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| courtesy of www.wikia.com |
Transmedia refers to various
stories narrated across multiple media platforms, where multimedia is of a
single story carried out by different media platforms. In Henry Jenkin’s Converging Culture, he says that “each
franchise entry needs to be self- contained so that if they didn’t see the
film, it doesn’t matter” (98). People
do not want to see a single story, they are compelled to extend on various
narratives to extend a story.
In
the form of transmedia storytelling, each medium has a purpose of creating a
unified story told across multiple channels being distributed. The storytelling is dispersed horizontally
across many media corporations, intermingling with one another. It is often
seen with big conglomerates like Disney or NewsCorp, where they dominate in
other forms of media rather than vertically along only one type of media.
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| courtesy of www.screenrant.com |
Marvel Comics
is a form of transmedia. Marvel is most
notably known for making comics, but recently they have expanded their company
into other media forms. Each medium in the comic publisher does what it does
best so that a story might be introduced in a film, novel, website, or video
game. Not only do they have comics but
they have invested in clothes, action figures, amusement park rides, and other
entities.
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| courtesy of ww.wikimedia.org |
Recently,
Marvel has put out numerous movies of such comic book characters like
Spider-man, Thor, the Hulk, Captain America, and Iron-man. These movies helped launch a variety of more
mediums such as video games and sequels. Marvel is so repetitive of its storytelling
that it even made an Avengers movie, which combines most of the Marvel
characters all put into one movie.
Transmedia storytelling is just taking one story and recycling it a
bunch of times. But like Marvel,
transmedia storytelling is successful to them because they do it through
numerous forms of media, giving way to many narratives. They even have their own Marvel Comics
Database. Point is, fans want to know
what happened before, after, and between each story. Marvels ultimate goal is to motivate audience
interaction by involving them in various ways.
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| courtesy of www.blogspot.com |
Marvel’s
initiative is to intertwine their comics into other media productions. Even
though this strategy may hurt their comic book sales, it boosts Marvel’s
adaptation to other media forms and makes comics almost obsolete for their
success. In fact, transmedia
storytelling has saved Marvel from near bankruptcy. Comics, a dying medium, was
bought out by Disney, helped restore Marvel and allowed comics to rise to the
top because it was integrated into other media forms rather than just one. Marvel’s
transmedia-focused content allows for its success in the media world by
combining mass media together to expand a story through various mediums from
common interests.
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