Post #7: Blank and dark full-pages in Sin City

Chapter 3: Layout aspects, p. 54


As it happens with other works by Frank Miller, there is a profuse use of full-page compositions in Sin City that can either comply with the space of the white page margin or not. The difference from other works that use this same page layout is that, in the hard-boiled series, characters generally appear in completely blank or dark pages, because of the high black and white contrast style.

Blank and dark full-pages. (“The Hard Good-Bye”, 34 and “That Yellow Bastard”, 57).

Post #6: Layout in Sin City

Chapter 3: Layout aspects, p. 53


Regular three- and four-strip pages (strips similar in height and width) are quite uncommon in Sin City. There are around eight of them in Sin City: The Hard Good-Bye’s 200 pages. Strips of similar height, but divided in different ways (columns of irregular sizes) are a little more common; they occur on approximately ten pages. Equally sized panels covering a whole page are extremely rare; only three cases were found (a three-by-three, a three-by-two and a two-by-three grid on pages 73, 36 and 19 respectively.

Examples from The Hard Goodbye: Regular three- and four-strip pages (68; 77), strips of equal height, but divided in irregular columns (167) and equally-sized panels forming a three-by-three grid on a page (73).

Post #5: Miller's layout in 300

Chapter 3: Layout aspects, p. 51


Works from the same artist may also present different layout patterns. Frank Miller, for instance, is known for a great diversity in this aspect. Each of his present-day works displays a distinct quality and some of them have unusual or totally irregular page layouts in which the idea of strips as an essential element of the comics medium is completely abandoned. In general, the artist regularly employs full-page, larger-than-a-page and even double-page panoramic compositions, upon which small frames are sometimes superimposed.

A larger-than-a-page and a double-page compositions (back and front covers in Miller’s 300).

 

These extremely large compositions sometimes get to cross the hyperframe of the page, causing the page to resemble a painting or even a film photogram. Perhaps because of this auteurial characteristic, Miller’s works have inspired several adaptations to cinema. This is the case of 300, a 2007 film by director Zack Snyder.

Post #4: Transmedia Storytelling in Watchmen

Chapter 2: Narrative aspects, p. 40-41


In Snyder’s Watchmen, transmedia storytelling is mainly used to support the alternate world of the graphic novel, providing fake documents, newspaper headlines and magazine covers that confirm the events in the graphic novel and the film. Actually, a considerable part of this fictitious material is already present in the graphic novel; thus, instead of constructing new narrative details, film producers simply provided them in other media.

The website domain The New Frontiersman was created with a link to the newspaper’s profile on Flickr electronic photo album, with dozens of posters, magazine covers and newspaper pages that appear in the graphic novel, but are not seen in the film with great detail. 

At the New Frontiersman newspaper web domain, there is also the link to four videos, to which the graphic novel does not make any reference. They are a TV program on world politics, talking about the decisive role of Dr. Manhattan in the American victory in Vietnam; a government institutional video explaining the Keene Act and warning people against masked heroes; a program on Veidt Music Network imitating the MTV style; and a news report program aired on March 11^th, 1970, looking back at ten years since the existence of Dr. Manhattan. Here, again, the main purpose of these videos is to support the fictitious world of Watchmen. 




Another remarkable transmedia storytelling strategy in the film franchise is carried out by video games. The fan has the opportunity to interact with superheroes in situations that are transmedia extensions of the main work’s narrative. In the online “Minutemen Arcade”, Snyder and his team produce an old-fashioned style video game designed as the arcade 8-bit video games from the eighties. The fan is able to choose between characters Silk Spectre I and Nite Owl I to fight against their archenemy Moloch and his gang in 1942 New York.

  

Post #3: Sin City DVD Menu

Chapter 2: Narrative aspects, p. 34


In a good example of how DVD technology drew reading and viewing experiences together through the organization of film sequences in “chapters”, in the “Recut, Unrated and Extended” double DVD version of Sin City (see fig.5), the intertwined plotline of the theatrical film version is reassembled so that viewers can watch each of the four stories separately.

Post #2: The Metaphor of the Maze in Paul Auster's City of Glass

Chapter 1: Intermedial Relations, p. 14

One of the main characteristics of comics is its juxtaposition of the verbal and the visual texts, which designates Mixmedia texts. A Mixmedia text “contains complex signs in different media that would not reach coherence or self-sufficiency outside that context” (Clüver, “Estudos Interartes” 8). The juxtaposition of verbal and visual texts in comics offers the reader a third layer of meaning, as in the metaphor of the maze in Paul Auster's City of Glass, the graphic novel by Mazzuchelli and Karasik.

Paul Auster's City of Glass, page 4

In the graphic novel, the image of the buildings in New York is transformed into a maze and, later on, into one’s fingerprint on the window of Quinn’s house. This visual metaphor provides two subtexts: the fact that Quinn feels lost in New York (the maze as a metaphor for being lost) and the fact that the character has lost his identity after his wife’s and son’s deaths (the fingerprint as a metaphor for identity) and has been living through the lives of others.

Post #1: The split screen and the final credits in Ang Lee's Hulk (2003)

Chapter 1: Intermedial Relations, p. 12

The use of split screen and the final credits in Hulk evoke some formal qualities of the comics medium. This is what Irina Rajewsky calls Intermedial Reference in her text “Intermediality, intertextuality, and remediation: A literary perspective on intermediality”