Media and Communication

Over the past two decades comic book fans have become a digitally-empowered minority, with mainstream filmmakers much more likely to yield to fan pressure when adapting comics than in pre-digital times. Nonetheless, this fidelity-favouring audience is still only a fraction of the eventual attendance of these blockbuster releases. The larger non-fan audience is frequently drawn to 'comic-book movies' by generic markers carefully positioned by filmmakers and publicity to evoke past successes; with the continued popularity of comic-book movies suggesting these strategies have been successful. To better understand these two broad groups that attend comic book adaptations, audiences at screenings of recent high-profile films Thor and Green Lantern were surveyed. Adopting a similar methodology to Watching The Lord of the Rings, this research was carried out as a quali-quantitative paper survey of filmgoers at three different screenings of each film. The results offered a nuanced picture of the audience(s) for one of the most popular trends in modern cinema. Ultimately, it was found that while the two broad audiences that attend theses adaptations are not mutually exclusive, they do have differing interests and expectations, which the filmmaker and scholar must consider. The September 2007 issue of the popular UK film magazine Empire had an arresting image of a little-known red and yellow clad superhero thrusting his fist into the pavement. By the following summer, Iron Man would be one of the most successful comic book film adaptations of all time, but at this early stage of promotion the magazine's feature writer,

Research across a number of disciplines demonstrates that digital
technologies have intensified migrants’ connections to both old
and new homelands. Yet to be explored, however, is how this
interconnectedness intersects with shifting conceptions of “home”
over the life course. The research presented here helps fill this gap
by drawing on surveys and semi-structured qualitative interviews
conducted with Irish immigrants to Australia, now in their 60s, 70s,
and 80s, who left Ireland prior to the emergence of new media. The
article charts a trajectory across three phases of the migrant life
course: “leaving home,” characterized by feelings of dislocation from
Ireland and an involvement in the local Irish “ethnic village”; “at home,”
characterized by withdrawal from ethnic community involvements
under the pressure of family and work responsibilities; and “going
home,” characterized by a desire to reconnect with origins, both locally
and transnationally. Our findings suggest that age-related social
circumstances and existential concerns have played an important
role in shaping older migrants’ use of new media to stay “connected.”

From his debut in a six-page comic in 1939 and to his most recent portrayal by Christian Bale in the blockbuster The Dark Knight Rises, Batman is perhaps the world’s most popular superhero. The continued relevance of the caped crusader could be attributed to his complex character, his dual identity, or his commitment to revenge and justice. But, as the contributors to this collection argue, it is the fans who, with the patience of Alfred, the loyalty of Commissioner Gordon, and the unbridled enthusiasm of Robin, have kept Batman at the forefront of popular culture for more than seven decades.
Fan Phenomena: Batman explores the unlikely devotion to the Dark Knight, from his inauspicious beginnings on the comic book page to the cult television series of the 1960s and on to critically-acclaimed films and video games of today. Considering everything from convention cosplay to fan fiction that imagines the Joker as a romantic lead, the essays here acknowledge and celebrate fan responses that go far beyond the scope of the source material. And, the contributors contend, despite occasional dips in popularity, Batman’s sustained presence in popular culture for more than seventy years is thanks in no small part to his fans’ ardor.
Packed with revealing interviews from all corners of the fan spectrum—including Paul Levitz, who rose through the ranks of fan culture to become the president of DC Comics, and Michael Uslan, who has executive produced every Batman adaptation since Tim Burton’s blockbuster in 1989, as well as film reviewers, academics, movie buffs, comic store clerks, and costume-clad convention attendees—this book is sure to be a bestseller in Gotham City, as well as everywhere Bruce Wayne’s alter ego continues to intrigue and inspire.

In the summer of 2000 X-Men surpassed all box of ce expectations and ushered in an era of unprecedented production of comic book film adaptations. This trend, now in its second decade, has blossomed into Hollywood's leading genre. From superheroes to Spartan warriors, The Comic Book Film Adaptation offers the first dedicated study to examine how comic books moved from the fringes of popular culture to the center of mainstream film production.

Through in-depth analysis, industry interviews, and audience research, this book charts the cause-and-effect of this influential trend. It considers the cultural traumas, business demands, and digital possibilities that Hollywood faced at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The industry managed to meet these challenges by exploiting comics and their existing audiences. However, studios were caught off-guard when these comic book fans, empowered by digital media, began to in uence the success of these adaptations. Nonetheless, filmmakers soon developed strategies to take advantage of this intense fanbase, while codifying the trend into a more lucrative genre, the comic book movie, which appealed to an even wider audience. Central to this vibrant trend is a comic aesthetic in which filmmakers utilize digital filmmaking technologies to engage with the language and conventions of comics like never before.

The Comic Book Film Adaptation explores this unique moment in which cinema is stimulated, challenged, and enriched by the once-dismissed medium of comics.

In 1978 Superman made audiences believe a man could fly. Since then, superhero movies have shown that man can not only fly, but swing from webs through New York’s concrete canyons, turn monstrous shades of green if suitably angry, and dress as giant rodents to safeguard the city streets. Today, there are more superhero movies than ever before as the cinematic skies are filled with caped crusaders and nocturnal vigilantes that continue to delight and excite filmgoers the world over. Through detailed analysis and fascinating facts, this guide explores how, in a single bound, the superhero has made the leap from the comic book page to the silver screen. So fasten your utility belt as you prepare to take flight with this must-read for fans of superheroes and blockbuster cinema.

A name change, a chic venue and eighty papers running the gamut from 'Post-Racial Othello' (Douglas Lanier) to 'The Literary Rambo' (Jeremy Strong), the 4 th International Association of Adaptation Studies Conference took place in the BFI Southbank on the 24 th and 25 th of September, 2009. With previous conferences held in Leicester (2006), Atlanta (2007) and Amsterdam (2008), this was the first conference organized by the association since changing its name from 'The Association of Literature on Screen Studies' to its new, more inclusive title. This decision was taken at the 2008 conference and is reflective of the field's interests widening beyond novel and theatre adaptations. Fittingly, a diverse range of textual relations was under consideration during the conference proceedings, including sessions on 'Costume and Adaptation', 'Silent Adapta-tions' and 'Screenwriting: Adaptation in Practice'. The conference is always well-organized and the attendees seasoned enough to ensure that their papers are well-researched and engaging; tailored to solicit meaningful debate. This year's choice of venue saw the conference reach a new level of lavishness, with certain spaces more often used for public interviews with avant-garde filmmakers and world-class directors than conference proceedings. In these venues, with stadium seating and digital projection, sessions such as 'Ben-Hur 50 Years On' were accorded the pomp and ceremony befitting their subject. However, this high standard did not extend to all spaces with some a little too small for their popular papers and the speakers drowned out by the hustle and bustle of the busy venue. Also, with the growing success of the conference—organizers admitted the proceedings could have been filled three times over—there were more papers presented than ever before, necessitating an increased number of parallel sessions. This made the always difficult choice of deciding what to attend even more problematic (would 'Germany and Adaptation' be more interesting than 'Hollywood and Adaptation' and how about the panels on gothic adaptation or Stanley Kubrick?), while a greater number of speakers in each session limited the opportunity for questions and post-panel discussion. Yet these problems befall any popular conference, and serve to demonstrate the increasing interest in adaptation studies and this association. Despite the association's more expansive remit, with the exception of a session on 'British Television and the Classic-Novel Adaptation', film adaptations remained the

In the summer of 2000 "X-Men" surpassed all box office expectations and ushered in an era of unprecedented production of comic book film adaptations. This trend, now in its second decade, has blossomed into Hollywood's leading genre. From superheroes to Spartan warriors, "The Comic Book Film Adaptation" offers the first dedicated study to examine how comic books moved from the fringes of popular culture to the center of mainstream film production. Through in-depth analysis, industry interviews, and audience research, this book charts the cause-and-effect of this influential trend. It considers the cultural traumas, business demands, and digital possibilities that Hollywood faced at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The industry managed to meet these challenges by exploiting comics and their existing audiences. However, studios were caught off-guard when these comic book fans, empowered by digital media, began to influence the success of these adaptations. Nonetheless, filmmakers soon developed strategies to take advantage of this intense fanbase, while codifying the trend into a more lucrative genre, the comic book movie, which appealed to an even wider audience. Central to this vibrant trend is a comic aesthetic in which filmmakers utilize digital filmmaking technologies to engage with the language and conventions of comics like never before. "The Comic Book Film Adaptation" explores this unique moment in which cinema is stimulated, challenged, and enriched by the once-dismissed medium of comics.

Why have more comic book film adaptations been produced since the year 2000 than any other time in film history, and what impact are these adaptations having on their respective industries? These questions were the focus of my 2015 book The Comic Book Film Adaptation: Exploring Modern Hollywood's Leading Genre, published by the University Press of Mississippi. To develop this study it was essential that I interview creators and artists from both sides of the adaptation divide. At the 2015 San Diego Comic-Con I brought some of those industry professionals
(Tom Brevoort, Joe Kelly, Michael E. Uslan, and Mark Waid) together to continue discussions from the book. Hosted by the academic forum the Comics Arts Conference, the panel, titled The Comic Book Film Adaptation, was held on Friday, July 10.

During the Celtic Tiger a strand of films emerged in Ireland that centred on nomadic people, rebellious children and renegade policemen. These pastoral narratives borrowed classical Western tropes to articulate the effect of the massive economic and social shifts taking place in Ireland - redefining the country’s ever-diminishing frontier.

Despite the popularity of today’s comic book film adaptations, superheroes did not make the leap from comics to screen in a single bound; rather it was a series of incremental steps. This chapter examines one of the most important yet overlooked steps in the comic book character’s journey from niche interest to mainstream success: animated series. In particular, it focuses on the early 1990s animated Marvel series X-Men (1992-1997) and Spider-Man (1994-1998).
Drawing on the transtextual relations Gérard Genette puts forward in Palimpsests, film scholar Robert Stam suggests that film adaptations are “hypertexts derived from preexisting hypotexts that have been transformed by operations of selection, amplification, concretization, and actualization.” He expands this point by suggesting, “diverse prior adaptations can form a larger, cumulative hypotext that is available to the filmmaker who comes relatively ‘late’ in the series.” For instance, when asked on the X-Men DVD commentary whether the 1992 animated series X-Men had influenced his live action adaptation, director Bryan Singer replied, “Tremendously. The animated series [… featured] the characters that had risen through the comic franchise and had become part of a more public lexicon, I wanted to take advantage of that.”
Focusing on industrial and formal relationships between comics, cinema, and animation, this chapter argues that animation is not so much the missing link, but rather the forgotten bridge between the comics that are respected as the source text and the excitement that greets each new transmedia franchise installment.

When Time magazine named “You” as the Person of the Year in 2006, it articulated a growing belief in the power of new media to “simulate an ideal public sphere” (Moyo 141) in which “consumption itself is now regarded as a positive” (Creeber 19). Although, arguably insurmountable, disparities exist between producer and consumer; it seems reckless to ignore the audience in an era marked by such participation. Thus, this study of comic book adaptations allows one to reopen the fidelity debate, not as a return to the reductive research that ignored wider determinants, but rather as a means of productively addressing how fan discourses, and what Colin MacCabe calls “the grammar of value” (9), can be a vibrant part of the many relations that shape an adaptation. Accordingly, this chapter will demonstrate how comic book fans (alongside other devotees of pop culture) helped facilitate Hollywood’s transition to a more participatory industry. It will argue that the increased fidelity of modern comic book adaptations can be partly attributed to comic book fans, who gained wider influence over production in the digital age. This chapter will conclude with an analysis of the unprecedented fidelity of the Golden Age of Comic Book Filmmaking, which fostered the emergence of the first comic book transformations (e.g., Sin City, Watchmen, and Scott Pilgrim), and how, even within the larger category of borrowings, the source has become an increasingly important determinant in films such as Batman Begins (Nolan 2005).

Dudley Andrew contends that “if a novel’s story is judged in some way comparable to its filmic adaptation, then the strictly separate but equivalent processes of implication which produced the narrative units of that story through words and audio-visual signs, respectively, must be studied” (Film Theory 103). This semiotic approach has been recognized as an important adaptation studies tool by a number of scholars (Stam “Beyond Fidelity” 62; Griffith 28). Cohen applied this method in his analysis of Dick Tracy, summarizing, “The ‘comic aesthetic’ in Dick Tracy does not transcend the ontology of cinema; it is an aesthetic translation of the characteristics and conventions from the comic medium by using the stylistic and functional equivalents in cinema” (36). Building on this observation, this chapter will seek to identify equivalences between the forms, mapping where they have been utilized by filmmakers to achieve a comic aesthetic.

Mainstream comic book publishers are unashamed by embellishment. In fact, many hold exaggeration as the high criterion to which artists should aspire. Published in 1978, the instructional art book How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way was described by its co-author, Stan Lee, as the first instructional book on drawing comic book superheroes. In the book, Lee (working with popular Marvel Comics’ artist John Buscema) explained many of the formal aspects of comic book art and how to tailor them to the “mildly magnificent Marvel style” (9).
Commentators and critics frequently characterise films as having comic book qualities. Although such descriptions are often a barely veiled criticism, the use of this term does suggest that comic book nuances can be discerned in cinematic storytelling. As this chapter will attest, such nuances have blossomed in recent years into a fully-fledged style. Although variants on these conventions might also be identified in other traditions (e.g. theatre, painting, and prose), as described in the previous chapter, comics and cinema share a semiotic overlap. While this unique overlap might facilitate a comparatively easy back-and-forth between the forms it also makes it difficult (arguably impossible) to identify influences that are distinctly comic or cinematic. To negotiate the active relay between the forms, Lee and Buscema’s seminal guide will be used in this chapter to chart how filmmakers learned to adapt comics the Marvel Way.

"Mr. Stark, you've become part of a bigger universe. You just don't know it yet". In the brief post-credit scene that followed Jon Favreau's Iron Man (2008), Nick Fury announces to Tony Stark (and the audience) the arrival of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) - an ambitious attempt to bring comic book continuity to the big screen. Soon after, the franchise went transmedia with comic books, television shows, DVD "one-shots", and video games. Thus, the term "Marvel Cinematic Universe" (MCU) is no longer adequate to describe a narrative that has been extended across a number of media. Today the MCU might be more accurately described as one of the first successful examples of transmedia storytelling.
Compelled by the box office triumph of Joss Whedon's crossover movie The Avengers (2012) a number of studios are now attempting to apply the transmedia storytelling template set by Marvel to their intellectual property. This chapter unpacks the process of transmedia storytelling, which is finally moving to the centre of mainstream screen production following years of false starts. By focusing on the industry leader, Marvel, the ideal characteristics of a transmedia-ready property will be identified, including: Flexible Continuity, Platform Neutral Storytelling, Collaborative Authorship, Fan/ Non-Fan Balance, Story World Depth, Brand Recognition, and a Conglomerate Structure. Ultimately, this chapter will demonstrate how Marvel Entertainment applied the practices of its publishing arm to its transmedia endeavours, setting the standard for a host of imitators and the future of transmedia storytelling.

Films have long been organised according to genre categories grounded by thematic and narrative conventions. Yet while these taxonomies have remained relatively static in industrial and academic discourse over the past two decades, the digital age has given rise to new modes of film distribution and consumption. This article presents preliminary findings from an audience research project carried out in collaboration with Australian media company Village Roadshow investigating genre and spectatorship. The findings suggest that in an era characterised by video-on-demand, screen convergence, and personalised recommendation systems, the existing categorisation strategies favored by the film industry and screen studies scholars may no longer align with the practices and priorities of contemporary audiences. The article presents findings from a pilot study that examined the discursive processes that constitute genre as a cultural practice in the digital age through identifying how respondents classified and described certain films. The research also sought to explore the extent to which these classification practices aligned with or diverged from existing genre paradigms. The findings provide an audience-centered understanding of the shifting landscape of film distribution and consumption, as streaming services such as Netflix motivate significant transformations in the way films are accessed, understood, and consumed. Considering the influence of both traditional genre categories and new forms of categorisation and consumption driven by streaming services, the article demonstrates how contemporary audiences link films as diverse as Moonlight (Jenkins 2016), Deadpool (Miller 2016), and Psycho (Hitchcock 1960) based on style, narrative structure, and affective experience, thereby illuminating how audiences conceive of and relate to genre in this period of industrial flux. This research offers analytical strategies grounded in audience research aimed at re-evaluating genre in an era of personalised content curation, niche content categorisation, and on-demand access to films.

Born in the depths of the Great Depression as a four-colour response to the challenges of the Machine Age, the comic book superhero was an uniquely American creation. However, from Captain Britain to Captain Canuck international creators have reimagined the superhero archetype to reflect local traditions and culture. While US superheroes on the page and screen are popular in Australia, local creators have avoided producing their own superheroes in favour of more grounded icons like Mad Max. In the absence of Australian voices, the few Australian superheroes created have been produced by overseas artists who often perpetuate long-standing stereotypes.
This article will consider the reasons for the seeming incompatibility between Australia and the superhero. Drawing on a hundred interviews with superhero creators and fans at Melbourne comic book conventions the most frequently cited reasons for Australia’s superhero drought will be organised and analysed under three inter-related headings: National Identity, Cultural Cringe, and Market Differentiation. Although many of the perceived obstacles to Australian superheroes are no longer relevant (and perhaps never were), the respondent interviews demonstrate how they still have potent purchase in Australian cultural life.
This article will also consider how the recent emergence of local superhero writers and artists working for international publishers like Marvel and DC Comics can provide a corrective to outdated depictions of Australia. The analysis will conclude with an examination of how the Australian superhero TV show Cleverman surmounts many of the long-standing hurdles to Australian superheroes through a careful integration of superhero conventions and Indigenous mythology, suggesting a future direction for Australian superheroes.