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TRANSMEDIA/
GENRE Matthew Freeman
Anthony N. Smith
Rethinking Genre in a Multiplatform Culture
Transmedia/Genre
Matthew Freeman • Anthony N. Smith

Transmedia/Genre
Rethinking Genre in a Multiplatform Culture
Matthew Freeman Anthony N. Smith
Bath Spa University University of Salford
Bath, UK Salford, UK

ISBN 978-3-031-15582-6    ISBN 978-3-031-15583-3 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15583-3

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2023

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher,
whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprint-
ing, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other
physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, com-
puter software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Acknowledgements

This book has been a long time in the making. It was originally contracted back
in 2017 and promised to focus on ‘emergent transmedia’, exploring all those
developing and often indie practices of transmedia storytelling that started to
materialise around that time. Genre was a core part of this thinking, as it
became clear that, even as transmediality was evolving into a whole multiplicity
of meanings, practices, applications and understandings, the concept of genre
was central to how stories spread across multiple media. Even if few talked
about it.
Time went on, our lives went in new directions, and new challenges pre-
sented themselves. (If nothing else, Freeman became a father—twice!).
Thankfully, Smith joined the project in 2018, bringing a fresh perspective that
dovetailed perfectly with Freeman’s interest in looking at how the technologi-
cal and participatory affordances of transmedia entertainments relate to con-
temporary workings of genre. And it was Smith who really consolidated the
vision for the project as something even more ambitious: put simply, this book
seeks to understand genre as it works today, theorising a new model for genre
in the age of media convergence. This marks a contribution that we are both
very proud of, and one that we hope was worth the wait.
Of course, we need to thank and appreciate those people who helped us
along the way. As ever, Freeman would like to offer a genuine thanks to Carley,
whose love remains utterly unwavering. He also offers a big thanks to his dad
for his continued support, especially during a difficult period in his own life,
and to Beth Wakefield for her friendship. Smith would like to thank Zoë,
Lucinda and Aimee for their love, support and good humour throughout the
writing of this book. Finally, we both want to thank the editors at Palgrave,
who have been nothing but patient and understanding since the very begin-
ning of this project.

v
 Contents

1 Introduction or: Why We Still Need Genre  1

Part I Media Conglomerates  19

2 T
 ransmedia Superhero: Marvel, Genre Divergence and
Captain America 21

3 T
 ransmedia Western: Lucasfilm, Genre Linking and
The Mandalorian 47

Part II Digital Platforms  65

4 T
 ransmedia Horror: Netflix, Genre Empowerment and
Stranger Things 67

5 T
 ransmedia Docudrama: ITV Hub, Genre Democratisation
and Quiz 85

6 T
 ransmedia Comedy: BBC Three, Genre Distribution and
Pls Like105

7 T
 ransmedia Fantasy-JRPG: Kickstarter, Genre Leveraging
and Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes119

vii
viii Contents

Part III Emerging Technologies 137

8 T
 ransmedia War: Virtual Reality, Genre Embodiment
and The Day the World Changed139

9 T
 ransmedia Science Fiction: Deepfake Technology, Genre
Fictioning and Reminiscence153

10 C
 onclusion: Towards a Conceptual Framework of
Transmedia Genre167

Index175
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction or: Why We Still Need Genre

Imagine you are searching through the interface of Netflix, as we assume you
must have done at some point or another. You are browsing its catalogue of
seemingly unending content. As you do so, it quickly becomes apparent that
Netflix’s entire navigation principle is based on coded sets of tags—otherwise
known as genres. Some basic online research reveals that, as of 2021, Netflix
has over 27,000 genres listed on its platform (Lilly 2021), which does not even
include its so-called hidden genre codes (Spencer 2018). So, two observations
immediately come to mind when browsing Netflix in this way. The first is that
Netflix’s approach to ‘tagging’ content under particular genre categories is not
in any way bound by medium, production context, country of origin, year of
release and so on. Its entire approach to genre is instead something much
wider, broader and more diverse than many studies of film or literary genre
have considered previously. A quick search for ‘thriller’, for example, brings up
everything from Netflix Original Before I Wake (2016) to The Silence of the
Lambs (1991), both mixed in with television series The Alienist (2018). And
the second observation is that by mixing film and television from many eras
and production contexts, Netflix’s genre tags function as the platform’s mar-
keting mechanism, grouping titles together so as to engage certain demo-
graphics. Genre, recalibrated for Netflix, creates personalisation out of chaos.
Netflix’s use of genre tags may be commonplace and even fairly obvious to
describe, but it demonstrates a very important point: that genre, while working
differently when viewed from either industrial, technological or participatory
perspectives, remains the bedrock of today’s transmedia landscape. So says
Alison Norrington, Creative Director at StoryCentral Ltd., a transmedia con-
sultancy firm that works globally with clients including the likes of Walt Disney
Imagineering, SundanceTV, AMC Networks and FOX International: ‘In this
messy, fragmented media landscape, where content is everywhere and so too
are our audiences, genre is perhaps the only remaining constant’ (2020). Which
is all in spite of the fact that genre, at least in academic circles, has largely fallen

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2023
M. Freeman, A. N. Smith, Transmedia/Genre,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15583-3_1
2 M. FREEMAN AND A. N. SMITH

away in recent decades, precisely at a time when academics need it the most.
We are all part of a media convergence age where the meaning-making power
of genre is both more important and less stable than it was before, with audi-
ences increasingly fragmented across an ever-diversifying set of platforms and
channels. Yet operating complexly within such fragmentation, today’s genres—
often formed via a set of interconnected, hyperlinked digital platforms that
afford highly individualised perspectives on media—are being shaped and
reshaped almost continuously by these different platforms and channels. Each
of these genres is thus in constant dialogue and re-negotiation with one another
as a result of the extensive transmedia experiences that surround them. And yet
as Norrington declared, with digital platforms characterised by their expansive,
fragmentary nature, genre is indeed crucial to how we navigate and make sense
of today’s media landscape, even if the processes underpinning this are not fully
understood.
Which brings us to this book’s first—and main—overarching objective.
Genres are perhaps the most innately transmedial of media constructs, formed
as they are from all kinds of industrial, cultural, technological, textual and dis-
cursive phenomena. Yet very few have attempted to analyse explicitly how
genre works in a transmedia context. This book aims to do precisely that, to
make a deliberately transmedial contribution to the study of genre in the age of
media convergence. Media industries and their various technologies, practices
and systems of operation have become more aligned and networked in recent
decades, providing a clear model for extending entertainment across multiple
media. As Jenkins writes, media convergence—emerging as a concept around
the start of the Internet era in the early 1990s—describes ‘the flow of content
across multiple media, … the co-operation between multiple media industries,
and the migratory behavior of audiences’ (2006: 2), which makes ‘the flow of
content across media inevitable’ (Jenkins 2003). This book considers the impli-
cations of this inevitability for genre, looking across different kinds of conver-
gences, in turn expanding the critical toolkit via which genre can be analysed
by developing a new conceptual model.
But let’s back up for a moment. Convergence is really only an umbrella term
for making sense of the proliferation of interconnected screens that dominate
our contemporary media culture, and refers most broadly to convergences at
the level of technology, industry and culture. Industrial convergence describes
a ‘synergy amongst media companies and industries’ (Hay and Couldry 2011:
473), and primarily describes corporate convergences within global media con-
glomerates, like Disney. Technological convergence, meanwhile, refers to the
‘hybridity that has folded the uses of separate media into one another’ (2011:
493), principally through digitisation. In turn, both of these forms of conver-
gence have an impact at the level of culture and audiences, most notably by
enhancing the ‘participatory capabilities of [media texts] and allowing the
audience to influence the final result’ (Karlsen 2018: 26). Most famously theo-
rised as ‘participatory culture’ by Henry Jenkins (1992), these participatory
capabilities often play out as ‘experience-centered, technologically augmented
 1 INTRODUCTION OR: WHY WE STILL NEED GENRE 3

conversations, a sharing between storytellers and audiences, between audiences

and other audiences, and between online and offline worlds’ (Freeman and
Gambarato 2018: 8).
But why are we recounting these oft-cited definitions of media convergence
here? It is important to begin with such a clear recounting of these terms, since
they underpin precisely why we need a new conceptual framework for analysing
genre. According to Rick Altman, whose seminal work on film genre—that is,
Film/Genre (1999)—lays much of the grounding for this book (as well as
inspiring its title), a problem with many of the genre theorists of the past is
their tendency to ‘evince no need to justify their positions’ or to ‘explain why
a change in direction is necessary’ (1999: 1). We will not make this same mis-
take. The need for a new direction stems in part from the vocabulary—and the
perception—that has greeted much of today’s convergent media. The likes of
films, television series and video games all exist across multiple streams of often
portable media and devices, but a notable outcome of convergence culture is
that media now has the tendency to be reduced to the standardising and argu-
ably reductive term ‘content’. Christopher Nolan, perhaps Hollywood’s lead-
ing purveyor of blockbuster smarts, discussed this point in interview: ‘It’s a
term that pretends to elevate the creative, but actually trivialises differences of
form that have been important to creators and audiences alike’ (Reynolds
2014). As Nolan further explains: ‘Content can be ported across phones,
watches, gas-station pumps or any other screen, and the idea would be that
movie theatres should acknowledge their place as just another of these “plat-
forms”, albeit with bigger screens and cup-holders’ (ibid.).
It is precisely within this context of standardised (trans)media content where
media now circulates or where ‘media content flows fluidly’ (Jenkins 2006:
332) that a question arises over the renewed and seemingly paradoxical role of
genre amidst such content-porting—in particular, the workings of genre con-
ventions and its expectations. Genre has long been studied in terms of its cat-
egorising potential and its ability to shape how media is understood, but what
about the genre dimensions of transmediality, and its use of multiple media to
tell stories? Put simply, how does genre open up distinctive strategies for today’s
transmedia landscape, and how do transmedial sites change how genre is
understood and constructed?
Which brings us to the book’s second overarching objective: the creative
industries are at the forefront of shaping how a range of emerging digital media
technologies, platforms and services are now being used to connect audiences
to content. The worlds of innovation and research and development (R&D)
now focus on emerging trends such as immersive technologies, artificial intel-
ligence (AI), online streaming and new forms of podcasting, to name just a few
examples—each of which affords unique opportunities to tell stories. Though
these emerging technologies, platforms and services have certainly not escaped
the clutches of academics, little attention has been paid thus far to what the
industrial, technological and participatory transformations of such innovative
new platforms mean to ideas of genre.
4 M. FREEMAN AND A. N. SMITH

In responding to this objective, and in setting the stage for the revival of
genre theory in contemporary transmedia scholarship, this book interrogates
the form and function of genre across a range of media convergence sites, span-
ning franchises, streaming platforms, catch-up services, immersive technolo-
gies, AI, social media and beyond. We show how the conceptual possibilities of
genre are reconfigured through their adaptation to emerging technologies and
cultural practices across media. In that sense, we might be seen to be picking
up where Janet Murray left off, whose seminal book Hamlet on the Holodeck
(1999) explored how computer-based interactive narratives might operate in
relation to a range of popular genres. As well as discussing science fiction and
fantasy forms (both of which will be returned to in our book), Murray also
identified more realist forms of drama including soap opera as ripe for enhance-
ment and expansion by then-cutting-edge digital techniques. In many ways the
techniques Murray discussed over 20 years ago can be said to have anticipated
some of the increasingly ubiquitous approaches adopted by today’s contempo-
rary transmedia producers. For example, Murray looked at how in a television
series like ER—a US medical drama that ran from 1994 to 2009—the specific
fictional locations frequently seen in the series could be presented virtually for
participants to explore, and could thus be used to expand existing storylines or
preview forthcoming storylines, or provide more background on characters
(Murray 1999: 255–256).
Building on Murray’s semi-prophetic consideration of production, technol-
ogy and participation, we will also analyse three sites of generic construction
suitable for today’s age of media convergence: first, industry, where transmedia
genres are cultivated and managed; second, technology, through which trans-
media genres are communicated and mediated; and, three, audience, where
transmedia genres are co-created via participatory means. The first site allows
us to consider the contextual influence of industrial convergence, that is, prac-
tices of conglomeration and licencing arrangements, on cross-platform mani-
festations of genre. The second site incorporates not only technological
specificities of, say, Netflix, Twitter, BBC iPlayer, virtual reality and so on but
also cultural codes and conventions of these platforms and technologies. The
final site stresses the role of audiences, individual users, players and watchers on
constructing (or reconstructing) genre themselves, acting out and reacting to
genre cues whenever they, say, post on social media, engage in a deepfake mar-
keting app and so on. Importantly, across all three sites of media convergence,
genre is transformed.
Reflecting themes of connectedness and hybridity that characterise the field
of transmedia studies, this book is therefore about interrogating the generic
mutations (Turner 2015) that must inevitably occur as part of sprawling trans-
media experiences. As Glen Creeber once put it, ‘put crudely, genre simply
allows us to organise a good deal of material into small categories’ (2015: 1).
The problem, however, is that we now live in a transmedia age that is most
commonly understood in terms of its interconnectedness and participatory
processes across multiple platforms and channels, bringing with it heightened
 1 INTRODUCTION OR: WHY WE STILL NEED GENRE 5

accessibility, sharing, co-creation and—as per our Netflix example at the begin-
ning of this introduction—personalisation. The idea of returning to ‘catego-
ries’ may feel decidedly at odds with this intrinsically personalised nature of
what media is said to be in the twenty-first century—sprawling, breaking free
of its borders—but that is precisely why we need to return to genre studies. If
genre is essentially ‘a system of organising the world’ (Creeber, 2015: 1), then
this book looks at genre as it works today.

A Brief History of Genre Studies

Genre theory spans not only decades but centuries, with a history reaching as
far back as Ancient Greece. Importantly, across time, genre has been funda-
mental to categorising culture, but those categorisations and meanings have
continued to shift upon changes in culture and society. It is time, then, for
understandings of genre to change once more, and for genre studies to catch
up with the digitally connected transmedia landscape of today. But before we
can make sense of how genre works today, we must first return to the question
of genre itself.
Genre, as a theoretical concept and method of analysing a large variety of
film and television productions, has been highly influential in these fields since
the early 1980s. Central to the study of genre, particularly in film studies, is the
work of Rick Altman (1999), who set out what he described as a semantic ver-
sus syntactic approach to film genre, before later considering pragmatic ele-
ments of institutions and audiences. In general, Altman claimed, a genre
depends first and foremost on the combination of: semantic properties, which
are the textual characteristics that serve as the thematic building blocks of a
genre (e.g. nineteenth-century America’s Far West settings in Westerns); and
syntactic properties, which relate to the patterns by which the semantic ele-
ments are structured and formally represented—and the meanings that might
be interpreted from this (e.g. the representation in Westerns of the American
frontier as a border separating civilisation from barbarism and chaos) (Altman
1999: 218–220). Furthermore, Altman’s understanding of genre is based on
the cumulative effect determined by the replication of textual modes—narra-
tive, thematic and iconographic—and the surrounding discourses that contrib-
ute to genre formation. Our book will both build on and rethink Altman’s
assumptions, making the case that while semantic, syntactic and discursive
properties of genre are all absolutely at work in the transmedia environment,
today’s industrial, technological and participatory affordances have the poten-
tial to transform these properties in new and uncharted ways.
Which is fitting, since for Altman, ‘the debate over genre has consistently
taken place in slow motion’, with ‘decades—or even centuries—separate[ing]
major genre theory statements’ (1999: 1). That said, much of the debate con-
cerning genre has tended to revolve around the balance between genre as a
textual or material construct, and one that is socially or culturally discursive. A
genre, James Naremore argued (1995: 14), ‘has less to do with a group of
6 M. FREEMAN AND A. N. SMITH

artefacts than with a discourse—a loose evolving system of arguments and

readings, helping to shape commercial strategies and aesthetic ideologies’.
Altman (1999) further notes: ‘Genre is not your average descriptive term, but
a complex concept with multiple meanings’, while Steve Neale (1999) empha-
sises how ‘in the public sphere, the institutional discourses are of central impor-
tance’, arguing for a more ‘multi-directional’ approach to analyses of genre.
Christine Cornea, too, points out that ‘while early genre critics liked to see
genres as more or less fixed (if not by their academic theorising, then by the
industry), this has been challenged by discrepancies in genre definition that
occur in the way a film is categorised at different times’ (2010: 8). Our book
will build on these ideas by showcasing the ways in which genre itself can pro-
vide new insights into the production, distribution, marketing and reception of
cross-platform entertainments by adopting a transmedial lens.
In some ways, adopting a transmedial lens through which to analyse genre
is a very natural development of what genre studies has been doing for a very
long time, albeit less explicitly and more discursively. For instance, following
the seminal work of Altman, Jason Mittell explored the ‘extra-textual’ ways in
which genres are culturally operated (2004). By shifting the focus away from
analyses that attempt to provide the definition of a genre, Mittell looked
towards new ways in which genre interpretations and evaluations operate as
part of the larger cultural workings of genre. For example, instead of asking
questions such as ‘What do police dramas mean?’ or ‘How do we define quiz
shows?’, Mittell’s cultural approach (also see Mittell 2001) led to new kinds of
critical questions being posed, such as ‘What do talk shows mean for a specific
community?’ or ‘How is the definition of animation articulated by socially-­
situated groups?’ (2004: 14).
Importantly, as Mittell clarifies, ‘such an approach demands cultural specific-
ity, recognising that a genre might have various categorical boundaries and
meanings in different cultures’ (2008: 12). Mittell’s point is that the cultural
meanings, industrial practices and consumer expectations of a given genre are
likely to change if examined transnationally, pointing to how the cartoon genre
was perceived as ‘a low-value, highly commercialised kids-only genre’ in the
US compared to its ‘legitimate role as a site of social commentary and artistic
innovation’ in Japan (2008: 12). Genres shift transnationally according to cul-
tural specificity, then, but how do they evolve transmedially according to
medium-specific cultural practices? In other words, if culturally specific dis-
courses contribute—through defining, interpreting, evaluating—to the forma-
tion of a genre, then we need to track the variability of genre-forming
discourses across media. Indeed, it is worth clarifying that our book aims to
focus on how genres adapt to the variable cultures of a contemporary transme-
dial setting. Therefore, while we recognise that traditional media texts, such as
films and television programmes, contribute to genre formation, ours is largely
a ‘cultural approach’ to genre analysis (Mittell 2004). This book, therefore,
does not adopt a strictly definitional approach to genre, whereby genres are
chiefly understood, and taxonomically classified, in formal and aesthetic terms,
 1 INTRODUCTION OR: WHY WE STILL NEED GENRE 7

as is typical of more traditional genre theory. Neither are we concerned with a

more interpretive approach to genre whereby, what Fredric Jameson described
as, ‘the ideological basis for genre’ is explored (1975: 136). Via such an
approach, genres are interpreted as reflecting broad societal structures and ten-
sions; Sara Humphrey’s study of how video games activating the Western and
film noir genres reinforce retrograde ideologies related to race and gender is a
recent example of such an approach (2021). However, rather than broadly
interpret what a genre might mean, we should, as Mittell argues, consider
instead ‘what genre means for specific groups in a particular cultural instance
[emphasis in orig.]’ (2004: 5). Accordingly, in line with a cultural approach to
how genre operates transmedially, we examine how genre is culturally con-
structed, by industries and audiences, in particular instances across platforms
and technologies as part of transmedia practices.
Furthermore, via this cultural approach, we pay particular attention to para-
textual influences on genre formation. Writing about the role of book covers in
how readers engage with literary novels, Gerard Genette (2001) approached
genre as the work done by an author or publisher to write text that accompa-
nies a book. Genette calls this statement of genre ‘the genre indication’ (ibid.).
For Genette, genre is part of a paratext insofar as it is stated in the material
authorised as part of the publication or distribution of the book (ibid.). Years
later, building on these ideas, Jonathan Gray’s concept of the paratext refers to
those media items that sit in-between products and alongside products,
between ownership and cultural formation, between content and promotional
material. For Gray (2010), the meaning of contemporary media stories is no
longer located solely within the main texts themselves (e.g. in films, television
episodes), as it also extends across multiple platforms such as online materials,
promotional additions and toys. These kinds of media paratexts can aid the
audience’s ‘speculative consumption’ of a story as ‘entryway paratexts’ and in
turn extend the storyworld by providing new narrative content (Gray 2010:
25). Moreover, ‘genre is part of this in that if you have experience with a par-
ticular genre, for example Dollhouse and sci-fi, you go into watching the show
with different expectations than someone who has no experience with science
fiction’ (Gray 2010: 112). Paratexts, Gray would argue, are texts that control
how we see and interpret the main text. In terms of genre, they are frequently
the vehicles for what Mittell identifies as ‘the culturally circulating practices
that categorise texts’ (2004: 13). Furthermore, paratexts are, in effect, trans-
medial by nature and by definition, thus they serve as a useful concept for
thinking about both the textual and discursive nature of genre across media.
Echoing both Mittell’s calls for a cultural specificity approach to analysing
genre, and Genette’s and Gray’s approach to factoring in paratextual influences
on genres, Sue Harper notes that ‘even five years in cultural history is a very
long time, and generic shifts can take place at breakneck speed’ (2017). By way
of example, Harper points to the thriller genre:
8 M. FREEMAN AND A. N. SMITH

In the post-war period in British cinema, films such as Odd Man Out and Mine
Own Executioner shared a visual rhetoric and view of trauma. The genre was
pretty homogenous as a whole during the period from 1945 to 1950. But right
through the 1950s and into the early 1960s, the thriller genre became bewilder-
ingly diverse: it could be bifurcated between black and mild, between fascinated
and repelled, between liberal and repressive. It is possible to argue that the mul-
tiplicity of the genre is due to the unease in the period about transgression and
taboo. The thriller genre could be seen in this period as responding, in an indirect
manner, to the lack of consensus about the outsider in society. In the 1970s, with
films such as Gumshoe, the thriller genre became a site of irony and dis-
avowal. (2017)

Harper’s point is valid, and in a study of genre across a diverse number of

media it is important to narrow down the focus of this book to a particular
period of time and to define each genre according to its manifestations today.
Suffice to say, this book is deliberately contemporary, examining case studies
produced during the last decade—specifically, between circa 2014 and 2022.
Another way of conceptualising the importance of textual and cultural influ-
ences on genre is the work of Anne Friedman, who used the metaphor of the
‘ceremony’ to explain this dynamic between the ‘material and situational
dimensions of genre’, writing:

Any performance of a text takes place within a broader ceremonial frame, and
involves all the constituents of the occasion: the audience, the actions of opening
and concluding the performance, talk about the performance, and its demarca-
tion from other performances. (1986: 88)

Friedman elaborates: ‘Such things as reading a book, attending and giving

lectures, dinner conversations, filling in forms and interviews are all ceremonial
frames’ (1986: 88). Now, a question: what happens to the material codes of
genre if its situational frame is continually in flux given the different affor-
dances of multiple media platforms all being used to tell different parts of a
story? To extend Friedman’s metaphor to today’s transmedia landscape, then,
we might say that genre now operates within and across multiple proverbial
ceremonies, with each ceremony feeding into, overlapping and even distorting
the others. In other words, understanding genre in a transmedial context
means taking a medium-specific approach to transmediality, looking at differ-
ent genres across different platforms and technologies, and thus connecting a
specific generic characteristic to the nature of the platform being used.
Such an approach means conceiving of genre as what Harper calls ‘an indus-
trial category’, as ‘an economically determined structure which exemplifies a
neat match between audience pleasure and production profit’ (2017). This
industrial consideration is indeed a key perspective of our book, building on
studies that, observes Christine Cornea (2010: 8), concern themselves ‘with
the ways in which the industry is able to use genre to maximise efficiency of
 1 INTRODUCTION OR: WHY WE STILL NEED GENRE 9

production’ or studies that ‘look at how genre operates as a branding device or

how it functions in association with audience expectations’.
These kinds of industrial perspectives are useful in the age of media conver-
gence, as a notable problem with previous genre theory is that much of this
work does not theorise genre as a media-spanning system. As noted earlier,
though genre has been a preoccupation of scholars for a long time, it tends to
be specific to one medium in any given study, limited to a single disciplinary
perspective. For example, think of the seminal work on film genre (Grant 1986;
Altman 1999), television genre (Mittell 2004; Creeber, 2015) or literary genre
(Rosen 2001). The same criticism can also be made of the countless books on
particular genres within a given medium, such as the quiz show (Holmes,
2008), the fantastic (Todorov and Howard 1975), the crime drama (Turnbull
2014), the Western (Rollins and O’Connor 2009), the sitcom (Mills 2009),
the teen movie (Driscoll 2011) and so on. In spite of the absence of transme-
dial dynamics in much of existing work on genre, said work is still crucial to
underpinning many of the conceptual categories that will be developed in this
book to establish a new model for understanding and analysing genre
transmedially.

A Multiplatform Approach to Genre

That being said, this tendency to theorise genre through a single medium does
arguably explain why genre theory has struggled in recent years to adapt to
today’s digitally connected, hybridised and hyperlinked transmedia culture.
Few studies have explored the realm of transmediality in terms of genre, despite
the former emerging as perhaps the most well-theorised component of media
convergence and the latter having been a preoccupation of scholars for a very
long time, as we have seen. Critical debates around the idea of genre as a trans-
medial construct tend to consist of occasional asides and consideration. Colin
Harvey’s Fantastic Transmedia book (2015) delves into concepts of memory
and play in relation to science fiction and fantasy cases of transmedia story-
worlds. But despite opting to focus on the likes of the Hulk, Star Wars, The
Lord of the Rings and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Harvey still engages with ‘a
broad definition of transmedia storytelling’ (2015: 1), rather than thinking
about how multiplatform contexts influence fantasy and science fiction genres
to adapt and reformulate. Notably, our book does specifically explore how
transmedia practices reshape sci-fi and fantasy genres, as well as adjacent story
types concerned with the fantastic, such as horror and superhero genres.
Furthermore, a key contribution of our book is that it approaches transmedia
entertainments far beyond just science fiction and fantasy scenarios.
The question of how both fantastic and non-fantastic genres play out in
practice across multiple media platforms will be explored throughout the pages
of this book, but for now allow us to hint at some of the conceptual consider-
ations that enable us to understand the relationships between transmediality
and genre. As noted above, any given genre is based in part on well-defined
10 M. FREEMAN AND A. N. SMITH

textual components (both semantic and syntactic). And in a textual sense, we

can say that a genre exists when those recognised components come back and
repeat themselves. Thus, one could say that the establishing of the horror genre
coincides with Frankenstein (1931), the second horror film after Dracula
(1931), while the consolidation by virtue of imitation would happen with The
Mummy (1932), even if a crucial role, from this perspective that focuses on
repetition, is played by the abundant set of sequels of those first horror films.
Genre thus concerns the repetition of formulaic qualities that are easily identifi-
able and consequently marketable due to familiarity. As Linda Ruth Williams
notes, there is an interplay between generic conventions and the audience that
functions as a ‘social currency’ (2005: 18). Vivian C. Sobchack also claims that
‘there is a pattern these movies follow, and the pleasure we get from them is the
pleasure of re-experiencing the familiar’ (1974: 59). Conceptually speaking,
then, transmediality has an awful lot in common with genre. Barry Keith Grant
famously theorised genre as the production of variation on sameness, noting
that ‘stated simple, genre movies are those commercial feature films which,
through repetition and variation, tell familiar stories with familiar characters in
familiar situations’ (2003: xiv). Similarly, Freeman has discussed the impor-
tance of conceptualising transmediality as a system of building variation on
sameness:

Insofar as it works to extend existing stories and expand established fictional

worlds, transmedia storytelling is on the one hand about sameness—since all of
the various stories in a given story world are somehow required to ‘feel like they
fit with the others’, as Jenkins puts it (2006: 335), as parts of the same fictional
storyworld. But on the other hand transmedia storytelling is simultaneously
about variation—since each of the various stories in a given storyworld must also
expand that same storyworld, telling different events about that world.
(Freeman 2016: 8)

In the simplest and narrowest sense, transmediality and genre might appear to
be opposites of each other, with the former seemingly about expansion across
borders and the latter about categorisation within borders. But as we have
learnt, genre is both a textual and a paratextual construction—both a system
(or systematic) series of markers, cues, conventions and structures that make up
the textual fabric of texts and a far more discursive, industrially produced, mar-
ket-oriented set of cues around a text that signals its mode of classification to
an audience. And this amalgamation of text and paratext echoes Freeman’s
own definition of transmediality as ‘both an expansive form of intertextuality
and intertextuality that builds textual connections between stories while allow-
ing stories to escape their textual borders and exist in between them as well as
across them, folding paratext into text’ (2016: 190).
Looking forward, it is therefore key to follow in the footsteps of the ‘extra-­
textual’ approach to genre analysis argued by Jason Mittell (2004), as well as
the ‘multi-dimensional’ approach suggested by Steve Neale (1999), whereby
 1 INTRODUCTION OR: WHY WE STILL NEED GENRE 11

genre ‘encompasses systems of expectations, categories, labels and names, dis-

courses, texts and groups or corpuses of texts, and the conventions that govern
them all’ (1999: 2). As such, we ourselves will analyse three sites of generic
construction suitable for today’s digital and multiplatform culture: one, indus-
try, through which transmedia genres are created and managed; two, platform,
through which transmedia genres are communicated and mediated via tech-
nology; and, three, audience, through which transmedia genres are co-created
via participatory and performative means. This latter site, in particular, stresses
the importance of audiences constructing genre themselves within today’s
multiplatform environment, essentially acting out genre when posting on social
media, playing VR games and so on. What is key to stress, however, is that
across all three of these sites, genre is transformed, evolving in line with the
user experience that is being constructed across and between the borders of
multiple media platforms.
Many of the aforementioned conceptions of genre will be returned to
throughout this book, re-applied, re-contextualised and re-imagined for the
age of multiplatform media. And as we have established, taking a media-­
traversing approach to making sense of genre in the twenty-first century
broadly means taking into account (and also triangulating) three contextual
factors of industrial, technological and participatory convergence. But what
does this mean in practice? Put simply, what is the research method for taking
a multiplatform approach to analysing genre? We will now lay out the method-
ological approach taken in this book, an approach which means folding in
analyses of media industry practices, promotional paratexts, textual and brand
analysis, online ethnography and wider audience research.
Methodologically, approaching transmedia practices as the building of per-
sonalised experiences via technology—studying both ‘the techno-social devel-
opment of digital media and the sociocultural development of fan studies’
(Booth 2018: 61)—will provide a useful starting point for making sense of
genre in today’s transmedia culture, one that emphasises relationships between
what Booth calls ‘interactive elements’ and ‘the influence of fans’ in the process
of reconstructing and renegotiating genre across media (Booth 2018: 67).
Hills (2018: 224), too, has called for the ‘need to consider transmedia not
just as storytelling but also as a kind of experience’, noting: ‘Given that trans-
media extensions occur within a proliferating, ubiquitous screen culture, the
issue of transmedia’s locatedness in space and place has generally been under-
explored’ (2018: 224). While Hills is referring specifically to set tours and
walkthrough experiences, our own multiplatform approach to genre is not only
about the idea of ‘being there’ (Hills 2017: 245). More than this, our work
puts genre right at the heart of the multifaceted, multi-perspectival systems
through which the use of multiple media across diverse screens, technologies
and locations work together in different ways to engage audiences in a highly
experiential and often personalised manner.
Studying the personalised transmedial workings of genre hints at the impor-
tance of returning, somewhat contradictorily perhaps, to a technology- or
12 M. FREEMAN AND A. N. SMITH

platform-­specific approach. After all, though it is perhaps the defining claim of

Rick Altman’s seminal research into film genre that genres have always spanned
multiple media, Altman did not consider genre to be something that naturally
extends itself across those multiple media. As Altman commented, ‘it cannot be
taken for granted that film genre is the same thing as literary genre’ (1999: 12).
Explains Altman: ‘Even when a genre already exists in other media, the film
genre … cannot simply be borrowed for non-film sources—it must be re-­
created’ (1999: 53). In his work, Altman always struck a careful balance
between positioning genre as ‘an on-going process’ (1999: 54) that transitions
from many different forms of media—literature to film, for example—and as
something that requires constant ‘realignment’ (1999: 43) according to the
medium in which it is based. Where, then, does that leave our transmedial per-
spective, where creators construct new yet interconnecting tales by crossing
multiple media platforms and by telling those new tales on each of those media?
Are we to assume, therefore, that as a story or entertainment franchise is told
across multiple media platforms that its genre is actually being realigned and
re-created from platform to platform as an on-going transmedial process?
Taking such an approach to genre means focusing not necessarily on indi-
vidual media per se, but instead on converged sites of generic mutation and
innovation, such as streaming services, social media platforms and deepfake
technology, which each fuse and layer multiple screens and other forms of
media on top of one another. Looking at these sites of convergence on a case-­
by-­case basis will allow us to better understand the role that these specific sites
play in terms of genre-building in and across today’s transmedia landscape.
In turn, this approach to genre will also recalibrate our overall understand-
ing of what transmediality actually is. And this is very important. As was stated
at the beginning of this introduction, there is a danger that comes with describ-
ing the convergences of contemporary media—namely, that convergence often
becomes directly synonymous with the outright blending of all forms of media
into single, standardised forms of digital media content. For even amidst a time
of apparent technological and industrial convergence, mobile media, con-
nected viewing, immersive engagement and so on, it is still crucial to remem-
ber that the likes of streaming platforms, catch-up services, immersive
technologies and social media channels all operate with largely specific sets of
affordances, practices, policies and consumption habits (Smith 2018). And so
in order to fully understand the transmedial genre-building potentials of these
emerging media platforms and technologies, we first need to better understand
what each of these platforms—as a specific technology with distinct affor-
dances, embedded within a wider industrial and participatory cultural con-
text—can actually do. Looking, not at genre, but at the transmedia dispersal of
another pan-media concept—that is, ideology, Dan Hassler-Forest notes the
need to consider the role of medium specificity in the creation of political mes-
sages across entertainment media franchises (2018: 299). As per Altman’s ideas
about genre realignment, we similarly argue that the specificities of particular
 1 INTRODUCTION OR: WHY WE STILL NEED GENRE 13

platforms, technologies, industrial practices and participatory cultures under-

pin the shaping of genre across media and must, therefore, be accounted for.
A formal but conceptual point about the approach of this book: Why the
focus on what might be described as Anglo-American media industries, plat-
forms and participatory contexts? In some ways, this focus goes against the
grain of the most recent work in the field of transmedia studies, which has
‘expanded from an early focus on popular genres to more diverse media (pub-
lishing, music, location-based experiences), from entertainment to documen-
tary and journalism, activism and mobilization, education, religion, diplomacy,
sports, and branding (see Freeman and Gambarato 2018). Indeed, Freeman
and Proctor previously pushed for this field ‘to fully interrogate transmedia
cultures—in the plural—and to establish a cultural specificity approach to
transmediality’, which would provide far more ‘localized, cultural perspectives
on transmediality’ (2018: 2). We are also aware of more recent research in
genre studies, such as that by Costanzo (2014), Chung and Diffrient (2015)
and Dibeltulo and Barrett (2018), which traces the impact of globalisation and
transnationalism on issues of film genre. The Dibeltulo and Barrett collection,
in particular, demonstrates the need for genre studies to cast a transnational,
cross-cultural and indeed more global outlook. In line with their approach, the
book editors rightly observe the need to consider ‘generic transition across
space, time, systems of production, distribution, exhibition, and reception’
(2018: 4). While we concur wholeheartedly with this outlook, it is also notable
that this collection, and the other two projects noted above, narrow their focus
to film genre, and thus neglect to engage with the question of transmediality
that justifies the need for our book. Moreover, we have chosen to focus on so-­
called popular genres of entertainment, but not to elicit any kind of general
explanation about the workings of all transmedia genres everywhere. Rather,
we focus on US and UK examples because it is necessary to first analyse, theo-
rise and fully understand a more overarching model of transmedia genre before
one considers more localised, cross-cultural or national approaches to transme-
dia genre.
It is for this same reason that we do not delve into questions of sub-genre.
The book is structured around ‘top-level’ genres, as it were, such as horror,
comedy, science fiction, fantasy and so on, although we are not claiming that
any of our chosen case studies should be classified exclusively as one genre over
another. On the contrary, taking a multiplatform approach to genre means
acknowledging the multitude of influences and hybrid relationships at play at
any one time. Instead, then, our approach is based on analysing genre activa-
tion—that is, attempting to understand the industrial influences, technological
augmentations and user engagement practices of a genre’s codes and conven-
tions, however discursive. In other words, our approach is based on examining
what it means to construct and reconstruct a genre from one platform to
another. That said, we hope that this book inspires others to consider alterna-
tive approaches to transmedia genre, tackling the question of sub-genres.
14 M. FREEMAN AND A. N. SMITH

The Structure of the Book

In terms of chapter structure, the remainder of the book is divided into ten
chapters, organised into three parts. The first part considers entertainment
franchises and is rooted in analyses of media conglomerates, namely Disney and
its sub-divisions Marvel and Lucasfilm. The second part examines a range of
digital platforms—Netflix, ITV Hub, BBC iPlayer, YouTube and Kickstarter—
and considers how each of these platform’s industrial, technological and par-
ticipatory properties work to (re)shape a particular genre as it flows, augments
and mutates across multiple media. The third part, finally, looks at emerging
technologies, namely virtual reality and AI-driven deepfake apps. These sites
may seem diverse (which they are), but they each represent particular indus-
trial, technological and participatory transformations in the make-up of twenty-­
first-­
century convergence culture. We therefore use each of our eight
case-study chapters to exemplify different ways through which genre works in
a transmedia context, identifying new conceptions specific to a given genre that
provide rich additions to genre studies. Each chapter will reveal and analyse a
new conception of transmedia genre, such as ‘genre divergence’, ‘genre
empowerment’ and ‘genre fictioning’, to name just three, before returning to
these conceptions in the conclusion, where we will use them to lay out a new
conceptual framework for analysing genre in the transmedia age.
Specifically, Chaps. 2 and 3 consider the workings of media conglomeration
and its impact on contemporary genre formation. Chapter 2 looks at Marvel
and uses the character of Captain America to examine how today’s conglomer-
ate media culture interacts with the cross-platform construction of the super-
hero genre. It reveals how, at Marvel, industrial conditions motivate instances
of what we term genre divergence, as industry discourses and corporate tech-
niques combine to manage genre contrasts and discrepancies within the Marvel
franchise. This chapter also demonstrates how the actions of fan and journalis-
tic practices contribute to the process of minimising genre divergence in
Marvel’s fictional multiverse.
Chapter 3, which looks at another of Hollywood’s leading entertainment
franchises, Star Wars, explores how the Disney-owned Lucasfilm has formed
franchise connections between Disney-produced products and the Star Wars of
old, primarily through genre intertexts and the practice of what we term genre
linking. Via an analysis that takes both a textual and cultural approach to the
Western genre in relation to the Disney+ series The Mandalorian (2019–), this
chapter identifies how genre develops associations between this series and with
what is culturally perceived to be the core of the Star Wars franchise: the origi-
nal Star Wars film trilogy (1977–1983).
Chapter 4—the first of four chapters that explore genre activation practices
in relation to particular digital platforms—charts how the global streaming
service Netflix has built its flagship series Stranger Things (2016–) into a series
of referential, intertextual portals that channel how audiences respond to and
participate with the genre of horror. By conceiving of transmedia genre as
 1 INTRODUCTION OR: WHY WE STILL NEED GENRE 15

emotional empowerment for the multiplatform audience, this chapter exam-

ines how a streaming service such as Netflix orchestrates not so much a horror
entertainment across its digital platforms, but rather its reactional, emotional
fallout.
Chapter 5 continues to explore the impact of digital platforms on twenty-­
first-­century manifestations of genre, but this time examines how the UK
broadcaster ITV’s streaming platform, ITV Hub—along with its online mar-
keting strategies and its digital spread across social media channels—transforms
the genre of docudrama into a mode of engagement specific to today’s multi-
platform culture. Looking at ITV’s high-end docudrama Quiz (2020), this
chapter argues that the docudrama genre has evolved into an aesthetic, discur-
sive and interactive engagement strategy that works to scaffold today’s digital
infrastructures of catch-up TV, namely heightened customisation and demo-
cratic voice.
Chapter 6 looks at BBC Three sitcom Pls Like (2017–) and considers how
its dissemination across multiple online platforms including YouTube relates to
the widespread contemporary practice of transmedia distribution. This chapter
demonstrates how emergent transmedia distribution practices can inform new
approaches to the comedy genre. In particular, we consider how uses of genre
can, in the creation of online programming, suit the cultural specificities of
multiple digital platforms as part of a transmedia distribution rollout.
Chapter 7 explores the world of digital crowdfunding, analysing how genre
is constructed on the online platform Kickstarter as part of campaigns designed
to secure media project funding. Using the Kickstarter campaign content for
the Eiyuden Chronicle video game project as a case study, the chapter examines
how this paratextual material establishes the fantasy Japanese role-playing game
(or JRPG) genre in line with the affordances and conventions of the Kickstarter
platform.
Chapter 8—the first of two chapters that aim to consider the impact of
emerging technologies on transmedia genre practice—examines virtual reality
and explores how this emerging medium shapes (and reshapes) the war genre.
We use this chapter to analyse how an innovative VR experience produced
about the bombing of Hiroshima, The Day the World Changed (2018), evolves
the war genre into an altogether more panoramic experience, lending a liminal,
God-like perspective over the otherwise grounded stories of war.
Chapter 9, finally, analyses the emerging trend of using deepfake apps as part
of transmedia marketing, which we contextualise via research into artificial
intelligence. Using the film Reminiscence (2021) and its accompanying deep-
fake app as a case study, this chapter considers what deepfake technology means
to our understanding of science fiction. We argue that the emergence of deep-
fakes—and AI more generally—has obliterated the former divide between ‘sci-
ence’ and ‘fiction’, fully amalgamating the tensions at the heart of this genre.
We should note that these particular pairings are not mutually exclusive.
Netflix creates any number of genres, not just horror, while the affordances of
the ITV Hub impact many different genres beyond the docudrama. The genres
16 M. FREEMAN AND A. N. SMITH

examined across this book are likely to be determined differently depending on

the technological-industrial-participatory context. In other words, a docu-
drama constructed and extended via the ITV Hub is not necessarily the same
kind of docudrama that might be constructed and evoked via Netflix.
Nevertheless, while all chapters demonstrate our model of how genre works
transmedially, the pairings identified in each chapter also work to highlight key
practices or concepts of transmedia genre. Each pairing exemplifies the rela-
tionships between particular affordances of media convergence and specific
strategies for constructing genre across multiple media that those affordances
engender. Importantly, then, while each chapter considers a different site of
media convergence, spanning various creative industries such as film, televi-
sion, immersive and video games, altogether the book’s eight chapters work as
a whole to establish what we consider to be a new conceptual framework for
understanding genre across media. The conclusion chapter will outline this
model, pulling together the themes from the previous chapters to consider new
meanings of genre across media. For as Cornea (2010: 6) once said, ‘if any-
thing immediately creates a conceptual frame for meaning … it is the notion
of genre’.

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 PART I

Media Conglomerates
 CHAPTER 2

Transmedia Superhero: Marvel, Genre

Divergence and Captain America

Introduction
Captain America is a superhero, of course, famously fighting for justice and
liberty in the pages of superhero comics for many decades. Marvel’s patriotic
super soldier is indeed an icon of the superhero genre, which we explore here.
Fittingly, therefore, the Marvel Cinematic Universe film Captain America: The
Winter Soldier (2014) is widely perceived as a superhero movie. Yet a combina-
tion of the film’s textual characteristics and related public discourses addition-
ally position the film as a political thriller. For example, demonstrating the role
of journalistic reviews in this process of genre construction, The Atlantic (Orr
2014) claimed, on the film’s release, that the film ‘harkens to the political
thrillers of the 1970s’. Simultaneous to this genre-forming process, Marvel’s
Captain America comic-book title was being similarly situated, not only as a
superhero title but also within an additional genre context. Dissimilar to The
Winter Soldier, however, the Captain America comic book was constructed,
during the writer Rick Remender’s 2012–2015 run on the title, not as a serious
political thriller but as an eccentric science-fiction fantasy. For example, epito-
mising the positioning of the title at this time, Marvel’s (Comixology) accom-
panying blurb labels Remender’s run as a genre soup of ‘high-adventure,
mind-melting … sci-fi, pulp-fantasy’.
There are two key insights to extrapolate from the case of Captain America’s
genre construction in 2014. Firstly, the superhero genre is a highly elastic one,
stretching to accommodate a range of other genres, as we detail. Secondly,
contemporary transmedia entertainment franchises, such as the Marvel super-
hero franchise, can each contain instances of significant genre divergence, lead-
ing to a kind of genre disunity. This second insight is central to the contribution
this chapter makes to the book’s study of genre and transmediality.
Using the Marvel franchise as a case study, we specifically examine how con-
temporary conglomerate media culture, through the development of

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 21

Switzerland AG 2023
M. Freeman, A. N. Smith, Transmedia/Genre,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15583-3_2
22 M. FREEMAN AND A. N. SMITH

franchises, interacts with the construction of genre. In so doing, we reveal how,

at Marvel, industrial conditions motivate instances of simultaneous genre diver-
gence, as the above case suggests. However, we furthermore show how indus-
try discourses and techniques, including branding and promotional practices,
combine to manage and de-emphasise such genre contrasts and discrepancies
within the Marvel franchise. Finally, we demonstrate how the activities of jour-
nalistic and participatory cultures contribute to the process of minimising
genre divergence in the Marvel franchise. Therefore, we ultimately show how
the conglomerate-owned transmedia entertainment franchise, a dominant
industrial model of fictional content creation within our media convergence
culture, can give rise to a fluid, complex and sometimes contradictory set of
genre formations. To begin this exploration, we first establish the contempo-
rary transmedia entertainment franchise as a distinct site of genre construction
within media conglomerate contexts.

Conceptualising the Transmedia

Entertainment Franchise
A given transmedia entertainment franchise is a set of media texts stemming
from the same core intellectual property, such as a set of fictional characters and
worlds, which are dispersed across a range of media platforms with some degree
of coordination. The Marvel franchise, for example, incorporates a myriad of
different content and product forms (e.g. films, comics, video games, TV
series, toys, clothes) concerning Marvel’s universe of superhero characters. The
logics of industrial convergence have served as a key factor driving the preva-
lence of the transmedia entertainment franchise within contemporary media
culture (Ndalianis 2004: 25; Jenkins 2006: 106–107). The increased tendency,
since the 1980s, for mergers and acquisitions among companies across film,
television, music, publishing and other media sectors has resulted in vast con-
glomerates operating across media platforms (Balio 2013).
Such media conglomerates are motivated to develop entertainment fran-
chises across their various platforms, divisions and subsidiaries. By doing so, a
conglomerate is able to generate income from different revenue streams via the
same intellectual property (Johnson 2013: 4–5). The Walt Disney Company’s
acquisition of Marvel Entertainment in 2009 is indicative of this strategic goal.
By dispersing Marvel properties across its media platforms Disney has been
able to generate income from this acquisition via film, television, comics, music,
theme park and consumer products divisions.1 Practices of media licencing fur-
ther motivate the development of transmedia entertainment franchises
(Johnson 2013). For example, Disney, the world’s leading brand licensor

1
What we refer to as Disney-owned ‘Marvel’ throughout this chapter is currently structured as
two distinct subsidiaries situated within the Disney conglomerate structure, namely, Marvel
Studios, which produces Marvel films, and Marvel Entertainment, which includes Marvel Comics.
At the time of writing, Kevin Feige oversees both divisions in his role as chief creative officer
of Marvel.
2 TRANSMEDIA SUPERHERO: MARVEL, GENRE DIVERGENCE AND CAPTAIN AMERICA 23

(License Global 2019), permits (on the basis of financial return) a range of
other businesses to license the Marvel brand and characters so as to create their
own merchandise.
Scholarship has tended to emphasise how a given media corporation coheres
a given franchise’s many fragments so as to present a consistent media-­spanning
brand. Scholars, for example, observe how IP-governing companies centrally
coordinate transmedia storytelling within a given franchise, ensuring narrative
consistency between texts produced for different media industries (Jenkins
2006: 95–134; Harvey 2015: 182–202). Disney-owned Lucasfilm’s Story
Group’s tight regulation of Star Wars transmedia storytelling is an example of
this process (Harvey, 146). Scholars similarly observe how media companies
engineer visual consistency between a given franchise’s texts (Johnson 2007;
Freeman 2014; Smith 2018: 18). Freeman (2014), for example, shows how
the noir-influenced visual style of Batman: The Animated Series (1992–1995)
was designed to resonate with the gothic aesthetic of the Tim Burton-directed
Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992) films. This approach therefore
worked to unify the brand identity of the Warner-owned Batman franchise.
In line with such strategies, Marvel consistently aims to cohere the many
pieces of content that it circulates across media. Marvel has, for example,
adopted transmedia storytelling techniques by extending the Marvel Cinematic
Universe storyworld (hereafter, MCU), first established by Marvel Studios-­
produced films, across television, streaming platforms and a limited amount of
comics (Harvey 2015; Flanagan et al. 2015). The case of the MCU further-
more reflects the film medium’s economic and cultural primacy within con-
glomerate media empires and the transmedia entertainment franchises they
develop (Smith 2018: 16). Accordingly, franchise-owning corporations often
ensure that stories and styles of franchise content across media are subordi-
nated to film narratives (Johnson 2013: 97–98; Atkinson 2019: 15), as in the
case of Marvel’s MCU content.
Practices at Marvel Comics, which forms part of Disney subsidiary Marvel
Entertainment, have, in the twenty-first century, aligned to this transmedia
model of film dominance to some degree. It is true that most of the publisher’s
output contributes not to MCU narrative continuity but rather to the vast
Marvel Universe comics storyworld (hereafter, MU), which the publisher
began developing in the early 1960s; therefore, bar a limited number of publi-
cations, Marvel comic books are not MCU transmedia extensions. However,
Flanagan et al. (35–36) argue that industrial circumstances have nevertheless
motivated Marvel Comics to adopt, at least in certain instances, a ‘films lead’
policy ensuring that ‘things happening in Marvel comics should not contradict
what is going on in the MCU’ (despite them not sharing the same narrative
continuity). Marvel Comics has frequently used techniques to cohere these
two separate fictional storyworlds by tweaking MU comics’ story elements so
as to make their narratives reverberate with those of the MCU (Flanagan et al.
2015: 36–37; Smith 2018: 157–162). An example of this approach is evident
in the Marvel Comics title Peter Parker: Spectacular Spider-Man (2017–2018),
24 M. FREEMAN AND A. N. SMITH

which was launched to coincide with the release of the Spider-Man: Homecoming
film (2017). By returning Peter to his hometown of New York City, the comic-­
book narrative was designed to resonate with Spider-Man: Homecoming’s
NYC-set story (Smith 2018: 158).
Yet, in contrast to such practices, the case of genre divergence concerning
Captain America identified at this chapter’s outset appears to undermine the
standard media conglomerate aim of franchise brand coherence. It is further-
more important to note that this case of genre divergence in relation to Captain
America content is not an isolated occurrence at Marvel. Instead, it is exem-
plary of some wider franchise practices within Disney-owned Marvel. A similar
instance of simultaneous genre divergence occurred between Marvel Comics’
Daredevil title and the Marvel Television-produced Daredevil (2015–2018)
series, which was made for Netflix.2 The latter’s ‘dark and gritty’ (Crow 2016)
take on The Man Without Fear was constructed as a ‘street level noir’, accord-
ing to then-Marvel Chief Creative Officer Joe Quesada (Jagernauth 2014). In
contrast, at the moment the Daredevil series first ‘dropped’ on Netflix in 2015,
the Daredevil comic book was providing ‘fun, swashbuckling superhero adven-
tures’ (Hoffer 2017) under the stewardship of the writer Mark Waid, which
spanned 2011–2015. A tale of two very different Hulks provides a further
example of genre divergence within the Marvel franchise. Since his first appear-
ance in The Avengers (2010), Hulk has most typically been used in MCU film
sequences to activate action and comedy genres (Singer 2019), as he typically
battles enemies or provides comic relief. Published simultaneous to the release
of some of these films, however, Marvel Comics’ The Immortal Hulk (2018–
present) has steered the character into a different genre territory. As its writer
Al Ewing (Mclaughlin 2018) acknowledges, the book was designed as a horror
narrative, which its ‘horrible … iteration’ of the title character exemplifies.
How, then, is a media corporation, such as Disney, able to permit such genre
divergence across media when guided by broader brand coherence aims? To
address this question, one must first establish the various means by which the
superhero genre is constructed. To help provide this necessary foundation, the
following section establishes key practices by which media industries activate
the superhero genre. The section focuses, in particular, on industrial practices
within the US comic-book sector. A focus on genre conventions within comics
is appropriate, as this is the sector that initiated the superhero genre as an
industrial category. This industry furthermore continues to serve as a corner-
stone to superhero-centred transmedia entertainment franchises, having intro-
duced a multitude of popular superheroes to media culture.

2
Marvel Television was at this time a division of Marvel Entertainment, though Marvel Studios
has since taken over responsibility for television and streaming series.
2 TRANSMEDIA SUPERHERO: MARVEL, GENRE DIVERGENCE AND CAPTAIN AMERICA 25

Industrial Constructions of the Superhero Genre

The superhero genre initially emerged as an industrial category out of the
nascent comic-book industry of the 1930s, and more specifically the introduc-
tion in 1938 by DC Comics (then National Allied) of Superman within the
pages of Action Comics. As Bradford W. Wright (2001: 14) observes, the tre-
mendous sales success that Superman comics enjoyed ‘had a strong residual
impact on the rest of the industry, which expanded as new publishers entered
the field and flooded the market with various [Superman] imitations’. The
eponymous hero of Captain America Comics, first published by Marvel (then
Timely) in 1941, was born of this process. As Peter Coogan (2007: 24)
observes, by 1942, if not before, the US comic-book sector appeared to under-
stand and discursively identify such narratives centred on hyper-abled altruists
as forming a ‘superhero’ category.
To determine the particular techniques by which the comic-book industry
has given rise to the superhero genre, it is instructive to first review existing
definitions of this industrial category. Via his textual approach to defining this
genre in comics, Coogan ultimately concludes that the distinctive character of
the superhero is at the category’s ‘core’ (2007: 28). According to Coogan
(2007: 24–26), this character is typically defined by being (A) super-powered;
(B) selflessly intent on defeating evil and protecting society; (C) in possession
of a secret identity and (D) dressed in an iconic, abstract-design costume.
This definition, however, does not account for the genre’s particular com-
plexities, which result from the genre’s prevalence within the comic-book
industry since the 1960s. Prior to this decade, but following the emergence of
the superhero genre in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the industry became
overtly diverse in terms of genre, drawing on a range of themes from American
pulp fiction traditions. For example, during the late 1940s and 1950s both
Marvel and DC diversified their lines, publishing crime, war, sci-fi, horror,
romance and Western comics. Such rich genre diversification is typical of media
industries, as media companies tend to draw from, and combine, many differ-
ent genres as a means to ensure cultural products are novel and differentiated.
On the face of it, however, such genre diversification appears to have been
largely absent from US comic books since the superhero genre’s steadfast dom-
ination of the industry from the 1960s onwards (Wright 2001). Yet, as Henry
Jenkins argues (2009: 17), within this atypical industrial context, genre differ-
ence has become routinely constructed within superhero comics, with the
superhero genre proving adept at ‘absorbing and reworking all other genres’.
Examples of other genres being configured within the bounds of the super-
hero genre at Marvel Comics include:

• horror, as in Marvel Zombies (2005–2006), in which Marvel heroes

transform into a super-powered flesh-eating horde;
• war, as in Punisher: Born (2003) and Punisher: The Platoon (2017), which
each detail the Vietnam Conflict experiences of the Marvel Universe’s
deadliest vigilante, the Punisher;
26 M. FREEMAN AND A. N. SMITH

• science fiction, as is the Marvel 2099 imprint (started in 1992), which

resituates Marvel heroes in a cyberpunk dystopian world;
• romance, as in Mr. & Mrs. X (2018–2019), which centres on the mutant
duo Rogue and Gambit’s relationship as a married couple.
• crime, as in Daredevil during Brian Bendis’ lengthy run as a writer
(2001–2006), in which the title character tackles not only supervillains
but also the (relatively) mundane organised crime of New York City.

US superhero comics furthermore rework and incorporate other genres spe-

cific to global comics’ culture. In the case of Marvel, for example, it has pro-
duced comics that draw on the textual characteristics of Japanese manga genres
(Jenkins 2006: 112; Smith 2018: 151–152).
It is this apparent malleability of the superhero genre that has led the comic-­
book writer Grant Morrison (quoted in Anders 2009) to question its existence:
‘I’m not even sure if there is a superhero genre or if the idea of the superhero
is a special chilli-pepper-like ingredient designed to energise other genres’.
What Coogan, therefore, identifies as the defining features of the superhero
genre, Morrison conceptualises here as, not the elements of a singular genre,
but instead of a narrative supplement to be administered across a range of
genres. Yet, while Morrison’s position is a reasonable outcome of focussing on
the modern history of comic-book narratives, it neglects to account for the
genre-forming work of the US comic-book industry beyond the pages of
comic-book stories. The industry has constructed the superhero genre not only
through producing series centred on superhero characters, but also via the
creation of paratextual material as part of publishing practices. Such paratexts,
which we move on here to discuss, have traditionally served as an important
means by which Marvel Comics, and the wider industry, has bolstered the
superhero genre.
Marvel Comic’s approach to comic-book cover design throughout its his-
tory serves as one key example of the company’s use of paratexts to shape and
reinforce the superhero genre. Following its inception in 1961, the publisher
initially presented several of its now famous characters, not as superheroes spe-
cifically, but as science fiction and fantasy horror phenomena more generally.
Such genre-contextualisation occurred as the publisher inaugurated certain
characters within the pages of existing anthology series, including Amazing
Fantasy (which introduced Spider-Man), Tales of Suspense (which launched
Iron Man) and Journey into Mystery (in which Thor debuted). Yet Marvel
Comics soon standardised cover-design techniques to distinguish many of its
narratives as superhero tales first and foremost, de-emphasising associations
with other genres.
This is evidenced by the inclusion, in Marvel cover designs throughout
much of the publisher’s history, of the ‘corner box’ convention. Initially
2 TRANSMEDIA SUPERHERO: MARVEL, GENRE DIVERGENCE AND CAPTAIN AMERICA 27

conceived for the Fantastic Four #14 (1963) cover, and used consistently until
the early 2000s, the corner box is situated in the top left corner of the front
cover.3 A boldly lettered comic-book title (typically the name of a superhero
character or team) occupies the space spanning the right of the box to the
right-hand side of such covers. The box typically contains date, price, publish-
ing brand and an image of the title character(s), or a logo of the superhero
team (such as the Fantastic Four or The X-Men), contained within a given
issue. The device was born out of industry traditions of signalling a given issue’s
contents in the top left corner of an issue so as to suit the staggered arrange-
ment of comic books on magazine racks.
Via this paratextual practice, therefore, a superhero character or team name,
plus an image (or logo) of the title character (or team), abstracted from any
fictional storyworld context, dominates the top quarter area of a given Marvel
cover. The consequence of this in terms of genre construction is significant, as
this approach to cover design separates the superhero genre from, and priori-
tises it above, other genres. Therefore, while a given superhero comic book’s
narrative might draw upon other genres, this graphic design approach subordi-
nates other evoked genres to the superhero genre.
Marvel Comics ceased continuous use of the corner box device in early
2000s. Yet variations of these paratextual practices persist up to the present day.
Via the use of such techniques from the 1960s onwards, therefore, Marvel
Comics has made the Marvel brand synonymous with the superhero genre.
The company has been able to continually, and innovatively, combine the
superhero genre with other genres, so as to ensure market demands for novelty
are met. Yet Marvel Comics’ paratextual practices have consistently maintained
the pre-eminence of the superhero genre, to which the publisher’s brand iden-
tity is tied, thereby signalling the subsidiary status of other evoked genres. As
we detail further on, this paratextual approach that the comic-book industry
developed has been scaled across media so as to mitigate instances of genre
divergence in the Marvel franchise. Prior to this, however, the following sec-
tion, via a focus on Captain America in particular, further examines simultane-
ous genre divergence at Marvel. It additionally accounts for the cultural
conditions and practices within media industry contexts that give rise to them.

Creating Genre Divergence Across Media

Genre construction in the film Captain America: The Winter Soldier clearly
aligns with the discussed superhero comics’ practice of combining the super-
hero genre with other genres. As indicated at the chapter’s outset, the textual
characteristics of what is, ostensibly, a superhero film, specifically evoke the US
political thriller film genre cycle of the 1970s. This was very much by design,
as the comments of those involved with production demonstrate. Marvel

3
While initially conceived for the Fantastic Four #14 cover, Patsy Walker #106 (1963) was the
first of Marvel’s corner-box-carrying covers to reach publication (Cronin 2017).
28 M. FREEMAN AND A. N. SMITH

Studios President and Chief Creative Officer of Marvel Kevin Feige, for exam-
ple, notes that the film was conceived as a ‘70s political thriller masquerading
as a big superhero movie’ (Plumb 2013). He furthermore claims that the pro-
duction team specifically drew inspiration from three particular paranoid politi-
cal thrillers that Hollywood produced in the 1970s under the shadow of the
unfolding Watergate scandal, namely The Parallax View (1974), Three Days of
the Condor (1975) and All the President’s Men (1976) (Smith 2014: 79).
As intended, The Winter Soldier’s narrative themes clearly echo those of
these thrillers, as it shares these films’ preoccupation and disillusionment with
institutional immorality and corruption. Whereas, for example, in Three Days of
the Condor, the protagonist uncovers a dangerous, powerful conspiracy operat-
ing within the CIA, in The Winter Soldier, Captain America faces off against the
morally ambiguous government espionage agency SHIELD following its infil-
tration by the terrorist group Hydra.4 The Winter Soldier’s sombre colour
scheme furthermore recalls the muted aesthetic of the aforementioned thrill-
ers, which indicate these films’ pessimism concerning the corruption of all-­
powerful government institutions. Captain America’s costume design in The
Winter Soldier epitomises the film’s drab palette. Intended by Winter Soldier
co-director Joe Russo (McMillan 2014) to ‘represent, thematically’ its film’s
story, the outfit is without the bold red, white and blue of the character’s tradi-
tion, and instead largely consists of navy blue, with punctuations of dull metal
and brown leather. A more obvious evocation of Hollywood’s 1970s political
thriller genre occurs through The Winter Soldier’s inclusion of Robert Redford
within its cast, who plays a corrupt politician. Redford’s presence functions as
an intertext connecting The Winter Soldier to Three Days of the Condor, in
which Redford stars as its protagonist.
Marvel Comics’ practice of combining superheroes with other genres as a
means to ensure its products achieve novelty clearly influenced Marvel Studios’
own approach to genre here. According to Feige, the studio’s objective to
ensure each MCU film ‘feel[s] unique and feel[s] different’ (Smith 2014: 79)
motivated The Winter Soldier’s absorption of textual traits of the political
thriller. As Feige (Plumb 2013) observes, with the first Captain America film,
Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), the studio drew upon the charac-
teristics of 1940s World War II movies. However, the studio aimed to utilise ‘a
completely different genre’ with The Winter Soldier (Plumb 2013). In rational-
ising this variable approach to genre, Feige notes that superhero comics ‘do it
all the time’ (Plumb 2013).
This influence that comic-book creative practices had on The Winter Soldier
is reflective of a cultural flow of ideas that runs through Marvel Comics and
Marvel Studios. It also speaks to Marvel Comics’ uniquely influential role at
Marvel. As comic-book creators and industry observers point out, Marvel
Comics effectively operates as the franchise’s R&D department (Boucher

4
Within the MCU, SHIELD is an acronym for the Strategic Homeland Intervention,
Enforcement and Logistics Division.
2 TRANSMEDIA SUPERHERO: MARVEL, GENRE DIVERGENCE AND CAPTAIN AMERICA 29

2018; Holloway and Donnelly 2019). While, then, Marvel Comics narratives
are, as noted, sometimes subordinated to Marvel Studios output, Marvel
Comics content can be an important influence on Marvel Studios productions.
Of course, Marvel Comics most obviously serves as a source of creative inspira-
tion by virtue of having created a range of perennially popular superhero char-
acters many decades previous. However, as the case of The Winter Soldier
suggests, the wider Marvel franchise additionally takes inspiration from more
recent creative approaches taken by Marvel Comics to these valuable intellec-
tual properties.
Marvel Comics not only inspired Marvel Studios approach with The Winter
Soldier of combining the superhero genre with a further distinctive genre; the
publisher’s content more specifically provided some groundwork for Captain
America’s pivot towards the political thriller in the MCU. The Winter Soldier
story arc published in the pages of the Captain America comic book (vol. 5,
issues #1–9, 11–14, 2005–2006), and written by Ed Brubaker, served as a basis
for some of the Winter Soldier film’s story material (and title). The Captain
America comic’s frequent evoking of the political thriller during Brubaker’s
seven-year run on the title furthermore likely influenced Marvel Studio’s own
gravitation to the genre. According to Brubaker (Spurgeon 2012), he infused
his run with a ‘tone’ of ‘24 meets Tom Clancy’, two fictional worlds that often
each combine espionage with murky political machinations. Brubaker’s
approach resulted in a comics’ narrative containing themes of political pressure
and corruption, with illustrations often fittingly bathed in shadow. His take on
Captain America therefore prefigured and likely informed, to some degree,
Marvel Studios’ approach to The Winter Soldier in relation to genre.
While the source Brubaker narrative clearly held some influence upon The
Winter Soldier’s genre, however, the film’s specific activation of Hollywood’s
1970s genre cycle of political conspiracy thrillers is, within the Marvel context,
distinctive. Nevertheless, at least in a more general sense, The Winter Soldier’s
construction of the political thriller aligns in genre terms with the previously
published Marvel Comics material. Yet this flow of influence between these
sibling conglomerate divisions did not prevent clear genre contrast between
Marvel Comics output and The Winter Soldier at the time of the film’s release.
As The Winter Soldier opened in theatres, situating Captain America within the
political thriller genre, the Captain America comic book simultaneously placed
its hero in a bizarre and fantastical science-fiction adventure. Having estab-
lished the construction of the 1970s political thriller film in The Winter Soldier,
we move on here to detail this contrasting genre activation in the Captain
America comic book, which resulted in simultaneous genre divergence for the
Marvel franchise.
The writer Rick Remender led this drastic genre shift within the pages of
Captain America following his replacement of Brubaker on the title. The
maiden story arc of Remender’s run, Castaway in Dimension Z (vol. 6, issues
#1–15 2013–2014), is indicative of this transformation in genre. The arc con-
cerns Captain America’s perilous adventures in Dimension Z, a strange, hostile
30 M. FREEMAN AND A. N. SMITH

and dystopian wasteland ruled by the hero’s long-time enemy, Arnim Zola. As
IGN (Bailey 2012) observed of the arc’s second issue, the ‘dark espionage’ that
had previously characterised the title had been replaced by outlandish sci-fi ele-
ments including the peculiar technologies and ludicrously odd alien creatures
that characterise Dimension Z.
As AV Club’s (Sava 2013) review of the arc suggests, Castaway in Dimension
Z is ‘sci-fi worldbuilding’ on a ‘grandiose scale’, with this bold approach com-
plemented by penciler John Romita Jr.’s ‘expressive [and] exaggerated art-
work’. However, as is the case with many superhero narratives, the arc draws
on adventure genre tropes via its many exciting and fanciful action sequences.
As a CBR (Richards 2012) preview for the arc observes, the narrative fuses
‘rough and tumble’ adventure into its ‘psychedelic sci-fi’. Due to this combina-
tion of elements, the Castaway in Dimension Z narrative, along with Remender’s
entire run on the Captain America title, can be more specifically classified as a
space opera in the tradition of John Carter, Flash Gordon and the Star Wars
saga; that is, a ‘colourful, dramatic, large-scale science fiction adventure … usu-
ally set in the relatively distant future, and in space or on other worlds’ (Hartwell
and Cramer 2007: 10).
Remender’s activation of the space opera in Captain America therefore
transitioned the comic book away from Brubaker’s genre construction, as well
as from the genre destination that the Captain America film series was headed
towards. Here we account for this divergence, noting in particular how medium
specificity factored into this process. As we show, even within a conglomerate-­
owned media franchise such as Marvel’s, a given medium’s specific culture of
content production, circulation and consumption still influences medium-­
specific approaches to genre. Indeed, in the case of Captain America, key
industry and broader cultural differences between the two media sectors of film
and comics motivated the identified genre divergence. While, as we have
acknowledged, there is a cultural flow of ideas related to genre that runs
between Marvel Comics and Marvel Studios, medium-specific circumstances
nevertheless give rise to distinct approaches to genre.
A particular focus on Marvel Comics and its authorisation of Remender’s
space opera approach on Captain America demonstrates this. While Marvel
Comics might operate as a quasi R&D department for the wider Marvel fran-
chise, it also maintains a central position within a distinct industrial culture,
namely the US comic-book industry. As Smith (2018: 160) observes of con-
temporary industry approaches to comic-book narrative, wider franchise needs
and concerns can certainly factor into editorial practices at Marvel Comics.
However, as he further points out (2018: 161), medium-specific conditions
nevertheless still motivate many editorial decisions related to narrative. The
culture of the US comic-book industry, including its own distinct practices,
contexts and histories, similarly informs approaches to genre.
This is evident in the way that Marvel Comics’ placement of Captain America
within a space opera context formed part of a creative response to medium-­
specific market conditions and editorial objectives. The Captain America
2 TRANSMEDIA SUPERHERO: MARVEL, GENRE DIVERGENCE AND CAPTAIN AMERICA 31

comic book’s abrupt genre transformation more specifically served as part of a

Marvel Comics’ editorial initiative to revamp its entire product line in 2012.
The publisher branded this initiative Marvel Now!. According to then-Editor-­
in-Chief Axel Alonso (Marvel Comics 2012), the aim of this revamp was to
attract ‘old, lapsed or new’ readers by providing each of its titles with a ‘new
creative team and a driving concept’. As then-Chief Creative Officer of Marvel
Entertainment Joe Quesada (Marvel Comics 2012) noted prior to the Marvel
Now! launch, there would be ‘a lot of changes to the character status quos,
alter egos, costumes, creator shifts [and] design shifts’. Captain America’s
genre about-turn complemented this broader set of changes across Marvel
Comics’ output. So as to appeal to potential new readers, Marvel Now! comic-­
book titles were, as Marvel Comics executive editor Tom Brevoort (Marvel
Comics 2012) observes, all narratively designed to offer ‘about as clean a point
of entry as there’s ever likely to be’. However, shifts in creative teams and
genres, such as that which occurred on the Captain America title, as well as
other changes, were specifically designed to attract old/lapsed comic-book
readers through the offer of novelty.
Attention-grabbing product line revamps such as Marvel Now! have been a
common feature of the comic-book industry from the late 2000s onward, as
both Marvel and DC have looked to expand their readerships during a period
in which comic-book sales have consistently declined (Smith 2018: 137–149).
Therefore, medium-specific conditions, in terms of market pressures particular
to comics, motivated Marvel Comics, with their Captain America title, to sig-
nificantly deviate from the genre being constructed by Marvel Studios with The
Winter Soldier. For Marvel Studios, their utilisation of the political thriller
genre was a means to enable The Winter Soldier to stand out as a distinctive
proposition to film-going audiences. Simultaneously, genre themes of espio-
nage and political corruption were, for Marvel Comics, something to move
Captain America far away from as it looked to regain consumer interest in a
struggling industry. The specificities of the comic-book market therefore neces-
sitated that Marvel Comics divert the MU Captain America to a different genre
context from that where MCU’s Cap was headed.
A further factor driving this instance of genre divergence at Marvel, and
which again relates to medium specificity, is a particular and prevalent tendency
among creative practitioners across media; that is, a tendency of practitioners
to draw upon genre traditions particular to the medium in which they are oper-
ating. Remender’s approach on Captain America certainly reflects this ten-
dency, as his comic-book run’s activation of genre is partly a product of his
utilisation of the cultural history of American comic books. In other words,
historical manifestations of genre within the comics medium specifically influ-
enced Remender’s construction of the space opera genre. We detail here this
medium-specific process of what Noël Carroll (1982: 64) labels ‘genre memo-
rialisation’, which is typical within the Marvel franchise. We furthermore dem-
onstrate how this postmodern mode of engagement with genre history
contributes to genre divergence at Marvel.
32 M. FREEMAN AND A. N. SMITH

Analysing Hollywood films of the 1970s and 1980s, Noël Carroll (1982:
52) claims that ‘allusion, specifically allusion to film history, has become a
major expressive device’; he uses the term ‘historical pastiche’ to label films that
adhere to this trend. Carroll (62) additionally notes that genre memorialisation
forms part of these practices; that is, ‘historical pastiche’ texts can include the
‘loving evocation through imitation and exaggeration of the way genres were’.
He furthermore cites Raiders of the Lost Ark’s ‘reverie of the glorious old days’
of 1930s’ adventure movie serials as an example of genre memorialisation (62).
Such postmodern practices of subjecting earlier constructions of genre to what
Frederic Jameson (1991: 19) refers to as the ‘aesthetic colonization’ of the past
continue to be pervasive in entertainment media, including in comics’ narra-
tives. As Marc Singer (2018: 62–70) observes, American comics have fre-
quently been attentive to the superhero ‘genre’s history and conventions’ (64)
to the extent that the genre itself has become a ‘primary subject’ (62). As an
example of this practice, he cites ‘reconstructionist’ comics, such as Marvel’s
Marvels (1994) mini-series, which echoes, valorises and elaborates upon super-
hero genre constructions across Marvel Comics’ history.5
As the examples of both Raiders and Marvels suggest, despite the cross-­
media spread of the trend, postmodern approaches to genre often draw upon
the cultural history of the specific medium in which they are carried out. This
is the case with the construction of genre in Remender’s Captain America, as
the run memorialises American comics’ own space opera tradition. For exam-
ple, to create Dimension Z’s rugged yet spectacular landscape, he and Romita
applied the aesthetic of Wally Wood, a writer-illustrator lauded for the quirky
sci-fi narratives he produced for EC Comics in the 1950s (Richards
2013; Truitt 2012).
As part of their genre memorialisation approach with Castaway in Dimension
Z, Remender and Romita furthermore drew on a history of space opera con-
structions within superhero comics. In particular, the duo engaged with indus-
try legend Jack Kirby’s mid-1970s run on Captain America. Kirby had
co-created the title and character decades earlier, and his return stint on the
title is famed for its extravagant and visually spectacular sci-fi elements. The
character of Arnim Zola, who Kirby invented during this run, and who
Remender would later employ as Castaway in Dimension Z’s main villain, is
one such element. Zola, a mad scientist who has transferred his consciousness
into a robot body, is an extravagant sci-fi design, with the villain’s face pre-
sented on a screen encased on the host robot’s chest. Remender indeed
intended Castaway in Dimension Z as a homage to Kirby’s 1970s run (Khouri
2013); by drawing narrative inspiration from, and alluding to, this earlier
period of the Captain America title, Remender claimed that he had created a
‘treasure chest of amazing Kirby insanity for readers’ (Richards 2012).

5
Such practices of genre memorialisation in film and comics frequently align with a conceptual
framework in genre theory that claims that a given genre, as part of its evolution, comes to self-
reflexively engage with its own conventions and traditions (Schatz 1981: 37–38; Bailey 2016: 6–7).
2 TRANSMEDIA SUPERHERO: MARVEL, GENRE DIVERGENCE AND CAPTAIN AMERICA 33

At Marvel, such practices of medium-specific genre memorialisation are not

restricted to comics, as the approach is, for example, also common among
MCU filmmakers. As noted, Marvel Studios, in the tradition of Marvel
Comics, fuses the superhero genre with further genres as a means to ensure
each MCU film appears novel to audiences. However, as is the case in film
culture more generally, MCU filmmakers have tended to draw inspiration
from, as well as pastiche and memorialise, historical constructions of genre
within film specifically. This is the case with The Winter Soldier’s allusions to
Hollywood’s 1970s genre cycle of paranoid political thrillers. It is also the case
with Ant-Man (2015), which was, as Feige (Butler 2013) notes, modelled on
the ‘heist-film’; Black Panther (2018), which was conceived as MCU’s version
of a James Bond film, as Ryan Coogler, its director, acknowledges (Prell
2018); and Spider-­Man: Homecoming (2017), which, at the behest of Marvel
Studios, emulates and pays homage to story themes and textual features of
John Hughes’ run of 1980s teen movies, as the film’s director Jon Watt
(Desowitz 2017) explains.
There are clear cultural factors that explain why these postmodern practices
of historical pastiche and genre memorialisation are often medium-specific in
nature. Firstly, creative practitioners operating with a given medium are often
immersed in and passionate about the cultural history within that same given
medium, and therefore typically draw from that history specifically. For exam-
ple, in the case of Remender, his love of and fascination with sci-fi adventures
from earlier eras of American comics motivated his pastiches of Jack Kirby and
Wally Wood within his Captain America run. Secondly, there is an industrial
incentive for those engaged in allusion and pastiche to reference cultural arte-
facts from the medium in which they are operating, as the result has the poten-
tial to attract audiences steeped in that medium’s culture. For example, as the
US comic-book industry’s dedicated readership is highly knowledgeable of its
long history (Pustz 1999; Smith 2018), Remender’s allusions to Kirby and
Wood’s space opera works resonate with this audience specifically. This is evi-
dent in specialist press writing on Castaway in Dimension Z, which typically
identifies and approves of Remender’s medium-specific pastiche practices
(Bailey 2012; Truitt 2012). By drawing from comics history specifically as part
of his genre memorialisation, Remender’s Captain America is well suited to its
industry’s core readership.
Crucially, such historical pastiche processes are a determinant factor in
instances of simultaneous genre divergence in the Marvel franchise.
Fundamentally, this is because creative practitioner approaches of drawing
upon genre influences internal to their own medium have the potential to drive
contrasting genre outcomes across media. This is evident not only in the case
of Captain America but also in the aforementioned examples of genre diver-
gence in relation to Daredevil and the Hulk. Regarding the former, the aim of
genre memorialisation underpinned the construction of the swashbuckling
adventure genre on Mark Waid’s Daredevil comic-book run. As Waid notes, in
the decades prior to his time on the title, Daredevil had been cast as a ‘dark,
34 M. FREEMAN AND A. N. SMITH

dour, grim … crime-noir’ book (Tipton 2012). While these previous noir con-
structions would inform Marvel Television’s Daredevil Netflix series (McMillan
2015), the types of fun ‘swashbuckling’ Daredevil adventures that Waid
enjoyed reading as a child in the 1960s inspired his own take on the title
(Toucan 2012). A vibrant and carnivalesque colour palette, and a swashbuck-
ling adventurer for a title character—who beams a smile in the face of danger—
resulted from this genre shift. For commentators, Waid’s genre construction
here is a clear attempt to connect and pay homage to the character’s narrative
roots (McGloin 2013; Mooney 2014). The consequence of Waid’s genre
memorialisation was a comic-book run that appears diametrically opposed to
the Noir-infused Daredevil streaming series that was released simultaneously
with it.
In the case of the Hulk-related instance of genre divergence, an aim to
memorialise the character’s comic-book origins similarly influenced the activa-
tion of horror in the writer Al Ewing’s aforementioned run on The Immortal
Hulk. Despite the book’s title being introduced in 2018, the book is in fact a
retitled continuation of The Incredible Hulk, which debuted in 1962; as with
Waid’s approach on Daredevil, Ewing, on The Immortal Hulk, draws from the
genre starting point of the particular title on which he is assigned. As Ewing
(Mclaughlin 2018) acknowledges, The Incredible Hulk began as a ‘horror
comic’, in which the title character was a monstrous antagonist. With a narra-
tive rich in grotesque body horror, and which, according to Ewing (Mclaughlin
2018), is designed to make us ‘feel nervous when we see [Hulk] with charac-
ters we like’, the writer aligned the title to its initial genre. Ewing’s narrative
additionally makes direct allusions to this earlier genre construction. For exam-
ple, the title of Ewing’s first issue, ‘Or is He Both?’, is an intertextual reference
to a line included in the cover design of The Incredible Hulk’s debut issue,
namely, ‘IS HE MAN OR MONSTER OR … IS HE BOTH?’. Therefore,
Ewing’s motivation to honour the Hulk’s genre history has underpinned the
comic book’s clear divergence from the action and comedy genre contexts to
which the MCU Hulk is most associated.
These postmodern genre practices also appear to encourage genre diver-
gence due to the fact that genre memorialisation in one medium is not always
scalable across media. For example, Ewing’s horror in The Immortal Hulk,
Remender’s space opera in Captain America and Waid’s swashbuckling adven-
ture in Daredevil each make intertextual connections to the cultural history of
their respective comic-book title. In other words, each of the three writers has
memorialised genre in the same publication in which the memorialised genre
construction initially occurred. As noted, these postmodern genre construc-
tions hold significant intertextual meanings for many comic-book consumers;
however, as film-going audiences have less collective knowledge of, or interest
in, the cultural history of American comics, these intertexts would be of little
value in film culture. There is, therefore, less incentive for Marvel Studios to
activate these respective genres in relation to these respective characters. While,
then, there is always a cultural exchange of genre ideas between media at
Another random document with
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 BRICK HORIZONS

Here the old map a woodland marks,

With rivers winding through the hills;
And prints remain of spacious parks,
And gabled farms and watermills.

But now we see no fields to reap,

No flowers to welcome sun and rain:
The hillside is a cinder heap,
The river is an inky drain.

The modern town of red brick streets,

Row beyond row, and shelf on shelf,
On one side spreads until it meets
A town as dreary as itself;
And on the other side its arms
Of road and tramway are out-thrust,
And mutilate the fields and farms,
And shame the woods with noise and dust.

Here, from the scenes we love remote,

Dwell half the toilers of the land,—
The soul we think of as a vote,
The heart we speak of as a hand.

Dull sons of a mechanic age

Who claim but miss the rights of man,—
They have no dreams beyond their cage,
They know not of the haunts of Pan.

Here, wandering through mills and mines

And dreary streets each like the last,
Enclosed by brick horizon lines,
I found an island of the past.
A few sad fields, a few old trees,
In that new world of grime and smoke
Told me the time was springtime; these
Alone remembered and awoke.

And in the grass were stars and bells,

The immemorial blossomings
That spring to greet us from the wells
Of Beauty at the heart of things.

A lark sang overhead, its note

Had the same joy with which it fills
The morning, when we hear it float
Through crystal air on thymy hills.

We mar the earth, our modern toil

Defaces old and lovely things;
We soil the stream, we cannot soil
The brightness of Life’s fountain springs.

Here where man’s last progressive aim

Has stamped the green earth with the brand
Of want and greed, and put to shame
Her beauty, and we see the land

With mine and factory and street

Deformed, and filled with dreary lives,—
Here, too, Life’s fountain springs are sweet:
Our venture fails, God’s hope survives.

And in the heart of every child

Born in this brick horizon ring
The flowers of wonderland grow wild,
The birds of El Dorado sing.
 FIRST PATHWAYS

Where were the pathways that your childhood knew?—

In mountain glens? or by the ocean strands?
Or where, beyond the ripening harvest land,
The distant hills were blue?

Where evening sunlight threw a golden haze

Over a mellow city’s walls and towers?
Or where the fields and lanes were bright with flowers,
In quiet woodland ways?

And whether here or there, or east or west,

That place you dwelt in first was holy ground;
Its shelter was the kindest you have found,
Its pathways were the best.

And even in the city’s smoke and mire

I doubt not that a golden light was shed
On those first paths, and that they also led
To lands of heart’s desire.

And where the children in dark alleys penned,

Heard the caged lark sing of the April hills,
Or where they dammed the muddy gutter rills,
Or made a dog their friend;
Or where they gathered, dancing hand in hand,
About the organ man, for them, too, lay
Beyond the dismal alley’s entrance way,
The gates of wonderland.

For ’tis my faith that Earth’s first words are sweet

To all her children,—never a rebuff;
And that we only saw, where ways were rough,
The flowers about our feet.
 HIDDEN PATHS

You see a house of weathered stone,

A pillared gate, a courtyard wide,
And ancient trees that almost hide
The garden wild and overgrown;
You see the sheltering screen of pines
Beyond the farmyard and the fold,
And upland cornfields waving gold
Against the blue horizon lines;
But we of every field and wall
And room are now so much a part,
We seem to touch a living heart
And rather feel than see it all.

You pass the broken arch that spanned

The garden walk,—you note the weeds,
But miss our secret path that leads
To hidden nooks of wonderland;
And, where the faded rooms you mark,
You know not of the ancient spell
That o’er them in the firelight fell
When all the world outside was dark.

Elsewhere is your enchanted ground,

Your secret path, your treasure store;
And those who sojourned here before
Saw marvels we have never found.
For Earth is full of hidden ways
More wondrous than the ways it shows,
And treasures that outnumber those
For which men labour all their days.
 THE PATHS OF THE INFINITE

Have we not marked Earth’s limits, followed its long ways round,
Charted our island world, and seen how the measureless deep
Sunders it, holds it remote, that still in our hearts we keep
A faith in a path that links our shores with a shore unfound?

No quest the venturer waits, no world have we to explore;

But still the voices that called us far over the lands and seas
Whisper of stranger countries and lonelier deeps than these,
In the wind on the hill, and the reeds on the lake, and the wave on the shore.

Never beyond our Earth shall the venturer find a guide:

From the golden light of the stars, but not from the stars, a clue
May fall to the Earth; and the rose of eve and the noonday blue
Veil with celestial beauty the fathomless deeps they hide.

They have their bounds those deeps, and the ways that end are long;
But the soul seeks not for an end,—its infinite paths are near;
Over its unknown seas by the light of a dream we steer,
Through its enchanted isles we sail on an ancient song.

Here, where a man and a maid in the dusk of the evening meet,
Here, where a grave is green and the larks are singing above,
The secret of life everlasting is held in a name that we love,
And the paths of the infinite gleam through the flowers that grow at our
feet.
 A DESERTED HOME

Here where the fields lie lonely and untended,

Once stood the old house grey among the trees,
Once to the hills rolled the waves of the cornland—
Long waves and golden, softer than the sea’s.

Long, long ago has the ploughshare rusted,

Long has the barn stood roofless and forlorn;
But oh! far away are some who still remember
The songs of the young girls binding up the corn.

Here where the windows shone across the darkness,

Here where the stars once watched above the fold,
Still watch the stars, but the sheepfold is empty;
Falls now the rain where the hearth glowed of old.

Here where the leagues of melancholy loughsedge

Moan in the wind round the grey forsaken shore,
Once waved the corn in the mid-month of autumn,
Once sped the dance when the corn was on the floor.
 BEYOND THE FARTHEST HORIZON

We have dreamed dreams beyond our comprehending,

Visions too beautiful to be untrue;
We have seen mysteries that yield no clue,
And sought our goals on ways that have no ending.
We, creatures of the earth,
The lowly born, the mortal, the foredoomed
To spend our fleeting moments on the spot
Wherein to-morrow we shall be entombed,
And hideously rot,—
We have seen loveliness that shall not pass;
We have beheld immortal destinies;
We have seen Heaven and Hell and joined their strife;
Ay, we whose flesh shall perish as the grass
Have flung the passion of the heart that dies
Into the hope of everlasting life.

Oh, miracle of human sight!

That leaps beyond our earthly prison bars
To wander in the pathways of the stars
Across the lone abysses of the night.
Oh, miracle of thought! that still outsweeps
Our vision, and beyond its range surveys
The vistas of interminable ways,
The chasms of unfathomable deeps,
Renewed forevermore, until at last
The endless and the ended alike seem
Impossible, and all becomes a dream;
And from their crazy watch-tower in the vast
Those wild-winged thoughts again to earth descend
To hide from the unfathomed and unknown,
And seek the shelter love has made our own
On homely paths that in a graveyard end.
Oh, miracles of sight and thought and dream!
Y d b t l d t f th t
You do but lead us to a farther gate,
A higher window in the prison wall
That bounds our mortal state:
However far you lift us we must fall.
But lo! remains the miracle supreme,—
That we, whom Death and Change have shown our fate,
We, the chance progeny of Earth and Time,
Should ask for more than Earth and Time create,
And, goalless and without the strength to climb,
Should dare to climb where we were born to grope;
That we the lowly could conceive the great,
Dream in our dust of destinies sublime,
And link our moments to immortal hope.

No lesson of the brain can teach the soul

That ’twas not born to share
A nobler purpose, a sublimer care
Than those which end in paths without a goal;
No disenchantment turn it from the quest
Of something unfulfilled and unpossessed
O’er which no waters of oblivion roll.
But not in flight of thought beyond the stars
Can we escape our mortal prison bars:
There the unfathomable depths remain
Blind alleys of the brain:
The sources of those sudden gleams of light
That merge our finite in the infinite,
We look for there in vain;
For not upon the pathways that are barred
But those left open,—not where the unknown quest
Dismays the soul, but where it offers rest,
Are set those lights that point us heavenward.

So, let us turn to the unfinished task

That earth demands, strive for one hour to keep
A watch with God, nor watching fall asleep,
Before immortal destinies we ask.
Before we seek to share
A larger purpose, a sublimer care,
Let us o’ercome the bondage of our fears,
And fit ourselves to bear
The burden of our few and sinful years.
Ere we would claim a right to comprehend
The meaning of the life that has no end
Let us be faithful to our passing hours,
And read their beauty, and that light pursue
Which gives the dawn its rose, the noon its blue,
And tells its secret to the wayside flowers.

Our eyes that roam the heavens are too dim,

Our faithless hearts too cumbered with our cares
To reach that light; but whoso sees and dares
To follow, we must also follow him.
Our heroes have beheld it and our seers,
Who in the darkest hours foretold the dawn.
It flashes on the sword for freedom drawn:
It makes a rainbow of a people’s tears.
The vast, the infinite, no more appal
Him who on homely ways has seen it fall:
He trusts the far, he dowers the unknown
With all the love that Earth has made our own,
And all the beauty that his dreams recall:
For him the loneliest deeps of night it cheers;
It gathers in its fold the countless spheres,
And makes a constant homelight for them all.
 A HALT ON THE WAY

A pause, a halt upon the way!

A time for dreaming and recalling;
We bore the burden of the day,
And now the autumn night is falling.

A halt in life! a little while

In which to be but a beholder,
And think not of the coming mile
And feel not, “I am growing older.”

A stern old man with wrinkled brow,

Urging us on with beckoning finger,
Time seems no longer—rather now
A sweetheart who would make us linger.

Old times are with us,—long ago;

Upon the wall familiar shadows;
We find again the haunts we know,
The pleasant pathways through the meadows.

And as we turn and look ahead,

Seeking beyond for things departed,
And dream of pathways we must tread
In days to come through lands uncharted,

Old faiths still light us on our way,

Old love and laughter, hope and sorrow,—
As evening of the Northern day
Becomes the morning of to-morrow.
 OLD LANDMARKS

The log flames, as they leap and fall,

Cast ancient shadows on the wall;
Again I hear the south-west blow
About the house, as long ago
We heard it, when we gathered round
The hearth made homelier by the sound
That in the chimney caverns keened
And told of things the darkness screened.
Dim in their panels round the room
The old unchanging faces loom;
And soft upon the crimson robe,
The hand that rests upon a globe,
The dusky frames, the faded tints,
The flicker of the hearth-light glints.
Out in the yard familiar tones
Of voices reach me; on the stones
A waggon rumbles, and a bark
Welcomes an inmate from the dark.
It might be twenty years ago,
So much of all we used to know
Remains unchanged; and yet I feel
Some want that makes it half unreal.
For we who long ago were part
Of all we knew, the very heart
Of all we loved, let somewhere slip
The bonds of that old comradeship.
The past awakes; but while I muse
Here in the same old scenes, I lose
The paths to which we once had clues.
Along familiar ways we went
All day, at every turn intent
To mark where Time had made a theft,
Or undisturbed our treasure left.
H ld d d h
Here an old tree was down, and there
A roof had fallen, a hearth was bare,
Where once we saw amid the smoke
The glowing turf, the kindly folk.
Here one we had watched beside the plough
Stride with his horses, hobbled now;
And here there strode a full-grown man
Where once a bare-legged urchin ran.
And where was now that girl whose feet
Once made yon mountain path so sweet?
Whose shyness flushed her cheek, the while
The mischief hidden in her smile
Belied it? I behold the spot
Where once she passed but now is not,
The grey rocks, where the mountain breeze
Fluttered the skirts about her knees.
We passed beside the wheelwright’s door
Where, as it used to be, the floor
Was piled with shavings, and a haze
Of dusty motes made dim the rays
Of sunlight, and the air was sweet
With smell of new-sawn wood and peat.
We heard the smithy anvil clink,
And saw the fire grow bright and sink
In answer to the bellows’ wheeze,
While, as of old, between his knees
The smith a horse’s fetlocks drew,
And rasped the hoof and nailed the shoe.
Here, and at every place of call,
The welcome that we had from all,
The pleasant sound of names outgrown
By which in boyhood we were known,
Quick springing to their lips, a look
That backward to old meetings took
Our thoughts, a word that brought to mind
Something for ever left behind,—
All, though they blessed us, touched the springs
Of tears at the deep heart of things.
O tea s at t e deep ea t o t gs.

We saw the mountains far away,

Beyond whose blue horizons lay
The wonderlands of which we dreamed
Of old; and still their barrier seemed
To tell us of the pilgrim quest,
And things remote and unpossessed,—
Not of that world which on our hearts
Had marked its bounds and graved its charts.
They told us of that unknown shore
That none can find; but where, before,
They called us o’er the world to roam,
They now seemed sheltering walls of home.
And those old paths whose ends we sought
Were dearer for themselves than ought
Their ends foretold: no truth could harm
Their beauty or undo their charm;
No disillusions of the far
Could touch their homeliness, or mar
The love that made them what they are.

Here we were children: here in turn

Our children in the same paths learn
The secrets of the woods and flowers,
And dream the dreams that once were ours.
Their vision keen renews our own,
Their certainties our doubts atone,
And, sharing in their joys, we weave
The years we find with those we leave.
A little weary, glad of rest
Ourselves, our hearts are in their quest.
Pilgrims of life, whose steps have slowed,
We love to linger on the road,
Or reach the welcome stage, while they
Are eager for the unknown way.
Some time to come their thoughts will turn
To these wild winter nights, and yearn
For something lost and left behind
For something lost and left behind,
As now I turn.—I hear the wind
Keen in the chimney as of old,
And darkness falls on field and fold;—
I catch the clue, on scenes that were
I look not backward,—I am there!
The men are gone, the gates are barred,
We steal across the empty yard,
The cattle drowse within their stalls,
The shelter of our homestead walls
Is round us, and the ways without
Are filled with mystery and doubt.
Over the hidden forest sweeps
The wind, and all its haunted deeps
Are calling, and we do not dare
Farther beyond our walls to fare
Than o’er one field, the sheds to gain
Where, sheltered from the wind and rain,
The watchful shepherd and his dogs
Still tarry, and a fire of logs,
A lantern’s light, a friendly bark,
Make us an outpost in the dark.
I miss the way! I drop the clues!
Through mists of years again I lose
My childhood, and alone I sit
And watch the shadows leap and flit
Above the hearth. The world that lies
Beyond our homely boundaries
I know, and in the darkness dwell
No hidden foes, no wizard spell.
But still the starry deeps are crossed
By lonelier paths than those we lost;
Still the old wonder and the fear
Of what we know not, makes more dear
The ways we know; and still, no less
Than in my childhood’s days, I bless
The shelter of their homeliness.

A id th b dl d k
Amid the boundless and unknown
Each calls some guarded spot his own;
A shelter from the vast we win
In homely hearths, and make therein
The glow of light, the sound of mirth,
That bind all children of the earth
In brotherhood; and when the rain
Beats loud upon the window-pane,
And shadows of the firelight fall
Across the floor and on the wall,
And all without is wild and lone
On lands and seas and worlds unknown,—
We know that countless hearthlights burn
In darkened places, and discern,
Inwoven with the troubled plan
Of worlds and ways unknown to man,
The shelter at the heart of life,
The refuge beyond doubt and strife,
The rest for every soul outcast,
The homely hidden in the vast;
And doubt not that whatever fate
May lie beyond us, soon or late,
However far afield we roam,
The unknown way will lead us home.

THE END

Printed by R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgh.

By SIDNEY ROYSE LYSAGHT

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THE MARPLOT
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