Unit 8: Remediation

Question 1

Identify formal traits of comics in a structural analysis.

Answer 1

• Sequence requires the reader to impose closure, to link together the action between two panels or images. Closure can given an impression of motion (even though comics are static) or a narrative coherence where the actual process is invisible between the panels.
• The term “sequential art” restored some degree of higher status to the works, much as we recently moved from “comics” to “graphic novels.”
• The gutter is the blank space between panels, and this is more or less unique to comics in the sequence art forms.
• A “restricted arthrology” is in sequence, while a “general arthrology” is the full set of a multiframe (a whole page or more), or the linkages between two images not adjacent to each other.

Question 2

Arthrology

Answer 2

• A “restricted arthrology” is in sequence, while a “general arthrology” is the full set of a multiframe (a whole page or more), or the linkages between two images not adjacent to each other.

Question 3

Identify the relationship between remediation and content.

Answer 3

• Remediation is the transformation of a media product to a different medium.
• the logic of hypermediacy [that is, the blurring together of several different media] expresses the tension between regarding a visual space as mediated and regarding it as a ‘real’ space that lies beyond mediation. Put more simply, “remediation” lies somewhere between “reality” and “representations of reality.”
• Remediation can also be aggressive, as when the new medium tries to refashion the older medium or media entirely, while still marking the presence of the older media and therefore maintaining a sense of multiplicity or, as they have called it, hypermediacy.
• Remediation is a combination of hypermediacy and immediacy.

Question 4

Related metafictional styles to pulp comics.

Answer 4

• “Metacomics” in the Silver-Age and Revisionist styles of American action hero comic books. This formalist approach seriously considers a medium and genre we typically do not pay careful attention to.
• These metafictional effects press readers to recognize comics as not only popular entertainment but as the self-conscious products of authors and artists who are keenly aware of their role in producing pulp materials for a particular audience.

Question 5

Identify and describe popular culture’s capacity for dissent.

Answer 5

• the “transnational imagination,” a way of seeing that frames local circumstances in a global and historical trajectory that ultimately affects collective action.
• These are figures that have been able to capture, and to a degree channel, popular desires for social or political change.
• Works of popular culture can represent marginalized communities by subverting against stereotypes or the dominant cultural hegemony.

Question 6

Allusion

Answer 6

• An allusion is an indirect reference to another work that alters or shapes how the reader understands the new text.
• In this sense, allusion can deeply alter how we read even a very short moment or scene in a work. Allusion is “thick” when it is done properly or most effectively.
• The most obvious reference or allusion in V for Vendetta is to the Gunpowder Plot, also known as Bonfire Night or Guy Fawkes Day.
• Macbeth is the most obvious first allusion because it encapsulates themes of regicide, power, and alludes to the Gunpowder Plot itself.
• Particularly, the allusions in the text create a feedback loop. They bring extra-textual meanings into the story, illuminating the work’s characters and themes, as well as launch the reader out from the text, situating her within a network of cultural and historical references. A crafty author is able to intentionally manipulate allusions to incite a deeper understanding of textual issues, characters, and themes.

Question 7

Articulate your own understanding of the relationship between a medium, political commentary, and mass distribution.

Answer 7

• the mass media play a crucial role in the modern political process.
• different medium encode ideology that will perpetuate or subvert against particular ideologies.
• television is subject for mass distribution which affects the political commentary allowed within it by executives.

Question 8

Reading - “Show and Tell Notes Toward a Theory of Metacomics”

Answer 8

• The Silver Age is a generic style that arises from a particular historical circumstance which is the creation of the self-censorship system called the Comics Code (1954, revised in 1981, then abandoned in the 1990s). It removed violence; become authoritarian; removed sexuality.
• The Revisionist Age contains elements of the Silver Age but revises it.
• the comic genre is both high-fantasy and “low” culture.
• metapicture is picture about itself, a picture that refers to its own making, yet one that dissolves the boundary between inside and outside.
• two poles of metafiction: one that finally accepts a substantial real world whose significance isn’t entirely composed of relationships within language; and one that suggest there can never be an escape from the prison-house of language
• structural metafiction doesn’t break the frame of its fictional world, but calls attention to that frame, to how it functions; radical metafiction open the frame of the narrative until there is no frame any more.
• closure and metafiction both require active participation from the read, who would need some degree of knowledge to fill in the information.

Question 9

Reading - “Surveying the World of Contemporary Comics Scholarship: A Conversation.”

Answer 9

• study of comics oscillates between an ethical regime of images and a representative regime of images. In other words, it is a question of evaluating the uses to which comics are put, or the distinctions between genres in accordance to what is represented.