Jan-Noël Thon

Mediality and materiality of contemporary comics

During the past few decades, the interdisciplinary field of comics studies has matured considerably, resulting not only in a growing number of dedicated conferences and journals but also in a multitude of methodologically different approaches to the study of comics, including various types of formal, semiotic, and narratological analysis as well as historical, political, and cultural investigations (for a selection of pertinent examples, see Beaty 2007; Carrier 2000; Chute 2010; Duncan and Smith 2009; Gabilliet 2010; Gardner 2012; Groensteen 2007; Packard 2006; as well as the contributions in Chaney 2011; Ditschke, Kroucheva, and Stein 2009; Eder, Klar, and Reichert 2011; Heer and Worcester 2009; McLaughlin 2005; Meskin and Cook 2012; Pustz 2012; Smith and Duncan 2012). According to Jared Gardner and David Herman, a core reason for this renewed vigour of a field that was initially hampered by ‘a defensive relationship to the academy at large’ can be seen in a number of recent ‘alliances with other, more recognizable fields’ such as ‘autobiography studies, sexuality studies, postcolonial studies, etc.’ (Gardner and Herman 2011b, 6). Since comics can be considered a fundamentally narrative form, Gardner and Herman may have good reasons to focus on the interrelation between comics studies and narratology (see also, for example, Groensteen 2013; Schüwer 2008; as well as the contributions in Gardner and Herman 2011a; Stein and Thon 2013). It seems striking, however, that they largely omit media studies from their discussion. Indeed, the relationship between comics studies and media studies appears to remain a comparatively uneasy one, despite a number of works that are located precisely at this intersection (see, for example, Bachmann 2016; Berndt 2015; Sina 2016; and the contributions in Chute and Jagoda 2014). Among other things, this may have to do with the rather contested question of to what extent, or in what way(s), comics can appropriately be described as a medium. Of course, media studies itself is – and will likely remain – a long way from any collectively shared conceptualisation of the term ‘medium’, but the latter tends to be understood as referring to a complex multi-dimensional concept, which allows one to distinguish between at least a communicative-semiotic, a material-technological, and a conventional-institutional dimension of media and their mediality (see, for example, Ryan 2006; Schmidt 2000; Thon 2014, 2016). If Hillary Chute, on the one hand, describes comics as a medium ‘that doesn’t blend the visual and the verbal – or use one simply to illustrate the other – but is rather prone to present the two nonsynchronously’ (Chute 2010, 452), she emphasises the communicative-semiotic dimension of mediality, while deemphasising the material-technological dimension (though she also discusses publication formats in some detail); if Christian Bachmann (2016), on the other hand, examines ‘metamediality’ and ‘materiality’, he emphasises the material-technological dimensions of different publication formats, while de-emphasising their communicative-semiotic

Guest Editors' Column: Transmedial Narratology: Current Approaches

NARRATIVE HAS always been a phenomenon of considerable medial range, and recent technological innovations in the context of the so-called digital revolution as well as salient changes of media use during the emergence of the “web 2.0” have only served to further multiply the ways in which stories can be told across media forms and genres. Thus, it is no surprise that not only literary texts, but also pictures and picture series, comics and other multimodal printed works, theatrical and other kinds of performances, films and television series, web series and other kinds of online video content, hypertexts and several areas of the social web, video games and interactive fictions, as well as various other media forms and genres have been productively

Transmedial Narratology Revisited: On the Intersubjective Construction of Storyworlds and the Problem of Representational Correspondence in Films, Comics, and Video Games

ABSTRACT:Located within the more encompassing project of a genuinely transmedial narratology, this articles focus is twofold: on the one hand, it aims to further our understanding of strategies of narrative representation and processes of narrative comprehension across media by developing a transmedial conceptualization of storyworlds as intersubjective communicative constructs; on the other hand, it will zoom in on transmedial as well as medium-specific forms of representational correspondence (sensu Currie), examining the question to what extent spectators of films, readers of comics, and players of video games may choose to apply variations of the principle of charity (sensu Walton) in cases where default assumptions about the relation between a narrative representation and the storyworld(s) it represents become problematic or even collapse entirely.