, so insisted on two, and this went back and forth for some time, before some other customer took mercy on me, suggesting that the woman was trying to tell me that the doughnuts were three for the price of two, and so, in the end, I walked away with three.


 I mean this as no insult to the people of Frankfurt, but this city was intended primarily as a bolt hole where I could lock myself away for a few days and finish off grading for my semester at USC. I had left on the last day of classes and by this point in the trip, the papers for my graduate seminar on Fandom, Participatory Culture, and Web 2.0 were coming in electronically, and I needed to take some time out to grade them in a city where I had no local contacts, no scheduled talks, and thus would not be disturbed. You can see me here grading in the hotel room.


 But, ultimately, I could not visit Frankfurt without doing some exploring. Cynthia and I took a break from grading to do a walk through rain soaked city streets and to visit the Deutsche Filminstitut, which has a museum focused on the history and art of motion pictures and is highly recommended. We especially enjoyed spending time on a floor focused around 19th century forms of media. In the past, these materials would be framed as “the prehistory of cinema,” but increasingly, there are the source of fascination in their own right. I am a very modest collector of such artifacts of this earlier moment of media in transition. I especially admired the juxtaposition created here between magic lantern shows (which deployed a broad array of special effects and optical manipulations) and the work of Georges Melies, which turns out to have a remarkably similar aesthetic, though these connections have rarely been explored by film scholars. The museum also has a large collection of materials associated with Charlie Chaplin, including toys, advertisements, and other collectibles, showing the transnational fan culture which grew up around his work.

Giessen

Grading completed, we then took a train to Giessen, a small, somewhat sleepy little German village, where I ran a master class for graduate students doing work on various topics in media and popular culture through International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC). The talk had been organized by Joern Ahrens, who I knew from his time as a visiting scholar at Comparative Media Studies, but he was unfortunately called out of town before I arrived. Nevertheless, I found my time with the students cordial and engaging, as might be suggested by these two photographs from the session.




 While I was interacting with the students, Cynthia got to explore a quaint old country cemetery which was just on the edge of the campus. This is one of the many beautiful images she captured there.


Stuttgart

From there, we traveled to Stuttgart, where I participated in FMX, a trade-show/festival focused around animation, games, special effects, and other forms of digital entertainment. I was featured on a special track of programming focused on transmedia which was co-hosted by the fine folks at 5-D, which runs transmedia and world building themed events here in Los Angeles.

Today’s program included Scott Walker, one of the key organizers of the Los Angeles area Transmedia Meetup, who has done some innovative thinking about audience engagement strategies through his company, Brain Candy; Femke Wolting, who is part of the acclaimed team at Submarine Channel, which has done many transmedia projects in both fictional and documentary storytelling; and Nuno Bernardo from beActive, a transmedia from Portugal producer who recently published The Producer’s Guide to Transmedia .

I delivered a talk on the Future of the Content Industries, which would be a core talk I delivered multiple times across Europe. But, for me, the high point was getting to participate in an open-ended conversation about world building and story telling with Alex McDowell, the noted British-born production designer who most recently has been shaping the look and feel of the upcoming Superman movie, and Shekhar Kapur, the Indian born producer associated with The Bandit Queen and the Elizabeth movies, among other projects. We brought very different perspectives to the topic in terms of our professional stakes and our cultural backgrounds. This conversation, and subsequent talks with Kapur at the conference dinner, ranked as one of the  intellectual high points of my time in Europe. The exchange was marked by constant shifts in tone from the philosophical or even “spiritual” to the intellectual to the personal to the professional, each of us circling around some of the most challenging issues surrounding the nature of entertainment in a transmedia and transnational era. I am sharing the video with you here thanks to special efforts by the 5D and FMX staffs, so thanks guys.

5D: The future of Storytelling in Transmedia at FMX 2012 from Dave Blass on Vimeo.

For more about transmedia at FMX, check out Scott Walker’s very perceptive blog post, which shares his impressions not only of the day of programming I participated in but also other highlights from the week long festival. See also here an interview I did about transmedia for a German blog as part of the publicity build up for my appearances in his country.

While I was at the convention, I also shot an interview with Klaus Uhrig, a producer for Bayerischer Rundfunk. Uhrig is preparing a documentary for national television dealing with issues of collecting, ownership, and publishing, as phenomenon undergoing profound transition as we move into the era of cloud computing. More and more, we are not going to own the media we consume — whether television programs, movies, or books — but rather we will access them (in effect, rent them) from their publishers. As someone deeply invested in collector culture and very excited to own so many of my favorite media texts in DVD, I am a bit concerned about the uncertainities of access such an era is apt to produce. After all, Borders has never gone into my home and removed books I’ve bought from my bookshelf, but Amazon has been called out several times now for removing or disabling digital books from people’s iPads and Kindles. And, where media availability is concerned, what iTunes and Hulu giveth, they can also withdrawal on their whim, something which is going to have serious consequences for media educators who want to predictably show certain core works semester after semester to their students. So, I am not normally cranky about the future, as anyone reading this blog knows, but to me, there are disturbing implications for our current moment of corporate “curation” and cloud based publishing, which we urgently need to be discussing. You see here a photograph of the producers interviewing me for the program.

Next Time: Portugal

Filed Under: book shelf, civic media, Comics Culture, fan culture, globalization watch, transmedia entertainment, University of Southern California
July 17, 2012

Videos from Transmedia Hollywood 3: Rethinking Creative Relations

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Sometimes it’s easy, sometime’s its hard.

We’ve had ongoing success in building a community around the Future of Entertainment Consortium’s west coast event, Transmedia Hollywood, which is jointly produced each year through a collaboration between University of Southern California and University of California-Los Angeles (or as they would put it, University of California-Los Angeles and University of Southern California). But, this year’s conference seemed to be under some kind of black cloud. We never have had so much difficulty lining up speakers, so much last minute shuffling of presenters. On top of that, the event will be known as the year without Henry, since I ended up in the hospital on the eve of the event, ended up missing most of the day as I fought my way through the bureaucracy to get released. And, then, we faced epic delays getting the videos out to the world.

Well, the videos are finally here and, despite the struggles, we are still very proud of what we were able to produce — the speakers are, as always, lively and thought provoking, a rich mix of academics and folks from many different sectors of the entertainment industry, and the content remains timely, capturing some of the key transitions shaping the entertainment industry today and bringing an ever stronger transnational focus to the mix, as we are connecting more and more with folks creating transmedia content around the world.

With the growth of transmedia and creative industries/production studies focused classes at universities around the world, we hope these videos will prove to be important resources for use in the classroom or to assist researchers who would not otherwise have access to insider perspectives within the media industries.

Above all, enjoy! And if you find something interesting, help us spread the word.

Transmedia Hollywood 3: Rethinking Creative Relations

As transmedia models become more central to the ways that the entertainment industry operates, the result has been some dramatic shifts within production culture, shifts in the ways labor gets organized, in how productions get financed and distributed, in the relations between media industries, and in the locations from which creative decisions are being made.

This year’s Transmedia, Hollywood examines the ways that transmedia approaches are forcing the media industry to reconsider old production logics and practices, paving the way for new kinds of creative output. Our hope is to capture these transitions by bringing together established players from mainstream media industries and independent producers trying new routes to the market. We also hope to bring a global perspective to the conversation, looking closely at the ways transmedia operates in a range of different creative economies and how these different imperatives result in different understandings of what transmedia can contribute to the storytelling process – for traditional Hollywood, the global media industries, and for all the independent media-makers who are taking up the challenge to reinvent traditional media-making for a “connected” audience of collaborators.

Many of Hollywood’s entrenched business and creative practices remain deeply mired in the past, weighed down by rigid hierarchies, interlocking bureaucracies, and institutionalized gatekeepers (e.g. the corporate executives, agents, managers, and lawyers). In this volatile moment of crisis and opportunity, as Hollywood shifts from an analog to a digital industry, one which embraces collaboration, collectivity, and compelling uses of social media, a number of powerful independent voices have emerged. These include high-profile transmedia production companies such as Jeff Gomez’s Starlight Runner Entertainment as well as less well-funded and well-staffed solo artists who are coming together virtually from various locations across the globe. What these top-down and bottom-up developments have in common is a desire to buck tradition and to help invent the future of entertainment. One of the issues we hope to address today is the social, cultural, and industrial impact of these new forms of international collaboration and mixtures of old and new work cultures.

Another topic is the future of independent film. Will creative commons replace copyright? Will crowdsourcing replace the antiquated foreign sales model? Will the guilds be able to protect the rights of digital laborers who work for peanuts? What about audiences who work for free? Given that most people today spend the bulk of their leisure time online, why aren’t independent artists going online and connecting with their community before committing their hard-earned dollars on a speculative project designed for the smallest group of people imaginable – those that frequent art-house theaters?

Fearing obsolescence in the near future, many of Hollywood’s traditional studios and networks are looking increasingly to outsiders – often from Silicon Valley or Madison Avenue – to teach these old dogs some new tricks. Many current studio and network executives are overseeing in-house agencies, whose names – Sony Interactive Imageworks, NBC Digital, and Disney Interactive Media Group – are meant to describe their cutting-edge activities and differentiate themselves from Hollywood’s old guard.

Creating media in the digital age is “nice work if you can get it,” according to labor scholar Andrew Ross in a recent book of the same name. Frequently situated in park-like “campuses,” many of these new, experimental companies and divisions are hiring large numbers of next generation workers, offering them attractive amenities ranging from coffee bars to well-prepared organic food to basketball courts. However, even though these perks help to humanize the workplace, several labor scholars (e.g. Andrew Ross, Mark Deuze, Rosalind Gill) see them as glittering distractions, obscuring a looming problem on the horizon – a new workforce of “temps, freelancers, adjuncts, and migrants.”

While the analog model still dominates in Hollywood, the digital hand-writing is on the wall; therefore, the labor guilds, lawyers, and agent/managers must intervene to find ways to restore the eroding power/leverage of creators. In addition, shouldn’t the guilds be mindful of the new generation of digital laborers working inside these in-house agencies? What about the creative talent that emerges from Madison Avenue ad agencies like Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, makers of the Asylum 626 first-person horror experience for Doritos; or Grey’s Advertising, makers of the Behind the Still collective campaign for Canon? Google has not only put the networks’ 30-second ad to shame using Adword, but its Creative Labs has taken marketing to new aesthetic heights with its breathtaking Johnny Cash [collective] Project. Furthermore, Google’s evocative Parisian Love campaign reminds us just how intimately intertwined our real and virtual lives have become.

Shouldn’t Hollywood take note that many of its most powerful writers, directors, and producers are starting to embrace transmedia in direct and meaningful ways by inviting artists from the worlds of comic books, gaming, and web design to collaborate? These collaborations enhance the storytelling and aesthetic worlds tenfold, enriching “worlds” as diverse as The Dark Knight, The Avengers, and cable’s The Walking Dead. Hopefully, this conference will leave all of us with a broader understanding of what it means to be a media maker today – by revealing new and expansive ways for artists to collaborate with Hollywood media managers, audiences, advertisers, members of the tech culture, and with one another.

Once the dominant player in the content industry, Hollywood today is having to look as far away as Silicon Valley and Madison Avenue for collaborators in the 2.0 space.

Moderator: Denise Mann, UCLA

Panelists:

Nick Childs, Executive Creative Director, Fleishman Hillard

Jennifer Holt, co-Director, Media Industries Project, UCSB

Lee Hunter, Global Head of Marketing, YouTube

Jordan Levin, CEO, Generate

In countries with strong state support for media production, alternative forms of transmedia are taking shape. How has transmedia fit within the effort of nation-states to promote and expand their creative economies?

Moderator: Laurie Baird, Strategic Consultant – Media and Entertainment at Georgia Tech Institute for People and Technology.

Panelists:

Jesse Albert, Producer & Consultant in Film, Television, Digital Media, Live Events & Branded Content

Morgan Bouchet, Vice-President, Transmedia and Social Media, Content Division, Orange

Christy Dena, Director, Universe Creation 101

Sara DIamond, President, Ontario College of Art and Design University

Mauricio Mota, Chief Storytelling Officer, Co-founder of The Alchemists

A new generation of media makers are taking art out of the rarefied world of crumbling art-house theaters, museums, and galleries and putting it back in the hands of the masses, creating immersive, interactive, and collaborative works of transmedia entertainment, made for and by the people who enjoy it most.

Moderator: Denise Mann, UCLA.

Panelists:

Tara Tiger Brown, Freelance Interactive Producer/Product Manager

Mike Farah, President of Production, Funny Or DIe

Ted Hope, Producer/Partner/Founder, Double Hope Films

Sheila C. Murphy, Associate Professor, University of Michigan

By many accounts, the comics industry is failing. Yet, comics have never played a more central role in the entertainment industry, seeding more and more film and television franchises. What advantages does audience-tested content bring to other media? What do the producers owe to those die-hard fans as they translate comic book mythology to screen? And why have so many TV series expanded their narrative through graphic novels in recent years?

Moderator: Geoffrey Long, Lead Narrative Producer for the Narrative Design Team at Microsoft Studios.

Panelists:

Katherine Keller, Culture Vultures Editrix at Sequential Tart

Joe LeFavi, Quixotic Transmedia

Mike Richardson, President, Dark Horse Comics

Mark Verheiden, Writer (Falling Skies, Heroes)

Mary Vogt, Costume Designer (Rise Of The Silver Surfer, Men In Black)

For those of you who live on the East Coast, here’s the latest news from Sam Ford, who is hard at work planning the next Futures of Entertainment conference:

We have just announced that FoE6 will be Friday, Nov. 9, and Saturday, Nov. 10, in the Wong Auditorium at MIT. Panels will tackle subjects such as the the ethics and politics of curation, corporate listening and empathy, “the shiny new object syndrome,” new distribution models in a digital age, and rethinking copyright. We will also look specifically at innovations in storytelling and sports, in video games, in public media, and in civic media.

Information on the tentative schedule, as well as registration, is available here.

Filed Under: branded entertainment, c3, Comics Culture, globalization watch, interviews, television, transmedia entertainment, University of Southern California
July 15, 2012

Performing Our “Collective Dreams”: The Many Worlds of San Diego Comic-Con

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So, after ten weeks of speaking and traveling across Europe, my wife and I have finally return to Los Angeles, more than a little road weary and jet-lagged, but eager to share some of the new contacts and insights I’ve gained through my travel. I hope to share some of my travel experiences before much longer, but in the meantime, I am trying to catch up with a range of other things which have happened since I have been away.

Today, I wanted to share with you an article which I wrote about the 2011 San Diego Comic-Con for Boom: A Journal of California, which has finally come out in print — just in time for Comic-Con 2012. I am not in San Diego this week — it would have been too much to tackle after my long trip — but half the people I know are there, so I figured I would prioritize sharing this article with my regular readers. If you would like to read a PDF of the article as it appears in the magazine, including a range of eye-catching photographs, you can find it here:

Boom0202 04
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And you can find the issue itself on the newstand, where-ever quality publications like Boom may be sold in your community.

“Super-Powered Fans”: The Many Worlds of San Diego Comic-Con

by Henry Jenkins, written for Boom: A Journal of California

In an “Only at…” moment, the New German Cinema auteur Werner Herzog made a surprise appearance at the 2011 Comic-Con International event. Popping up during a panel focused on the Discovery Channel’s Dinosaur Revolution series, Herzog pontificated in a Bavarian accent about how the four-day geekfest represented an epic acting out of the public’s “collective dreams.” We all applauded with delight as Herzog, known for his art films and documentaries, bubbled with boyish enthusiasm about fandom’s ritual practices and shared beliefs as breathlessly as he might have talked about going up the Amazon River to film Fitzcaraldo, or in search of prehistoric art for his more recent Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

A few years ago, another documentary filmmaker, Morgan Spurlock, found himself in conversation with comic book legend Stan Lee at one of Comic-Con’s cocktail parties. The pair got excited about possibilities for documenting the festivities. Spurlock’s agent connected him to another client in attendance, Firefly mastermind Joss Whedon. Soon, famed blogger Harry Knowles (Ain’t It Cool News), also in San Diego for the conference, had joined the dialogue. The team shot a film (Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope) at the 2010 convention, and it started playing on the film festival circuit in the fall of 2011. Further, a photo book based on the documentary was selling on the Comic-Con exhibit floor in 2011 with the tagline, “See anyone you know?” For more and more of us, the answer is hell yes! (For the record, mine is one of hundreds of snapshots on the book’s cover.)

If you have a single geeky bone in your body (and who doesn’t these days?), you have probably heard about Comic-Con, which is held each year at the San Diego Convention Center. Entertainment Weekly does an annual Comic-Con cover story. The Los Angeles Times does a special insert. And trade publications like The Hollywood Reporter also provide extensive coverage. However, for the most part, these reporters rarely get outside Hall H (where most of the film-related programming is held) or Ballroom 20 (where the high-profile television events take place). Mainstream journalists are focused on what the big studios and A-list celebrities are doing. If they do get beyond that, they typically focus on the spectacular costumes. Both are part of what makes this gathering so interesting, but there’s much more to the Comic-Con story.

Comic-Con has a history, culture, economy and politics all its own, one we can only understand if we go beyond the celebrities, spoilers, and costumes and explore some of

the many different functions the con performs for the diverse groups that gather there. Comic-Con International is press junket, trade show, collector’s mart, public forum, academic conference, and arts festival, all in one.

I have been active in this world for almost three decades. Students who take my classes about comics, games, transmedia entertainment, and science fiction have sometimes called me a professor of “Comic-Con Studies.” But, compared to those who have been attending the Con for four decades, I’m still a relative newcomer; the 2011 festival was only my fourth time at the event.

I came to Comic-Con, first and foremost, as a fan–wanting, like everyone else, to see the artists who create the pop culture fantasies I love. By my second year, I was there as an academic, speaking as part of the event’s track of scholarly programming and as part of a larger movement to legitimatize “comic studies” as an emerging field. By the third year, I was asked to participate in industry panels, reflecting the degree to which my research on fan cultures and transmedia entertainment has attracted interest from Hollywood. And last year I was there as an embedded journalist or native guide (pick your favorite metaphor), intending to help Boom’s readers understand what Comic-Con was all about.

Comic-Con is the center of the trends I describe in my book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. It’s the meeting point between a transmedia commercial culture and a grassroots participatory culture, the place where an uncertain Hollywood goes when it wants to better understand its always unstable relations with its audiences. Comic-Con is a gathering of the tribes, a crossroads for many different communities drawn together by their shared love of popular mythology. What follows are a series of snapshots of the many different Comic-Cons, all functioning inside the San Diego Convention Center every year, simultaneously. Each of these vignettes from Comic-Con 2011 tells us something about how we produce and engage with entertainment media in a networked culture.

Comic-Con as Invasion

Organizers estimated that almost 140,000 people attended the 2011 event. To put this into some perspective, that’s just a little under the population of Pasadena (147k) or, perhaps more to the point, of Hollywood (146k). Read through a different lens, Comic-Con attendance figures equal roughly half the number of people the federal government estimates have full or part-time employment in the motion picture industry. And Comic-Con’s population is roughly one tenth of the population of San Diego itself.

For those five days, fans own the San Diego Convention Center, whose futuristic architecture–all pristine white and glistening metal–mirrors some cheesy 1970s-era science fiction flick (say, Logan’s Run). More than that, the fans own downtown San Diego. Imagine this San Diego scene I saw unfold last year: The landscape is dotted with giant inflatable Smurfs, a full-scale reconstruction of South Park, and a building wrapped in Batman promotional material. The 7-Eleven in front of me has posters depicting Steampunk versions of Slurpee machines, courtesy of Cowboys and Aliens. Over there, sitting at a table outside the Spaghetti Factory, are Batman and Wolverine, united by a shared taste for black leather–never mind that they come from fundamentally different universes (“You’re from DC; I’m from Marvel”). An armada of Pedi-cabs are passing by, ferrying fans anywhere they want to go. One of the cabs you see pass is a replica of the throne from Game of Thrones (a project from HBO which soon took on mythic status at the event, as I repeatedly heard people say, “Did you see…?” and “Did you hear about…?”).

As I walk ahead, every congestion point in the foot traffic, such as the crossing of the trolley tracks, has been transformed into a gathering place for marketers trying to pass out swag and fliers. As we approach the convention center, we are accosted by Ninja Turtles and Captain Americas, by sexy booth babes in fur bikinis, and–perhaps most effectively–by a bevy of retro Pan Am stewardesses giving away vintage-style powder blue flight bags and walking in unison, having mastered the wave and the twirl with stylized femininity.

Comic-Con as Homecoming Party

Science fiction and comics fans have been holding gatherings at least since the first World Science Fiction Convention in 1939 (an ambitious name for a group which at the time probably didn’t draw many from outside the Brooklyn area). Some cons are focused around a single media property–historically Star Trek or Star Wars, these days more often Harry Potter. Others are focused on a genre, such as comic books or anime or role-playing games. Many people at Comic-Con attend these other, more specialized, more local gatherings throughout the year, but they all come home to San Diego. Thus, Comic-Con has become the Mega-con, the Con to end all Cons, the gathering place for fans of all varieties (and yes, now, from all over the planet).

Comic-Con started as a small regional comics convention in 1970 with 170 attendees. The organizers sought to broaden their base by including other related interests, including the Society for Creative Anachronisms, The Mythopoetic Society, and, later, gamers and anime fans. By 1980, the convention attracted 5,000 attendees. This was the heyday of comics collecting, when vintage comics discovered in old attics were being avidly sought by wealthy adult collectors. The comics “bubble” eventually popped: vintage comics were valuable because so many mothers had thrown them away, creating artificial scarcity. But by then, genre entertainment had moved from B movies and midnight movies to major Hollywood summer blockbuster status, and the Con kept undergoing growth spurts–15,000 in 1990; 48,000 in 2000; and 130,000 in 2010.The Con so swamped the available hotel rooms in 2011 that my wife and I ended up renting a dorm room at a local college miles away, spending the five days of our stay sleeping in cramped bunk beds.

Today, one of my big ambivalences about Comic-Con is how much it now emphasizes fans as consumers rather than fans as cultural producers. There’s a small alleyway tucked in the back corners where fan clubs have booths to attract new members. There are panels where fan podcasts are being recorded, where fan fiction is being discussed, and where costumers trade tips with each other. For the most part, however, Comic-Con International puts the professionals in the center and the subcultural activities the conference was based on at the fringes.

Comic-Con as Publicity Event

Today’s television has moved from an appointment-based medium where viewers watch programs at scheduled times to an engagement-based medium where people seek out content through many different media (from Hulu and iTunes to boxed sets of Dvds) on their own time and as their interests dictate. Today’s Comic-Con is shaped by the idea of the fan not as a collector, but as an influencer. Most Comic-Con attendees are “early adopters” of communication technologies; they have blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, etc., and know how to use them. These fans have become the leading edge of the studio’s promotional campaigns. Industry research shows that Twitter hashtags represent one of the best predictors of box office success, both because the kinds of folks who see movies on the opening weekend are more often likely to be the type to tweet about their activities, and because these grassroots intermediaries help to inform and shape the ticket-buying habits of more casual audience members.

San Diego seems to be the right place–just close enough to Los Angeles to draw A-list celebrities, just far enough that it makes for a great road trip for those feeling claustrophobic in the media capital. And it’s the right time, in the midst of the summer movie madness and less than a month before the launch of the fall television season, to draw maximum attention from the media industry. This is the one time of the year when many Hollywood types directly interface with their audiences, and probably the only place where they are doing so on the fans’ terms. Their mission is to “break through the clutter.”

Ironically, of course, Comic-Con is perhaps the most media saturated environment you can imagine! Hollywood studios and television networks have to pull out all stops if they want to play, from clips of previously unreleased footage or surprise appearances by crowd-pleasing celebrities to displays of costumes, props, and sets on the floor of Exhibit Hall. In 2010, Marvel introduced the entire cast of the forthcoming Avengers film. In 2011, Andrew Garfield, the new Spider-Man, created a stir–making his grand entrance wearing a “Spidey” Halloween costume, pretending to be a fan asking a question from the floor mic.

My family, like many fans, prepare for Comic-Con as if it were a military operation. By the time we get there, we’ve mapped and charted our priorities. We know what we most want to see. And we have strategies for the best way to get into the highly attended event. You usually have to awaken and get in line hours early or, more risky, find a point in the schedule which is not a big draw to grab a seat and hold it through a parade of lower-profile panels. The organizers don’t “flush” the theater between events, so you can defend your squatting rights. In Ballroom 20, at least, you can get a bathroom pass and come back in without waiting in line.

These practices have their downsides and upsides. Some events draw apathetic and distracted audiences while the true blue fans are locked outside. But attendees get exposed to media properties they might not otherwise encounter. This gives producers who are still struggling to find their audience a unique opportunity to win over new viewers. We lined up outside Ballroom 20, with the primary goal of seeing the Game of Thrones panel, and sat through Burn Notice, Covert Affairs, and Psyche sessions. And it’s a good thing we did; more than 7,000 people were turned away from the Game of Thrones panel, presenting at Comic-Con for the first time this year.

A few years ago, the conference organizers were discouraging fans from tweeting about what they heard. Today, exclusivity and secrecy have given way to publicity. Now, Comic-Con’s organizers are announcing hashtags (words or phrases preceded by # that allow Twitter users to find others talking about the same topics) in front of every panel. Many speakers are recruiting Twitter followers. And some networks are collaborating with Foursquare, all sure signs the “fan as influencer” paradigm is shaping their branding strategies. We were warned again and again not to tape the clips shown, but, this year, most of them got released in good quality formats to the leading science fiction blogs within days, if not hours, after the event.

Comic-Con as Jury

The myth, at least partially true, was that Comic-Con was key to the early success of such cult television series as Heroes, Lost, True Blood, and The Walking Dead, and that it also crushed the hopes of misguided movie efforts, such as Catwoman and Ang Lee’s Hulk, both dead on arrival after negative Comic-Con response. However, Hollywood’s fascination with the Comic-Con “bounce” has been deflated by the mediocre box office of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Tron, and Sucker Punch, huge buzz-makers at 2010 Comic-Con that failed to deliver months later. In response, some major studios (Warner Bros, Marvel, Disney, Dream Works and The Weinstein Company) opted not to present at the 2011 convention. By then, the prevailing wisdom was that Comic-Con fans will turn out opening weekend for the superhero blockbusters with or without big promotion at the event. On the other hand, genre television programs such as Grimm, Once Upon a Time, Alcatraz, Terra Nova, and Person of Interest require highly engaged viewers to draw in their friends and families week after week. And, in film, the real beneficiaries of Comic-Con have been lower budget, slightly off-beat, and smart genre films, such as District Nine, Monsters, Moon, Paul, or Attack The Block, few of which have been “hits” but most of which might not make it into the multiplex without Comic-Con mojo. In any case, the news that Hollywood was stepping back from Comic-Con turned out to be overstated; 2011 speakers included Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Kevin Smith, Guillermo Del Toro, Jon Favreau, Peter Jackson, and, yes, Werner Herzog.

Normally, I am exhausted by the time late afternoon comes at Comic-Con. The sensory bombardment (the buzz and crackle of massive television monitors, the smell of over-priced hotdogs and nachos, the constant shock of random encounters with people dressed like their favorite cartoon characters) is simply too intense to prolong. Having gotten up at the crack of dawn to wait in line for some high-profile event, by late afternoon parents are getting into red-faced fights with their children, couples seem to be in danger of breaking up, and people are slumped over on the buses, some snoring, others weeping, from the exhaustion.

We stayed late on Friday, hoping to get into a packed hall to watch the pilot of a television series, Locke and Key–a pilot which most fans knew in all likelihood would never reach the air. Fox commissioned this series based on the best-selling horror comics from Steven King’s son, Joe Hill, who was recognized that weekend by the Eisner Awards as the best comics writer of the year. Fox decided not to add Locke and Key to their slate. The producers shared the pilot here in hopes of rallying fan support behind either airing it on another network or developing it straight-to-DVD. The pilot was remarkably faithful to the original graphic novel and respected the intelligence of comic book fans. (No wonder Fox didn’t pick it up!) But the producer’s efforts to rally fan support suggests just how much weight they believe this jury might play in shaping the fate of cult media properties.

By contrast, Grimm, a fairy-tale themed series that made it onto NBC’s fall line-up, had trouble finding the love, despite a pedigree that includes top writers from Angel. The Comic-Con crowd snorted over one obvious plot device (a woman who keeps passing out every time she’s about to deliver a key piece of information) and rustled their feet over abrupt shifts in tone and style. As my wife put it, Grimm “doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up.” Some fans were already skeptical going into this event because Grimm and Once Upon a Time, both on the fall schedule, seemed so clearly derivative of a long-run Vertigo comics series, Fables. All of them explored the fantasy of storyland characters entering our contemporary reality.

Fans applauded politely when the lights rose, but everyone there knew this screening was, well, grim. (Grimm was picked up for a full season, but its ratings have been lackluster compared to the success of its rival, Once Upon a Time.) Contrary to what some producers might have told themselves, the Comic-Con crowd isn’t fickle: it knows exactly what it wants from genre entertainment, and the producers had better deliver it or face our collective scorn.

Comic-Con as Consciousness-Raising Session

The popular vampire series Twilight‘s stars and producers opened the film program in 2011. Twilight’s involvement in Comic-Con has been controversial, with picketers marching outside the theater in years past with signs proclaiming that “real vampires don’t sparkle” and “Twi-hards, go home.” Throughout the first half of the 20th century, science fiction and comics fandom were dominated by technologically inclined men. However, by the early 1960s, feminist writers like Ursula K. Le Guin or Joanna Russ were drawing more women to fan gatherings, and there have been high-profile conflicts around gender in fandom ever since. Go to some cons, and the attendees are overwhelmingly male. Others are overwhelmingly female. Comic-Con (in recent years at least) has felt a dramatic increase in female attendance that has brought with it some growing pains. The same year that a small number of male fans picketed the Twilight panel, for instance, people were passing out fliers about sexual harassment, suggesting uncertainty about how the fanboys and fangirls were going to interact.

In fact, there were huge numbers of female fans in line outside Ballroom 20–not teenyboppers wanting to hamster-pile Robert Pattison, not girlfriends of male fans, and not exhibitionists trying to see how much skin they could show (all stereotypes of female fans fostered by the news media). These were dedicated fans in their own right, pursuing their own desires and interests. And, by all reports, male fans this year were more worked up over DC’s decision to re-launch and renumber all of their titles than about the presence or absence of Twilight fangirls. Comic-Con is featuring more and more women in its programming (including female producers and showrunners who are starting to impact genre entertainment), and they are often peppered by questions about how to survive in an industry still largely dominated by men.

Some have argued that Hollywood’s discovery of Comic-Con has inspired the “rise of the fanboy” as a powerful influence on production decisions. The gendered language is purposeful since, apart from the Twilight conflicts, producers and journalists don’t seem to have noticed that there are women gathering in San Diego now, too. How long before their tastes and interests become part of the equation, as the media industry seeks to court their most passionate and influential fans?

And something similar is starting to happen around race and ethnicity. Most fan gatherings are heavily Caucasian, while the few minorities in attendance gather by themselves on panels focused on why fandom is “so damn white.” But, perhaps as a result of the Southern California location, Comic-Con is by far the most racially and ethnically diverse fan gathering in the country. If San Diego is where Hollywood sends its people to learn what the audience thinks, they encounter a multi-racial mix, often with strong views about the ways minorities get marginalized or stereotyped in popular media. In some ways, genre franchises, such as Lost, Heroes, The Matrix, and Star Trek have done a much better job including people of color than other genres. But they still lag behind an American population that is increasingly becoming a minority majority.

At a panel I attended on diversity and fandom, there was lots of discussion about the Racebending campaign launched by fans of The Last Airbender. These fans protested Hollywood’s efforts to take an animated series known for its multicultural representations and make it into a live-action film with white actors cast in most major roles. The fans pushed back, using their online communication skills and partnering with traditional activist groups such as Media Action Network for Asian Americans, to educate their community about the history of “white-casting.” They weren’t successful at changing the casting decisions, but much of The Last Airbender coverage mentioned their protest, and there are many signs that Hollywood is now running gun-shy, backing off other recent casting decisions (Runaways, Akira) when fans and industry critics, including George Takai, call them out. Fans now represent an important force pushing the industry toward a fuller representation of what America looks like–fans as influencers in a different sense.

Comic-Con as Costume Party

If you’ve seen a photograph of Comic-Con, odds are that it showed some fan in a costume. Keep in mind that most of us don’t dress up (or strip down) for the con. However, for those who do, seeing and being seen at Comic-Con is a big part of the fun.

Why do so many people wear costumes at Comic-Con? For the same reason people dress up in costumes at Carnival in Rio, Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Burning Man in the Black Rock Desert. For that matter, why did you dress up for the office Halloween party last year? Because wearing red, blue, or green spandex frees us from what fans like to call our “mundane” roles and creates a festive environment. Herzog nailed it. Comic-Con is a field of dreams and wearing costumes transforms those “dreams” from something personal and private to something shared and public. Showing a pudgy midriff or pasty white skin amidst fur and feathers allows nerds (typically defined by their brains and not their bodies) to feel sexy. Donning cape and cowl allows children and adults to play together, strangers to find others with the same values, and fans to become micro-celebrities posing for pictures with other guests.

Watching all of these costumed characters creates a kind of intertextual vertigo; the more fanlore you know, the more you take pleasure in seeing incongruous juxtapositions. One of my favorite sightings of the weekend was a bevy of women dressed as Disney princesses ordering Bloody Marys at a mock-up of Fangtasia, the vampire bar from HBO’s True Blood. And there were periodic meet-ups where characters from the same universes came together–twenty or so Princess Leia slave girls, an assembly of the Avengers which included someone dressed as Marvel mastermind Stan Lee, and a parade of characters from He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. Out on the streets, I even witnessed a chance encounter between a woman wearing a skin-tight bright blue latex Mystique costume (X-Men) chatting with an equally blue Na’vi from James Cameron’s Avatar, suggesting their common identities as, pardon the pun, people of color.

In Japan, they call it cosplay, andevery weekend there are meet-ups of genre-themed cosplayers in Tokyo’s YoYoGi Park. But the scope, scale, and diversity of what you can see here supersedes anything that’s ever gone down at Harajuku Station.

Comic-Con as Networking Event

A high percentage of Hollywood insiders have emerged from the ranks of fandom. Kevin Smith, Guillermo Del Toro, Joss Whedon, and J. J. Abrams come back year after year because fans accept them as “one of us.” Historically, most major science fiction writers published their first works in amateur fanzines. More and more stars and creators of cult films and television series have similar histories and would come to Comic-Con even if they weren’t paid. Darren Criss, Glee‘s hot-stuff Blaine, was making YouTube videos performing Harry Potter songs only a year or two before joining the show.

Because they are all in San Diego for the weekend, industry insiders use the event to do what they do best–pass around business cards, buy each other lunch, and otherwise network. For the industry insiders and wannabes, the challenge is how to “dress for success” in this festive environment, how to hold onto professional standards while looking like you belong and are not simply a Comic-Con poseur, there just to cut deals. Of course, the other challenge is figuring out how to schedule business meetings so they don’t conflict with the Doctor Who panel you really want to attend.

There’s no question that Comic-Con represents a different kind of trade show environment for corporate networking. If you go to E3, say, you mostly end up talking to other game designers; at ShoWest, movie people; at the National Association of Broadcasters, television folks. But Comic-Con draws from all of the entertainment sectors. Thus, Comic-Con has become the common ground where transmedia deals get cut, yet another reason why it has gained greater importance in an era of media convergence.

Comic-Con as Marketplace

Sooner or later, everyone ends up in the Exhibit Hall, typically multiple times over the weekend. Sometimes it feels like all or most of the 140,000 attendees end up there at the same time. As one fan put it, Comic-Con is the closest thing to Christmas morning you are going to experience as an adult. Again, most media coverage highlights items which fit a mainstream conception of geek culture–ice trays which depict Han Solo in carbonite or sleeping bags which look like the inside of a Tauntaun (both of which, I admit, are pretty cool). But, if you noticed hipsters walking the streets of San Francisco or Los Angles in the fall dressed like contemporary versions of Peter Pan’s Lost Boys in big furry hoods, it might be because they got such media attention at San Diego that summer. And Exhibit Hall is where all of the different communities can find “the stuff dreams are made of”–the otaku (fans of Japanese-made media); the connoisseurs of high-priced original comic book and animation art; the collectors of vintage toys and high-end action figures; the dealers in autographs; the furries (whose kink is dressing up like anthropomorphic animals). Many of these interests are so particular and so dispersed that it’s hard to find what you’re looking for in any given city. Perhaps you can track stuff down on eBay or Etsy, but many hope that it is all at Comic-Con.

For example, my tastes increasingly run toward retrofuturism, a fascination with older imaginings of the future. Steampunk represents one form of retrofuturism and is to Victorian science fiction what Goth is to Victorian fantasy and horror. Steampunk builds outward from the imaginings of Jules Verne and his contemporaries, constructing a technological realm which never existed, built with brass, stained glass, and mahogany. The Exhibit Hall offered everything from handcrafted lab equipment and goggles to high-end steampunk weapons (created by WETA, the New Zealand special effects house responsible for the Lord of the Rings movies.)

In a related vein, I dig mid-century modern images inspired by the “World of Tomorrow” offering at the 1939 World’s Fair. I was especially drawn to booths which dealt with “paper”–old posters, comic strip pages, and other printed matter from the early part of the 20th century. More generally, I collect older forms of media–magic lanterns, stereoscopes, and the like. Somewhere in between lies a new project which has captured my imagination–the production and distribution of new low-fi music on old Victrola wax cylinders. Science fiction fans are increasingly drawn to the past, rather than the future, in their ongoing search for alternatives to the present, and you can find such merchandise on display in the Exhibit Hall.

Comic-Con as Life Support

Ironically, the least attended panels at Comic-Con are often those dealing with comics. Many people here love the content of comics, but many of them are not reading the comics themselves. At Comic-Con, both comics industry veterans and emerging talents often discuss their work in half-full rooms. And the massive waves of shoppers pushing their way through the Exhibit Hall often parted like the Red Sea when it came to the tables in Artists’ Alley, which was really treated as Artists Ghetto. In 2011, many artists moved offsite, figuring they would see the same interested attendees and have more fun hanging out at a local tavern.

As a result of such apathy, the floppy monthly comic books my generation grew up reading may now be an endangered species. The major comics publishers have been absorbed by larger entertainment conglomerates–as Marvel is now a part of Disney and DC a part of Warner Bros.–which prop up the comics publishing ventures as a research and development wing to help the company incubate new media franchises. Cowboys and Aliens, the story goes, was published as a comic almost entirely because they wanted to see if it could build an audience before being turned into a feature film.

Yet many of the people who care about the survival of comics were gathered in San Diego, and there was lots of talk of “Comics without Borders.” A few years ago, this phrase might have referred to the efforts of underground and alternative publishers to escape the constraints of the old Comics Code. Last year it referred to what happens after the bankruptcy of one of the two leading brick and mortar booksellers. Comics used to be available on spin racks in grocery and drug stores. In recent years, however, interested readers have had to seek them out, often stepping down into dark and dank basements where someone who looks and sounds like Comic Book Guy on The Simpsons comments on all of your purchase decisions. The publication of graphic novels and their distribution through chain bookstores brought comics out of hiding again, resulting especially in a dramatic increase of female readers. Now, so-called mainstream publishers (DC and Marvel) sell far fewer titles through comic book shops than the alternative publishers (such as DC’s Vertigo offprint) sell through bookstores. And, curiously, Japanese manga outsell American comics by something like four to one in the U.S. market.

Everyone wanted to know what would happen to all of those casual and crossover readers now that Borders was closing operations. Some calmly suggested that they would simply cross the street to Barnes and Noble., Newly empowered, the Barnes and Noble chain is cutting more aggressive dealers with comics publishers. Meanwhile, DC and Marvel rolled out new strategies for increasing the availability of their titles for download on iPads and other digital platforms, a move which would increase their accessibility to fans but might further endanger the specialty stores for whom the big superhero titles constitute their bread and butter.

Meanwhile, there were gatherings of teachers and librarians who have been part of a larger movement to use comics to encourage young readers. The biggest growth in comics sales over the past few years has come from young adult or all ages titles, largely driven by sales to school and local libraries. Over the past few decades, the average age of the comics reader, much as with other print-based publications, was rising, threatening their industry’s long-term viability. However, the success of comics in the library offers new hope for the next generation. So, if some seemed ready to hold a wake for comics, there were others who, mimicking Monty Python, protested that they were “not dead yet.”

Comic-Con as Classroom

I had breakfast toward the end of the convention with a group of graduate students who were getting credit for attending and researching Comic-Con. This particular extension course has been run since 2007 by Matthew J. Smith from Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, and attracts a diverse collection of students, all pursuing their own projects, using the con as their laboratory or field site. Kane Anderson, a stocky Performance Studies student with flaming red hair from U.C. Santa Barbara, , has spent the past two cons dressed in a range of skin-tight and brightly colored superhero costumes (Captain Marvel and Black Adam, mostly), trying to better understand what motivates the convention’s cosplay. Melissa Miller, a Gothy gender studies and public communications student from Georgia State University, was back for a second year camping out with the “Twi-Moms,” the mature Twilight fans, to better understand fandom’s gender politics.

Throughout the event, I spotted different researchers interviewing people, taking field notes, and, in many cases, “going native” as they abandoned their research to chase after autographs. One of them was on a mighty quest to get Chris Evans to sign his Captain America shield; another was excited to get comic book uber-auteur Grant Morrison to fill out a questionnaire. One academic’s artifact is another’s swag. In fact, many of the young scholars were collecting gifts to carry back home to appease their restless thesis advisors.

Actually, some of their advisors were across the convention center attending events hosted by the Comic Arts Association, a professional organization for scholars researching and teaching about comics and graphic stories. Even as the comics industry is sputtering, there has been a spurt in college-level comic studies courses, much as previous generations had taken subjects in film appreciation. Inside this space, the big debates focused on whether comics studies should become its own discipline or whether comics-focused research should be integrated across everything from anthropology to

art history, from psychology to media studies. This track of academic programming attracted not only faculty and students but creators eager to think about their industry from a different perspective and fans hoping to learn more about the medium’s history and aesthetics.

Comic-Con as Ritual

For the past few years, the formal programming at Comic-Con has ended with a sing-along screening of the musical episode from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Once More, With Feeling.” However diverse they may be on other levels, a high percentage of Comic-Con attendees are fans of the works of Joss Whedon–Buffy, Angel, Firefly/Serenity, Dollhouse, Doctor Horrible’s Singalong Blog, and the forthcoming Avengers movie. And Whedon, as well as others from his casts and crews, was highly visible throughout the convention. Consider all of the Buffy alum, in particular, who were prominently involved in the event: Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy) was there promoting her new CBS series, Ringers; Anthony Head (Giles) was speaking on the Merlin panel and trying to lend his support to Grimm; Nathan Fillion (Caleb), now the star of Castle, was there talking one-on-one with his fans; Felicia Day (Vi) was showcasing the fifth season of her web-series, The Guild; and Seth Green (Oz) dropped by to talk up Robot Chicken. David Boreanaz (Angel) was supposed to be here, but the Bones panel got canceled. And Nicholas Brendon (Xander) came out in front of the sing-along screening and tried to remember the words to the song Anya and Xander sing in the episode. Think of this group as the Buffy diaspora.

In this context, “Once More, With Feeling” has attained near-mythic status–not only because of its genre-bending musical numbers but because it represents the last moment when the “Scooby Gang” was more or less together before the series “jumped the shark,” according to many of its fans (myself among them). When Dawn, Buffy’s kid sister, introduced the plot elements which would lead to the community’s disintegration in the episode, she was booed. Everyone knew what was coming, but we all wanted to forestall it a few minutes more.

Many fan favorites center around themes of friendship, whether bonds between partners or a more expansive community fighting to save the universe. Fans use such stories to reflect on their own social connections, the bonds that bring them together as friends and as part of a subcultural community. For many of us, fandom is one of those places where “it gets better,” where we find others who share our values and don’t make fun of our passions.

We can share some of these same experiences now, year round, in cyberspace. But Comic-Con is the place where communities come together face-to-face, and thus anchor their relationships for the coming year. As Buffy ended, with friends going their separate ways, and as people filed out of the doors of the San Diego Convention Center, I felt a lump in my throat. But I knew that most of us would be back next year, “once more, with feeling.”

Comic-Con is a microcosm of the dramatic changes transforming the U.S. entertainment industry.

As media options proliferate, attention is fragmenting and audience loyalty is declining. The entertainment industry depends on its fans like never before. As social media allows fans to connect with each other and actively spread the word about their favorites, fans are exerting an unprecedented impact on decisions regarding which films to finance and which series to put on the air. As more and more stories are being told across media platforms, Comic-Con is the crossroads among entertainment sectors. As comics publishing is struggling to survive, here is where its future will be determined. And, as Comic-Con’s own population diversifies to include more women and minorities, this gathering becomes a vehicle through which they lobby for greater diversity within mainstream media.

That all of this takes place in such a giddy atmosphere, full of carnivalesque costumes and grand spectacle, only lubricates the social relations among these groups, making it easier to shed old roles and embrace new relationships. For those five days, the center of the U.S. entertainment industry is not Hollywood, but a few hundred miles south in San Diego.

Filed Under: Comics Culture, fan culture, participation, transmedia entertainment
February 27, 2012

Announcing Transmedia Hollywood 3: Rethinking Creative Relations

By

UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television,

and

USC School of Cinematic Arts &

USC Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism

Present:

Transmedia Hollywood 3: Rethinking Creative Relations

April 6, 2012, USC

Conference Overview:

As transmedia models become more central to the ways that the entertainment industry operates, the result has been some dramatic shifts within production culture, shifts in the ways labor gets organized, in how productions get financed and distributed, in the relations between media industries, and in the locations from which creative decisions are being made. This year’s Transmedia Hollywood examines the ways that transmedia approaches are forcing the media industry to reconsider old production logics and practices, paving the way for new kinds of creative output. Our hope is to capture these transitions by bringing together established players from mainstream media industries and independent producers trying new routes to the market. We also hope to bring a global perspective to the conversation, looking closely at the ways transmedia operates in a range of different kinds of creative economies and how these different imperatives result in different understandings of what transmedia can contribute to the storytelling process–for traditional Hollywood, the global media industries, and for all the independent media-makers who are taking up the challenge to reinvent traditional media-making for a “connected” audience of collaborators.

Many of Hollywood’s entrenched business and creative practices remain deeply mired in the past, weighed down by rigid hierarchies, interlocking bureaucracies, and institutionalized gatekeepers (e.g. the corporate executives, agents, managers, and lawyers). In this volatile moment of crisis and opportunity, as Hollywood shifts from an analog to a digital industry, one which embraces collaboration, collectivity, and compelling uses of social media, a number of powerful independent voices have emerged. These include high-profile transmedia production companies such as Jeff Gomez’s Starlight Runner Entertainment as well as less well-funded and well-staffed solo artists who are coming together virtually from various locations across the globe. What these top-down and bottom-up developments have in common is a desire to buck tradition and to help invent the future of entertainment. One of the issues we hope to address today is the social, cultural, and industrial impact of these new forms of international collaboration and mixtures of old and new work cultures.

Another topic that will be addressed is the future of independent film. Will creative commons replace copyright? Will crowdsourcing replace the antiquated foreign sales model? Will the guilds be able to protect the rights of digital laborers who work for peanuts? What about audiences who work for free? Given that most people today spend the bulk of their leisure time online, why aren’t independent artists going online and connecting with their community before committing their hard-earned dollars on a speculative project designed for the smallest group of people imaginable–those that frequent art-house theaters?

Fearing obsolescence in the near future, many of Hollywood’s traditional studios and networks are looking increasingly to outsiders–often from Silicon Valley or Madison Avenue–to teach these old dogs some new tricks. Many current studio and network executives are overseeing in-house agencies, whose names–Sony Interactive Imageworks, NBC Digital, and Disney Interactive Media Group–are meant to describe their cutting-edge activities and differentiate themselves from Hollywood’s old guard. Creating media in the digital age is “nice work if you can get it,” according to labor scholar Andrew Ross in a recent book of the same name. Frequently situated in park-like “campuses,” many of these new, experimental companies and divisions are hiring large numbers of next generation workers, offering them attractive amenities ranging from coffee bars to well-prepared organic food to basketball courts. However, even though these perks help to humanize the workplace, several labor scholars (e.g. Andrew Ross, Mark Deuze, Rosalind Gill) see them as glittering distractions, obscuring a looming problem on the horizon–a new workforce of “temps, freelancers, adjuncts, and migrants.”

While the analog model still dominates in Hollywood, the digital hand-writing is on the wall; therefore, the labor guilds, lawyers, and agent/managers must intervene to find ways to restore the eroding power/leverage of creators. In addition, shouldn’t the guilds be mindful of the new generation of digital laborers working inside these in-house agencies? What about the creative talent that emerges from Madison Avenue ad agencies like Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, makers of the Asylum 626 first-person horror experience for Doritos; or Grey’s Advertising, makers of the “Behind the Still” collective campaign for Canon? Google has not only put the networks’ 30-second ad to shame using Adword, but its Creative Labs has taken marketing to new aesthetic heights with its breathtaking Johnny Cash [collective] Project. Furthermore, Google’s evocative Parisian Love campaign reminds us just how intimately intertwined our real and virtual lives have become.

Shouldn’t Hollywood take note that many of its most powerful writers, directors, and producers are starting to embrace transmedia in direct and meaningful ways by inviting artists from the worlds of comic books, gaming, and web design to collaborate? These collaborations enhance the storytelling and aesthetic worlds tenfold, enriching “worlds” as diverse as The Dark Knight, The Avengers, and cable’s The Walking Dead. Hopefully, this conference will leave all of us with a broader understanding of what it means to be a media maker today–by revealing new and expansive ways for artists to collaborate with Hollywood media managers, audiences, advertisers, members of the tech culture, and with one another.

PANEL 1 (9:15-11:15): “Realigned Work-Worlds: Hollywood/Silicon Valley/Madison Avenue” Denise Mann, moderator

This panel seeks to capture the unruly, still unfolding, wild wild west moment of cultural-industrial conversion taking place in both virtual and real-world workplaces as Hollywood looks for top-down solutions to engaging with consumers where they live–online. Once the dominant players in the content industry, Hollywood today is having to look as far away as Silicon Valley and Madison Avenue for collaborators in the 2.0 space. Many in Hollywood are trying to bridge the gap between the old and new ways of doing business, describing their operations as “Silicon Valley startups within a big media company.” Disney is buying out the founders of social experiments like Club Penguin, Togetherville, and Playdom in order to reinvent their family business for the connected generation. In each instance, Hollywood’s old guard is having to rely on a new generation of entrepreneurs from the tech and geek communities to teach them how to navigate the 21st century.

Break: 11:15-11:30

Panel Two (11:30-1:30): “Creative Economies: Commercial vs. State-Based Models”

Henry Jenkins, moderator

In the United States, transmedia production has been often coupled with issues of promotion and branding, because of the ways that production is funded in a Hollywood studio or network television models. But, around the world, in countries where there is strong state support for media production, alternative forms of transmedia are taking shape, which are governed by different imperatives (cultural, educational, artistic). How has transmedia fit within the effort of nation-states to promote and expand their creative economies? What can commercial media producers learn from these alternative models and approaches? How might these developments further expand our understanding of what transmedia is and what it can contribute to the language of storytelling? What are the advantages and disadvantages of creating transmedia content under these different kinds of creative economies?

Lunch (1:30-2:30)

Panel Three (2:30-4:30): “Working on the Margins–Who Pays for Transformative Works of Art?” Denise Mann, moderator

The independent film industry isn’t working any longer–so says powerful indie producer Ted Hope, who now advocates for using transmedia entertainment models that allow media-makers to engage directly with fans, and in the process, rethink old production, marketing, and distribution patterns that no longer make sense in the 21st century. A new generation of media-makers, actors, writers, directors, and producers are taking concrete steps to reinvent bottom-up entertainment for the contemporary, connected, tech-savvy audience. For some independent-minded creators, the best way to connect with today’s self-aware audience is by creating a self-mocking, self-reflexive web series like The Guild or Dr. Horrible. For others, the best way to engage with the audience is by creating collective works of art via star-driven companies like hitRECord or Funny or Die. The impulse behind each of these works of collective intelligence is to take art out of the rarified world of crumbling art-house theaters, museums, and galleries and put it back into the hands of the masses– creating an immersive, interactive, and collective works of transmedia entertainment, made by and for the people who enjoy it most.

Break (4:30-4:45)

Panel 4 (4:45-6:45): “Creative Intersections: How Comics Fit into the Transmedia Ecology”

Henry Jenkins, moderator

By many accounts, the comics industry in the United States struggles to survive, with mainstream titles facing declining readerships, despite some growth in the sales of independent graphic novels through bookstores. Yet, the comics industry has never played a more central role in the entertainment industry as a whole, with comics seeding more and more film and television franchises, and with comics performing important functions within larger transmedia projects. So, how can we understand the paradoxical status of the comics industry? In what ways are these other media outlets helping to subsize the production of printed comics? What kinds of advantages does content audience-tested through comics bring to other media industries? Why have so many television series sought to extend their narratives through graphic novels in recent years? As comics are brought to the screen, what do the producers owe to the fans of the original material as opposed to new viewers who may have little to no awareness of the series’ origins in comics? What lessons might transmedia producers learn from the larger history of extended universes and intertexuality within comics?

Moderators:

Henry Jenkins

Henry Jenkins is the Provost’s Professor of Communications, Journalism, Cinematic Arts, and Education at the University of Southern California. He is the author or editor of 15 books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (1992), Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2006) and with Sam Ford and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Media and Value in a Networked Culture (Fall, 2012).

Denise Mann

Denise Mann is Associate Professor and Head of the Producers Program at the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television. Her most recent book is Hollywood Independents: The Postwar Talent Takeover (Minnesota, 2008). Previously, Mann co-edited Private Screenings: Television & the Female Consumer (Minnesota, 1992) and has published articles on television and consumer culture in a range of journals. Mann served as an associate editor on Camera Obscura, a journal of feminism and film theory, for six years.

Speakers include:

Ivan Askwith

Ivan Askwith is Senior Director of Digital Media at Lucasfilm, where he oversees strategic and creative direction for the wide range of online, mobile, social and cross-platform initiatives that make up the digital presence of Star Wars, Lucasfilm, and the company’s other properties. Previously, he was the Director of Strategy at Big Spaceship.

Morgan Bouchet

Morgan Bouchet is Transmedia and Social Media Vice President of the Content Division of Orange and is Director of the Orange Transmedia Lab . Orange is a brand of France Telecom, the main telecommunications company in France (and one of the world’s largest). Bouchet joined France Telecom in 2000, developing content experiences and Vod products before moving to transmedia and social media. Prior to France Telecom, Bouchet was manager of the New Media division of FKGB, a French entertainment marketing company.

Angela Chen Caplan

Angela Cheng Caplan is the President and CEO of Cheng Caplan Company, Inc., a boutique literary/talent management and production company based in Los Angeles, California, representing Academy Award nominated filmmakers, best-selling book authors, Pulitzer Prize winning journalists and world famous comic book creators such as Brian Wood

Katerina Cizek

Director Katerina Cizek is an Emmy-winning documentary-maker working across many media platforms. Cizek directs the National Film Board of Canada’s Highrise series on residential skyscrapers. For five years, she was the National Film Board of Canada’s Filmmaker-in-Residence at an inner-city hospital, in a many-media project that won a 2008 Webby Award, a Banff Award, and a Canadian New Media Award.

Sara Diamond

Sara Diamond is the President of the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD) University, Canada’s “university of the imagination.” Prior to her presidency at OCAD University, Dr. Diamond was the Artistic Director of Media and Visual Art and Director of Research at the Banff Centre, where in 1995 she created the Banff New Media Institute (BNMI) and led it for 10 years. Dr. Diamond holds a PhD in computer science and degrees in new media theory and practice, social history, and communications from the United Kingdom and Canada.

Christy Dena

Dr. Christy Dena is the director of Universe Creation 101, an organization that creates and consults cross-media narrative development. As a transmedia analyst, she collaborated with colleagues Tim Kring, Nokia and The company P on Conspiracy for Good, a Digital Emmy-nominated alternate reality experience (2011 Digital Emmy-nominated alternate reality experience. Another recent project includes curating and co-organizing Transmedia Victoria, an industry conference and workshop for the Australia Council of the Arts. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Sydney, a postgraduate diploma in Creative Writing from University of Melbourne, and a B.A. in Visual and Performing Arts from Monash University.

Nick De Martino

Nick De Martino is a media and technology consultant and was Senior Vice President of Media and Technology at the American Film Institute for 20 years before retiring in 2010. Under his direction, AFI and Apple Computer developed the first training lab for Hollywood filmmakers, the beginning of many collaborations with high-powered technology companies (that also included Adobe, Intel, and IBM, among others). The Los Angeles Business Journal named De Martino a leader in technology twice, and in 2006, the Hollywood Reporter and the Producer’s Guild of America’s New Media Council ranked De Martino #3 in the “Digital 50″ which recognizes digital innovaters.

Jennifer Holt

Jennifer Holt is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara. She specializes in the areas of media industry studies, film and television history, and media policy. Her current research looks at regulation and policy in the era of digitization and convergence. She is the co-editor of Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method (Blackwell, 2009) and author of Empires of Entertainment (Rutgers UP, 2011), which examines deregulation and media conglomeration from 1980-1996. She is also the Co-Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center’s Media Industries Project.

Ted Hope

Ted Hope has produced Academy-Award nominated independent films such as 21 Grams (2003), The Savages (2007), and In The Bedroom (2001). Three of his entries to the Sundance Film Festival have won the Grand Jury Prize: American Splendor (2003), The Brothers McMullen (1995), and What Happened Was.. (1994). In the early 1990s, he co-founded Good Machine, an independent film production and distribution company that went to become Focus Features. Currently, Hope works from his New York-based indie production house, This Is That, which he co-founded in 2002. He is the recipient of the 2009 Vision Award from the LA Filmmakers’ Alliance as well as the Woodstock Film Festival’s Honorary Trailblazer Award.

Gareth Kay

Gareth Kay is Chief Strategy Officer of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, an ad agency based in San Francisco. He joined GS&P as the Director of Digital Strategy in 2009. Prior to joining GS&P, Kay was Head of Planning at Modernista!, where he oversaw the strategic direction of all accounts including Cadillac, HUMMER, Napster and (RED). Gareth began his career in the UK and worked at TBWA, dfgw and Lowe. Gareth serves on the boards of Boulder Digital Works and the VCU Brandcenter, and sits on the Google Creative Leadership Council.

Katherine Keller

Katherine Keller is a “Founding Tart” and the current Culture Vultures

Editrix at Sequential Tart. She is married to Ralph Mathieu, owner of

the Eisner nominated Alternate Reality Comics. (Yes, she married her

neighborhood comic shop owner.) In her day job she works at the Lied

Library, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is passionate about

comics, pop culture, fandom, and open access publishing.

Joe LeFavi

Joe LeFavi, is a transmedia producer and brand strategist who launched consultancy Quixotic Transmedia in 2010. His company provided the transmedia strategy for Immortals (2011), Relativity Media’s highest grossing film. He has also collaborated with I am Rogue, Lionsgate and Crest Animation. In addition, his company has published motion comics for Platinum’s Cowboys & Aliens, numerous titles for Archaia such as Immortals and Johnny Recon, and over 100+ titles for The Jim Henson Company, which includes their line of Archaia graphic novels.

Jordan Levin

Jordan Levin is founding partner and CEO of Generate, a management and cross-platform production company in Los Angeles. Levin is best known for co-founding the WB, where he where he helped develop a distinctive brand of young-skewing shows (Dawson’s Creek, Gilmore Girls, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and served as the youngest-ever network CEO.

Sheila C. Murphy

Shelia C. Murphy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Screen Arts & Cultures at the University of Michigan. Murphy is also the author of How Television Invented New Media (Rutgers UP, 2011). She received her B.A. in Art History from the University of Rochester and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Visual Studies from the University of California, Irvine. From teletubbies to cybernetics, television to “convergence,” net.art and hacking, her interest lies in visual discourse of and cultural rhetoric about how, why, when and where we use computers and incorporate them into our everyday life.

Jose Padhila

Jose Padhila is a Brazilian filmmaker and producer. His credits include Bus 174, Elite Squad, and Elite Squad: The Enemy Within, a trilogy that explores corruption and brutality in Brazil. Elite Squad won the Golden Berlin Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2008, one of Padhila’s many filmmaking awards. Upcoming films include Robocop, Words with Gods and Rio, eu te amo.

Mike Richardson

Mike Richardson is the current president of Dark Horse Comics, a comics publishing company he founded in 1986, as well as the president of Dark Horse Entertainment, which has developed and produced numerous projects for film and television based on Dark Horse or other licensed properties. Dark Horse publishes many licensed comics, including comics based on Star Wars, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Aliens, Predator, Mass Effect, and Conan; the company also publishes creator owned comics such as Frank Miller’s Sin City and 300, Mike Mignola’s Hellboy, Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo, Paul Chadwick’s Concrete, and Michael Chabon’s The Escapist.

Mark Verheiden

Mark Verheiden is a writer for comics, movies, and television. He is a co-executive producer for the television series Falling Skies for DreamWorks Television and the TNT Network. Verheiden was also a writer and consulting producer for Heroes and a a writer and co-executive producer on the television series Battlestar Galactica. Verheiden’s introduction into writing comics came in June 1987, when he penned The American, which was published by Dark Horse Comics. Verheiden has written many series for Dark Horse based on both the Aliens and Predator series of films.

Mary Vogt

Mary Vogt is a costume designer who has been Emmy-nominated for her work on Pushing Daisies (2008). She was the costume designer for the Men in Black movies, Batman Returns (1992), Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007), and the 2010 Tamil (South Asian) science fiction blockbuster, Endhiran (Robot).

Watch here for further speaker announcements.

Location:

Venue

Eileen Norris Cinema Theatre, USC Cinematic Arts Complex, Los Angeles

Parking

The USC School of Cinematic Arts is located at 900 W. 34th St., Los Angeles, CA 90007. Parking passes are available for Parking Structure D (PSD) for $8.00 at Entrance Gate #4, located off Jefferson Blvd. at Royal Street (east of Hoover Street). The School of Cinematic Arts is down 34th Street (heading away from Figueroa) from the Parking Structure. To view a map of the Parking Structures and Entrance Gates, visit http://web-app.usc.edu/maps/

Conference Pass (includes admission to all panels and reception)

General Public: $40

Faculty/Students: $10

(Valid university ID required at check-in)

Purchase Tickets here

Processing fees may apply.

All sales are final.

Extra Event: Teaching Transmedia

As more and more colleges and universities are teaching courses in transmedia enertainment, crossmedia design, and convergence culture, Transmedia Hollywood wants to invite people interested in exchanging resources or trading experiences to gather for a special “birds of a feather” meeting at the Annenberg Innovation Lab on the eve of the conference — April 5 — at 7 pm. If you want to come, drop me a note at hjenkins@usc.edu

Filed Under: branded entertainment, Comics Culture, globalization watch, transmedia entertainment, University of Southern California
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