"Wait for the Next Pictures": Intertextuality and Cliffhanger Continuity in Early Cinema and Comic Strips

Harry Hershfield's "Desperate Desmond" exemplifies the intertextuality of sensational melodrama in the 1910s, especially between motion pictures and comic strips. Documenting Hershfield's sources and analyzing the narrative strategies of his strip and its motion picture adaptations, this essay theorizes "cliffhanger continuity" as a special, commercially expedient feature of serial publication.