Comics as a Test Case for Transmedial Narratology

Bibliographic Data

ID5339344
AuthorsKarin Kukkonen (0000-0001-5240-3280, corresponding author)
Year2011
Volume40
Issue1
Pages34-52
Publication date2011-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSubStance (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0049-2426 • E-ISSN: 1527-2095
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/sub.2011.0005
OpenAlexW2159211647
LanguageEN
Citations received12
References cited6

Comics as a Test Case for Transmedial Narratology1 Karin Kukkonen (bio) Comics can be described both as a type of medium and as a vehicle for storytelling. On the one hand, comics are a medium. Even as online and digital comics formats are emerging, comics remain a paper-bound medium. And even if there are some problems with pinning down the exact nature of comics (see McCloud, Chute, and Hatfield for further discussion), they are easily recognizable as a medium with their panel sequences, speech bubbles, and speed lines. Thus comics take a particular place in today's media landscape. On the other hand, comics also work as a vehicle for narrative. Thus their medium-specific features of panel sequences, speech bubbles, and speed lines are (usually) designed to tell a story to their readers. This story can be short and limited, like those in newspaper comic strips, or it can be sprawling, complex, and ambitious, like many comics series and graphic novels. Thus comics are among the many media in which narrative is "simply there, like life itself"—to quote Roland Barthes in his "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives" (79). I would like to examine here how these two aspects of comics—their status as a medium, and their role as a vehicle of narrative—intersect. What are the narrative functions of comics' medium-specific features? What are their potentials and limitations? How do the images, words and sequences of comics shape their narrative potential? How does the historical development of media interact with comics storytelling? I shall explore these questions by focusing on Fables 7: Arabian Nights (and Days) by Bill Willingham and Mark Buckingham (2006), and the intermedial narrative tradition of Arabian Nights on which the Fables series draws. I shall also work to situate the study of comics within the broader project of transmedial narratology—that is, the project of investigating how particular media constrain as well as enable storytelling practices. The characters and stories of Arabian Nights have spread from verbal narratives into illustrations, animated films, and feature films—and now into TV series and video games. As it made its way through the last three centuries, Arabian Nights has been globalized, commercialized, and constantly remediated, and it thus provides an instance of "convergence culture" avant la lettre (see Sallis and Ali for overviews of Arabian Nights in the English literary tradition). The Fables series engages in this same [End Page 34] process of exchange, when Willingham and Buckingham recount the meeting between Western fairy tale characters and those from Arabian Nights. Fables draws on earlier versions of Arabian Nights, particularly the nineteenth-century fairy book and its illustrations, remediating and recontextualizing their storyworld and characters. As a result, the series becomes part of the "long tradition of reciters and professional storytellers" that reshapes the tales by telling them anew (Pinault 250). In this tradition, starting with the different Arabic manuscripts of the tales (see Pinault), notions of authenticity and fidelity are continually undermined. As the body of texts associated with Arabian Nights crosses and re-crosses media boundaries, however, there emerges a historical perspective on how storytelling practices both shape and are shaped by the media in which they unfold. Fables draws extensively on this larger narrative tradition. At the same time, the series makes conscious and careful use of the unique comics medium in order to achieve particular narrative effects, such as the representation of smooth movement or the interplay of changing perspectives. In considering Fables, we will see how the different modes in comics—especially images, words, and sequence—have an impact on narration, and also how those modes allow comics to draw on storytelling traditions and thus become part of a larger cultural conversation. Comics as a Multimodal Medium As a multimodal medium, comics combine words and images, plus the panel arrangements that are used to imply temporal sequence. Each of these modes works as "a system of choices to communicate meaning" (Ruth Page, 6), as I describe below, and the constellation of modes in comics—i.e. the "choices" made in a particular graphic narrative—has a considerable impact on the storytelling possibilities supported by the medium

Art · Comic strip · Comics · Literature · Media studies · Narrative · Narratology · Newspaper · Sociology · Storytelling · Visual arts · Comics and Graphic Narratives · Digital Storytelling and Education · History · Narrative Theory and Analysis