Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology

8 Film Comics

193 8 Film + Comics A Multimodal Romance in the Age of Transmedial Convergence jared gardner Born together at the end of the nineteenth century, comics and film were both multimodal narrative forms from the start, telling stories using multiple, interdependent semiotic chains of text and image. Together, comics and film became the first two new narrative media of the twentieth century, and in developing their conventions they borrowed heavily from each other even as they also explored their own unique affordances (see Gardner ch. 1). The significance of this development in the history of narrative media in the last century cannot be overestimated. After all, while narrative, in one sense at least, has always been multimodal (see Grishakova and Ryan 4), it is hard to find sustained or culturally significant examples in the West that do not inevitably make one semiotic chain subservient to the other. An illustrated book is not multimodal , after all, in the same way that a sequential comic is; the pictures almost always serve to illustrate the text, which is primarily responsible for the work of telling the story. While our reading experience of Oliver Twist would certainly be different without the twenty-four illustrations that accompanied the original serialization of the novel, that they are not essential is evidenced by the fact that few modern editions include all of the original illustrations and many include none at all. And although increasingly we see examples in the twenty-first century of what Wolfgang Hallet has usefully described as the “multimodal novel” (129)—a novel in which “it is the systematic and recurrent integration of non-verbal and non-narrative elements in novelistic narration that makes the difference” (130)—this phenomenon has largely developed in the last twenty years in response to a dramatically changing media ecology. Thus I would argue that we risk misreading both the significance of the phenomenon of the multimodal novel of the twenty-first century and the new multimodal 194 Gardner narrative forms of the twentieth century—film and comics—if, as Ruth Page recently called for, we start “reconceptualiz[ing] all narrative communication as multimodal” (5). Of course, multimodal narratives existed long before comics and film, with opera and theater being the most obvious predecessors for those encountering film and comics for the first time in the late nineteenth century . But here, too, the differences are worth considering. Theater and opera were experienced “live”—that is, with performers enacting the story in the narrative “present” and “live” in the sense of happening in real time. And neither opera nor theater were available yet for mechanical reproduction—for interactions such as looping, rewinding, and rereading that would be opened up by translating the experience of the multimodal performance out of the live space of the theater into a multimodal text. 1890–1910: Birth of Modern Multimodal Media An important part of what defined the unique experience of the twentieth century’s new multimodal media is that early comics and film both told their multimodal narratives in complex transmedial environments—newspapers, illustrated magazines, vaudeville houses, and nickelodeons—where paratexts multiplied in profusion, creating almost infinitely varied and unruly encounters with the text. From the early Kinetoscope through the heyday of the nickelodeon, early film was experienced in environments that included vaudeville routines, live music, narration, and sound effects, not to mention the lively commentary of the audience itself. As the saying goes, silent film was never silent , but it was also never simply film, just as the early sequential comics were never simply comics. The early narrative strips were experienced across the serial disruptions of the weekly (and later daily) newspaper, with its own cacophony of tragic headlines, advertisements, and data. And as was the case with early film, the audience itself contributed vitally to the transmedial experience of the early comic, with people often reading and commenting upon the comics in public spaces and collaborative environments. With the rise of the daily continuity strip in the late 1910s and 1920s, comics’ creators began inviting readers to collaborate on the stories, offering contests and often deliberately blurring the boundaries between front-page news and graphic narrative. Film + Comics 195 In both cases, at least initially, multimodal narrative was inseparable from transmedial reading experiences and environments; so it is not surprising that within a very short time both film and comics began to discover possibilities for complex transmedial storytelling. They began with...