Why Media Studies Should Pay More Attention to Christian Media...

I have been pleasantly surprised by how much interest has been generated by last week's announcement in the blog that Comparative Media Studies and the MIT Communications Forum was hosting a special event focused on Evangelicals and the media. So, I wanted to be sure to let you know that the webcast version of the event is now available. Some people have asked why our program would help to host such an event. There are a number of reasons why media scholars should care more about the use of media by this particular population:

1. This event brought together representatives of two of the largest and most influential media ministries operating today -- James Dobson's Focus on the Family and Rick Warren's Saddleback Church. While they often operate in a world apart from mainstream commercial media, their work has enormous reach. For example, Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life, has sold more than 20 million copies, making it the bestselling nonfiction hardback book in history, though many of those copies sold through Wall-Mart or Christian bookstores

which do not necessarily register in the tabulations of the New York Times best-seller list. Similarly the Dobson organization has run a major media empire since the late 1970s.

2. As Diane Winston explained during her opening remarks at the Forum, Evangelical Christians have been key innovators in their use of emerging media technologies, tapping every available channel in their effort to spread the Gospel around the world. I often tell students that the history of new media has been shaped again and again by four key innovative groups -- evangelists, pornographers, advertisers, and politicians, each of whom is constantly looking for new ways to interface with their public.

3. Anyone who wants to understand how niche media works in this country needs to understand what's going on in Christian media. It's hard to call Christians a subculture when most studies suggest that the vast majority of Americans claim some religious faith and most claim to belong to some mainstream Christian denomination. Yet, because the most hardcore members of these groups feel alienated from much of commercial popular culture, they have created their own alternative cultural sphere -- producing their own television programs, films,

music, games, magazines, comics, you name it. We can learn a lot by studying the strategies by which this alternative popular culture is produced, distributed, and consumed, often depending heavily on viral marketing to get the word out without having to rely on mainstream media channels.

4. While we often talk about "conservative Christians" as if the evangelical movement spoke with one voice, the term evangelical actually describes a range of different religious, cultural, and political perspectives, as was clear as we begin to see the contrast of perspectives between the two media ministers who spoke on this panel. One important educational function an event like this can play is helping people to recognize and understand the diversity of the

evangelical movement and thus push past some of our stereotypes. Getting ready for this event, I shared with my students a broad range of Christian-produced media from the rather hardcore music videos of Carman to news reports on Rick Warren's conversations with Barack Obama. Some of what we watched -- including some materials from Dobson promoting abstinence education -- upset some of my students, while other materials fit more comfortably within the consensus of the class. (We often justify showing other controversial content on the grounds that we want to "challenge" our student's preconceptions. Well, maybe it is time we challenged our student's preconceptions about "crazy Christians.") My students learned something by simply observing the personal style, the language, the tone, even the delivery of the speakers, as well as listening to the ways they answered questions from the audience.

5. Academic institutions may have an important role to play in supporting and sustaining conversations between conservatives and liberals in the face of the growing divisiveness of American politics. I am eager to use some of the programming we do through CMS to bring together people who may come from fundamentally different ideological perspectives in a context where we can have a civil conversation designed to help us understand what others believe and why they believe it. I was personally very pleased with the tone of the conversation -- the questions from the floor were smart and respectful and the speakers saw this as an occasion to encourage reflection and dialog rather than as a chance to prostheltize to our community. Indeed, I think in this context, the speakers were more frank in addressing core concerns than they would have in a more confrontational context, allowing us to get a better glimpse into how they think about and deploy media.

I should acknowledge that Timothy Stoneman, currently a visiting scholar in the Science, Technology, and Society program was the person who first proposed this session and assisted in recruiting the speakers. He is doing interesting work about the use of radio by evangelical missionaries, a project which sheds light on a somewhat earlier chapter in the history of Christian media.

By the way, we've gotten questions about whether our sessions with Jim Ross and Mick Foley, recent guests to the CMS program from World Wrestling Entertainment, will be available via podcast. We have fallen a little behind putting up the podcasts on the web due to a range of other activities but these events were recorded and I will let readers know when they go up on our site.

Meanwhile, if Christian media is not interesting to you, might I suggest checking out the podcast of advertising guru Alan Moore's recent talk at the CMS program. Moore's work will be familiar to readers of this blog through an interview I did with him earlier this year.

[Note: This post originally misidentified Dr. Dobson as Charles rather than James. I don't know where my brain was at since I have been following James Dobson since the 1970s. I might have crossed him with Charles Stanley, who was the minister of a mega-church in Atlanta when I was growing up. Sorry for the confusion.]

Notes from a New World: An Interview with Wagner James Au (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first part of a two part interview with Wagner James Au, a longtime reporter on games and games culture, who is currently finishing up a book about his experiences as an "embedded journalist" in Second Life, New World Notes. Yesterday,he shared some of his thoughts about the nature of Second Life and about how he came to become some involved in this story. Today, I have asked him to respond to some of the issues which have surfaced in recent debates about the "value" of virtual worlds in general and Second Life in particular. I first met Au some years ago when he was writing a engaging little fantasy spoofing the news that Julia Roberts was a closet gamer (a fan of Halo, in fact). He had decided that "Professor Jenkins," the mild mannered protagonist who appears in accounts of my testimony before the U..S. Senate Commerce Committee and my savaging on Donahue (see Fans, Gamers, and Bloggers for the sordid details), might be an ideal figure to make an appearance inside the story and help account for Julia's fixation on violent entertainment. In his original draft, he even included a brief sexual encounter between Prof. Jenkins and America's Sweetheart (well, he had her plant a loving kiss on the top of my bald head, to be more precise) which got "censored" from the version of the story that finally appeared in Salon. All that was left was a reference to my surely uncontroversial claim that Julia Roberts is a "hotie," something I would never say, of course, but which does reflect my long-standing fascination with her screen career.

As it happens, he had come to the right place, since one of my first claims to fame was that I was a student teacher for American History at Campbell High School in Smyrna, Georgia and that Julia Roberts, then a young drama geek, was a student in my class. If memory serves me correctly, I sent Julia to the principal's office for talking during class and barely missed out on the chance to see her in a high school production. So, when he heard the news, Au asked me to write my own version -- still tongue in cheek -- about the truth behind the story of Ms. Robert's fixation on Halo:

Can we blame her if she slips home at night ... and blasts evil minions to hell and back -- something else she never gets to do in her movies? Shouldn't we feel bad for the way our culture exploits her grace, charm and beauty in vehicles which amount to little more than shameless and gratuitous displays of niceness and appeals to our prurient interest in innocence and levity ... Mr. and Mrs. America, don't let your daughters give themselves over to the light side ... the best thing to cure them of all that pent-up purity may be a really bloodthirsty video game...

I have served as a source off and on for other, more weighty stories that Au has covered in the games space and we were lucky enough to have him speak about his perspectives on multiplayer games and learning during one of the Education Arcade conferences, which we hosted as part of E3. I consistently find him one of the most informed reporters covering games today and so I am delighted to get a chance to share this interview with you.

You have, of course, been following the ongoing debate about the "value" of Second Life. How much weight -- positively or negatively-- should we place on the issue of subscriber numbers in terms of evaluating what is going on in Second Life? Are there other measures or criteria we should be using?

The numbers do matter. The growth of Second Life will determine whether it becomes an important but relatively niche platform, or evolves, as some (including myself) have suggested, into an essential part of the Net's next generation.

The question to ask is what happens to Second Life if it continues to expand at its

existing growth rate of 23% monthly

--.what Clay Shirky himself (rather conservatively) calls "healthy growth". At the current velocity, the number of active SL Residents will easily be over a million by the end of 2007. ("Active" defined as a unique user who logs into the world at least once a week, 3 months after account creation.)

Even assuming that Second Life growth somehow stalls toward the end of 2007, it will still wind up a moderately successful niche MMO of some one million active users. (See this graph, by my blog's demographics expert, Tateru Nino.)

Given the world's current activity, the number of companies and institutions investing in it, growth of EU users (who now outstrip Americans), imminent localization to the the Asian markets, continued expansion of broadband, this outcome is actually the *least* plausible scenario. However, it's worth contemplating for awhile, at least for the sake of skeptics who insist Second Life is not a phenomenon worthy of heightened attention. For even then, we will still be talking about an online world that has been fostered and sustained entirely through user-created content, comprised of a million regular participants from around the world, existing in a diverse ecology of commerce, art, entertainment, technological, educational and scientific pursuits, most of them homegrown, some of them financed by corporate and non-profit concerns from around the globe. I fail to see how this would not be a unique and important Internet phenomenon, and how it would not remain an important contributor to Net culture.

And recall again that this is the *pessimistic* scenario. The far more plausible scenario is that the existing growth rates will continue into 2008, meaning we'll then begin to approach active user numbers in the several millions. Most likely, the network effect will continue this growth, especially as the open source initiative shows progress in improving Second Life's interface and user experience (the main culprit for its poor retention numbers) and as the servers themselves are open sourced (more on that down the way), making it feasible to talk about user numbers in the tens of millions. And beyond.

The conclusion of your book deals with the future of Second Life -- which might be seen as a core concern of the debate. How would you respond to Shirkey's argument that World of Warcraft represents a much more viable model for online experience than Second Life?

The important thing to keep in mind is that Clay has little or no first-hand experience with Second Life (unless that's changed since last December, when he acknowledged as much to me) and therefore, it's important to separate out his entirely valid comments about uncritical press coverage of total user-signups, and any of his speculations about the Second Life experience which are either second hand, or depend on inferences which don't map to Second Life as it's actually experienced.

Take the argument that a traditional role-playing game is more compelling than a social game. In regards to Second Life, again, this is where Clay's *a priori* kung fu fails him. With Second Life, it's not an either-or proposition. There are numerous user-created roleplaying games *within* Second Life, actually, many with substantial followings. The first, Dark Life, an old school mini-MMO in the World of Warcraft mode, was created by a professional game developer back in 2003, and still has a following. In the last few weeks alone, my games correspondent has covered several-- here , here and

here . I'd estimate that 25% or so of Second Life's active users regularly play one or more of the world's mini-MMOs, or engage in other RPG/gamer activity. The quality of these games have gone up tremendously, in recent months, so I expect those numbers to grow.

The other question is, "Viable how?" If by viable we mean "popular", that distinction probably belongs to CyWorld of South Korea, not World of Warcraft. With a reported 20 million unique users in 2005, CyWorld's nearly 3 times as popular than WoW. And CyWorld is not an RPG, but a social/chat space for avatars. It's also worth mentioning Habbo Hotel , the European social world with a reported 7 million unique regular users last December, roughly equivalent to WoW at the time.

By "viable", do we mean experientially? Because World of Warcraft actually runs through thousands of shards (i.e. separate copies of the same world) largely divided by global region, with Europeans shunted to their own servers, Asians to theirs, etc. As a combat-oriented genre game with few outlets for pure socialization, it attracts far less women than Second Life. (In Nick Yee's demographic analysis, 16% of WoW players are female; by contrast, in Second Life, about 40% of Residents are women.) And, of course, WoW is a leading revenue source for its parent corporation, Vivendi. So I guess

my question is this: how exactly is a male-dominated fantasy violence simulator which effectively segregates its players by national origin and is part and parcel owned by one of the world's largest multinational media conglomerates supposed to be the most "viable model" of the online world experience? (Except, of course, for Vivendi shareholders.) I'm just not seeing it.

There is right now one web with many participants, yet there are competing worlds in the multiverse space and there are apt to be even more competitors. Doesn't this fragmentation of worlds pose a challenge to those who might imagine something like Second Life as a future for the web?

Yes, this threatens to lead to a fork in the metaverse, where user base for online worlds remains divided into numerous, incompatible worlds according to interest/preference:

Google Earth, Multiverse, Croquet, Areae, traditional MMOs, revamped Asian online worlds,

and the recently announced worlds from Sony and MTV. The one which succeeds most, I suspect, will be the one that's most like the Web, with open standards and interoperability. SL is heading in that direction, as is Areae and Croquet. Most likely, there will be portals between several of these open- sourced worlds, suggesting a kind of multi-metaverse where individuals maintain several avatars and a universal substrate identity.

Notes from a New World: Interview with Wagner James Au (Part One)

I have been using this blog, off and on, across the past few months, to focus attention and generate debate about Second Life as a particularly rich example of participatory culture. Those who have followed this blog over time will have read my response to Clay Shirkey's critique of Second Life, my conversation with Peter Ludlow, the editor of the Second Life Herald and the co-Author of a new book on virtual worlds, and my response to questions about the relationship between Second Life and real world politics. Today, I want to continue this consideration of Second Life with an interview with Wagner James Au, the author of a forthcoming book, New World Notes, which describes his experiences as an "embedded journalist" covering the early days of Second Life. Au had contacted me in response to some of my earlier posts on this topic and I asked if he'd be willing to share some of his thoughts to my readers. Here's what his online biography says:

Wagner James Au is the author of New World Notes, and is also a game designer and screenwriter. He reviews computer games for Wired and has covered gaming as an artistic and cultural force for Salon. He has written on these subjects for the Los Angeles Times, Lingua Franca, Smart Business, Feed, Stim, Game Slice, Computer Gaming World, and Game Developer, among others. He's spoken about his work at South by Southwest, Education Arcade, and State of Play II. He is now developing New World Notes into a book.

Today, we open the interview with some discussion of his experiences covering Second Life and his general perspective about the mix of factors which is pushing this particular corner of the multiverse into the center of discussions about virtual worlds. Tomorrow, he will weigh in more directly on the three way debate between Jenkins, Shirkey, and Beth Coleman. For those who'd like to read more of his thoughts on Second Life, I'd recommend checking out "Taking New World Notes" which appeared in First Monday.

Can you tell us about how you came to become an "embedded journalist" in Second Life?

In the spring of 2003, Linden Lab gave me a demo of SL, then in early Beta. They brought me in, I think, because I'd recently written for Salon about the potential of user-created content in the "mod" culture of games, and Will Wright's emphasis on that (subsequently discarded) feature for The Sims Online. But during the demo, Linden Vice President Robin Harper suggested something else. What if I wrote *for* them, within the world, as a journalist-- an embedded journalist, as it were? (I had full editorial

control on the stories I pursued and wrote about, I should add, with the only prior restraints asked of me that I be scrupulously fair when reporting on disputes between Residents.) In early 2006, I left to write my book about Second Life for HarperCollins, and continue my reporting on my own independent blog, New World Notes .

Can you give us some sense of the shape of your forthcoming book? What are the

key questions you try to address?

It'll track the develop of Second Life both as a world and a Web 2.0 phenomenon, weaving a lot of the stories I've written for New World Notes into a broader and expanded narrative.

Why do you think Second Life has generated such interest (some would say Hype) in recent months? How does this hype distort the actual nature of the experience? Is there any aspect of Second Life that you think has been underhyped and under reported?

Right now there are two conversations about Second Life going on. The first involves all the numerous real world companies setting up shop in SL, coupled to mainstream news reports about the world that are, of course, introductory, and focus fairly consistently on the money-making opportunities. This is almost entirely the source of the backlash and hype in the pejorative sense. It's also the surface narrative which, while part of the SL phenomenon, does more to occlude the deeper activity going on. The second conversation, by contrast, involves all the grassroots user-created content which is merging the world with the broader web, creating a more robust world in a roleplaying sense, while also evolving it into a platform for real world applications. That's the main story, in my opinion, the one I try to tell on New Worlds Notes, and the one which accounts for Second Life's consistent, steady growth. It's not a function of media and corporate interest. The Sims Online was featured on the cover of Newsweek, was a spinoff to the most popular computer game franchises of all time, and attracted several major corporations who wanted to promote their brands within it, but without Second Life's user-created content or IP rights policy or robust virtual-to-real economy, growth stagnated months after launch.

Is there a tension between the corporate colonization of Second Life and the "gift economy" which underlies a vision of the space as a new kind of participatory culture?

For the most part, there is no tension, because the native participatory culture hardly knows the corporations are even there, or care all that much that they are. Residents have scant or limited interest in their "colonization", which is a strong word for what's really going on: big name brands on dozens of private islands that few visit for any extended period of time. Consistently, grassroots, user-created events and sites are far more popular.

What do you see as the long term implications of Linden Lab's decision to open

up the source code of Second Life?

The decision is monumental. Recently, for example, CBS committed $7 million so a metaverse development company could make worlds like Second Life more accessible to mainstream users. Much of this development will almost certainly take advantage of the open source initiative. The decision, I should add, applied only to Second Life's viewer software. However, just last week, Linden's Technology Development VP announced that the company will open-source the back end so servers can run anywhere on any machine . "SL cannot truly succeed," Joe Miller told an audience of executives, "as long as one company controls the Grid." Again, this is a vision of a world that is not a niche product, but the Web in 3D.

How to Become a Compulsive Workaholic With No Life... Or The Secrets Behind My Success

Nancy Baym from Online Fandom has tagged me with the "Simply Successful Secrets" meme. I am supposed to tell you some of the secrets behind my success. I was tempted to say that one of the secrets is that I never respond to blog memes, chain letters, pyramid schemes, letters from Africans who want to promise me a portion of their national treasury, and venture capitalists who think that I might have a strong interest in their next project if I only set aside an hour or two to consult with them for free. By riding my life of such things, I discover I have many more hours in the day than most of my friends.

But then I took a niceness pill and decided that it was only fair that Nancy tagged me since I tagged her a few months ago in response to the Five Things You Don't Know About Me meme.

I also figure that this is an aspect of the communal and informal nature of the blogosphere that people stop what they are doing, suspend the normal topics of their blogs, and write personal things because someone essentially dared them to do so. It's hard to imagine anything would happen if at the end of this post I tagged Dan Rather, John Stewart, Bill O'Reilly, or Simon Cowell. None of these people have sufficient control over their own output to be able to put the social obligations represented by such memes ahead of institutional expectations.

So, you want to know how I succeed at doing the broad range of things I write about here. Well, let me give you a clue. These are the things I wanted to do this weekend:

Go to see Grindhouse at the Boston Common Theater.

Watch the opening episode of The Sopranos' final season

Keep plowing through the new Robin Hood series from the UK.

Watch the 5th season dvds of The Shield that just arrived from Amazon

Read the growing pile of comics and graphic novels next to my bed.

Finally get a running start on the Second Season of Supernatural.

Etc., etc., etc.

Keep in mind the myth that I get paid to watch movies and television, read comics, and play video games. I could in theory count any of the above as work but it is all less pressing than the things I ended up spending the weekend doing.

Instead, these are some of the things that I did do this weekend (from a list of more than 47 items):

Write the welcome letter to those attending the Media in Transition 5 conference.

Review and make notes on the rough cuts of the next round of Project nml Exemplars.

Read and comment on draft chapters for four different thesis

grade a pile of undergraduate essays

prepare for next week's classes

develop a description for a revision of the Comparative Media Studies undergraduate curriculum

Prepare powerpoints for a series of talks I am giving over the next few weeks.

write blog entries

You know you work too hard when you think the best thing about weekends is that you don't have any meetings and so you can really get work done.

In other words, if you want to know the secret of my success, talk to Doctor Faustus.

So, you can follow the advice below if you wish but keep in mind that, as the title of this post suggests, doing so will probably suck the blood out of your body and turn you into a compulsive workaholic. Read the following at your own risk.

Follow the Path of Least Resistance. One reason why I do so many different things in once -- like publish three books back to back -- is that it allows me to stay in constant motion. If you do only one thing and you hit a roadblock, all you can do is stop until you can route around it. If you multitask, then you just shift lanes, do something else for a while, and come back to the original task hopefully with a fresh perspective. So, the key to getting lots of things done is to have lots of things to do in the first place and to keep doing at least some of them all the time.

Make Lists. It is easy to get lost when you have a few hundred different balls flying at you from all directions. So, periodically, you need to stop for ten minutes and make a list of all of the things you have to do. The list helps you to set priorities and figure out what you want to do. It allows you to be proactive rather than reactive. It provides the pleasure of crossing off items on the list which can itself be a strong motivator to keep working.

Exploit Electronic Media. I could not do what I do if I did not have e-mail and other electronic media. I would accomplish far less if I was stuck in a postal or telephone based information economy. With e-mail, I can fire off e-mail when I think of it, in the middle of the night, and not have to worry about reaching the person on the other end of the phone. I may fire off thirty or forty pieces of e-mail in an hour. E-mail also allows me to keep a record of what I've said and what the other person said in response. So I use e-mail even with my assistant who sits in the outer office.

Network. As will be clear by now to regular readers of this blog, I know a lot of people and I know who to go to for help, advice, etc. This means I also try to be there for these people. I try to respond to every piece of e-mail I get and to do as many favors for as many people as I can. (That's partially because I am an Eagle Scout and so doing a good deed everyday has become second nature, but it is also the case that avoiding conflicts lowers friction in my life and having lots of friendly contacts insures that I can count on people when I need them.) Favors cost time in the short run, save time in the long run. Annoying people costs you every time.

If You Want to Write, Write. Robert Benchley published a classic essay in the 1930s called "How to Get Things Done" (or some such) in which he said the first step in doing everything you have been procrastinating about is to sit down to write. Most of us would rather do anything -- even those chores we've been putting off -- rather than write. As a former journalist, I am not afraid of writing. I also know that with constant deadline pressure I can't afford to be a perfectionist. Procrastination is an indulgence for those people who have time for it. I don't and so I don't put things off that I can do right now. And writing is key among them. And following my core logic of the path of least resistance, if I start to feel blocked as a writer, I often will change the format or tools that I am using for writing. So, I will write parts of my essays as e-mail (since most of us are more comfortable writing an e-mail to a friend than writing an essay for class) or powerpoint (since it allows me to shuffle the pieces and reorganize my mouths as many times as needed.)

Exercise and Work at the Same Time. My doctor wanted me to exercise. I knew I would never do it since it would take time away from work. So I decided to integrate it into my professional life. I now have walking office hours. I will take a student or colleague with me on the two mile walk around the Charles I take most days, weather permitting. It both insures that I get my exercise and that I get to know the people I work with better. Of course, you can push this principle too far. I once half jokingly asked a friend who wanted me to take up Yoga whether I could do it and watch television at the same time. She was not amused.

Break Big Tasks into Smaller Tasks. This is something I've learned from being an MIT. You can't deal with a complex system without taking it apart, working through each part, and then putting it back together again. Besides, most of us feel overwhelmed by big projects but can deal with small items of our list without much worry. So, break it down into whatever granularity you need to focus on and complete the task at hand.

Get a Great Staff. All of the above might sound totally egotistical since it implies that I am in any way the author of my own success. The reality is that Henry Jenkins can do all of these things because Henry Jenkins isn't a person. He's a brand. There's a large team of really great people working in the CMS program who either enable me to do things or take away obstacles so I can focus my time and energy on the tasks that do require my attention. My father taught me years ago to treat your staff well and they will help you; treat them badly and you are in big, big trouble. I am always astonished by how few academics understand this basic principle.

Reword Yourself for Success. This is the one that I honor in the abstract rather than in reality but it is key. If you exhaust yourself, you can't work effectively. Just as you should treat your staff well, you should treat yourself well. So, I probably should have done at least one of those things that I wanted to do this weekend just so I can keep moving forward in the week ahead. But even as I am writing this, I know I am probably not going to listen to myself. And if I don't follow my own advice, why should you?

so, the final message here is don't try this at home, kids!

Dissecting a Media Scare

Shortly before I went on break, someone e-mailed me a segment from WDAZ News (Grand Forks, North Dakota) focused on the "newest youth trend" -- "Emo" (or as the reporter helpfully explains, "emotional people.") It struck me as a textbook example of the ways that youth subcultures get misrepresented on television news and the ways that adult anxieties about kids who don't look, dress, and act "normal" get turned into hysteria by misreporting. I have long argued that we need media literacy for adults far more urgently than we need it for kids, so I figured we might use this space to collectively dissect this video and the various ways that it constructs Emos* as a threat to public safety. So, dear viewers, let me invite you to join me in a game of what's wrong with this picture?

1. Look closely -- there were no actual Emos consulted in the production of this segment. The reporter spoke with a local police officer who emerges here as the expert on this youth trend (despite the fact that he knew nothing of the subculture before his daughter told him about Emos) and then went to the local high school, talked to a few "average" students about what they think about those "other" kids who are all "emotional" and stuff. This means one of several possibilities: the reporter couldn't find any actual Emo in Grand Fork; the reporter has no idea what an Emo looks like; and the reporter couldn't care less if there are any actual Emos who might have a point of view in this story. (Of course, given how subculture members most often get treated on news segments like this one, this may be a blessing in disguise!)

2. Literal mindedness is the hallmark of most coverage of youth subcultures. Subcultures adopt often hyperbolic style to express their resistance to dominant culture but it is not a simple matter to understand what that style means and one should be highly reluctant to ascribe any single meaning to the style. In this case, though, the reporter isn't even responding to any actual subcultural practices: they are responding -- let's assume unknowingly-- to parodies of the subculture created by outsiders who themselves know little about what's going on. I took a look at some of the sites which flash quickly across the screen during the segment -- Insta Emo Kit -- for example and it is clear that they are as close to a checklist of what you have to do to become a good little Emo as George W. and his classmates red the Preppy Handbook to figure out how to get through Yale. We fill out check lists for a great many reasons. As a native Southerner, I am sucker for checklists that start with "15 reasons you may be a redneck" for example. But most of them are not exactly a guiding set of principles by which we organize our existence or rank ourselves. Subcultures don't typically come with membership cards and instructional manuals and if you think you found one, I'd be looking for the little emoticons that demonstrate that more than likely the author is smiling at you.

Consider, for example, this passage from the site:

The height of achievement for an emo boy is to live to forty while mooching off his parents and clutching their inheritance. This will allow the emo boy to go to emo concerts in the future and listen to the same old derivative music that got its start in the punk movement back in the 70's. Ah, we mean the 90's. If any emo music you listen to has its roots in anything before 1998, then you're old school and therefore not emo.

Does this sound like something that was written by a leader of the Emo movement? Or for that matter, by anyone even remotely sympathetic to the Emo subculture? Is it possible that the reporter didn't bother to read the website that the story suggests is the key to understanding Emos?

3. The next step is to remove the subculture from any larger historical or cultural context. Maybe there were no Emos in North Dakota until a few months ago. Maybe the reporter is looking for that extra-timely factor that gives a story like this one a sense of urgency and might even push us towards a crisis mentality. Nothing like this has ever happened in North Dakota before and by jiminy, we've got to put a stop to it right away.

4. The next step is to link the subculture to some risky behavior -- in this case, the reporter makes literal the old journalist story, "If it bleeds, it leads" by equating being an Emo with cutting. There is no actual evidence beyond a few sketchy websites to demonstrate any direct links between the two. There's no attempt to figure out how common such practices might be within this community. There's no recognition that cutting is a symptom of clinical depression which occurs across many different segments of the population. It is simply taken as given that if your son or daughter goes all Emo on you, there's a high likelihood they are going to be looking for a way to cut themselves up.

5. Recanting is always helpful. Pay attention to the rather gothy girl in this segment who starts out trying to offer some sympathetic account of why these kids act the way they do and then uses every trick in the book to disassociate herself from being seen as an emo. If even your friends won't stand by you, then there has to be something seriously wrong with you, or at least that's the logic the newscasters are using. Note also the opportunistic use of quotations: does this girl really think that cutting yourself is just another form of creative expression or was that a slip of the tongue that the journalists are using here to create a through-line for their piece?

*I should warn you that I have had very little exposure to Emo culture myself but you don't have to know much to see how badly they are being misrepresented here. A reader notes that they are usually called Emo or Emo Kids, not Emos. I have left the text as is so it doesn't render the comment senseless but know that you probably shouldn't trust me on the plural form. I haven't gone back to check the video but I am pretty sure they do use Emos throughout.

So Why Should We Care?

A little while back, reader David A. wrote a response to my blog post about the Politics of Fear, saying what a number of others have suggested -- that I take all of this too seriously.

Here's what he had to say:

I am always amused by our politician's efforts in regulating the internet, for our own good of course. I think you take them way too seriously, Henry. Efforts to rein in violent video games will have no more effect on their sales than the CAN-SPAM Act had on the amount of spam I get in my inbox. It's all a dog and pony show. The reason they can make propose such irresponsible, and quite possibly unconstitutional legislation, is that is that they know it will have no effect on anything -- for a wide variety of legal, technological and commercial reasons. Furthermore, they get the no-risk benefit of appearing to be "doing something" about the problem.

What the politicians fail to realize is just how foolish and ineffectual it makes them look from the prospective of up-and-coming generations of voters. How is anyone going to take them seriously in the future?

All of this sounds reasonable. We can fall prey to a moral panic about moral panics. But here's why I remain concerned:

1. Governments have no legitimate business holding hearings on matters to which they have neither the authority nor the resolve to pass actual legislation. In Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers, I reprinted my account of testifying before the Senate Commerce Committee investigation into youth and violence after Columbine. The hearings were described by one of the Senators who participated as a "ritual humiliation" of the American entertainment industry and were intended to create a chilling effect around popular culture, intimidating the media industry into making decisions which they could not be legally compelled to make otherwise. Such hearings, in and of themselves, do damage to the range of ideas in circulation in our society, precisely because the hearings themselves can not face legal challenges, and because they invite us to take likely the protections of free speech in the Federal Constitution, undermining respect for what should remain solid walls against government constraints on expression.

2. Political leaders and newscasters, alike, can lead moral authority to thugs who operate outside of government constraints and at a much more local and immediate level. Even if no laws get passed, or the laws that get passed are overturned through the courts, they have given moral authority to parents who are over-reacting to their son or daughter's thrashing about trying to define their identities, to principles and teachers who pass policies at the most local level that can make it a utter hell to receive a public education in this country, and to bullies who want an excuse to beat up any kid who looks, acts, or thinks differently than the fine folks in Grand Forks, North Dakota. In the case of Columbine, there were any number of horrors committed at local levels by people who wanted to protect their teens from the horrors that the folks in Washington DC were warning them about and they went further than Sam Brownback or Joseph Lieberman would have ever imagined but I didn't exactly see either Republicans or Democrats standing up and suggesting that these people were abusing their authority in this matter.

Having staked out a position in opposition to DOPA, I now receive a steady stream of angry letters from yahoos of this ilk. Here, for example, is an excerpt from a letter we received from a concerned parent:

Teens need to live genuine lives, not virtual lives. And your position that by monitoring teen use of the Internet we risk the trust of our teenagers is completely indefensible. The overwhelming majority of teenagers are untrustworthy almost by definition. Anyone who accepts at face value what a teenager says is either an idiot or a teenager or both.

The unfortunate reality for those who, like you, abandon reality in preference to its digital approximation is that as parents of teenagers we are legally bound to the activities of our juvenile dependents. If one of our teenagers violates the law, we, the parents, will be served a summons along with our child. And make no mistake, a 16 year old is still a child. Hence, it is only prudent that as responsible parents we keep a close eye and a tight reign on our children as they enter the wonders and horrors of the Internet...

With all due respect, we really don't need another apologist for irresponsible

Teenaged behavior.

Hey, it's an improvement over what I usually get called! Sure, this guy was probably cranky about his teenage daughter before MySpace came along, but the last time we need is to give this guy more firepower.

3. Such laws do pass and do have some real impact on those youth who have the most to lose. While DOPA failed to pass the Senate, there are still very real risks that similar legislation (The Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act) will sail through Congress this go around and even if it doesn't, at last count there were anti-social networking laws under consideration in more than 20 States, including Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and West Virginia. Many of these laws will pass. Some will be overturned in court. Many of them will make it harder for schools and libraries to provide instruction to students about rationale use of social networks. Some will block teens whose only access is through schools and public libraries from access to the online experiences which are formative for their classmates. There's something at stake here, folks, and most likely, it is at stake in your own state or local community.

Do such laws block the long-term development towards a more participatory culture? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But they can certainly inflect misery on the lives of an awful lot of young people along the way. We don't want to over-react but we can't afford to be complacent. Let's not panic but let's take action

Behind the Scenes: Super Deluxe

"We're Super Deluxe. And by God, We're going to make you laugh." -- taken from the Super Deluxe webpage. Super Deluxe is a new comedy site launched by Turner Broadcasting in January of this year. The site promises a mix of original professional content with community tools which will allow people to share amateur produced videos. It might be seen as one of the first of what are likely to be a series of attempts by major media producers to create their own YouTube like sites which combine authorized commercial content with fan generated materials. In this case, the site is targeting comedy as a genre that is likely to support both commercial and amateur produced material of high quality -- with their understanding of comedy including a fair amount of animation as well.

As the press release announcing the service explained:

Original programming will range from short films and sketches to episodic series and more. In addition to being available online, SUPER DELUXE content will be available via cable VOD, wireless devices and personal media players.

Programming is just the beginning, however. SUPER DELUXE's community tools will allow fans to interact with artists and each other, adding an extra dimension of value for the consumer. Through these tools, fans can express their own unique sense of humor and interact with artists and others by creating their own profiles, uploading their own videos, rating and sharing content, making comments, sending messages and more. Fans can even join or create groups with other artists and users to share and discuss their favorite humorous topics, comedians or anything else that strikes their interest.

The featured content on the site at the moment is quirky, original, and engaging. Consider, for example, a range of shorts featuring somewhat fractured versions of American presidents, contemporary and historical (with the idea of failed presidents a strangely recurring theme across much of the content produced so far).

The Professor Brothers - Substitute (Brad Neely) depicts what happens when a professor trusts his American history class to a friend who warns him that he will absolutely make a mess of things and then proceeds to make these words a self fulfilling prophecy.

"Don't Recognize Me" depicts U.S. Grant, riding across the countryside on his motorcycle, hoping to meet some folks who don't know he was once a less than spectacularly successful president.

"President's Day," produced by the fine folks at Fark, shows us what happens when a bunch of the guys -- all former presidents -- help Lincoln celebrate his birthday at the local bowling alley. Along for the ride are Taft and Polk, who are perhaps not the A List of former presidents, but they know how to show a guy a good time.

W's World (Kyle Boyd) features George Bush and his side kicks, Condy "Brown" Rice and a pot-smoking baby elephant, as they seek to deploy the same principles to the oil lands in Alaska that have proven so successful in Iraq.

These videos give you a sample of the range of commercially produced content being showcased on the site.

James DiStefano and Erlene Zierke, two of the young masterminds behind Super Deluxe, agreed to answer some of my questions about the site. (I should disclose that Turner is a member of our Convergence Culture Consortium). In what follows, they discuss the nature of their site and its relationship to user generated content and the fan culture that is growing up around certain forms of comedy. Some people have described the site as an alternative to YouTube except that YouTube is a general interest site where-as Super Deluxe focuses on a specific genre of entertainment. That's where I decided to start the interview.

What do you see as the advantages of specialization over generalization?

The clearest advantage is the ability to create and maintain a brand. Sites that generalize lack a voice or a distinct feel. During our design phase, many of our potential users said they only went to these sites when guided by a link shared through email or IM. Many users cited a difficulty in separating the wheat from the chaff in such a large library of clips.

Early in the project, we decided to focus specifically on a certain type of comedy, and we decided to stay true to Turner's roots in aggregating and branding libraries of content by soliciting artists to produce material for us. We wanted to retain that open spirit embodied in the video-sharing sites, but we wanted to give our community something to talk about. Like this kind of content? Stay - we have a good sized and growing library to share.

Super Deluxe (http://www.superdeluxe.com/) is different in many ways because of this specialization. The artists producing content for Super Deluxe also give this site a distinct perspective. Our editorial staff does a great job of infusing the site with a voice, a feel, on a daily basis. We pick a mixture of Turner-produced content and user-contributed content every time we update the site, and this gives Super Deluxe a perspective on things that other sites lack. We're much more 'record label' than 'record store.'

And why this particular specialization?

Comedy is a genre that bends nicely to the constraints of the online medium. Short clips seem to work best on the Internet for a variety of reasons. If users don't like the video size, video quality, or content, they have the ability to move away to any other destination in the time it takes to click a mouse or search Google. With comedy, you can grab someone's attention in the first 10 to 15 seconds and have a pretty good shot of keeping them for the duration of a video. In other genres, it is difficult to establish compelling characters or interesting plot lines in the short amount of time we have to grab someone's attention.

What developments in the area of comedy are feeding into the development of Super Deluxe? Where is your content coming from? What trends in the culture are you tapping?

The culture we embrace places a premium on pursuit and discovery - it's part of an important ritual around this type of content on the Web. People trade funny videos, photos, comics and stories all the time. At launch, we emphasized the portability of online comedic content by including multiple tools to share and embed our video.

We're catering to the 'openness' of our audience's expectations and tastes. We encourage our artists by not imposing strict restrictions or lengthy approval processes; this approach lends itself to experimentation. In doing so, we've built a library of original and exclusive content unlike many other video sites. That's been an essential part of attracting interest in this space.

On Super Deluxe, it isn't necessary for our sensibilities to have broad appeal; we don't have to create a sitcom that appeals to the juicy part of the bell curve in order to gain an audience. A Super Deluxe viewer can construct their own path through the network, watch what they want, participate how they want, and discard what doesn't interest them.

The anthropologist Mary Douglas has argued that there is only a thin line that separates jokes and insults. How do you imagine Super Deluxe negotiating that line? Are there going to be occasions where you need to censor potentially offensive content? Are you giving the community ways to police itself?

We've already encountered these issues in the short period of time since launch. We've had situations where we've removed inappropriate content - videos that crossed the line from joke to insult (and, honestly, some videos went past insult and straight to offensive). It's not hard to see what fits with our ideals and what doesn't. Our editorial system allows us to promote like-minded content producers while still giving individuals the opportunity to define their idea of what's funny to them.

There is a flagging mechanism on Super Deluxe for our community to use. We review each flagged submission and decide whether it meets our standards or to to take it down. We retain an open dialog between us and our community. They help us police and message us or flag where appropriate. Our community helps Super Deluxe decide who we are and what we stand for. This level of openness helps us define the grey area, the thin line. Our sensibilities are strong but our policies are flexible.

Are you giving individuals ways to find content that reflects their own value systems?

We are. If we don't find something particularly amusing, well planned/executed, or indicative of the culture we have created within Super Deluxe, we don't promote it on any of our editorial pages; however, we still give the user several other outlets to publicize his/her creation. Our members can share their creation with their friends, embed it elsewhere for all to see, or direct people to subscribe to his/her RSS feed. While we may not find it particularly funny, there may be some users who will appreciate it.

There is starting to be a backlash against what some critics are calling the "cult of the amateur," arguing that mediocre content made by inexperienced producers is starting to push out professionally produced content made within systems of quality control because amateur content costs less to produce and distribute. How would you respond to this criticism?

When it comes to user-generated content, the medium is in the phase of experimentation. Every creative medium goes through a similar phase in order to establish norms around what's considered 'good' content. I couldn't cast out the "cult of the amateur" as invalid while it progresses through this phase. The distinction between user-generated video and independent film-making is only separated by a few degrees - not residing on opposite sides of the circle.

Recorded music is a medium that has professional, independent, and amateur productions co-existing in the same marketplace. Why couldn't Web-based video?

Can you give us a sense of the scale at which amateur content is coming into Super Deluxe at this point? What criteria are you using to decide which content to foreground on the site? What kinds of amateur content has impressed you the most so far?

Given that we're just finishing our 'soft launch' of Super Deluxe (a period with little or no promotion or marketing), we're extremely pleased with our level of viewership, of registration, and with our community participation. Our next phase is to roll out more original, exclusive content and expand the possible ways our community participates and interacts on Super Deluxe.

On Super Deluxe, when it comes to user-contributed content, we have a phrase that guides our vision: "created, not recorded." There's a huge difference between capturing a 'stupid pet trick' and writing/editing a script to produce a finished video. And while we accept submissions that encompass the former, we promote videos that encapsulate the latter.

We pick amateur content to promote based on a number of criteria. Does it fit with our voice, our theme? Will our users find it interesting? Does it have a shelf-life, or potential for future development? And, most importantly: as representatives of culture in this online world, do we find it funny or entertaining?

Cube is one video that met all these complex criteria. We love this video, and it got a great reaction from our community.

"Squirrel vs Marshmallows" is another one that really gets us excited about our users. It's well planned out and well executed, and I can't get the song out of my head every time I watch the video. It's a perfect example of what we're looking to promote on Super Deluxe.

Your blog has created a category called "Worst Damn Thing." Explain. Do you think the pleasure of user-generated content involves laughing with or laughing at?

We encourage our audience to upload the content that reflects them and their sense of 'the funny.' Some of it, though, tends to be more on the side of 'recorded' rather than 'created.' One particular piece uploaded to Super Deluxe was more appropriate for a standard video-sharing site than for an editorially-driven site like Super Deluxe. So we decided to give our audience a clear signal as to the kind of user contributions we'd promote while also having a little fun with it. We try to retain our sense of humor, both as creators of culture and as lovers of the genre.

We don't intend for "Worst Damn Thing" to stifle creativity; the designation is intended to help raise the bar for what user-generated content can be, in an effort to move the medium from experimentation to independent creation.

The Bastard Son of Comedy

In my Media Theory and Methods graduate proseminar, I have an assignment each year that asks graduate students to do interviews with media producers. This assignment has two goals: the first clearly is to give them experience conducting interviews, a key skill for many of the kinds of research projects we conduct through the program; the second is to get them to think about the role which theory plays outside of academic spaces. I am inspired here by the work of Thomas McLaughlin who has published a book on what he calls vernacular theory. For him vernacular theory refers to any kind of theory produced outside of the academic environment -- including the theory produced by such groups as expert practioners (such as the media makers included in these projects), fans, activists, visionaries, anyone who needs to make generalizations about media (either implicitly or explicitly) in the course of their work. Through this assignment, I push my students out of the classroom and into the streets. Through the years, students have done profiles on the people who design shop window displays, on game designers and musicians, on ministers as they prepare sermons, or in the case of one of my students this term, on a local standup commedian who shares his thought about his craft. I thought I would share with my readers the following essay by one of the first year CMS Masters students about the vernacular theory of comedy. I found it very interesting given that some of my own earliest scholarship dealt with the interface between vaudeville and film comedy. So much remains constant over decades of practice in this space, so much here speaks to the core theories of comedy which we teach in literature or film courses on the genre. So I figured this might be useful or interesting to many of you.

andres lombana

The Bastard Son of Comedy

I arrived at the Gamble Mansion at 5 Commonwealth Avenue at 6:00 p.m. I entered using the main door, registered myself in the front desk and got into an opulent Louis XV style room in the first floor. The room was illuminated by many candelabra lamps attached to the walls and one big chandelier that was hanging from the center of a very high ceiling. The room had a marble fire place framed by two white columns and a gigantic mirror over it. The wooden floor was shining and contrasted with seven empty metallic chairs that were arranged in a semicircle. A buffoon and a drummer harlequin were entertaining a young lady; they were the motif of the wallpaper that covered the entire room.

Dana Jay Bein was there, standing up behind an amplifier and a microphone, drinking a medium size Starbucks coffee and typing something in his cellphone. We had an appointment to talk about comedy and I did not expect to have such a luxury setting for our interview. But it happened that the Boston Center for Adult Education, where Dana teaches a stand-up comedy class, is located in this historic building.

"Comedy comes from the darkest moments of human day to day life" Dana stated.

"Comedy is like no other" he continued, "it started as tragedy but now you are putting it out there as humor." From his point of view, failure and pain were in the origin of comedy. "Everybody has that instinct to laugh of other people failures, or even your own failures. You see somebody gets splashed by a car driven into a big puddle in a rainy day, and one of your instincts is to laugh" he said.

Comedy is an honest and truly defensive mechanism against the tragedy of life. "I think you have to make it funny otherwise it hurts too much. Your honest painful experiences can be brought to the stage and can be shown to people as an honest expression of comedy" Bein claimed. "Comedy did something for me personally, it allowed me to turn things around" he added.

"Self-deprecation" is the key concept for understanding Dana Jay Bein's approach to comedy. "I was introverted as a child, so self-deprecation became my defense mechanism in middle school and high school" he said. "Self-deprecation is rooted in people making fun of you. The only way to really defeat other people making fun of you is to get on the board and start to make fun of yourself, kind of show them that it doesn't bother you" he added. "Then, self-deprecation comes to the next level when you find your own voice in that self-deprecation." Nowadays, Bein takes "self- deprecation" as the most effective way to connect with his audience. "I make fun of myself and not only does it make the audience comfortable of who I am as a performer but it also gives me the green light to make fun of other things as well" he said.

According to Dana, everybody has the ability to be funny and everything can be funny because all is based in perspective. "Everybody has the ability to be funny, some people learn how to hone it, and some people don't" he said. "Everybody's life experience is his/her own library of comedy. The problem is that some people try too hard to be funny by taking things from outside of their own experiences, and their whole life is actually a brilliant library of funny experiences, observations and relationships" he added. "If you really look at things and people, you can find a humor in almost everything."

Dana Jay Bein began performing stand-up comedy in 1997. "I grew up in West Springfield and I was nurtured directly from the white trash. I worked in a kitchen as a prep-cook underneath of a chef who was already doing stand up comedy. He noticed that I was very funny, that I have a tough shell and that I was quick-witted. Nothing offends me. So he took me under his wing and we started to do grassroots performances together. He gave me the name 'The Bastard Son of Comedy' because I was very offensive, I was swearing a lot and my parents were never married" he said.

Although Dana considers himself an amateur in the stand-up comedy world because he is not on Comedy Central, his 10 years of experience on stage allowed him to speak confidently about stand-up. "A stand-up show is a mix of coffee shop poetry slam and a concert" he declared. "Stand up is very personal, it is all you, it is all your energy, it is either you succeed or you fail" he added. Basically, the stand-up show consists of 7 to 15 minutes on stage where the performer speaks directly to the audience with the help of a microphone. "You kind of feel crucified on stage" he said. "Stand-up comedy, specifically, is a lot of work, it is not easy. Let alone the difficulties that people know like the public speaking fear that people have. Public speaking is the most feared thing in the world. And that is just the top of the iceberg. The next thing is Am I funny? Next thing is, What am I gonna say?"

For crafting his stand-up comedy, Dana Jay Bein writes a lot. He has a notebook with him almost all the time, and if he does not have it for some reason, he writes in binders, receipts, newspapers, and whatever he finds on hand. "I write down thoughts, observations that I make, or funny things people says to me based on situations, and I try to build of those things" he said. "There are times where I set blocks of time for comedic writing. Because it is a lot of work to put all of this to paper, to craft... and to organize all the memories that come back to you" he added. "I don't throw anything that I write away. A lot of stand-up comedians get frustrated with their material and they may throw a joke, or a story or a premise away. I have a stash of comedy under my bed. It is kind of like if you have children, when you put the old toys in the attic and, once the new toys get boring to them, you bring the old toys back down and it's like fresh to them again....like a crossword puzzle....it's the same with comedy if you are writing a joke and you have a block, or you cant figure out what fits in your set, you put it away for a while and maybe you go back in a week, a month, six months, a year, and maybe now it fits in your act somewhere based on what is changed in pop culture, based on what is changed in the news, based on what is changed in you personally" he said.

Dana rehearses constantly and prepares his sets before he does a gig. "I do as much rehearsals as possible. I practice in front of the mirror and I do my material for my girlfriend. It is always good to have at least one person that you can do that with" he said. "It is essential to have a microphone at home. I usually hold a microphone and talk. Sometimes I record. For new jokes it's a good way to hear your own timing, to hear how the jokes sound" he pointed out. However, he emphatically stated that he is not as deliberative as some comedians. He doesn't memorize each word in each sentence. "I just wanna make sure that I get the punch lines and the message across about the joke. I am not deliberate down to the word but I rehearse it deliberately" he added.

Stand-up is not just talking, it is essentially performance. Being comfortable on stage is crucial. Whether in a club, a house, a theater or a home, the stand-up comedian has to jump onto the stage and confront his/her audience alone. According to Bein, "nothing on stage is a mistake until you called a mistake, until you pointed it out as such." No matter the size of the stage, the comedian must be comfortable standing behind the microphone because it keeps him/herself grounded. "There is nothing wrong with just standing behind the mike" Dana said. Physicality is also very important because it gives comedians stage comfort. "I am not afraid to use physicality to demonstrate something on stage. If there are a lot of people in the crowd, maybe I go to the edge of the stage and see what is out there" he said. "I try to play a lot with physicality. Punch lines come out with some sort of facial expression" he added.

When structuring his stand-up show, Dana tries to start big and finish big. "Those are the two jokes that are the most crucial on stage: your opening lines, and the lines you end it. The ending line is usually the line they are gonna remember, and the opening line is the line you are gonna get their attention with. You can lose them immediately if your first line or first two lines don't work" he said. "I usually begin with stuff about me, whether it will be self-deprecating or factual, or observational. Sometimes I start talking about something local because that is something the people can relate to immediately, they got that immediate connection" he added.

Localizing is very important in a stand-up show. "I try to be as localized as possible" Dana points out. "It depends of where I am. I usually perform in club at Inman Square so I talk about the Brazilian population in that neighborhood, the restaurants in Inman Square, the fact that in the 80s comedians burst out of Inman Square" he said. The location of the show also determines the style of the comedy. "In the Boston area I try to squeeze as many jokes into the time that I have. It is more of the joke format in Boston because you wanna get as many laughs per minute as possible. Here comedians are a dime a dozen so you do not get as much time for your show. In contrast, when I perform in Western Mass I can do a lot of storytelling because I have more time" he added.

Making people laugh is finally the ultimate goal of every comedian. "I like to make people laugh; it is the cheapest and easiest form of altruism. It is easy to feel good making people laugh" Dana claimed. As in many other performing arts, the audience is finally the liveliest critic for the stand-up performer and the source of energy for his/her show. Stand-up comics have to connect with their audience as soon as possible, and the clearest sign of that connection is the audience's laugh. "When you get in front of an audience of a couple of hundred people and they're laughing at the things you are saying, it's a high that no alcohol or drug or enhancement can match, it's incredible"

Dana said. "It is always who is laughing" he continued, "If you tell a joke and everybody is laughing, that's what you need." However, that does not always happen. "Sometimes you put your heart and soul into a joke and you think the audience is gonna love it, and then nothing. It is tough. If you are not on that night, if you are having a tough show and you hear crickets, and there is nobody laughing, that is stressful and you have to be able to react to that as a comedian, you have to hopefully not take yourself too seriously and just roll with it" Dana said.

One of the most interesting concepts that Bein has developed in his vernacular theory about comedy, is the one of the "comedic mind". "I speak of the comedic mind as a kind of separate mind within your own mind" he claimed. "That mind allows you to think of things comedically" he continued. "It is like taking things out of the present, out of the reality, and putting them into this other kind of think tank. You gotta try to get people's comedic mind working. It is like a hamster on a wheel, with all these different materials and experiences, and points of view, and characters...as long as that hamster is running you can generate something funny to say on stage, an interesting situation to relate to another person, all sort of things" he said.

Other interesting concept in Bein's vernacular theory, is the one of "deconstructing the set", a sort of deep analysis of his show after performing it. "I deconstruct the set after the show. This was improvised. This was scripted. This worked this didn't work. What did they laugh at? What didn't they laugh at? And then, I take the things they laugh at and ask Why? Why was that funny to them? Was it my delivery? Was it because it was topical? Was it because they all got it? And more important, why didn't they laugh at? Was it because I didn't delivery it properly? Was it because I rushed it? Did I mumble the punch line? Wasn't their type of humor?" he explained. This method of evaluation allows Dana to improve his sets and to achieve the type of humor he is looking for. "It takes multiple shows. It is a process. The set must work 3 times in a row at least" he said.

While Dana was explaining to me this postmodern "terminology", I started to think that I could not leave the Gamble Mansion without listening to some of his jokes. So I tried to delve into his arsenal, taking care of dodging his punches. "You can break down a joke: it must have a set up and a punch line" he said. "You set up a joke with a premise or a story line and then, the punch line is the finale, is the end of a joke. The punch line is the part that is funny of a joke" he explained. "Why did the chicken cross the road?" he asked me. "The set up of this joke is kind of a play. Why does the chicken cross the road? You are assuming that this chicken has a chicken reason to cross the road. He is not gonna have human behavior, he is not gonna be personified. This chicken is gonna have a chicken logic. Why is he crossing the road? And the punch line kind of destroys that assumption: he is crossing the road to get to the other side, like normal, like people do. And that is what makes it funny."

Although Dana Jay Bein did his first steps in stand-up when he was working as a prepcook, he does not have any recipes in his pockets now. "There is not really a recipe for jokes. They start in an observation or a statement, or a funny thought" he said. "All of my jokes are based on a truthful premise" he added. "I might stretch the truth a little bit. I try to still be silly sometimes. I hyperbolize sometimes. Or I make the metaphor larger for the sake of humor. But I always try to base things in some sort of truth" he said. That truth matters a lot for Dana and is the only ingredient that he always adds to his jokes. "Honesty and emotion are part of what makes comedy funny. You can tell the difference between a good comic and a bad comic for the most part by how honest he is being" he pointed out.

Originality is very important in stand-up comedy, and comics may even copyright their jokes. "It is so taboo to steal a joke" Dana stated. "There are actually a lot of publicly known about fights right now. Joe Rogan had a public fight on stage with Carlos Mencia, because Mencia is a notorious joke thief. And Joe is kind of a comic policeman who is making sure people don't steal jokes" Dana said. "The problem with comedy is that if something happens, many comics can simultaneously write the same joke. There are many examples of comedians that have done that" he added. "It does not matter who tells the joke first, it matters who is most famous, more popular, how many people heard the joke first" he continued. "So now when I write a joke I google it up to be sure nobody has written something like that. I have become very paranoid about it" he claimed. It is also possible to sample jokes, to quote. "If I do sampling a joke" Dana said, "I make sure that it is known. I'll say 'this is not my joke'. I am gonna tell it because it is related to what I am talking about." What it is really forbidden in stand-up is the use of the so called "stock jokes", the ones that everybody hears in a party. "To use those jokes on stage is kind of cheating. It is cheap" Dana stated.

Every comedian has his personal dream. Dana Jay Bein's dream is to take Boston to the next level: to make the city the capital of the stand-up comedy as it was in the 80s. For doing that, he is working hard in his shows and in his teaching, and he is also developing a strong network of comedians in New England and on the internet (he has a myspace page). Even if he considers himself an amateur because he is not touring the country and he can not subsist from comedy alone (as the people from Comedy Central), he seemed to me very professional and very committed with his cause. His vernacular comedy theory was articulate and appealing. I especially liked something that he said right before I left the Louis XV room in Gamble Mansion: "comedy is a start to make the world ok."

Andres Alberto Lombana graduated in 2003 with a double BA in political science and literature from Colombia's Universidad de los Andes. His interests are emphatically cross-media, and he has some significant experience with educational media applications. From 2001 to 2005, Andres worked for the Fundacion Universitaria Iberoamericana (FUNIBER), a Spanish electronic learning company active in Latin America. There, he administered and edited e-learning objects that were both adaptive and migratory, and worked to develop learning communities. He was awarded a fellowship to spend 8 months at FUNIBER's Barcelona headquarters where he worked on digital layout and publishing processes. Outside of the work environment, Andres has been active in small-scale cross-media creative activities including movies, music, still images, and text. In 2001, he co-founded Elektrodomestika, a cross-media laboratory which explores and experiments with the use of new technologies in art creation. His latest project, Cotidianity, is a computer operetta that explores digital storytelling. His digital video The Duel (stop motion animation) was selected as part of the first Latin American and Caribbean Video Art Competition, and shown in the International Development Bank's art gallery in Washington and the Ethnologischen Museum of Berlin. Interactive media production, creative educational strategies, and the discourse of globalization combine to form the core of what Lombana would like to pursue at CMS. Lombana has been an active contributor to the documentary projects being developed by Project nml, being the lead producer for a segment on dj culture and now at work on a segment focused on animation.

Big Games with Big Goals

Last September, the Project nml team went to the Come Out and Play Festival in New York City, cameras in hand, ready to document the so-called Big Game Movement. The finished product, the latest in our series of films for the Project nml exemplar library, recently went up on the web and will be relevant to my many readers who are interested in the serious games movement more generally. What's a big game? Here's the provisional definition offered by some of our supporting materials:

Games for big groups of people in real world spaces (such as a park or the

streets) that use mobile communication technologies like cell phones to link

people together in gameplay.

In its early chapters, the film both shows some of the large-scale public games staged in Manhattan during the festival, including Cruel 2 B Kind, a game developed by Jane McGonigal and Ian Bogost, which becomes the central example running through the piece. It also offers some historical analysis of the emergence of the Big Games movement (Future GAMBIT director Philip Tan discusses how today's Big Games relate to Assassin and other live action role play games and c3 researcher Ivan Askwith talks about their relations to alternate reality games). As Askwith notes, McGonigal turns out to be the key connector between the world of ARGS (such as I Love Bees, The Beast, and The Lost Experience) and the world of Big Games, in part because of her interest in using games to promote greater social interaction and spatial exploration:

What Jane McGonigal really kind of brought to the mainstream in ARGs was the idea that rather than just being online and using email and going to webpages to find information, you would actually have to in real life play in the game yourself. You would go out, you would do something, you would be somebody and interact with other people in real time. Her idea was that games could be a communal activity, which is something they stopped being when we started playing video games like Mario Brothers where you would sit at home by yourself.

As the documentary continues, McGonigal becomes a key spokesperson describing the kinds of learning which can occur through engagement with these kinds of large scale games:

Jane McGonigal:

There are a couple different categories of skills that I think players leave the game with. The first is just really basic familiarity with mobile computing technologies.

A lot of players who had come to play the game had never even used the sort of texting function of a cell phone. They didn't know how to switch from numbers to letters on their cell phone pads, right, and people came and played the game and suddenly knew how to use all the features of their cell phone that they had been ignoring.

For "ilovebees", which was the game that we did in 2004 with 42 Entertainment, we involved a lot of GPS navigating. For a lot of players that was their first experience working with GPS coordinates and going out to navigate physical space with this kind of virtual data to make them feel like really powerful users of the technology. Anyone who played that game now is clearly an expert and could go out and continue to feel like an expert when it comes to using technologies in real life.

For me, it has to do with how you are able to be an effective citizen in massively networked culture. So, are you able to collaborate with people at a really big scale. For Cruel 2 B Kind, one of the design choices that I made was the idea that, after you got killed, instead of getting thrown out of the game, you actually worked with the people who killed you.

You have to make decisions together in real time, all 40 bodies moving together, with the same goals, with the same purpose and to execute the strategy that was collectively decided upon. For a lot of the players, that part of the game got really hard, and was hard to keep everybody together, was hard to have everybody stay involved. For some game designers that would be a sign that it was a bad- maybe we should make the game so that you're only working in small teams, right, but because Cruel 2 B Kind was a research game, one of the goals really is to see how we can bring players into this sort of unfamiliar sort of future forward-looking social interaction. You know, as we look at all kinds of collective intelligence applications unfolding on the web, and smart mobs where people are, you know, individually becoming part of a large mob, how can we take all of that and teach players how to have massively scaled real time collaboration face to face. You're sort of learning skills for the future is one way to think about it.

The players will be the people who were first on the scene, the first people to learn these skills and techniques and hopefully 10 years from now, they're going to be the people who are in charge of companies, and in charge of non-profits, and in charge of community groups- the real leaders and innovators.

Another game designer, Mattia Romeo describes how playing some of these games changed the ways he thought about the urban landscape:

One game that I enjoyed very much was "Conqwest", which was game that Frank Lantz and I worked on for the cell phone company, Qwest, and that one involved teams of players from local high schools, going, gaining control of certain territories of downtown by taking pictures of these semicodes, these stickers with information that were spread out throughout the space. One of the great things about that experience was that, because the stickers were of a certain size, the players' experience of the city got broken down to that size. The entire city became spaces this big that contained an object of this size, which was an amazing experience to watch people have that- all of the sudden, they're used to seeing the city in terms of like, "There's a store here and there's a street here, and there's this restaurant that I go to," and all of the sudden it was, "That lamppost is just the right size, or has a little opening in it that's just the right size to be able to fit one of those things in there and so it just changed their perspective of the city immediately and where they played it."

Late in the film, Jane McGonigal describes her desire to move players from role-playing games (based on fantasy) and towards real-playing games (based on real world identities and challenges.):

In a role-playing game, everybody has to agree to live in the same fantasy world, and people's fantasies actually probably differ more from one another than we might expect, so it's actually not as inclusive as it could be. You have to be able to project your inner vision of this fantasy world or this fictional world. You have to really act as if you believe it in and it can be really hard for people who just want to experience more like the interactions, social interactions- it can put them off.

The reason why I don't do any role-playing games is- I don't design role-playing in my games is because I prefer people to be themselves in the game world because when the game is over, you are still yourself, and so, anything that you learn in the game, experience in the game, and want to bring into your everyday experiences, it's much more possible that you'll be able to do that because you're yourself, you're not this, sort of, dark shadowy figure. So I consider my games to be real play, rather than role play.

In her own research into the player communities that emerge around ARGS, she has found that teams that formed to solve puzzles in fictional games are increasingly pushing to apply their collective intelligence to try to confront real world challenges (from tracking down the identity of the Washington DC sniper to documenting examples of campaign finances abuse). McGonigal's more recent projects have pushed her to identify ways that these groups might more fully realize their ambitions, trying to use game play to spark greater political awareness and civic engagement. When Jane was in Cambridge recently, we had a conversation about World Without Oil, a new ARG which explores environmental and energy related topics, which will launch later this month. McGonigal described the project in some depth during an interview in Gamasutra:

It's a different kind of ARG -- a collaborative alternate reality. There's a lot of content creation on the part of players that is not traditional to ARGs. What is traditional to ARGs is that there are characters and a full life online, which people who are starting to poke around the website now are finding. There are hints of how you might find these characters. There's a chat transcript posted amongst a bunch of characters. Maybe you could send them a message.

Maybe you could find out how they met under these mysterious circumstances, find out what it is they've been told that makes them think something terrible is going to happen on April 30th. That sort of investigative poking that happens before April 30th will be much like I Love Bees. Those coordinates went up a number of weeks before you had to show up at the payphones. Your job was to figure out what the hell you had to get ready for. It's same way here. There's no information really on the surface about what you're being asked to prepare for, but there are ways you could start to figure that out.

When the game launches, the internal narrative being generated by the puppet masters will be specifically about how the country is falling apart. Every player who signs up can start to tell stories about their part of the country. The game will respond. In traditional ARGs, there's a lot of pushing of the system to see how far it can go. If I get on the phone with a character and I tell her something crazy, will the puppet masters build that into the story? Will the puppet masters have to kill off the character? How much of an impact can I have?

The World without Oil game is really going to let people use any means necessary to drive the story, to test the limits, everything from posting, documenting things with photo, video, to live flash mobs. You get to decide what's happening, and by documenting it, you force us to build it into the story.

The sort of end game is, does the country recover? The characters might all be dead by the end of the story depending on what the players do. We're keeping it pretty flexible because the idea is that when you start to play you join as a puppet master. In that way, it's sort of the first collectively puppet-mastered game ever. We're giving away more power but holding the reins enough so that it'll be a satisfying experience. We're taking you to the next level.

If we want it to be collective, why don't we let the players run it collectively and see what they come up with? The subject of the game is a very real scenario. If we did suffer an oil shock, it would be the ordinary people, the players, who would be ultimately shaping what the hell happened, whether we descend into chaos or whether we band together. It's better to see what the people really think and want to do now. Play it before you live it.

As always, the Project nml films are funded through a grant from the MacArthur Foundation as part of their ongoing efforts concerning Youth and Digital Learning. Watch here for the roll out of other films in the series, including work that is currently being completed on Wikipedia, dj culture, and Anime fandom, among other topics.

Anna van Someren supervises the production of all of the films in this series with our graduate students working as primary producers on the individual titles.

In this case, the primary producer for this film was Deborah Lui, a first year CMS masters student. Lui is a 2003 alumna of MIT with a double major in architecture and management science, and a minor in theater. Deb has long been fascinated by the relationship between space and performance. As an undergraduate, Deb explored this interest by working as a researcher with the Interactive Cinema Group at the MIT Media Lab, and through the MIT Eloranta Undergraduate Research Fellowship, studying the relationship between performance and architecture in theater. Following graduation, Deb has gained experience in the arts (working at the Tony Award-winning Berkeley Repertory Theatre) and design (with Tom Ip & Partners Architects in Hong Kong). She has continued to pursue her interest in theater by working with several amateur and semi-professional performing groups as a director and an actor.

Sanjaya Malakar, Leroy Jenkins, and The Power to Negate

As a long-time American Idol fan, I am watching the current controversy about Sanjaya Malakar with morbid fascination. For those of you who are not following the plot, Malakar is a relatively untalented contestant who is surviving week after week as much more widely praised rivals are biting the dust. Simon Cowell this week went so far as to suggest that nothing which the producers on the show said about his performance would make any difference in the outcome of the voting: "I don't think it matters anymore what we have to say, actually. I genuinely don't. I think you are in your own universe and if people like you, good luck!" Elsewhere, Cowell has fanned the flames by threatening to quit American Idol if Sanjaya wins.

Regular readers of this blog will have already suspected some of the forces going on behind the scenes here to essentially "spoil" American Idol and can only imagine the choice words that Simon and the other judges are uttering behind the scenes. I reported here last summer about a group called Vote for the Worst which has adopted an interventionist stance towards reality television programs. The group has taken credit in the past for the surprising longevity of AI contestants, such as Scott Savol and Bucky Covington[See note at end of post], as well as having gotten a number of lackluster contestants onto Big Brother's All Stars series last summer. Here's what the group has posted over on their home page:

Why do we do it? During the initial auditions, the producers of Idol only let certain people through. Many good people are turned away and many bad singers are kept around to see Simon, Paula, and Randy so that America will be entertained.

Now why do the producers do this? It's simple: American Idol is not about singing at all, it's about making good reality TV and enjoying the cheesy, guilty pleasure of watching bad singing. We agree that a fish out of water is entertaining, and we want to acknowledge this fact by encouraging people help the amusing antagonists stick around. VFTW sees keeping these contestants around as a golden opportunity to make a more entertaining show.

They have a point: research suggests that American Idol attracts essentially two different viewerships. There are people who watch the first part of the series -- up until Hollywood -- enjoying the "gong show" like segments where bad singers get spotlighted. (That's why William Hung remains one of the most infamous contestants to ever appear on the show and why the producers consistently replay the footage of his mangled and tone-deaf performance of "She Bangs.") And then there are the people who tune in once the producers have gotten all of that out of their system to watch the talented few compete, get feedback, and try to win the hearts of the American public.

So, it is hard for the producers to claim that "vote for the worst" is not in the spirit of the show. The Vote for the Worst fans are simply acting out of turn, asserting their own right to pick which bad singers should get on the air and how long they should last.

Vote for the Worst, by itself, probably doesn't have the clout to really carry this very far, in the end, but this time around, the site has won the support of Howard Stern, the self-proclaimed "King of All Media," who is using his satellite radio program to encourage listeners to vote to keep Sanjaya on the show. Stern has drawn real blood in the past. In 1998, Stern ran a successful effort to get a regular on his program, Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf, selected as one of People Magazine's list of the most beautiful people in the world. This was an early experiment in the use of the web to encourage reader participation. Hank won over Leo DeCaprio, the pretty boy actor who was then riding high off his Titanic appearance, and the dwarf got a lot angrier and perhaps a little drunker when the magazine refused to feature him inside the print edition of their publication.

Of course, as with this earlier election, the whole process exploits several bugs in the system: first, it takes advantage of the fact that viewers can call in more than one vote. It is not just that a relatively small but determined number of people could indeed cast enough votes to keep Sanjaya at the middle of the pack but it is also the case that people can vote for Sanjaya and not sacrifice their ability to also vote for a favorite performer. So, it becomes a no cost gag vote, which can turn out to have bad consequences for individual contestants who have off weeks and end up going while Mr. Malakar remains. Of course, all of this might end quickly if viewers voted to eliminate contestants, rather than to keep them. Surely, there are more people who want Malakar off the show than want him to remain on the air. But the producers have consistently argued against having people vote to eliminate contestants, feeling that would bring a negative tone to the proceedings.

As this has occurring, there have been growing expressions of outrage among fans of the program. Vote for the Worst proudly posts a segment from The O'Reilly Factor during which civil litigator Danielle Aidala tries to argue that the fan's efforts to keep Sanjaya Malakar on the air represent speech that should be exempt from First Amendment protection -- comparing voting for the worst to inciting a riot. For once, O'Reilly comes across as the most rational voice on the program!

And check out the ways that YouTube is responding to the Malakar Matter, including what we can only hope is a tongue in cheek promise to go on a hunger strike to encourage people to vote him off the air.

So, what of the fairly sweet and relatively harmless young man caught in the center of this whole brouhaha? At first, it was pretty clear he was clueless about these efforts on his behalf, shocked when he stayed on the air in the face of seemingly inevitable elimination, seeming fragile in the face of the judge's withering comments. One news story quoted a family friend: "He's so young and so sensitive, it's hard for him to go out on that stage and not have that devastation affect his performance."

By this week, when he appeared in a campy Mohawk and mugged throughout his performance, it seemed to me that like William Hung before him, he had caught onto the joke being made at his expense and was willing to ride things out as long as it kept him in the spotlight. My wife thinks he is still playing to win and is under the mistaken belief that he really does have an army of teenyboppers behind him. Watch the clip for yourself and see what you think.

How might we make sense of all of this?

For starters, we are witnessing the public's periodic fascination with its power to negate. "America", as the Idol judges like to call us, at least when they are happy with our decisions, has a stubborn streak. There have certainly been cases when the public votes to keep someone on the program precisely because the judges were harsh to them and long-time Idol viewers have long speculated that the judges use this power to condemn tactically to generate public support behind certain contestants they want to keep on the air. The fans are also deeply suspicious of other efforts by the judges to game the system and there have been, as I outlined in Convergence Culture, ongoing controversies about the reliability of the voting system itself. In what other context would we trust the results of an election when no vote totals were ever released? And there are certainly cases where backlash emerges when the judge push a contestant too heavily and at the expense of fan favorites. It is telling that the winner of American Idol often sells fewer records than the also rans, suggesting that to the bitter end, the public wants to exert its ability to cancel out whatever the judges tell us to do.

I certainly saw Hank the Dwarf winning People Magazine's contest over Leo DeCaprio as a kind of populist response to the culture of glamor and celebrity -- as a push towards the anti-celebrity, the anti-heroic, the anti-glamorous, and the untalented as emblematic of a segment of the population that feels under-represented, under-counted, and under-appreciated.

In that sense, Hank and Sanjaya might be compared to LeRoy Jenkins, the hapless World of Warcraft player whose misadventures have developed a cult following among hardcore gamers. I was recently asked by a reporter to comment on the LeRoy Jenkins story -- assuming of course that I had to be a Jenkins expert (Can't imagine why?)-- and I suggested that we might see him as a new kind of American everyman, an embodiment of our collective feelings of insecurity and inadequacy. I remarked on the odd happenstance that the American everyman of World War II was Kilroy -- with G.I.s scribbling "Killroy was here" across the landscape as they recaptured Europe from the Nazis -- while the American everyman of the current war in Baghdad might be LeRoy, the guy who never had a chance. As I explained to the reporter, ""For the first time, we as a society get to decide who's famous. Having gained the right to project celebrities forward, we often choose losers, because in the past it was always success that connoted celebrity. If Leroy Jenkins can become a celebrity, anybody can."

Of course, the populist underpinnings of all this are tainted, I would argue, by the fact that this is being taken out of the hands of the grassroots Vote for the Worst campaign and transformed into a battle between two media powerhouses: Cowell vs. Stern.

And here's a question I have been struggling with. My sense is that Stern's listeners were laughing with Hank as he walked away to victory over the Hollywood hotshots, while they are laughing at Sanjaya Malakar as he remains uncomfortably caught in the spotlight, in way over his head, on American Idol. So, how do we account for the difference?

How long will all of this last? It's anyone's guess. My hunch is that it will last another few weeks in any case -- until the pack thins out a bit more -- and then the number of fans needed to stay on the program will grow well beyond the reach of Vote for the Worst and Howard Stern. There are probably a lot more people who want to see some of the other contestants win than want to see Sanjaya stick around but for the moment, the votes are split and so he will outlast many more worthy contestants. Could Howard Stern pull it off with American Idol as he did with People? Probably not. For one thing, the number of votes being cast on Idol far outweighs the number needed to win a web-based contest in 1998 and for another, Stern doesn't have nearly the reach he once did, given the lackluster revenue being generated by Sirius Radio at the present time. At the end of the day, Malakar is going down and Cowell will be able to once again play king-maker on his own program. And if he doesn't? Well, he won't be the first winner on American Idol whose record sales didn't reflect his standings in the competition. And even if Malakar won the contest, the producers would be able to make a mint off some of the other talent in the competition.

Editor's Note: Readers correctly point out that Bucky Covington was never a target of the Vote for the Worst campaign. I have left the original reference so that their comments would make sense and so that it would clarify a common misconception. I have read multiple news reports which did list Bucky as a VFTW target but I can't find any trace of him being so on the actual site. Sorry for any offense caused to his loyal fans. As it happens, I kinda like the guy myself.

Fluffing Up My Site...

Well, I am now back from Spring Break and I have put my fancy Easter Bonnet on! As you will have noticed by now, the blog has undergone a face lift while I was off line last week. I launched the blog last June, somewhat experimentally, not putting a lot of time into the design of the page, indeed, simply using a basic template offered by Movable Type. Once the blog took off, I've meant to do something to make it a bit more professionally polished but frankly, I had grown attached to the informality of the original design. Over the past few months, I have been working with Geoffrey Long, a CMS Masters Student, to develop a look and feel for the site which preserves the familiarity of the original but gave it a little more polish. I hope you like the results. Long by the way has also been responsible for the redesign of the Comparative Media Studies homepage and for the logos for the Convergence Culture Consortium and is currently finishing up work on the MIT Literature Section home page. He's certainly left his mark as a designer on MIT! And his thesis research which centers on transmedia storytelling, negative capability, and the Jim Henson Company will make his own kind of splash before much longer.

Since our launch last June, I have made more than 250 posts. The blog has attracted almost 800 links to date, suggesting the level of interest it has generated from my fellow bloggers. It's been a wild and wonderful ride so far, enhanced in part by the contributions of my diverse and passionate readers.

I figured I'd use today's post just to catch up on some loose ends.

Those of you who are interested in my work on New Media Literacies might be interested in this video-podcast from my recent talk at Middlebury College, hosted by regular blog reader and contributor Jason Mittell. The talk, "What Constitutes Literacy in the 21st Century," walks through some of the key ideas from the MacArthur white paper which I posted last fall. It is very similar to talks I have been making across the country on new media literacies but given the talk's location, I couldn't resist saying a few things about the efforts of Middlebury College History faculty to ban the use of wikipedia in student research.

The MIT Communications Forum has posted audio webcasts from their first two events so far this term.

In mid-Feburary, the first Forum of the term featured two members of the MIT Literature Faculty, Diana Henderson and Peter Donaldson, (also both faculty who contribute to the Comparative Media Studies Program), talking about their research into what the program billed as "Remixing Shakespeare." The speakers lived up to the title with Henderson sharing her thoughts about the ways that Shakespeare plays have been transformed by generation after generation of artists, drawing on her recently published book, Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare Across Time and Media. Donaldson shared with the group some of his recent research on Shakespeare on YouTube, suggesting ways that the video sharing service has both made historic performances more widely available than ever before, and encouraged people to integrate the Bard's words more fully into their own expressive lives.

A month or so back, I conducted a conversation with Frank Moss, the Director of the MIT Media Lab, about some of the directions being taken by recent work at the lab. I can't tell you how many times through the years that I have been introduced as the director of the MIT Media Lab. It seems to confuse people that MIT has more than one program with media in the title in a way that it doesn't confused them to have multiple programs with the word, engineering, in their titles! I have to say how much I have come to respect Moss and the new directions he is taking the lab. During this event, he shared some of his vision for the lab's future as well as presenting demonstrations of work the lab is doing in the area of low-cost computing, personal expression tools, smart cars, and prosthetics, all part of a larger vision of using technology to enhance human experience.

Those of you who are in Boston might want to check out a Forum which will be held this coming Thursday, April 5, in 5-7 pm, 3-270, focused on Evangelicals and the Media. Here's what the Communication Forum site tells us about the planned event:

American Evangelicals have a long history of engagement with the media, dating back to the Great Awakening of the late eighteenth century. Today Evangelical groups are active in all media, from the Internet and cellular telephones to print journalism, broadcasting, film, and multi-media entertainment. This forum convenes speakers from the academy and Evangelical community to discuss the social and political impact of the evangelical movement's use of media technologies.

Speakers

Gary Schneeberger is special assistant for media relations to Focus on the Family founder and chairman James Dobson. Schneeberger oversees the internal and external media efforts of the international evangelical ministry's Government and Public Policy Division as senior director of the radio program Family News in Focus, daily email service CitizenLink and Citizen magazine.

Jon Walker is a communications consultant for Rick Warren and Purpose Driven Life ministries, and has served as pastor of strategic communications for Saddleback Church and vice president of story for Purpose Driven Initiatives. He is founding editor of Rick Warren's Ministry ToolBox and the principal author for a book on Christian community, Better Together.

Diane Winston holds the Knight Chair in Media and Religion in the Annenberg School of Communication at USC. She is the author of Red-Hot and Righteous: The Urban Religion of the Salvation Army (1999) and co-editor of Faith in the Market: Religion and the Rise of Urban Commercial Culture (2002).

Moderator: The Rev. Amy McCreath is Episcopal chaplain and coordinator of the Technology and Culture Forum at MIT.

Those of you who are not in the Boston area can anticipate the webcast going up on the Communication Forum website within a week or so after the event.

In preparation for this event, my students and I will be watching some examples of evangelical media this week in our Media Theory and Methods prosem, including some work on youth and popular culture produced by Charles Dobson's organization and reading a selection from Heather Hendershott's Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and the Conservative Evangelical Culture. Hendershott writes about evangelical culture as an outsider but nevertheless shows respect for their beliefs and for the complexity of their cultural production. This book inspired and informed my discussion of the struggles over Harry Potter in Convergence Culture.

Spring Break....

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

Transmedia Storytelling 101

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

Transmedia Storytelling 101

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is your stance on horror fan culture?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just Men in Tights (Part Three)

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

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

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

DC: THE NEW FRONTIER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UNSTABLE MOLECULES

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

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

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

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

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

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

so:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CONCLUSION

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

Just Men in Tights? (Part Two)

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

REVERSE-ENGINEERING SUPERMAN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HISTORICAL FICTION, FICTIONAL HISTORY

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

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

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

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

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

JLA: YEAR ONE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just Men in Capes? (Part One)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FROM CONTINUITY TO MULTIPLICITY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DO SUPERHEROES GET EXHAUSTED?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Interview with Comics Journalist Joe Sacco (Part Two)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does your process involve much revision?

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

Where and how were you introduced to comic books?

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

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

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

What can traditional print journalism learn from your work?

I

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

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

How do you decide which events to cover?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Has there been a political backlash to your work?

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

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

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

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

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

YouTube and the Vaudeville Aesthetic

Taking the You Out of YouTube?

How to Watch a Fan-Vid

Astroturf, Humbugs and Lonely Girls

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

On Second Life

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

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

On New Media and Democracy

From Participatory Culture to Participatory Democracy Part One Part Two

Democracy Big Brother Style

National Politics in Game Worlds: The Case of China

On the Future of Education

From YouTube to YouNiversity

on New Media Literacies

White Paper for MacArthur Initiative

on DOPA and the Politics of Fear

The Only Thing We Have to Fear...

What DOPA Means For Education

Four Ways to Kill MySpace

MySpace and the Participation Gap

Joint Interview with danah boyd

on Fans and Intellectual Property

The Magic of Back Story: The Mainstreaming of Fan Culture

In Yoyogi Park (on fans and globalization)

Fan Fiction as Critical Commentary

My Secret Life as a Slasher

Fan Activism in a Networked Culture

In Defense of Crud

Getting Lost

Can One Be a Fan of High Art?

So What Happened to Star Wars Galaxies?

On Wikipedia and Collective Intelligence

Collective Intelligence vs. The Wisdom of Crowds

An Interview with Comics Journalist Joe Sacco (Part One)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

.

Who or what has influenced your work?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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