Historicising Transmedia Storytelling: Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds [1 ed.] 9781138217690, 9781315439525

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Historicising Transmedia Storytelling

This book is an important contribution to the study of transmedia story­ telling. With the aim to historicise transmedia storytelling, it offers an origi­ nal point of view on the topic. In these pages transmedia practices become key to re-reading in an innovative way the history of twentieth century popu­lar culture. —Paolo Bertetti, University of Siena, Italy

Tracing the industrial emergence of transmedia storytelling—typically branded a product of the contemporary digital media landscape—this book provides a historicised intervention into understandings of how fictional ­stories flow across multiple media forms. Through studies of the story worlds constructed for The Wizard of Oz, Tarzan and Superman, the book reveals how new developments in advertising, licensing and governmental policy across the twentieth century enabled historical systems of trans­media storytelling to emerge, thereby providing a valuable contribution to the growing field of transmedia studies as well as to understandings of media convergence, popular culture and historical media industries. Matthew Freeman is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at Bath Spa University, UK, and Director of its Media Convergence Research ­Centre. He is the author of Industrial Approaches to Media (2016), and the co-author of Transmedia Archaeology (2014).

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90 Technologies of Consumer Labor A History of Self-Service Michael Palm 91 Performing Ethnicity, Performing Gender Transcultural Perspectives Edited by Bettina Hofmann and Monika Mueller 92 Materiality and Popular Culture The Popular Life of Things Edited by Anna Malinowska and Karolina Lebek 93 Girlhood, Schools, and Media Popular Discourses of the Achieving Girl Michele Paule 94 The Creative Underground Arts, Politics and Everyday Life Paul Clements 95 Subjectivity across Media Interdisciplinary and Transmedial Perspectives Edited by Maike Sarah Reinerth and Jan-Noël Thon 96 The Rise of Transtexts Challenges and Opportunities Edited by Benjamin W.L. Derhy Kurtz and Mélanie Bourdaa 97 Explorations in Critical Studies of Advertising Edited by James F. Hamilton, Robert Bodle, and Ezequiel Korin 98 Popular Culture and the Austerity Myth Hard Times Today Edited by Pete Bennett and Julian McDougall 99 Historicising Transmedia Storytelling Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds Matthew Freeman

Historicising Transmedia Storytelling Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds Matthew Freeman

First published 2017 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Taylor & Francis The right of Matthew Freeman to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data CIP data has been applied for. ISBN: 978-1-138-21769-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-43952-5 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

For Carley

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Contents

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction: Why Historicise? 1 Part I

Defining Transmedia History 1 Characterising Transmedia Storytelling: Character-building, World-building, Authorship 21 2 Contextualising Transmedia Storytelling: Industrialisation, Consumer Culture, Media Regulation 43 Part II

Exploring Transmedia History 3 1900–1918: From Fin-de-Siècle to Fairy-Worlds: L. Frank Baum, the Land of Oz and Advertising 69 4 1918–1938: From Fairy-Worlds to Jungles: Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc., Tarzan and Corporate Authorship 108 5 1938–1958: From Jungles to Krypton: DC Comics, Superman and Industry Partnerships 145 Conclusion: Crossing the Shifting Sands 189 Index

207

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Acknowledgements

When I was younger I was never particularly keen on studying history. Things change, I suppose, although not entirely. The work of this book is not really one of history. As I like to tell those who will listen, this book is about historicisation – taking the phenomena of the present moment and reimagining them through the lens of a bygone past. There is something genuinely exciting about digging into the past, not just to examine that past per se, but also to better understand the workings of the present. That, in fact, is what I am doing here. And if this book represents the workings of my own present, then this too has a history, one filled with people without whom this work would not have been possible. People are central to this book. I mean that both in the sense that history has a funny way of revolving around the actions of individuals even as events rely on other factors relating to bigger incidents. But people are central to this book in another way, too, and here I mean in terms of the people whose lives I have crossed paths with over the past five years. Simply, I am indebted to a whole network of individuals, and I would like to briefly acknowledge those individuals here. For the sake of time I cannot possibly list all of these people, but I must highlight the select few whose influence and contribution have been invalu­ able. First, I start by acknowledging Paul Grainge at the University of ­Nottingham. When I applied to do my PhD (from which this book derives) at Nottingham, Paul was my first point of contact, and his kind, generous and encouraging emails were more invaluable and are far more appreci­ ated than he knows. Also at the University of Nottingham I thank Elizabeth Evans for her positive support of the project, and I wholeheartedly thank Roberta Pearson and Paul McDonald, who co-supervised the PhD on which this book is based. Their generous support, guidance, ideas, discussions and even gentle telling-offs once in a while are the bedrock of this research; I thank you both. Special thanks must also go to Henry Jenkins for his constant support and enthusiasm for my work. I first met Henry – whose seminal work into transmedia storytelling inspired this entire book – in 2012, and since that time he has quietly watched and guided the development of this project, offering generous support and ideas in my PhD Viva as well as in numerous

x Acknowledgements email exchanges before and since. My thanks, also, to Peter Hanff for taking the time to answer so many questions about all things Wizard of Oz with such precision and enthusiasm, to the many reviewers who all provided use­ ful comments about my work during peer-review processes and equally to the countless faces who gave invaluable tips at various conferences. Some of the ideas in this book benefitted from being published in other forms in journals whose editors also deserve my thanks. Portions of ­Chapter 3 emerged out ‘Advertising the Yellow Brick Road: ­Historicising the Industrial Emergence of Transmedia Storytelling’ in International ­Journal of ­Communication 8 (2014), while elements of Chapter 5 built upon ideas iterated in much earlier forms as ‘Up, Up and Across: Superman, the ­Second World War and the Historical Development of Transmedia S­ torytelling’ in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 35:2 (2015). I there­ fore thank editors Arlene Luck and James Chapman respectively for their time, efforts and thoughtful suggestions. I must also thank Carlos A. Scolari for helping me publish and write my first co-authored book, and equally Rebecca Feasey at Bath Spa University, mainly for her support and conti­ nued friendship. The final people who deserve thanks are my family. As ever, I am for­ ever grateful to my Dad, David Freeman, whose generosity and friendship is unwavering. And a special mention goes to my Mum, Susan Freeman, who sadly passed away in 2012. She is sorely missed. But this book is dedicated to my wife, Carley Freeman, for a great many things. For one, and not least of all, for simply putting up with me when I needed to hide in dark rooms during the more intense writing periods of the PhD, of which were there countless, and for supporting me throughout that time in just about every way a person can be supported. I could not have accomplished this book without her, and now that it is finished I can­ not thank her enough.

Introduction Why Historicise?

In 2012, Warner Bros. publicised the release of The Dark Knight Rises – the final blockbuster installment in Christopher Nolan’s iconic Batman trilogy  – with an online campaign that was designed to promote the film far and wide. New websites were created where audiences could ‘Go inside Gotham City’, as it was billed, and read editions of the Gotham Observer – a faux newspaper taken from the fictional story world that published news reports about key story events leading up to those in the film. These websites ­exemplify transmedia storytelling, a term coined in 2003 by Henry ­Jenkins to label the spread of entertainment across multiple media. Transmedia story­telling, as Jenkins defines it, is the telling of ‘stories that unfold across multiple platforms, with each medium making distinctive contributions to our understanding of the [story] world’ (Jenkins, 2006: 336). Since Jenkins defined the term, transmedia storytelling has gained signi­ ficant academic and industry presence over the last decade or so. The Dark Knight Rises encapsulates the way in which stories now ‘play out seamlessly across platforms from film to television, from videogames to websites or comic books’ (Kushner, 2013: online). More recently Jenkins observes that ‘over the past few decades, Hollywood and the games industry have begun to develop more sophisticated tools for modelling and rendering synthetic worlds’ (2014a: online), drawing particular attention to the roles played by ‘art directors and production designers,’ not to mention ‘DVD extras and web-based encyclopaedias’ on the development of transmedia story­ telling (2014a: online). The proliferation of content across multiple media is now so commonplace that the contemporary creative industries – be it the entertainment industries, the advertising industry or consumer and heritage ­sectors – are now calling upon transmedia consultancies to more effectively engage their audiences across multiple media. In 2010, the Producers Guild of America sanctioned a Transmedia Producer credit for film, television and interactive projects. Since then dozens of transmedia production companies have emerged worldwide – such as Miranda Studio, Starlight Runner Enter­ tainment and Fourth Wall – while new careers in creative strategy, content producers, intermediary agencies and digital marketing all reflect the neces­ sity to adapt to a transmedia future. In Canada, for instance, funding for films and television programmes is now restricted unless producers develop

2 Introduction transmedia extensions such as websites. Australia, Holland, Switzerland, Brazil, Colombia and the UK have since followed suit. Indeed, the BBC now makes extensive use of intermediary transmedia producers to develop its programming – including everything from Doctor Who to the 2012 London Olympics – into transmedia content. Many US television shows commence production with designated Transmedia Teams in place. With his eye on the future, Jeff Gomez, president of the a­ forementioned Starlight Runner Entertainment, a company founded specifically to m ­ aximise the value of entertainment properties by preparing fictional story worlds for extension across multiple media, insists that transmedia storytelling is ‘something that the Digital Age is now demanding of us all’ (2013: online). That demand may be true, but examples like the Gotham Observer are by no means specific to the Digital Age. Carlos Scolari once argued that ‘transmedia storytelling proposes a new narrative model’ (2009: 586), and yet over a hundred years before The Dark Knight Rises even reached cine­ mas, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz from 1900 was extending its own story across multiple media. That tale’s magical Land of Oz story world included The Ozmapolitan, also a mock newspaper. The Ozmapolitan, released as a giveaway item in select newspapers in 1905, was brimming with new nar­ rative details relating to key events from inside this magical fictional story world, offering readers ‘in-universe’ interviews with its characters as well as revealing a variety of previously undisclosed plot points that sparked the ensuing story events from the pages of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in the first place. Clearly there are parallels between Gotham Observer and The Ozmapoli­ tan. For all intents and purposes, both of these pieces exemplify transmedia storytelling, since both of these mock newspapers expanded their respective story worlds as part of an array of other media forms. And yet these two examples – crafted well over a century apart, drawing on different media forms and technologies and produced in different ways – indicate that trans­ media storytelling has been informed by different industrial configurations and strategies over time. But what are the strategies that afford transmedia stories? What are the industrial determinants or contingencies that underpin those strategies over time? And what are the characteristics of stories that are told across multiple media? In answering these questions, the aim of this book is to re-­contextualise transmedia storytelling as a product of the early ­twentieth century, and in doing so to enhance scholarly understandings of this pheno­ menon. As The Ozmapolitan shows, transmedia storytelling has perhaps always existed, but the means by which the stories are told across media are historically conditioned. This book is about understanding that historical conditioning, and intends to serve as a valuable contribution to the growing field of transmedia studies as well as to understandings of media convergen­ ces, popular culture and indeed the historical workings of media industries. This book is the first full-scale attempt to re-conceptualise the ostensibly

Introduction  3 contemporary phenomenon of transmedia storytelling as a historical prac­ tice of media production. I argue that only by looking to the past can we fully see the contingencies of the present, and that searching for historical precedents can force us to be far more nuanced in describing what is truly specific to our present media moment. It is an appropriate time to describe such nuances, for as Louisa Ellen Stein asserts, ‘academic and popular understandings of what exactly we mean by “transmedia” are in flux’ (2013: 405). Says Stein: ‘The term has been put to different purposes with different end goals depending on who is using it and in what context’ (2013: 405). But if ‘transmediality’ most broadly describes, as Elizabeth Evans defines, ‘the increasingly popular industrial practice of using multiple media technologies to present information concerning a single fictional world through a range of textual forms’ (2011: 1), then this book specifically examines the industry strategies of transmedia storytelling – by which I mean the strategies for holding fictional story worlds together across multiple media and for pointing audiences across those media.1 At the present moment, it is digital or industrial convergences that hold transmedia story worlds together while pointing audiences across media. Media industries and their various technologies, practices and systems of operation have become more aligned and networked in recent decades, pro­ viding a clear model for extending stories across multiple media. As ­Jenkins writes, media convergence – emerging as a concept around the start of the Internet era in the early 1990s – is ‘the flow of content across multi­ ple media, … the co-operation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of audiences’ (2006: 2), which for Jenkins makes ‘the flow of content across media inevitable’ (2003: online). But convergence is really only an umbrella term for making sense of the proliferation of interconnected screens and media texts that dominate our contemporary media culture, and in this case refers to convergences on the levels of both industry and technology. Industrial convergence, as James Hay and Nick Couldry assert, suggests a ‘new synergy amongst media companies and industries’ (2011: 473), and designates the levels of ownership within the media conglomerates emerging in the late 1950s and flourishing in the 1980s. Technological convergence, meanwhile, refers to the ‘hybridity that has folded the uses of separate media into one another’ (Hay and C ­ ouldry, 2011: 493). One example of the latter would include watching television on a mobile phone, an activity that exemplifies the changes brought about by new digital media technologies and advances such as the rise of the Internet.2 There are claims to suggest these two different aspects of convergence have led to two slightly different models of transmedia storytelling. Andrea P ­ hillips (2012) expresses differences between East Coast and West Coast transmedia. For Phillips (2012: 13), West Coast transmedia follows the logic of industrial convergence, where mass-media pieces of story (via films, television series, videogames, etc.) are orchestrated across major US studios and corporations. Phillips brands this model the ‘Hollywood or franchise transmedia’, and is

4 Introduction associated with ‘big-business commercial storytelling’ (2012: 13). East Coast transmedia, meanwhile, follows the logic of technological convergence, and is made up principally of digital platforms such as email, social media and blogs. Phillips discusses this model of transmedia storytelling as being ‘more interactive, and much more web-centric’ (2012: 14). However, while it is certainly tempting to regard industrial and techno­ logical advances as implying revolutionary shifts in transmedia practices – bringing different media into closer proximity and dialogue in ways that allow for a flow of storytelling across media – it is equally as important to recognise the extent to which distribution and consumption models have remained bound to more traditional means of production. Convergence has certainly accelerated the ability for a story to be extended across media, but I argue throughout this book that it is the strategies behind the production of transmedia storytelling – rather than the specifically converged structures of contemporary media industries and technologies – that ultimately hold transmedia story worlds together and point their audiences across media. Phillips, nevertheless, does begin to hint at the different models under which transmedia storytelling can work, and this thinking is important to con­ sidering the further different models under which transmedia storytelling operated throughout the past. In other words, the models of trans­media story­telling today are not the only ones. If The Ozmapolitan and the Gotham Observer exemplify transmedia storytelling at different points in time, then the industrial strategies used to create the Oz and Batman story worlds must differ radically. And yet the perceived newness of transmedia storytelling – or rather the perceived importance of newer convergences on the rise of transmedia story­telling – has left a sizable gap in scholarly literature about its longer histories. Indeed, in his short essay on transmedia history, Derek Johnson rightly points out that ‘one of the newest dimensions of contemporary trans­ media entertainment is our recognition of it as such’ (2013: online). I shall now briefly examine the small amount of academic literature that engages with the history of transmedia storytelling, using this literature to justify my own focus and period of investigation.

Transmedia History Scholarship Critical debates around the idea of transmedia history tend to consist mostly of occasional asides and consideration. Evans hints at the importance of recognising the ‘historical precedents of these developments’ in her research (2011: 19), but there has been very little concerted research into actually doing this. Johnson alludes to possible transmedia history both in his contri­ bution to the Spreadable Media project and in his Media Franchising book.3 In the former, Johnson acknowledges ‘a much longer history’ and points to rather speculative images of the mythological narratives of Ancient Greece. Here, Johnson proposes that oral traditions drawn in the visual artistry of

Introduction  5 pottery might be theorised as an ancient incarnation of transmedia story­ telling (2013: online). In a similar vein to Johnson’s approach, Roberta ­Pearson turns to the Bible as one possible example of a pre-historical form of transmedia storytelling. Pearson observes how the narrative architecture of Jesus Christ has been passed down across many centuries through a com­ plex combination of the written word, drama, religious paintings, stainedglass windows, symbolic icons and so forth (2009). Tellingly, neither Johnson nor Pearson considers the practices or processes involved in actually spreading such narrative architecture across multiple forms – a consideration that is almost entirely absent from the ­scholarly literature on this subject. Jenkins has also made occasional historical ­references in his own research, most prominently in Denise Mann’s Wired TV volume. Here, Jenkins turns to literary figures such as Lewis Carroll and J. R. R. Tolkien, discussing the ‘structures of old myths’ in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955) as possible ancestors to transmedia storytelling (2014b: 248–254). Elsewhere, Jenkins has hinted that transmedia storytelling is perfectly viable without using new digital technologies, and that the latter have mainly been used as facilita­ tors by the modern creators of transmedia universes, but again very little consideration has been afforded to actually understanding how transmedia storytelling could have worked in the past (Gallarino: online). An exception to this rule is Shawna Kidman, who considers a pre-digital history of trans­ mediality via the American comic book industry. Kidman rightly observes that ‘stories have long been able to exist in multiple forms simultaneously, and media has in the past become a site of both contestation and affiliation’ (2012: 42). Kidman points to factors like copyright and low production costs in the comics industry in order to explain why ‘comics developed as innately transmedial’ (2012: 42). These factors will be further interrogated in this book, since comics indeed play a vital role in the industrial history of transmedia storytelling. But whereas Kidman’s work is limited to the comic book industry, I will position comics as just one medium amidst a wealth of broader industrial-cultural contingencies that altogether shaped the work­ ings of transmedia storytelling in the past. Elsewhere, both Johnson and Jenkins do acknowledge the key role played by licensing on achieving historical practices of transmedia storytelling; licensing is of course an industrial practice that continues to be used today and will be examined in more depth in the historical context of the 1920s and 1930s in Chapter 4. Given that licensing, in which rights are trans­ ferred between parties, came before any industrial convergence and also works to extend intellectual property across platforms, it is understandable why it features in Jenkins’ and Johnson’s indications of transmedia history. Building on these claims, Avi Santo establishes the basis for exploring how ‘transmedia branding’ operated under this rubric of licensing in the past (2010: 2015). Santo looks at the differing cultural and economic values of The Lone Ranger and The Green Hornet between 1930s and the 1960s,

6 Introduction exploring the ‘shifting values and roles of character licensing across a num­ ber of intertwining cultural industries – most notably, radio, television, film, comic books, comic strips, and toys’ (2015: 6). Relatedly, Michael Kackman uses the licensed merchandise produced for the Hopalong Cassidy television show (1952–1954) to contemplate the workings of a ‘transmedia commercial intertext’ (2008: 98). I aim to build on both Santo’s and Kackman’s explorations of how licensing developed certain transmedia practices by looking at how licensing served as one of a series of interconnected practices associated with corporate authorship’s managerial function to specifically afford transmedia storytelling in the early twentieth century. Since when considered across history, the relation­ ship between transmedia storytelling and licensing is a rather slippery and ever-changing one. For example, though Jenkins argues that related licen­ sing practices such as merchandising ensure that such products are mostly peripheral to the process of building a story world in today’s culture (2006: 107), Chapter 4 shows how in the 1930s merchandise functioned not peripherally to a story world but as the driving force behind how that story world expanded across media.4 Besides these select studies on comic books and licensing, understand­ ings of the historical practices of transmedia storytelling are indeed ­limited and often speculative, and quite typically revolve around studies of char­ acters. Like Johnson and Jenkins, Evans also points to myths such as King Arthur and Robin Hood as possible instances of historical transmediality (2011:  19). Similarly, Paolo Bertetti has called for the need to find new analytic categories for deciphering the ways in which fictional charac­ ters are formed across media, arguing: ‘It is the case of legendary heroes or of m ­ odern serial characters, from Tarzan or Zorro to Harry Potter … [that character] forms itself among and through texts … never completely enclosed in a single text’ (2014: 16). I would also add the form of the fairytale to this discussion, whose tales such as Little Red Riding Hood and Jack and the Beanstalk have been re-articulated, extended and expanded, almost endlessly reappearing across different media for centuries. Most recently, Karin Fast and Henrik Örnebring (2015) acknowledge a historicised under­ standing of trans­media storytelling by analysing the mechanics of how story worlds may move across media platforms, focusing partly on the pulp char­ acter The Shadow from the 1930s. This allows for an understanding of how character elements transform over time. Characters may in fact be fundamental components of all transmedia sto­ ries, as Chapter 1 will show, but what were some of the industrial strategies for actually building those characters across media in the past? What does it actually mean to understand the industrial contingencies and practices of historical transmedia storytelling? And how have those industrial strategies, practices and contingencies evolved and differed across time? Mark J. P. Wolf (2012) perhaps comes the closest to engaging with these questions by tying a history of telling stories across media to his study of building

Introduction  7 imaginary worlds. But as I point out in Chapter 2, Wolf tends to neglect consideration of the cultural or industry practices that were specifically used to build imaginary worlds in the past, be it the pre-industrial fictional islands of Homer’s Odyssey or the industrially produced story worlds of the mass media. Of course, the ability to identify ‘the first’ strategies of transmedia story­ telling is well and truly beyond the scope of this book, and the specu­lation that I said surrounds much of the aforementioned scholarship admittedly stems from the fact that many of the examples this scholarship cites tend to predate the days of industry. Conceiving of the industrial history of trans­ media storytelling is therefore enormously important, for Johnson suggests that ‘conceiving of transmedia entertainment in historical terms [can] … help articulate a longer history of production and consumption’ (2013: online). And as I argue above, only by understanding those longer histories of production and consumption can we begin to make sense of the contin­ gencies and the affordances of our contemporary transmedia landscape. This focus on production and consumption is precisely why I begin my historicisation at the turn of the twentieth century in America. ­Transmedia storytelling always depends upon certain alignments of media, indus­ try, audiences and technologies that spread a story world across multi­ ple media. But as this book will also demonstrate, those alignments have varied signi­ficantly from those of today. Both industrial and digital con­ vergences may well underpin configurations of transmedia storytelling during the present moment, but industrialisation, consumer culture and media regulation all worked to form alignments across media during the early to mid-twentieth century, which underpinned transmedia storytelling at that time. This alignment of industrial and even cultural contingencies concerning industrialisation, consumer culture and media regulation influ­ enced much more specific determinants that drove transmedia storytelling in particular historical eras. And so Chapters 3, 4 and 5 will show how advertising, corporate authorship and industry partnerships respectively each built transmedia story worlds and steered audiences across media in the twentieth century. Since I will argue throughout this book that both the industry strategies and contingencies informing transmedia storytelling vary substantially over time, it is necessary to theorise a different conceptual model for examining transmedia storytelling as part of the industrial-cultural configurations of the past, rather than trying to apply its present model to the industrial-­cultural configurations of the past. This book is therefore in no way a ‘corrective’ to any particular scholarly understandings of transmedia storytelling. Rather, it is a direct expansion of those understandings, adding new information, insights and perspectives that illuminate the characteristics of this important phenomenon as it evolved across history. Looking forward a little, then, three overarching themes link the chapters of this book. The first theme concerns the importance of conceptualising

8 Introduction transmedia storytelling as a system of building variation on sameness. ­Insofar as it works to extend existing stories and expand established fic­ tional 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 story world. But on the other hand transmedia story­ telling is simultaneously about variation – since each of the various stories in a given story world must also expand that same story world, telling dif­ ferent events about that world. As will be shown throughout this book, this balance between variation and sameness typifies transmedia storytelling in some regards; this particular understanding of the transmedia phenomenon helps to see why certain industrial strategies and configurations of the past were most effective at building transmedia worlds. The second and third themes that link the book’s chapters are more specifically about the models of production required to achieve transmedia storytelling in and across different historical periods. Across ­Chapters 3, 4 and 5 I assess not one but three different production models for craft­ ing transmedia stories during the first half of the American twentieth ­century, each historically conditioned. The first model, occurring during the 1900s and 1910s and informed by major developments in industriali­ sation, would offer wonderful fictional adventures for audiences to follow across media but often failed commercially. The second model, occurring during the 1920s and 1930s and driven by the rising consumer culture, would often succeed commercially but occasionally by fragmenting story worlds into competing versions that failed to point audiences across media. And the third model, occurring the 1940s and 1950s and underpinned by media regulation policies specific to that era, afforded both profitability and transmedia stories that pointed audiences across media but charac­ teristically relied on contingencies of war or else operated in the margins of industries. The third theme, lastly, concerns the importance of individual agency on telling transmedia stories during all of these historical periods. I high­ light how only a small number of creative personnel were integral to crafting expansive story worlds across media. That is certainly not to say that only a handful of individuals were responsible for the industrial rise of transmedia storytelling; on the contrary, throughout the pages of this book I will point to many authors, companies, studios and networks in my attempt to assess transmedia storytelling historically. But I do stress that the various strategies, practices and industrial configurations under­ pinning transmedia storytelling in the past can only be understood by recognising the role played by individuals. For example, as Chapter 3 will argue, advertising may have provided an industry model through which transmedia stories could materialise in the early twentieth century, but that industry model was still conditional on the creative and innovative role of authors.

Introduction  9

Towards Transmedia Archaeology Having laid out this book’s rationale and positioned myself with respect to the existing research on the history of transmedia storytelling, I must now outline the methodology of the study. In short, this book takes a media archaeology approach, one that seeks to reconsider historical media so to illuminate, disrupt and challenge our understandings of the present. In its broader sense, media archaeology serves to understand how the media pre­ dating today’s more interactive and digital forms were in their own time contested, adopted and embedded. As Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka insist, ‘by revisiting “old” media it provides a richer horizon for understand­ ing “new” media in their complex and often contradictory roles in con­ temporary society and culture’ (2011: 2). Alongside Huhtamo and Parikka, scholars such as Matthew Kirschenbaum share this view that the significance of media archaeology resides in its assertion that ‘to be understood prop­ erly, media must be viewed from less progressivist and more “non-­linear” perspectives’ (2008: 32). As such, I argue that to understand transmedia storytelling properly we must similarly look past notions of convergence and adopt less causal approaches. As I have said already, and as I shall show throughout this book, past tellers of transmedia stories operated under a very different series of industrial-cultural determinants than those of tech­ nological or industrial convergence – and so digging into how those older determinants worked can bolster understandings of transmedia storytelling. However, this archaeological approach raises one notable problem. If  transmedia storytelling is indeed closely linked to twenty-first century media culture and its industrial configurations, then how can one go about classifying earlier forms of media culture and divergent industrial configura­ tions as the same phenomenon? Doing this successfully really means under­ standing transmedia storytelling according to a few general characteristics that can be seen in both the media of the past and of the present, with only the industrial configurations informing those characteristics varying one from period to another. In other words, if transmedia storytelling can be understood by characteristics, as Chapter 1 will showcase, then what remains to be understood is how such characteristics manifested under the configurations of the past. So, what exactly are these general characteristics of all transmedia ­stories – be it past or present? Earlier I suggested that transmedia storytelling is a system of producing narrative variation on sameness. Insofar as it must ultimately work to expand established fictional story worlds and extend the arcs of characters and plots across multiple media, transmedia storytelling might therefore be understood in terms of the following three characteristics: (1) Character-building; (2) World-building; and (3) Authorship I will elaborate on each of these three characteristics in Chapter 1, explain­ ing in much greater depth how these characteristics manifest in transmedia

10 Introduction stories, but for now each can be summarily defined: Character-building is the construction and development of a fictional character, including via things such as backstory, appearance, psychology, dialogue and interactions with other characters. World-building, meanwhile, according to Jenkins concerns ‘the process of designing a fictional universe … that is sufficiently detailed to enable many different stories to emerge but coherent enough so that each story feels like it fits with the others’ (2006: 335). Of course character is a part of any story world, as I also demonstrate in Chapter 1, and there­ fore world-building is in some sense a much larger category of character-­ building – world-building being about developing the fictional settings of a given story world so that new characters can populate it. Authorship, lastly, refers most broadly and most simply to the governing role played by a central author figure over the extensions of a story across media, be it a sole writer, a company or something in between. In short, if character-building is an aspect of world-building, then authorship is crucial for achieving both of the former. This book will present a set of three case studies that allows me to explore how each of these three aforementioned characteristics were determined by particular industrial workings in the past. And I show how the strategies for holding the past’s transmedia story worlds together and indeed for pointing audiences across those multiple media were informed largely by different determinants and configurations from one case to another, from one era to another. For seeing the historical strategies used for world-building I examine the Land of Oz, the story world first established in L. Frank Baum’s The ­Wonderful Wizard of Oz novel in 1900. Baum wrote a total of fourteen Oz novels over the next eighteen years; the tales of Oz also formed a ‘narrative sprawl’ (Kelleter, 2012: 26) across newspaper comic strips, promotional news­ papers, theatre productions, films and other materials. Across these various media iterations of the Oz story world many different characters appeared, none of whom was the constant hero. In fact, only one thing remained a true constant across the many Oz adventures of the period: The story world itself. The Land of Oz was a playground of fantasy where a whole host of char­ acters could roam and where different adventures could be told. As Frank Kelleter acknowledges, the Land of Oz is ‘a wide and constantly expanding realm of interlocking, transmedially active, mass-­addressed commercial stories’ (2012: 26). As such, the Land of Oz affords an ideal opportunity to not only to explore this particular case study as an exemplar of historical world-building, but also to identify the industrial and cultural determinants that proved integral to accomplishing those world-building strategies. To examine the role of authorship I turn to Tarzan as a case study, and more specifically the modes of that character’s textual production across multiple media under the ownership of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. As I explain in Chapter 4, Burroughs was the first author to successfully incorpo­ rate himself, and in so doing exemplifies the corporatisation of transmedia storytelling as the stories of Tarzan came to be extended across multiple

Introduction  11 media. Indeed, Tarzan’s adventures spanned the likes of pulp magazines, radio serials and films under Burroughs’ corporate authorship, and so ­Tarzan exemplifies how authorship could thereby work to guide audiences across multiple media throughout the 1920s and 1930s. And in order to illuminate the historically conditioned ways through which transmedia character-building was achieved in the past, I draw on the character of Superman, ‘a progenitor in the pop folklore of the twentieth century’ (Arnold, 1978: 11). Since the character’s inception in 1938 and through his rise in cultural prominence in the 1940s and 1950s, Superman cut across a range of media industries. His iconic red cape swooshed across everything from comic books and newspaper strips to radio serials, from the cinema to television. Superman’s proliferation across so many different media, at a time predating convergences, is invaluable for identifying and understanding the configurations and determinants required to extend a fic­ tional character’s stories across media at that time. This book will therefore present a close investigation of these three trans­ media story worlds, each of which exemplify complex alignments between industrial configurations, cultural developments and production practices that in turn enabled stories to be told across media. Separately, each of the examined story worlds looks at one of the noted characteristics of transme­ dia storytelling; taken together, the Land of Oz, Tarzan and Superman can be seen to exemplify the industrial history of transmedia storytelling in the US between 1900 and 1958: The Land of Oz (1900–1918), Tarzan (1918–1938) and Superman (1938–1958) Now, having laid out what I propose to do, how exactly will I go about doing this? Methodologically, I will first trace the histories of these story worlds, examining the points of transmedial development on the levels of world-building, authorship and character-building, respectively. These char­ acteristics will be framed in relation to three larger determinants – ­advertising, licensing and industry partnerships. This will enable me to understand the various ways in which different strategies worked to build transmedia stories in the past. But these three determinants will also be framed in relation to an even larger cultural setting or context, for I shall identify the points of intersection between the cultural moment of a given historical period and its influence on industrial practices of transmedia story­telling. Accordingly, I do not dwell extensively on frameworks of user-generated content or participa­ tory fandom that often features in many studies of transmedia story­telling today.5 Scolari et al., for example, suggests that transmedia storytelling should be considered in terms of ‘Media Industry (Canon) + Collaborative Culture (Fandom)’ (2014: 3). However, while this book pays some attention to the ways in which audiences navigated historical transmedia stories in the past, it is my proposition that we must first more fully understand the

12 Introduction industrial and cultural infrastructure of the past that enabled for the emer­ gence of historical transmedia stories in the first place. And so an overarching industry studies framework is thus the crucial place to begin interrogating transmedia history. Looking at individual authors, companies, studios and their perceived audiences, this book is grounded in reports of who did what, where and when – explaining the reasons for the emergence, development and challenges of transmedia storytelling from the perspective of industry. Defining who did what, where and when requires research across a mul­ titude of American media industries during the first half of the twentieth century – spanning theatre, newspapers, magazines, comic strips and comic books, novels, cinema, radio and television. I make extensive use of histo­ rical newspaper clippings; these resources provide insight into how media texts, authors, institutions and entire industries were culturally positioned. ­Historical newspapers also provide an invaluable tool for understand­ ing how certain audiences and critics comprehended any given story as it began to migrate across multiple media. The research also draws on a wide selection of industry trade papers, with a notable emphasis on the motion picture and broadcasting industries. Supporting these sorts of resources are more consumer-based papers, such as The Public Opinion Quarterly, among others, which I use to develop a broader picture of how the practices of the media industries impacted upon everyday American attitudes and behaviours. This sort of information is important for mapping the migration of audiences across media in historical contexts. And all of these resources are complemented by a small number of interviews and archive materials. A formal but conceptual point about the approach of this book: Why the sole focus on the US? I take this approach not necessarily to elicit any kind of general explanation about the industrial history of transmedia story­ telling everywhere. I am aware that at least some of the contingencies cru­ cial to this industrial history were connected with what was also happening in other capitalist economies – particularly with those in Europe and its own traditions of serial fiction in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century newspapers.6 Be that as it may, it is also true that many of the broader ­industrial-cultural transformations that I frame in this book as the ­contextual backdrop of transmedia storytelling – transformations rooted particularly in industrialisation and consumer culture – have been most typically defined according to the American landscape.7 I understand the history of the US to be a central hub for many of the defining cultural and economic changes that exemplify what I see to be the crucial industrial-­ cultural determinants of transmedia storytelling in the past. While I have therefore explained why I will begin my historicisation at the turn of the twentieth century – a time when defining cultural and economic changes concerning industrialisation, consumer culture and media regula­ tion became most apparent in the US – one important question still remains: Why end this historicisation at 1958? This particular date is actually equally significant, for it marks the point at which a number of American media

Introduction  13 industries became more fully industrially converged. For example, by this point MCA (Music Corporation of America), originally founded in 1924 as a music booking agency, had acquired television production subsidiaries, partnered with NBC and its affiliated Decca Records, and bought the United Studios film lot. Of course, that is not to suggest that there were no indus­ trial convergences prior to 1958. As Chapter 5 demonstrates and as Michele Hilmes has argued extensively elsewhere, many film studios, record compa­ nies, radio and television networks had started to become increasingly col­ laborative and integrative throughout the mid-part of the twentieth century, preceding the rise of convergences (1999). Importantly, this book therefore ends at the point where most studies of transmediality typically begin.

The Structure of the Book In terms of chapter structure, the book is divided into five chapters. ­Chapter 1 engages with the wider body of scholarly literature on trans­ media storytelling so to further develop my conceptual understanding of how character-building, world-building and authorship each function as the characteristics of transmedia storytelling, be it in any period. The rest of the book traces the industrial-cultural determinants that informed these char­ acteristics, picking up on the divergent historical conditions that afforded transmedia storytelling in particular eras. Chapter 2 sets up the larger industrial and cultural transformations through which transmedia storytelling emerged industrially. I stress the fore­ most importance of industrialisation, consumer culture and media regula­ tion as the larger underpinnings of transmedia storytelling during the first half of the twentieth century. If Chapter 2 presents an overview of the his­ torical context through which transmedia storytelling first took shape and developed as part of the economic fabric of American media industries, then Chapters 3, 4 and 5 trace the impact of industrialisation, consumer culture and media regulation in turn, demonstrating how these larger contingencies gave rise to new forms of advertising, corporate authorship and industry partnerships, which each drove strategies for achieving the characteristics of transmedia storytelling. In other words, the three case study chapters effectively illustrate the conceptual and historical groundwork that I lay out in the first two chapters, respectively. Chapter 3, the first of these case studies, positions The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as emblematic of the turn towards industrialisation in the US at the turn of the twentieth century. I show how industrialisation brought new industrial strategies of advertising. And in driving transmedia storytelling at that time, advertising facilitated world-building strategies. By looking at this context of industrialisation between 1900 and 1918 – a time of highrise billboards, comic strips and cinema screens – I show how the emergence of new forms of advertising provided the backdrop for enabling authors to develop transmedia story worlds.

14 Introduction Chapter 4 moves on to demonstrate how the rise of consumer culture further impacted upon twentieth-century transmedia storytelling. Looking at the period of 1918 to 1938, I map the corporatisation of transmedia story­telling, showing its development from the workings of an individual entrepreneur to the ownership of a company. As I discuss in this chapter, 1918 was a significant date in this regard, since licensing became far more ­prevalent in this year when the Supreme Court tightened trademark legis­ lation laws. While examining the different ways that licensing and indeed other related practices associated with corporate authorship’s manage­ rial function operated during this time – exploring the products based on ­Tarzan in relation to their conditions of production and distribution under Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. – I explore how these various corporate author­ ship practices equipped Burroughs with a heightened author-function that brought new strategies for building transmedia story worlds. Last, Chapter 5 draws on Superman to examine industrial strategies of character-building across multiple media industries between 1938 and 1958. I begin in the late 1930s for these years marked the beginnings of the Second World War, and I show how the war worked to enforce media regulation – specifically, government intervention policies – that in turn accelerated industry partnerships across multiple media industries. I show how these industry partnerships afforded transmedia storytelling during this time, which led to new strategies of character-building across media as a character like Superman began to cross multiple media. If transmedia storytelling is dependent on certain industrial alignments that together work to spread a fictional story world across multiple media, pointing the audience from one medium to the next, then already one begins to see how those alignments have varied significantly from those of today. This book’s particular contribution to the growing field of transmedia s­ tudies is that in re-conceptualising the ostensibly contemporary phenomenon of transmedia storytelling as an innately historical practice of production, dis­ tribution and regulation, it will also reveal the contingency of contemporary configurations and the story worlds that they engender. In mostly conceptu­ alising transmedia storytelling as part of digital or industrial convergences, it is fair to say that many scholars have thus far had a tendency to neglect the workings of the past – thus leaving us all with a limited and narrow understanding of what is actually a far longer, far broader and far more complex historical development. Until now.

Notes 1. Jenkins’ definition of transmedia storytelling may be the prevailing one that I use as a springboard, but do note that several other scholars have also con­ tributed parallel discussions to the academic discourse and definitions of trans­ mediality. Concepts such as ‘cross-media’ (Bechmann Petersen, 2006), ‘multiple platforms’ (Jeffery-Poulter, 2003), ‘hybrid media’ (Boumans, 2004), ‘intertextual commodity’ (Marshall, 2004), ‘transmedia worlds’ (Klastrup & Toska, 2004),

Introduction  15 and ‘trans­media interactions’ (Bardzell, Wu, Bardzell & Quagliara, 2007) are effectively all variations on the same phenomena of transmediality within a context of media convergence and thus sit alongside this same conceptual discussion. 2. See Graham Meikle and Sherman Young, Media Convergence: Networked ­Digital Media in Everyday Life (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 3. See Derek Johnson, “A History of Transmedia Entertainment,” Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (n.d.), accessed April 2, 2013, http://spreadablemedia.org/essays/johnson/#.UpsNJdiYaM9; Derek Johnson, Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries (New York: New York University Press, 2013). 4. Merchandising is in this way an example of what Eileen Meehan has called a ‘commercial intertext’ – a branded sequence of interwoven texts, associ­ ated products and promotional practices that collectively constitute the pro­ cesses of cultural exchange around a media figure. See Eileen Meehan, “Holy ­Commodity Fetish, Batman! The Political Economy of a Commercial Intertext,” in The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Super-hero and His Media, ed. Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio (New York: Routledge, 1991), 47–65. 5. User-generated content and participatory fandom may not be the focus of this book, but Carlos A. Scolari has begun to historicise participatory forms of story­telling. Scolari argues that many of the ‘low-cost commercial productions located on the periphery of the publishing industry of the 19th century,’ where ‘small publishers, unknown artists, and not particularly skilled artisans’ exem­ plify ‘a gray zone between ‘official narrative and user-generated content.’ See Carlos A. Scolari, “Don Quixote of La Mancha: Transmedia Storytelling in the Gray Zone,” International Journal of Communication (SI: Transmedia Critical: Empirical Investigations into Multiplatform and Collaborative Storytelling) (8) August 2014, http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc. 6. For an exemplary exploration of this kind of British serial fiction of the mid-­nineteenth century (specifically the work of Charles Dickens), see Anthony Smith, “Media Contexts of Narrative Design: Dimensions of Speci­ ficity within Storytelling Industries” (PhD diss., University of Nottingham, 2012), and ­Jennifer Hayward, Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera (Lexington: University Press of ­Kentucky, 1997). 7. See, for example, Daniel H. Borus, Twentieth-Century Multiplicity: ­American Thought and Culture, 1900–1920 (New York: Rowman & Littlefield ­Publishers, Inc., 2009); Susan L. Mizruchi, The Rise of Multicultural America: Eco­nomy and Print Culture, 1865–1915 (North Carolina: The University of North C ­ arolina Press, 2008); Anne M. Cronin, Advertising, Commercial Spaces and the Urban (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

Bibliography Arnold, Gary. “Hollywood’s Super Holiday.” The Washington Post, December 10, 1978. Bardzell, Shaowen, Wu, Vicky, Bardzell, Jeffrey and Quagliara, Nick. “Transmedial Interactions and Digital Games.” Paper presented at the International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology, 2007.

16 Introduction Bechmann Petersen, Anja. “Internet and Cross Media Production: Case Studies in Two Major Danish Media Organizations.” Australian Journal of Emerging Techno­logy and Society 4:2 (2006): 94–107. Bertetti, Paolo. “Toward a Typology of Transmedia Characters.” International ­Journal of Communication (SI: Transmedia Critical: Empirical Investigations into Multiplatform and Collaborative Storytelling) 8 (August 2014): http://ijoc.org/ index.php/ijoc. Borus, Daniel H. Twentieth-Century Multiplicity: American Thought and Culture, 1900–1920. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009. Boumans, Jak. Cross-media, E-content Report 8, ACTeN – Anticipating Content Technology Needs. (December 10, 2004). http://www.acten.net/cgibin/WebGUI/ www/index.pl/cross_media. Chandler, Alfred D. Jr. The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977. Cronin, Anne M. Advertising, Commercial Spaces and the Urban. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Evans, Elizabeth. Transmedia Television: Audiences, New Media, and Daily Life. New York: Routledge, 2011. Fast, Karin and Örnebring Henrik. “Transmedia World-building: The Shadow (1931–present) and Transformers (1984–present).” The International Journal of Cultural Studies (September 15, 2015): doi: 10.1177/1367877915605887. Gomez, Jeff. “What Made Oz So Great and Powerful? Starlight Runner’s Jeff Gomez Tells Us.” Forbes. March 15, 2013. Accessed July 18, 2014. http:// www.forbes.com/sites/markhughes/2013/03/15/what-made-oz-so-great-andpowerful-starlight-runners-jeff-gomez-tells-us/. Hay, James and Couldry, Nick. “Rethinking Convergence/Culture: An Introduction.” Cultural Studies 25:4 (2011): 473–486. Hilmes, Michele. Hollywood and Broadcasting: From Radio to Cable. Illinois: ­University of Illinois Press, 1999. Huhtamo, Erkki and Parikka, Jussi, eds. Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications. Ewing: University of California Press, 2011. Jeffery-Poulter, Stephen. “Creating and Producing Digital Content across Multiple Platforms.” Journal of Media Practice 3:3 (2003): 155–165. Jenkins, Henry, “Transmedia Storytelling.” MIT Technology Review. January 15, 2003. Accessed February 4, 2013. http://www.technologyreview.com/news/401760/ transmedia-storytelling/. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Jenkins, Henry. “‘All Over the Map’: Building (and Rebuilding) Oz.” Acta University Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies 9 (2014a): 7–29. http://www.acta.sapientia. ro/acta-film/C9/film9-1.pdf. Jenkins, Henry. “Transmedia: A Prehistory.” In Wired TV: Laboring over an Interactive Future, edited by Denise Mann, 248–254. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2014b. Johnson, Derek. “A History of Transmedia Entertainment.” Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. Accessed April 2, 2013. http:// spreadablemedia.org/essays/johnson/#.UpsNJdiYaM9. Johnson, Derek. Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries. New York: New York University Press, 2013.

Introduction  17 Kackman, Michael. “Nothing on but Hoppy Badges: Hopalong Cassidy, William Boyd Enterprises, and Emergent Media Globalization.” Cinema Journal 47: 4 (Summer 2008): 76–101. Kelleter, Frank. “‘Toto, I Think We’re in Oz Again’ (and Again and Again): Remakes and Popular Seriality.” In Film Remakes, Adaptations and Fan Productions: Remake/Remodel, edited by Kathleen Loock and Constantine Verevis, 19–44. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Kidman, Shawna. “Five Lessons for New Media from the History of Comics Cul­ ture.” International Journal of Learning and Media 3:4 (2012): 41–54. Kirschenbaum, Matthew. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008. Klastrup, Lisbeth and Tosca, Susana. “Transmedial Worlds: Rethinking Cyberworld Design.” Paper presented at the International Conference on Cyberworlds, IEEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA, 2004. Kushner, David. “Rebel Alliance: How a Small Band of Sci-Fi Geeks Is Leading Holly­wood into a New Era.” Fast Company. May 2008. Accessed September 21, 2013. http://www.fastcompany.com/798975/rebel-alliance. Marshall, David. New Media Cultures. London: Arnold Publishers, 2004. Meehan, Eileen R. “Holy Commodity Fetish, Batman! The Political Economy of a Commercial Intertext.” In The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Super-hero and His Media, edited by Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio, 47–65. New York: Routledge, 1991. Meikle Graham and Young, Sherman. Media Convergence: Networked Digital Media in Everyday Life. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Mizruchi, Susan L. The Rise of Multicultural America: Economy and Print Culture, 1865–1915. North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Nicoll, Benjamin. Review of Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka. Digital Culture and Education, November 15, 2013. Accessed August 29, 2014. http://www. digitalcultureandeducation.com/uncategorized/nicholl_html/. Pearson, Roberta. “Transmedia Storytelling in Historical and Theoretical Per­ spectives.” Paper presented at The Ends of Television conference, University of Amsterdam, June 29–July 1, 2009. Phillips, Andrea. A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling: How to Captivate and Engage Audiences across Multiple Platforms. New York: McGraw-Hill Edu­ cation, 2012. Santo, Avi. “Transmedia Brand Licensing Prior to Conglomeration: George ­Trendle and the Lone Ranger and Green Hornet Brands, 1933–1966.” PhD diss., ­University of Texas, 2006. Santo, Avi. “Batman versus The Green Hornet: The Merchandisable TV Text and the Paradox of Licensing in the Classical Network Era.” Cinema Journal 49:2 (Fall 2010): 63–85. Santo, Avi. Selling the Silver Bullet: The Lone Ranger and Transmedia Brand Licensing. Texas: University of Texas Press, 2015. Scolari, Carlos A. “Transmedia Storytelling: Implicit Consumers, Narrative Worlds, and Branding in Contemporary Media Production.” International Journal of Communication 3 (2009): http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc. Scolari, Carlos A. “Don Quixote of La Mancha: Transmedia Storytelling in the Gray Zone.” International Journal of Communication (SI: Transmedia

18 Introduction Critical:  Empirical Investigations into Multiplatform and Collaborative Story­ telling) 8 (August 2014): http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc. Scolari, Carlos A., Bertetti, Paolo and Freeman, Matthew. Transmedia Archaeology: Storytelling in the Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines. Basingstoke: Palgrave Pivot, 2014. Smith, Anthony. “Media Contexts of Narrative Design: Dimensions of Specificity within Storytelling Industries.” PhD diss., University of Nottingham, 2012. Stein, Louisa Ellen. “#Bowdown to Your New God: Misha Collins and Decentered Authorship in the Digital Age.” In A Companion to Media Authorship, edited by Jonathan Gray and Derek Johnson, 403–425. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2013. Wolf, Mark J. P. Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Sub­creation. New York: Routledge, 2012.

Part I

Defining Transmedia History

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1 Characterising Transmedia Storytelling Character-building, World-building, Authorship

In the introduction I began to argue that when stripped to its essence ­transmedia storytelling can be understood according to three characteris­ tics: character-building, world-building and authorship. This chapter will elaborate on how each of these three overarching characteristics – which are more or less true of all stories – make up transmedia storytelling by engaging with the wider body of scholarship on this subject, explaining how further specific principles of transmedia storytelling identified by Jenkins manifest in transmedia stories. Doing so will enable me to historicise these three characteristics in Chapters 3, 4 and 5, respectively, showing how the past’s industrial configurations worked to build transmedia story worlds. So, to re-cite Jenkins’ earlier definition, transmedia storytelling is the telling of ‘stories that unfold across multiple platforms, with each medium making distinctive contributions to our understanding of the [story] world’ (2006: 334). This is not to be confused with cross-media, in which content (news, music, text, images, etc.) is published in multiple media forms.1 One example of cross-media might include reading a newspaper article online rather than in print. Thus with cross-media, and unlike transmediality, con­ tent is simply relocated across other media with little concern for expanding that content, or its story, or its story world. Much the same is also true of adaptation. Admittedly the process of adapting a story from one medium to another does involve some variation on sameness, not least of all because a story may well need to change in order to work within the medium it is presented in.2 And yet adaptation – as in William Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet from the sixteenth century being made into the 1996 film William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet – is primarily about using the affordances of a different medium to tell a differ­ ent version of the same story, but not to expand that story. Evans (2011: 27) asserts this distinction clearly: ‘Transmedia [storytelling] does not involve the telling of the same events on different platforms; [it] involves the telling of new events from the same storyworld.’ Or as Wolf (2012: 245–246) puts it: Whereas adaptation is ‘translation’ (‘when a story existing in one medium is adapted for … another medium, but without adding new material to a world’), transmedia storytelling as ‘growth’ (‘another medium is used to present new material of a world’). But beyond these straightforward distinc­ tions, how else can transmedia storytelling be characterised?

22  Defining Transmedia History Let’s use the point that transmedia storytelling is about expansion and extension as a starting point and go from there. This idea evokes the ­imagery of building, of adding something to something else. Conversely, while Jenkins’ highly influential notion of convergence – itself the most com­ mon framing for transmedia storytelling – speaks of a situation where media now circulates or where ‘media content flows fluidly’ (2006: 332), the word ‘convergence’ itself seems to denote multiple pre-existing elements of media content all coming together. However, this chapter argues that transmedia storytelling is not so much about multiple pre-existing textual forms ‘con­ verging’ as it is about multiple textual forms being built in the first place – one component being added to another and another. Imagine a series of new extensions that are added onto the same building to make a larger house. A transmedia story is built up in a similar way, which can be equally char­ acterised in terms of building outwards. This admittedly subtle shift in thinking is quite important. It is also in line with more recent thinking on transmedia storytelling. For example, Fast and Örnebring argue that rather than limiting conceptions of transmedia storytelling to ‘planned, strategic aspects of creation’ (2015: 2), it is equally as important to ‘emphasise the many disjunctions and contradictions that almost inevitably follow when extending transmedia worlds across/between media’ (2015: 2). Here, the focus is on ‘the emergent (as opposed to planned) nature of the narrative aspects of transmediality’ (2015: 2). The rationale behind Fast and Örnebring’s thinking and this push to understanding trans­ media storytelling in terms of the ‘accrued characteristics that are more ad hoc/contingent than planned’ (2015: 2) is based on the fact that many transmedia story worlds are created over many years, by many people. And approaching transmedia storytelling from this more emergent and contin­ gent perspective will allow me in the later chapters to show the importance of certain industrial configurations of the early twentieth century on the ways in which stories began to be told across multiple media during that time. At this stage, however, allow me now to elaborate on each of my three characteristics of transmedia storytelling in turn, engaging with the ­scholarly literature available on the topic to further reinforce this general significance of building as well as to show the various forms that this takes. I start with my first characteristic – character-building – which again can be defined most simply as the act of both constructing and developing a fictional character.

Character-building Most simply, understanding transmedia storytelling according to a small number of general characteristics means starting with a guiding ­principle – in this case the working motto of Starlight Runner Entertainment, a com­ pany that brands itself as the world’s leading creator and producer of successful transmedia franchises. And for Starlight Runner Entertainment,

Characterising Transmedia Storytelling  23 with transmedia storytelling, ‘it all starts with story’ (‘What Is Transmedia’, 2010: online). Let’s take this motto as a kind of mantra for characterising transmedia storytelling and begin with the basics. If transmedia storytelling all starts with story, then what exactly is a story? For Roberta Pearson and Máire Messenger Davies, who give a usefully succinct and minimal definition, a story ‘arises from the combination of characters, settings, and events’ (2014: 128). All three of these factors are key to telling stories, and in more complex ways each of these factors also work to hold transmedia story worlds together and point audiences across media. Fictional characters, to examine the first of this trio, can certainly hold transmedia story worlds together and point audiences from one medium to another. Reiterating ­Bertetti, for instance, character ‘forms itself among and through texts … never completely enclosed in a single text’ (2014: 16). Hence Bertetti argues that ‘it is necessary to add the concept of transmedia character to the notion of transmedia storytelling’ (2014: 3344). Says Bertetti: ‘This concept indi­ cates a fictional hero whose adventures are told in different media platforms, each one giving more details on the life of that character’ (2014: 3344). Here’s a good example of a fictional character whose adventures are told across different media: Captain Jack Sparrow from the Pirates of the Caribbean story world, embodied famously by actor Johnny Depp in the film series. In response to a brief from The Walt Disney Company, who faced something of a problem when trying to make their lucrative Pirates of the Caribbean story world attractive to a child audience which may not have even been allowed to see the PG-13-rated film series, Starlight Runner Enter­ tainment suggested a series of chapter books for younger readers. The books featured younger versions of Jack Sparrow. ‘It was the same story world,’ Starlight Runner’s Jeff Gomez insisted, ‘just years earlier’ (2014: online). The Pirates of the Caribbean: Young Jack Sparrow Series therein functioned as ‘the perfect gateway for kids to enter the storyworld’ (Gomez, 2013: online). In this case, the concept of character was central to the process of extend­ ing the Pirates of the Caribbean story world across media as an ongoing transmedia story. Specifically, this example exemplifies a key point about transmedia storytelling that I alluded to above – that transmedia s­ torytelling must ultimately produce a series of media texts that function not as versions of the same fiction, as in adaptation, but rather as continuing extensions of the same story. As Geoffrey Long puts it, ‘transmedia stories build nar­ rative references to each component (the TV show chapter, the film chap­ ter, the video game chapter, etc.) to direct audiences through the system of the franchise’ (2007: 10). In other words, it was not simply the fact that Jack ­Sparrow reappeared in both the Pirates of the Caribbean films and the Pirates of the Caribbean: Young Jack Sparrow books that served to construct a transmedia story world; rather, it was the fact that the latter ­children’s books built upon the former films, with both the books and the films working together to build the character across both media.

24  Defining Transmedia History It was character, then, that worked to build narrative references between the films and the books, connecting both media texts as components of a larger story world. But this begs a more fundamental question that needs addressing: What exactly is a fictional character? Understanding the basic components of what makes a fictional character a fictional character is important, for this will allow me to identify the industrial configurations and strategies of the past that have worked to build characters across mul­ tiple media. I do not have the space to engage in this narratological debate fully, so for the purposes of my argument I offer a simple definition: Fictional characters are imaginary beings built up of particular physical, psychologi­ cal and environmental components. Pearson and Davies propose a number of key components that they argue work to construct a fictional charac­ ter, including appearance, dialogue, interactions with secondary characters, psychology, and backstory (2014: 154–159). In other words, a ­character is built using all or at least some combination of these components. But if character is one way of holding a transmedia story world together, and ­specifically character-building as I have proposed, then what might under­ pin this process? Indeed, what configurations underpin these character-building compo­ nents across media more generally? Answering this question means turning to Marsha Kinder. In scholarly terms, the critical foundation of trans­media storytelling actually first appeared in Kinder’s 1991 study of children’s media, which she used to define an ‘ever-expanding supersystem of mass entertainment’ that was organised across the film, television and video­ game industries (1991: 40). In using the term ‘transmedia intertextuality’ to explain how the media content produced by these industries moves across other media, Kinder acknowledges the importance of intertextuality on what would later be called transmedia storytelling. Intertextuality harks back to Roland Barthes and, most explicitly, Julia Kristeva, who argue that multiple media texts exist and operate in relation to others (1980). Barthes quite similarly argues that a media text is ‘a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings … blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations’ (1977: 48). In other words, intertextuality can be more than mere allusions or references; it can also expand those allusions and references. And in see­ ing intertextuality as itself an expansion of story across different texts, as Caselli and Lesnik-Oberstein (2004) also propose, intertextuality creates a scenario where the meaning of a story may be built in relation not only to the individual text and story in question but also in relation to a range of other texts and stories that may be invoked in the reading process. By way of example, literary theorist Lubomír Doležel argues that multi­ ple stories are both linked and expanded within a given intertextual story world specifically by character(s). For in intertextual theory, Doležel argues, characters can ‘extend the scope of the original storyworld by adding more existents to it, by turning secondary characters into the heroes of their own story, and by expanding the original story though prequels and sequels’

Characterising Transmedia Storytelling  25 (2010: 207). Doležel (2010: 207) demonstrates how this process of char­ acter construction works by pointing to the example of Wide Sargasso Sea, a novel written by Jean Rhys in 1966. Wide Sargasso Sea is a prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s famous 1847 novel Jane Eyre. Rhys’ novel followed the life of Antoinette Cosway, the first wife of Mr. Rochester in the Brontë novel, who was indeed a secondary character in Jane Eyre that was turned into the hero of her own story. Like an assemblage of ‘extensions’ that become a core part of a larger proverbial ‘house’, Wide Sargasso Sea exemplifies how intertextuality can work to build a fictional character across additional texts or additional media forms – via sequels and prequels. Most simply, sequels and prequels, both serialised formats – essentially tell stories that, as Paul Budra and Betty A. Schellenberg define, offer a ‘chronological extension of a precursor narrative’ (1998: 7–8). But Jason Scott (2009: 35) expands upon this definition by again emphasising the role of characters, noting that sequels ‘most commonly continue the story of the protagonist(s)’, utilising ‘a second generation of related characters, and arguably prequels are a reverse chronological extension.’ For example, the Pirates of the Caribbean: Young Jack Sparrow Series was a prequel to the Pirates of the Caribbean films, telling stories about the earlier adventures of Jack Sparrow. Its status as a prequel built the Jack Sparrow character across media via his interactions with secondary characters, appearance and backstory. In turn, the importance of things like prequels and sequels to how char­ acters may be built across multiple media highlights two bigger – and even more important – principles for how transmedia storytelling works. The first, as Jenkins has shown, is seriality: ‘Transmedia storytelling has taken the notion of breaking up a narrative arc into multiple discrete chunks or instalments within a single medium and instead has spread those dispa­ rate ideas or story chunks across multiple media systems’ (2009: online). ­Serialised forms such as prequels and sequels are adopted in transmedia ­stories so to build characters across multiple media, expanding on traits such as appearance, backstory and interactions with other characters. However, it is important to nuance the complexity of how seriality under­ pins cases of transmedia storytelling. Ben Singer defines seriality as that which ‘extends the experience of the single … text by division, with the sell­ ing of the media product in chapters’ (1990: 90). But in some sense, ­Jenkins’ definition of transmedia storytelling is in direct opposition to ­Singer’s under­ standing of seriality: ‘Each [textual] entry needs to be self-contained so that you do not need to have seen the film to enjoy the game, and vice versa’ (2006: 98). Rather than operating as a simple process of selling serialised chapters, then, transmedia storytelling is perhaps better theorised as either a strategic or an emergent/contingent form of expansive intertextuality – using things like characters and their components to link stories together, offering audiences new added insights into characters in ways that consti­ tute a sequel or a prequel, and doing so by quite often switching from one

26  Defining Transmedia History character’s point of view to another as one moves from one medium to another. Or as Jenkins puts it, transmedia storytelling is about subjectivity – that is, ‘exploring the central narrative through new eyes, such as second­ ary characters or third parties. This diversity of perspective often leads fans to more greatly consider who is speaking and who they are speaking for’ (2009: online). Consider the various texts emerging from The Matrix film (1999), which Jenkins selects as his transmedia storytelling exemplar. This case consists of three films, a collection of anime shorts called The Animatrix, a comic book series, and a videogame titled Enter the Matrix, all of which were linked via character. In ‘Final Flight of the Osiris,’ one of The Animatrix shorts, for instance, a protagonist called Jue sacrifices herself in order to send a mes­ sage to the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar, an event that is referred to in The Matrix Reloaded (2003). In that same film, Niobe, at this point a secondary character, rescues central characters Morpheus and Trinity in the middle of a freeway chase. This is a rescue that players of the videogame had encoun­ tered as a specific mission, where, just like with Doležel’s Wide Sargasso Sea example, a secondary character is turned into the hero of his or her own story (Jenkins, 2006: 104–106). Notably, the stories told in each of these various Matrix texts are linked by overlapping characters, which worked to serialise each of the different stories as expansive intertextual components even though each of these Matrix texts are indeed self-contained narratively. By shifting the subjectivity across each of the texts, the films, videogame and anime shorts all add new pieces of information that builds those characters. Again, transmedia storytelling is rather like the idea of extensions being added onto a house, with the subjectivity of each room lending new perspec­ tives to the experience of the house. In reference to another case Jenkins goes into more detail that shows some of the other forms that this process of transmedia character-­building can take. Discussing the television series Heroes (2006–2010), Jenkins points to the series of Heroes web-comics, each of which were published on a weekly basis to coincide with the broadcast date of the televised episodes. The television series referenced the existence of this comic in the world of the television series in an overtly intertextual way as characters are seen actually reading the comic book throughout particular episodes, using it to unlock narrative mysteries. The comic served, Jenkins notes, to ‘flesh out secondary characters, fill in back story, and provide missing scenes which round out the action depicted on the screen’ (2007: online). For example, the comics expanded on one character’s relationship with his father. Jenkins points out how scenes ‘overlapped between the comics and the television series, enough that we can see how the parts fit together … taking us in dif­ ferent places and telling us different things’ (2007: online). So, fleshing out secondary characters and filling in backstory via the serial forms of prequels and sequels can be understood as the two key strands of how character-building takes shape in transmedia storytelling. The former

Characterising Transmedia Storytelling  27 strand can be demonstrated via something like The Dark Knight Rises: The Official Novelization (2012), a tie-in novel to The Dark Knight Rises film. Despite sharing the same basic plot as the film, the tie-in novel expanded the known narrative surrounding the Joker character, revealing this character’s fate for the first time via shifting the perspective and thus the subjectivity of the story. And the latter strand can be seen in something like 24 (2001–2010), a television series whose second and third series were bridged by the story of 24: The Game (2006), which filled in the backstory between those series, offering a sequel to season 2 and a prequel to season 3. But character most explicitly linked the television series with the game, with the stories being ‘self-contained so that you do not need to have seen the [television show] to enjoy the game, and vice versa’ (Jenkins, 2006: 98). Gamers discovered how hero Jack Bauer met Chase, a secondary character from the television series, building those characters and their relationship across media. And so even as I position character-building – the building of a fictional character via the use of backstory or biography, appearance, dialogue, interactions with other characters, psychology, etc. – as a characteristic of transmedia storytelling, the various examples cited above indicate just how many strategies may be used to achieve this particular characteristic. What’s more, which combination of media works best to build charac­ ters across multiple media – and how has this process of character-building evolved over time? For that matter, which industrial configurations of the past have informed particular strategies of character-building across multi­ ple media? Intertextuality has a very long history, of course, and as I argue in Chapter 5, character-building across multiple media during the 1950s meant forging industry partnerships across the margins of media industries. Yet character-building is still only one characteristic of transmedia storytell­ ing. I will therefore now move on to elaborate on the s­ econd ­characteristic – world-building – which in some ways is a much larger category of the former characteristic, and broadly describes ‘the process of designing a fictional universe’ that can hold multiple stories together across multiple media (­Jenkins, 2006: 335).

World-building Earlier I implied that transmedia storytelling is not so much about stories converging as it is about stories building – operating, as Fast and Örnebring argued previously, as often from emergent contingencies is it does from stra­ tegic planning, rather like a series of extensions that are eventually added onto a building to make a larger house. But what exactly is the ‘house’ in this metaphor? Put simply, the house is the fictional story world.3 And the concept of a fictional story world is in fact central to Jenkins’ definition of transmedia storytelling. For Jenkins, the story world is that which holds together multiple stories across different media (2006: 103–110). As Jenkins remarks, ‘a good character can sustain multiple narratives and thus leads

28  Defining Transmedia History to a successful movie franchise. A good world can sustain multiple charac­ ters (and their stories) and thus successfully launch a transmedia franchise’ (2003: online). In sustaining multiple characters, therefore, a story world is essentially a far bigger analytical category of character. Hence some of the strategies of character-building identified earlier – prequels, sequels, the expansion of backstory, etc., not to mention larger principles of seriality and subjectivity – may also be used to build a story world and contribute to ‘an ever-­expanding and richly-detailed fictional world’ (2007: online). Characters, as Jens Eder, Fotis Jannidis and Ralf Schneider have acknowledged, are themselves ‘enti­ ties in fictional worlds’ – and as I shall now demonstrate, transmedia story­ telling is most effectively the process of building not just characters but also entire fictional story worlds, ones where many different stories can take place and where many different characters can roam free (2010: 17). Important to this thinking is the way that Dudley Andrew understands story worlds to be similarly intertextual structures that persist across multi­ ple texts across media and afford many stories to unfold and many characters to roam: ‘The storyworld of [Charles] Dickens is larger than the particular rendition of it which we call Oliver Twist … In fact, it is larger than the sum of novels Dickens wrote, existing as a set of paradigms, a global source from which he could draw’ (1984: 55). In some ways, the ability to some­ how build a fictional story world across multiple media is arguably the root of the perceived complexity or sophistication that lies at the heart of so much scholarly literature on transmedia storytelling. Jenkins has argued that transmedia storytelling – ‘the art of world-building’ (2006: 166) – immerses audiences in a story’s universe, providing a comprehensive experience of a complex story’ (2003: online). Echoing this idea of a ‘complex’ story, Carlos A. Scolari insists that transmedia storytelling’s ‘textual dispersion is one of the most important sources of complexity in contemporary popular cul­ ture’ (2009: 587). And yet when Scolari hints at transmedia storytelling’s so-called contemporary-rooted sense of complexity, he is prone to over-­ emphasise the role played by convergence, with the implicit assumption here being that media conglomeration or digital convergences have speci­fically afforded more detailed, more sophisticated and more integrative fictional story worlds than if produced outside of convergent contexts. Conversely, what is arguably most ‘complex’ or ‘sophisticated’ about transmedia storytelling is surely its ability to build and sustain vast imagi­ nary story worlds across multiple media, regardless of different industrial, cultural or historical contexts. And as Wolf has shown, imaginary story worlds might well be traced back as far as the fictional islands of Homer’s Odyssey (2012). The historicised nature of Wolf’s work on this subject in itself suggests that very different strategies have been used over time to build equally complex story worlds. And so if one was to simply ask ‘what are story worlds and how do they relate to transmedia storytelling?’ it seems that the answer once again requires an understanding of story.

Characterising Transmedia Storytelling  29 Let’s therefore turn back to Pearson and Davies’ earlier cited definition of story, described as that which ‘arises from the combination of characters, settings, and events’ (2014: 128). I have already outlined the role of char­ acters on developing stories across media, but quite similarly settings also play a pivotal role in this transmedia process. While Andrew offers a some­ what vague description of story worlds, defining them as ‘comprehensive systems that comprise all elements that fit together within the same horizon’ (1984: 54), Anthony Smith defines the concept of story world more precisely as ‘the spatio-temporal model of story that a given narrative evokes, and which incorporates sequences of events, the characters who instigate them … and the settings that contextualise these events and characters’ (2012: 29). Put simply, a story world is built up of characters, events and settings – just like any story. For as Marie-Laure Ryan points out, ‘the ability to create a world – or more precisely the ability to inspire the mental representa­ tion of a world – is the primary condition for any text to be considered a narrative’ (2013: online). Yet what differentiates a basic story world that exists in any story from the process of world-building across multiple texts and media is the way that the spatio-temporality of a given story world becomes expanded across media by using those additional media forms to add new aspects of world mythology, or to expand the timeline of the story world to include new events, or to explore new fictional settings, etc. In this same vein, according to Tim Kring, creator of Heroes, world-building is ‘like building your Transformer and putting little rocket ships on the side’ (Kushner, 2008: online). For The Lord of the Rings, for example, Tolkien penned entire backstories spanning thousands of years of fictional history, even naming the forests and rivers while developing new languages for the inhabitants of Middle Earth. Across this text, its appendices, and its pre­ decessor story The Hobbit (1937), Tolkien expanded the timeline of this story world, narrating earlier or parallel events that occurred in the back­ ground or tangentially to the primary story. Such world-building activity was in this case done via both the basic principles of story – character, events and settings – and also via maps and other paratextual documents, indicating the point that, as Wolf states, the act of building story worlds is often ‘transmedial in nature’ (2012: 68). More to the point, the building of transmedia story worlds is about forging a careful balance between what Jenkins describes as spreadability versus drillability: ‘Spreadability refers to a process of dispersal – to scanning across the media landscape in search of meaningful bits of data [while] drillability refers to the ability for a person to explore, in-depth, a deep well of narrative extensions when they stumble upon a fiction that truly captures their attention’ (2009: online). As I will argue in Chapter 3, for instance, world-building at the turn of the twentieth century was rooted in the spreadability of visual materials such as printed maps and posters, while colour and other forms of spectacle equally became effective ways to allow audiences to drill down into a story world’s extensions.

30  Defining Transmedia History But world-building manifests in other ways, too. Jenkins (2009: online) suggests that the building of fictional story worlds across media is equally characterised by the way that a given story world can fully immerse its audi­ ences as if it were a real space, and provide various opportunities for those audiences to extract pieces of that story world. For Jenkins (2009: online), ‘in immersion, the consumer enters into the world of the story (e.g. theme parks), while in extractability, the fan takes aspects of the story away with them as resources they deploy in the spaces of their everyday life (e.g. items from the gift shop).’ Consider the Warner Bros. Studio Tour London – The Making of Harry Potter, for example. This attraction, based in Leavesden, allows audiences to visit the sets, props and costumes created for the films. As well as seeing the spaces from the story world in person, such as Privet Drive, the home street of Harry Potter – fully immersing audiences in the world of Harry Potter – those audiences can also extract many of the physi­ cal artefacts from the story world by purchasing the likes of Butterbeer, Gryffindor scarfs, Hogwarts mugs and wands. However, this begs a further question: Even if a story world becomes linked together in some way – presented as both a spreadable, immersive fictional sphere that affords opportunities to drill down into an array of narrative extensions, each with extractable artefacts – how exactly are audi­ ences encouraged to migrate from one story to another and to partake in these activities of drillability and extractability? If each story in a given story world needs to be self-contained, as Jenkins insists of transmedia story­ telling generally, then what actually directs audiences towards the others? Considered from an industrial standpoint, building a story world means both building adjoining products and simultaneously selling products as individual proverbial ‘rooms’ of the larger ‘house’. Part of the conceptual breakthrough, then, of theorising transmedia storytelling has been to com­ prehend it simultaneously as storytelling in and of itself and equally as pro­ motion for further storytelling. For as Jenkins asserts, ‘creating transmedia story worlds’ is itself the very process of ‘understanding how to appeal to migratory audiences’ (2008: online). Thus more promotion-centric materi­ als like trailers and online adverts must play a vital role in the building of transmedia story worlds today. In this vein, Jonathan Gray usefully expands upon this relationship between storytelling and promotion in the contemporary context in his Show Sold Seperately book. Gray studies the way in which promotional materials for texts operate not exclusively as apparatus for selling but rather for selling via ‘advancing and developing [the] narrative’ of a text (2010a: 5). For Gray and what he terms media paratexts, the meaning of a series such as Heroes is not located solely within the actual text but also extends across multiple media forms including DVDs and online materials. Such materi­ als may actively serve to build the story world and steer audiences across media, for as Tim Kring elaborates: ‘Transmedia storytelling ultimately lures the audience into buying more stuff – today, DVDs; tomorrow, who knows

Characterising Transmedia Storytelling  31 what?’ (Kushner, 2008: online). In building a fictional story world across multiple media, transmedia storytelling hereby increases appetite for fur­ ther consumption of that story world, adding new entrypoints. Consider, for example, the Harry Potter story world as a case in point. To promote Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part II (2011), Warner Bros. created faux Facebook pages for a number of the film’s central characters, publishing snippets about the spells these characters have learned. This developed an audience’s understanding of the rules of magic and mythology that govern that particular story world. In another instance, this time to promote The Dark Knight (2008), ­Warner Bros. launched a new viral campaign called ‘I Believe in Harvey Dent’. After registering on the website ibelieveinharveydent.com, audiences then followed a national tour campaign over the course of the weeks leading up to the release of the film. The website published news stories about a van driving around and rallying the citizens of Gotham City to campaign for Harvey Dent to be District Attorney. Come the start of The Dark Knight, Dent had been elected. Such examples, as Gray elaborates, work to ‘open up a history … they put you into the world. They’ve given you an experience of that world … the narrative, in other words, has begun’ (2010b: online). And in enabling the transmedia narrative to have begun and to develop in this way, clearly the likes of promotional websites and related paratexts are crucial to the way in which transmedia storytelling works. For Bennett and Woollacott (1987: 248), the likes of ‘film publicity, posters, fanzine arti­ cles, interviews with stars, promotional stunts, etc.’ do far more than merely ‘organise expectations in relation to a particular film.’ In fact, Bennett and Woollacott (1987) propose the concept of inter-textuality to describe the complex ways in which fictions may exist in the gaps in between their tex­ tual exploits, with those ‘in-between’ pieces working to reshape how audi­ ences read texts, adjusting their meaning. In their study of the James Bond phenomenon, for example, Bennett and Woollacott explore ‘the respects in which, in adding to “the texts of Bond”, [the films] contributed to a reorgan­ isation of the inter-textual relations to which both the films and the novels were read’ (1987: 142). In it in this way that the earlier identified intertextuality is distinguished from inter-textuality: ‘Whereas Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality refers to the system of references to other texts which can be discerned within the internal composition of a specific individual text … the concept of inter-­ textuality refers to the social organisation of the relations between texts within specific conditions of reading’ (Bennett and Woollacott, 1987: 45). In other words, whereas the former refers to purposeful references within a text to other texts, the latter is used to explain how popular characters like James Bond seemingly escape their textual constraints and exist in the gaps in between their textual exploits. Both intertextuality and inter-textuality are important aspects of transmedia storytelling, and the distinction between these two concepts will be fleshed out at different points throughout this

32  Defining Transmedia History book to show how transmedia stories materialised both textually and ori­ ented culturally throughout the past. At this stage, however, suffice to say that transmedia storytelling is really the folding in of text with paratext. Gray’s concept of the paratext – itself an intertextual form found in the fuzzy threshold that exists between the textual story world and the inter-textual cultural spaces around that textual story world – lies in between products and by-products, between ownership and cultural formation, and between content and promotional material. Put simply, the folding in of the paratextual apparatus into the diegesis of the media text epitomises the blend of intertextuality and inter-textuality that is itself key to all transmedia storytelling. At the present moment, therefore, it is digital platforms that most emphati­cally and most frequently build fictional story worlds across media; online promoters exploit digital tools like social media and film websites to plant in-universe artefacts about a given story world. But as I show in ­Chapter 3, in the past other forms of industrialised advertising were key to world-­building; the arrival of new colour printing technologies around the early twentieth century similarly worked to build story worlds and point audiences across various media. It is in that sense that it makes sense to understand character-building as a smaller category of world-­building, with the latter able to draw on a larger pool of strategies to connect ­stories together as parts of a story world. That being said, the components of ­character-building and world-building highlighted thus far – prequels, sequels, the expansion of backstory, the addition of storyworld mythology, the expansion of the known timeline, the exploration of new fictional set­ tings, etc. – all require creative ownership, be it strategically planned or otherwise. And so these components signal the importance of a third char­ acteristic not yet discussed: Authorship. I will now move on to elaborate on this third characteristic, which broadly concerns the governing role played by a central author over a transmedia story world.

Authorship In his elaboration of the term transmedia storytelling Jenkins defines it as ‘a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systemati­ cally across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience’ (2007: online). This definition, as Louisa Ellen Stein observes, ‘places the emphasis on official authorial control, be it in the hands of a larger corporate entity, a small transmedia production group, or an individual transmedia auteur’ (2013: 405). More recently, Jenkins has offered a slightly more open-ended definition, in which transmedia storytelling comes to describe a ‘logic for thinking about the flow of content across media’ (2011: online), hence Fast and Örnebring’s shift to more emergent logics of transmedia storytelling. As I showed in the introduction, however, this logic tends most often to concern the role played

Characterising Transmedia Storytelling  33 by media convergence, with industrial and technological connections pro­ viding a model for how to extend stories across multiple media. But, again, this convergence model is not necessarily the only logic. Though conver­ gence, as Stein notes, ‘recognizes the expanse of audience authorship,’ this participation of audiences is most notably an affordance of digital media specifically rather than a general characteristic of transmedia storytelling itself (2013: 405). And so in understanding how transmedia storytelling worked under a dif­ ferent logic besides the digital participatory model of contemporary techno­ logical convergences, it is key to re-emphasise the importance of authorship on transmedia storytelling.4 Emphasising what Stein calls ‘official authorial control’ may seem retrograde at first glance, especially in the context of such an expansive and media-traversing subject like transmedia storytelling. At worst, even, the very idea of transmedia storytelling being contingent on such official authorial control might be seen as harking back to the excesses of the auteur theory, arguably ignoring the production contexts that inform authorship. But as I said in the introduction, in actual fact I am doing quite the opposite, showing that the strategies and configurations of transmedia storytelling in the past can only really be understood by acknowledging the agency of people. Indeed, in any case, when extending existing stories and expanding estab­ lished story worlds across media, an authorial figure remains crucial,5 for as was stressed earlier, transmedia storytelling must ultimately produce media texts that function not as versions of the same story but rather as extensions of the same story. Or as Evans puts it, transmedia storytelling ‘tells different stories, or at least different parts of a larger story’ (2011: 38). As I shall argue throughout the different historical contexts of this book, transmedia storytelling helps to make authors – be it TV showrunners, novelists, film directors, etc. – more visibly significant to the way in which stories are con­ sumed across media as story worlds. As Gray puts it, ‘these individuals add their voice to the audience’s understanding of the story’ (2010a: 108). Put simply, in telling different parts of the same larger story, it is authors who of course dictate characters and entire fictional story worlds, build­ ing both of these aspects across multiple media. Once again the analogy of building comes to the forefront, and all acts of building will always require the hands of a good builder. For example, when looking at how transmedia storytelling worked in the aforementioned case of The Matrix story world, Jenkins highlights the central role played by the Wachowskis, the films’ writer/directors: The Wachowski brothers played the transmedia game very well, put­ ting out the original film first to stimulate interest, offering up a few Web comics to sustain the hard-core fan’s hunger for more informa­ tion, launching the anime in anticipation of the second film, releasing the computer game alongside it to surf the publicity, bringing the whole

34  Defining Transmedia History cycle to a conclusion with The Matrix Revolutions, and then turning the whole mythology over to the players of the massively multi-player online game. (2006: 97) While many of these Matrix extensions were inevitably produced by other creative personnel – including Japanese anime specialists and videogame designers, to name only a few – the Wachowskis remained the central autho­ rial hands across the different media iterations: ‘The brothers personally wrote and directed content for the game, drafted scenarios for some of the animated shorts, and co-wrote a few of the comics’ (Jenkins, 2006: 113). In fact, for Jenkins, the Wachowskis’ ‘personal engagement made these other Matrix texts a central part of the “canon”’ in the eyes of audiences (2006: 113). Industrial convergence may have ‘provided a context for the Wachowski brothers’ experiment’ (Jenkins, 2006: 110), but throughout this book I will show the different industrial configurations through which authors have crossed media and extended stories across industries, as well as the cultural influences that made such media-crossing activities possible before contemporary convergences. Regardless of the industrial context, however, what is important to stress at this stage is that an author can indeed hold a fictional story world together (or even break it apart). One of the ways that this power occurs is in the link between an author and the perceived ‘canonicity’ of given texts – that is, its acceptance in the minds of certain audiences as a legitimate extension of a story world as opposed to an unauthorised or illegitimate addition, such as fan-fiction for example (Jenkins, 2006: 321). An author can always dictate what is canonical and thus holds the power to determine what does or does not constitute a part of a given story world. Consider the former days of the Star Wars story world as an example, a world that stretches back to the late 1970s. On the one hand, and prior to Star Wars becoming a Disney enterprise in 2012, Star Wars once comprised six films made between 1977 and 2005 by George Lucas. But over time Lucas’ six films became supported with other novels, comic books and cartoons. These latter additions were often distinguished from the films according to their canonised positioning in the Star Wars Expanded U ­ niverse, a phrase that implies a certain degree of separation from the ‘official’ or ‘canonical’ films. Occupying a position within the Star War Expanded U ­ niverse, for example, was Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn trilogy, a series of novels set five years after the events of Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983). Yet despite working to expand the Star Wars story world and build its core characters such as Luke Skywalker and Han Solo in ways that I have iden­ tified already as characteristics of transmedia storytelling, Zahn’s Thrawn trilogy complicates those former two characteristics insofar as Star Wars, unlike The Matrix or Heroes, was not necessarily always promoted as a transmedia story. The reason for this is simple: The Star Wars world lacked the hand of consistent authorial control across media, which resulted in a

Characterising Transmedia Storytelling  35 discourse of separation between the films and their transmedia extensions. For example, this discourse of separation was even reinforced by George Lucas himself. In an interview for Cinescape, Lucas once remarked: There are two worlds here. There is my world, which is the movies, and there is this other world that has been created, which I say is the parallel universe – the licensing world of the books, games and comic books. They do not intrude on my world, which is a select period of time … I do not get too involved in the parallel universe. (‘Canon’: online) For another interview, this time for Starlog magazine in 2005, Lucas rein­ forced this division of a ‘parallel world’, stating bluntly of the array of Expanded Universe stories that had since come to flood the larger Star Wars universe: ‘I do not read that stuff. That is a different world than my world … They try to make their universe as consistent with mine as possible, but obviously they get enthusiastic and go off in other directions’ (‘Canon’: online). In other words, character-building and world-building, at least in isolation, do not always constitute transmedia storytelling. Rather, both ­character-building and world-building must operate together and alongside a sense of authorship. In terms of characteristics, this three-way relationship is crucial to transmedia storytelling, be it in any historical or contemporary era. However, in the modern age of large multi-national conglomerates where media properties pass through the hands of countless producers, writers, marketers and so on, this kind of consistent authorial control can be diffi­ cult to achieve – let alone maintain over time. Take the character of Batman as an example. DC Comics, a company whose history will form the basis of Chapter 5, first owned Batman, before Time Warner bought DC Comics in 1969. Since then Batman has moved across the hands of countless cre­ ative personnel working in comics publishing, film and television produc­ tion, merchandising outlet subsidiaries and marketing divisions and more. As a result, Paul Levitz, former publisher of DC Comics, sums up just how difficult it is to maintain authorship over something like Batman once the character and his story world has passed through the hands of so many creative personnel: It’s always a delicate issue when you give your children over to others. Whenever we do a movie, a TV show, or even a radio program based on our heroes, the DC team watches over the production, fretting, fussing, and worrying. And worrying even more about every step the creative team takes away from the “canonical” path laid out by our history. (Dini and Kidd, 1998: 221) In the 1990s, Roberta Pearson and William Uricchio charted just some of the steps taken away from the ‘canonical’ path laid out by the history of

36  Defining Transmedia History Batman, which at that time Pearson and Uricchio claimed posed ‘endless re-articulations’ of the character with ‘multiple narrativizations’ of ‘the most divergent set of refractions’ (1991: 164–165). Likewise, all of the fretting and fussing has not stopped multiple re-articulations continuing even today. Will Brooker’s Hunting the Dark Knight book actually frames its examina­ tion of Batman in the twenty-first century around the fact that so many dif­ ferent interpretations of the character exist, each version to varying extents retellings and re-adaptations of many others (2012). Thus with so many authorial hands and influences over so many years across industries, it is hard to claim that the entire back catalogue of Batman constitutes trans­ media storytelling. But this raises an important question: Precisely why is it so hard to claim that the entire back catalogue of Batman constitutes transmedia ­storytelling? The lurking question here is in fact what does and does not count as transmedia storytelling – and why. Let’s not forget that right at the start of this book I used The Dark Knight Rises and its online promotional extensions (a Batman production no less) as a clear example of demonstrat­ ing trans­media storytelling. The fact that some Batman films (as well as their extensions across media) are seen to constitute transmedia storytelling when the larger Batman back catalogue does not flags up a critical point about the kind of authorship that must be in place for transmedia storytelling, one that goes beyond official authorial control and concerns relationships between authors and texts. Michel Foucault – who in his famous essay ‘What Is an Author?’ explored this ‘relationship that holds between an author and a text, the manner in which a text apparently points to this figure who is outside and precedes it’ (Bouchard, 1977: 115) – can shed some light on at least a part of this parti­ cular kind of authorship. For Foucault, the name of an author has ‘indicative functions’ – ‘it is, to a certain extent, the equivalent of a description. When we say “Aristotle,” we are using a word that means one or a series of definite descriptions of the type’ (Bouchard, 1977: 121). If we take author Edgar Rice Burroughs and his Tarzan stories a case in point, which is ­Chapter 4’s case study, in the 1930s the name ‘Edgar Rice Burroughs’ signalled a specific description of the literary Tarzan that was often quite distinct from the cine­ matic Tarzan. As Annette Wannamaker writes, ‘where Burroughs’ Tarzan is British, the Hollywood Tarzan is American; whereas Burroughs’ Tarzan is a ruthless vigilante, the Tarzan on screen is a law-abiding family man; and whereas Burroughs’ Tarzan embodies the superiority of aristocratic classes, the Americanized movie Tarzan does not have a title’ (2012: 29). In other words, Burroughs’ name was itself culturally ingrained with a description of what Tarzan was, both as a character and as a story world. As Bennett and Woollacott add on this subject, ‘the grouping of a set of texts under the name of an author articulates the hermeneutic demand for consistency of meaning’ (1987: 46). Or to put it another way, for Foucault, an author’s name ‘is functional in that it serves as a means of classification: A name

Characterising Transmedia Storytelling  37 can group together a number of texts and differentiate them from others’ (1977: 123). I propose that this notion of classification, which works to group together a number of texts and thus differentiate them from others, be taken one step further and actually broken down into two standards of authorship, or rather two ‘author-functions’ – both of which I argue to be important to transmedia storytelling. The first standard of authorship concerns this very Foucauldian notion that the mere presence of an author’s name on a media text (i.e. on the cover of a book, on the poster for a film, etc.) can point audiences across multiple media to other media texts that constitute a story world. For Bennett and Woollacott, this might include ‘drawing other texts or even paratexts written by or bearing the name of that same p ­ erson – letters, diaries, unpublished manuscripts – into an association with these’ (1987: 46). ‘In doing so, it organises the relations between these texts in such a way that they can be held to mutually illuminate one another in construing the author’ (Bennett and Woollacott, 1987: 46). Let’s call this the market author-function. The second standard of authorship concerns the way in which an author can impose and maintain the description of what does and does not constitute a particular fictional story world – as in a Tarzan that is a ruthless British aristocrat as opposed to a Tarzan that is a civilised American family man. Let’s call this the textual author-function. Essentially, the former encapsulates an inter-textual form of authorship – working’ to reshape how audiences read across texts, adjusting their ­meaning – whereas the latter epitomises a strictly intertextual form of authorship, with the author dictating the purposeful references within a text to other texts. And with all transmedia storytelling, both of these author-functions are in oper­ ation simultaneously by a central author figure.6 These two interrelated standards of authorship thus explain precisely why it is so hard to claim that the entire back catalogue of Batman consti­ tutes transmedia storytelling. DC Comics may have exploited their market author-function over the various Batmans over the years to guide different audiences from one text to another, but the many Batmans produced over the years by the hands of so many individuals perhaps inevitably led to a fragmentation of the story world’s description and meaning and thus cre­ ated multiple different versions of the story world. In other words, while the textual author-function is present in the smaller number of transme­ dia extensions surrounding The Dark Knight Rises, this textual-function is far less apparent – if not absent entirely – across the larger back catalogue of Batman. The significance of these two proposed author-functions on transmedia storytelling can even be noticed in contemporary newspaper discourses. For example, consider the authorial discourse implied by The New York Times when assessing the different styles of transmedia storytelling used in Heroes compared to Battlestar Galactica (2004–2009). The publication actually outright dismissed transmedia webisodes produced for the latter as

38  Defining Transmedia History ‘half-hearted’ attempts at transmedia storytelling. The reason for this dis­ missal is simply authorship – or rather a lack there of: ‘The writers and direc­ tors of the webisodes are not among the show’s A-team’ (Hale, 2008: 48). By contrast, the Heroes web-comics were praised considerably on account of the direct participation of the television series’ co-executive producer and were thereby seen to constitute transmedia storytelling (Hale, 2008: 48). If Jenkins’ earlier cited discussion of Heroes – in which he looked at how the comics unlocked narrative mysteries of the television show – e­ xemplifies the importance of the textual author-function on transmedia storytelling, then the above review of the Heroes web-comics in The New York Times clearly exemplifies the importance of the market author-­function. In fact, the impor­ tance of these textual and market author-functions, even in the midst of vast corporate structures, is why most of the commonly listed examples of transmedia storytelling in the twenty-first century tend to be those that keep both sets of author-functions in play simultaneously, be it through the hand of a single creative or a single company. This rule certainly applies to the likes of The Matrix, Heroes, 24, Lost (2004–2010), and at least to the revival of Doctor Who (2005–). In other ways, authorship standards can also impact how audiences engage with transmedia stories, and what they do with that story. Jenkins (2009: online) insists that the performance of audiences is often a key out­ come of transmedia storytelling, describing ‘the ability of transmedia exten­ sions to lead to fan produced performances that can become part of the transmedia narrative itself.’ Scolari, Bertetti and Freeman (2014: 3) suggest that there are different levels of participation and performance ranging from the consumer of a single media form to the ‘prosumer’ who expands the story world by producing new story content, typically via interactive digital media forms such as websites and online broadcasting platforms includ­ ing YouTube. Jenkins emphasises that transmedia, new technologies and convergence culture have indeed all worked to make this kind of perfor­ mance possible, empowering audiences by giving them the ‘right to parti­ cipate’ (2006: 23). Importantly, however, Charlotte Taylor-Ashfield (2016) shows how authorship can regulate the participation of audiences, pointing to the ways in which fans of Captain Marvel attached themselves closely to the work of author Kelly Sue DeConnick, which resulted in containing transmedia migration and participation rather than cultivating its spread, since fans were not motivated to seek out media not authored by or consis­ tent with DeConnick’s interpretation. So, if both character-building and world-building – achieved via prequels, sequels, backstory expansion, the addition of mythology, the expansion of the timeline, the exploration of new fictional settings, etc. – are import­ ant to transmedia storytelling, then authorship is crucial for achieving both ­character-building and world-building. But let’s take a step back for a moment. All three of these characteristics share an important commonal­ ity: They are all methods of producing variation on sameness, which I have

Characterising Transmedia Storytelling  39 indicated already to be a key way of conceptualising transmedia story­ telling. As noted previously, insofar as transmedia storytelling extends exist­ ing stories and expands established story worlds, it is a system of producing variation on sameness. On the one hand, all of the stories must belong to the same story world, and yet each new story must expand that story world, telling different adventures and offering new details. Equally, character-­ building, world-building and authorship share this particular theme: Build­ ing variation on the same character; adding new settings to a familiar story world; and maintaining sameness across the varying events of the narrative. But far more than serving as a nice way of conceptualising transmedia storytelling in a very general sense, conceptualising transmedia storytelling as a system of producing variation on sameness can actually shed some new light on why certain industrial configurations of the past were most effective at telling stories across multiple media. This new light becomes evident in the next chapter, in which I will move on to outline the broader context via which transmedia storytelling first emerged as an industrial phenomenon – and here I stress the foremost importance of industrialisation, consumer culture and media regulation.

Notes 1. See Anja Bechmann Petersen, “Internet and Cross Media Production: Case ­Studies in Two Major Danish Media Organizations,” Australian Journal of Emerging Technology and Society 4:2 (2006), 94. 2. See Robert Stam, Literature Through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of ­Adaptation (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005), 3–4; and Robert Stam and ­Alessandra Raengo, eds. Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and ­Practice of Film Adaptation (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004). 3. The term and concept ‘story world’ belongs to David Herman. See David ­Herman, Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative (Lincoln: ­University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 13–14. 4. This emphasis on authorship echoes Evans, who asserts authorial coherence as one of her three key features for understanding transmedia storytelling. The other two features are narrative coherence and temporal coherence. See ­Elizabeth Evans, Transmedia Television: Audiences, New Media, and Daily Life (New York: Routledge, 2011), 28–38. 5. Even in the context of adaptation, Simone Murray shows how ‘the trend towards heavyweight literary authors being credited as executive producers on screen adaptations of their works encapsulates the convergent commercial and creative dynamics at play.’ See Simone Murray, The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Literary Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2011), 27. 6. Jenkins uses Foucault’s schema to similarly analyse the ways in which Star Trek ‘author’ Gene Roddenberry is used as a concept by audiences to help clas­ sify what is Star Trek and what isn’t. See Henry Jenkins, “‘Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations’: Genre and Authorship in Star Trek,” in Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Doctor Who and Star Trek, eds. John Tulloch and Henry Jenkins. (New York: Routledge, 1995), 188.

40  Defining Transmedia History

Bibliography Andrew, Dudley. Concepts in Film Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text. London: Fontana, 1977. Bechmann Petersen, Anja. “Internet and Cross Media Production: Case Studies in Two Major Danish Media Organizations.” Australian Journal of Emerging Techno­logy and Society 4:2 (2006): 94–107. Bennett, Tony and Woollacott, Janet. Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero. London: Routledge, 1987. Bertetti, Paolo. “Toward a Typology of Transmedia Characters.” International Journal of Communication (SI: Transmedia Critical: Empirical Investigations into Multiplatform and Collaborative Storytelling) 8 (August 2014): http://ijoc.org/ index.php/ijoc. Bouchard, Donald F., ed. Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault. New York: Cornell University Press, 1977. Brooker, Will. Hunting the Dark Knight: Twenty-First Century Batman. London: I. B. Tauris, 2012. Budra, Paul and Schellenberg, Betty A., eds. Part Two: Reflections on the Sequel. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. “Canon.” Wookkiepedia: The Star Wars Wiki (no date). Accessed September 4, 2015. http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Canon. Caselli, Daniela and Lesnik-Oberstein, Karin, eds. “The Natural and the L ­ egitimate: Intertextuality in Harry Potter.” In Children’s Literature: New Approaches. ­Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004. Dini Paul and Kidd, Chip. Batman: Animated. New York: Harper Collins, 1998. Doležel, Lubomír. Possible Worlds of Fiction and History: The Postmodern Stage. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2010. Eder, Jens, Jannidis, Fotis and Schneider, Ralf, eds. Characters in Fictional Worlds: Understanding Imaginary Beings in Literature, Film and Other Media. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter Co., 2010. Evans, Elizabeth. Transmedia Television: Audiences, New Media, and Daily Life. New York: Routledge, 2011. Fast, Karin and Örnebring Henrik. “Transmedia World-building: The Shadow (1931–present) and Transformers (1984–present).” The International Journal of Cultural Studies (September 15, 2015): doi: 10.1177/1367877915605887. Gomez, Jeff. “What Made Oz So Great and Powerful? Starlight Runner’s Jeff Gomez Tells Us.” Forbes. March 15, 2013. Accessed July 18, 2014. http:// www.forbes.com/sites/markhughes/2013/03/15/what-made-oz-so-great-andpowerful-starlight-runners-jeff-gomez-tells-us/. Gray, Jonathan. Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts. New York: New York University Press, 2010a. Gray, Jonathan. “On Anti-Fans and Paratexts.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins. March 8, 2010b. Accessed 27 January 2012. http:// henryjenkins.org/2010/03/on_anti-fans_and_paratexts_an_1.html. Hale, Mike. “NBC Bridges Series Gaps with Online Minidramas.” The New York Times, December 28, 2008. Herman, David. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln: ­University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

Characterising Transmedia Storytelling  41 Jenkins, Henry. “‘Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations’: Genre and Authorship in Star Trek.” In Tulloch, John and Jenkins, Henry, eds. Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Doctor Who and Star Trek. New York: Routledge, 1995, 175–195. Jenkins, Henry, “Transmedia Storytelling.” MIT Technology Review. January 15, 2003. Accessed February 4, 2013. http://www.technologyreview.com/news/401760/ transmedia-storytelling/. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Jenkins, Henry. “Transmedia Storytelling 101.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins. March 22, 2007. Accessed September 30, 2011. http://henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html. Jenkins, Henry. “‘We Had So Many Stories to Tell’: The Heroes Comics as Trans­ media Storytelling.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins. December 3, 2007. Accessed February 20, 2012. http://henryjenkins. org/2007/12/we_had_so_many_stories_to_tell.html. Jenkins, Henry. “I Have Seen the Future of Entertainment … And It Works.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan. October 20, 2008. Accessed November 30, 2013. http://­henryjenkins.org/2008/10/i_have_seen_the_futures_of_ent.html#sthash. 341Drjg6.dpuf. Jenkins, Henry. “The Revenge of the Origami Unicorn: Seven Principles of Trans­ media Storytelling.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins. December 12, 2009. Accessed February 20, 2012. http://henryjenkins. org/2009/12/the_revenge_of_the_origami_uni.html. Jenkins, Henry. “Transmedia 202: Further Reflections.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins. August 1, 2011. Accessed November 2, 2012. http://henryjenkins.org/2011/08/defining_transmedia_further_re.html. Jenkins, Henry. “Transmedia: A Prehistory.” In Wired TV: Laboring over an Interactive Future, edited by Denise Mann, 248–254. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2014. Kinder, Marsha. Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Berkeley: University of ­California Press, 1991. Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. Kushner, David. “Rebel Alliance: How a Small Band of Sci-Fi Geeks Is Leading ­Hollywood into a New Era.” Fast Company. May 2008. Accessed September 21, 2013. http://www.fastcompany.com/798975/rebel-alliance. Long, Geoffrey. “Transmedia Storytelling: Business, Aesthetics, and Production at the Jim Henson Company.” M.A. diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2007. Murray, Simone. The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Literary Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2011. Pearson, Roberta E. and Uricchio, William, eds. The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and His Media. New York: Routledge, 1991. Pearson, Roberta and Davies, Máire Messenger. Star Trek and American Television. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Transmedial Storytelling and Transfictionality.” Poetics Today. 13:3 (2013): 361–388.

42  Defining Transmedia History Scolari, Carlos A. “Transmedia Storytelling: Implicit Consumers, Narrative Worlds, and Branding in Contemporary Media Production.” International Journal of Communication 3 (2009): http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc. Scolari, Carlos A., Bertetti, Paolo and Freeman, Matthew. Transmedia Archaeology: Storytelling in the Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines. Basingstoke: Palgrave Pivot, 2014. Scott, Jason. “The Character-Orientated Franchise: Promotion and Exploitation of Pre-Sold Characters in American Film, 1913–1950.” Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies (November 2009): http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/ scope/. Singer, Ben. “Female Power in the Serial-Queen Melodrama.” Camera Obscura 22 (January 1990): 90–129. Smith, Anthony. “Media Contexts of Narrative Design: Dimensions of Specificity within Storytelling Industries.” PhD diss., University of Nottingham, 2012. Stam, Robert. Literature Through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005. Stam, Robert and Raengo, Alessandra, eds. Literature and Film: A Guide to the ­Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004. Stein, Louisa Ellen. “#Bowdown to Your New God: Misha Collins and Decentered Authorship in the Digital Age.” In A Companion to Media Authorship, edited by Jonathan Gray and Derek Johnson, 403–425. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2013. Taylor-Ashfield, Charlotte. “#CarolCorps: Interrogating the Utopic Potential of Transmedia Storytelling for Female Superhero Fans.” Paper presented at ­Console-ing Passions: An International Conference on Television, Video, Audio, New Media, and Feminism, University of Notre Dame, June 16–18, 2016. Tulloch, John and Jenkins, Henry, eds. Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Doctor Who and Star Trek. New York: Routledge, 1995. Wannamaker, Annette and Abate, Michelle Ann, eds. Global Perspectives on Tarzan: From King of the Jungle to International Icon. New York: Routledge, 2012. “What is Transmedia?” (October 17, 2010). YouTube. Accessed 21 May 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9uX_65IFpY. Wolf, Mark J. P. Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Sub­creation. New York: Routledge, 2012.

2 Contextualising Transmedia Storytelling Industrialisation, Consumer Culture, Media Regulation

This chapter will present a broad overview of the larger industrial and ­cultural configurations that encouraged what is now called transmedia story­telling. This will help to show the broader context within which trans­ media storytelling first took shape and evolved as part of the economic fab­ ric of twentieth-century American media industries. For as I argued in the introduction, only by looking to the past can the contingencies of the ­present be more richly understood. And this means re-understanding transmedia storytelling as the result of different industrial and cultural determinants of the past; it means reframing historical media forms in order to illuminate or even to challenge our understanding of the present media moment. So, where to begin? In order to grasp what transmedia storytelling was at the turn of the twentieth century, or even later on in the mid-twentieth century, we cannot look exclusively at media texts but must also look at the broader landscape of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century ­fin-de-siècle. It is this book’s proposition that transmedia storytelling has been a significant part of the economic fabric of media and cultural production for a very long time, albeit operating under largely different industrial configu­ rations and strategies. But what were the different configurations and strate­ gies used to hold story worlds together and point audiences across media? What role(s) did transmedia storytelling play within the historical industrial setting of this fin-de-siècle? And what did it even look like at this time? In terms of identifying a sensible place to start answering these ques­ tions, Mark J. P. Wolf’s Building Imaginary Worlds book drops a useful hint (2012). Wolf’s study explores the history of building fictional story worlds, and notes that ‘before 1900 few [fictional] worlds extended beyond a sin­ gle book’ (2012: 275). Yet despite drawing attention to 1900 as a vaguely important year for the industrial origins of world-building, Wolf opts not to explain or even to explore the underlying contextual reasons for why the turn of the twentieth century was in fact such a pivotal turning point for how story worlds came to be built across media. But there are clues here. Though not actually stated as such, Wolf’s emphasis on the form of the novel throughout his analysis speaks volumes, hinting at crucial factors to do with mass production, printing technologies and of course the fact that other mass media like the cinema had now begun to emerge (2012).

44  Defining Transmedia History The  significance of 1900 and the industrial-cultural transformations that came around that particular time will be this chapter’s initial focus. I will explore how broader transformations around the turn of the ­twentieth cen­ tury in the US gave rise to the industrial emergence of transmedia story­ telling. Specifically, if transmedia storytelling is indeed dependent upon certain industrial alignments that altogether work to spread a fictional story world across multiple media, pointing audiences from one medium to the next, then this chapter will show how the alignments across media that ultimately drove the emergence and sustained development of transmedia storytelling during the first half of the twentieth century revolved around the following three contextual contingencies: (1) Industrialisation; (2) Consumer culture; and (3) Media regulation Industrialisation, by which I mean the extensive development of industry and new forms of mass production, will be explored according to economic transformations and certain technological innovations. Consumer culture refers to the rise of mass distribution that came as a result of industrialisa­ tion and the new mass production. And by media regulation I am referring to the control or intervening guidance over mass media by governments and other external bodies. In beginning to think about how these contextual contingencies afforded transmedia storytelling as an industrial practice, let’s start with industrialisation, which in some ways is the most significant of the three factors given that it is the earliest of the three.

Industrialisation Historians, as Derek Kompare rightly asserts, ‘have long addressed the importance of industrialisation to the nascent United States of America’ in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (2005: 1). ‘In a general sense,’ Eric Hopkins defines, ‘industrialisation meant a change from an economy based on agriculture to one based on industry and commerce’ (2000: 2).1 Kompare notes how ‘the idea of culture was industrialized to an unprecedented degree during this particular period’ (2005: 2). A wealth of media and cultural studies scholarship has gone to great lengths to document industrialisation and its development of mass-produced forms of cultural reproduction.2 Yet very little, if any, of such scholarship to date has even begun to touch on the possible relationships between the known history of industrialisation in the US and the far less examined histories of transmedia storytelling. So, what might be the link between industrialisation and the telling of stories across media? Chapter 1 offered the bare bones of a key ­analogy for understanding transmedia storytelling. I said that telling stories across media is not so much about stories converging as it is about stories ­building  – rather like a series of extensions that are added to a building to make a larger and ever-expanding house, as in a story world. This analogy was

Contextualising Transmedia Storytelling  45 intended as far more than a simple metaphor; it actually goes straight to the heart of what it means to understand transmedia storytelling – particularly in a historical context. In fact, as I began to argue in the previous chapter, this analogy hints at a central point: The industrial strategies of the past century that became most significant to the industrial history of transmedia storytelling were all practices or developments that afforded a way to build and to spread that which was built. Industrialisation was all about building and spreading. If media conver­ gence ‘makes the flow of content across multiple media platforms inevita­ ble’ (Jenkins, 2006: 106), then so did industrialisation, albeit in different ways. Indeed, in the present moment digital and industrial convergences may underpin transmedia storytelling, but at the start of the twentieth cen­ tury industrialisation did much the same thing just as well. Most specifically, and as I will soon explain, transmedia storytelling would come to be under­ pinned by the new models of mass production and the related developments in technology and advertising that came in its wake. And all industrial configurations are influenced or determined by far larger cultural factors. Of particular importance were ‘the technological changes that made the production of new forms of culture possible and the concentration of people in urban areas that created significant audiences for this new culture’ (Storey, 2016: 1). At the turn of the twentieth century in the US, indeed, larger cultural factors concerned transformations that saw a predominantly rural-farming economy eventually develop into an emerging urban-manufacturing landscape. It may have only fully characterised parti­ cular cities such as Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, but this period unquestionably witnessed the full force of industrialisation and became characterised by related developments concerning new models of mass pro­ duction, fresh industrialised systems of modern advertising and evolving developments in methods of mass communication. As Ian Gordon specifies: Shifts in the American economy and society – notably the development of new technologies and modes of transportation and c­ ommunication – resulted in large-scale industrial production, … the emergence of national markets and advertising, and the growth of urban centers whose populations had significant income to participate in a new cul­ ture: A culture of consumption. (1998: 3) Unpacking Gordon’s statement emphasises the five key factors of industrial­ isation that I argue actively encouraged – if not directly enabled – stories to be told across multiple media as an industrial practice around the turn of the twentieth century: industrial production, new technologies, communication, advertising and consumption. With regards to industrial production, the economic transformations hinted at by Gordon were rooted in the ‘extensive organisation of the economy for the purpose of manufacturing’ (Sullivan and Sheffrin, 2003: 472). New models of mass production brought changes

46  Defining Transmedia History in terms of industrial capitalism, cultural reproduction and consumer ­habits, which marked a turn towards an economics of industrial production that established an industrial means of producing variation on sameness. Producing variation on sameness was important, for as noted previ­ ously, this idea can be thought of as a way of conceptualising transmedia ­story­telling – and by extension as a way of understanding its history. The ­ability to manufacture such product variation came partly from the many new jobs that were created by growing industries in the US, such as retail, oil and railroads. With the American population rising from around 50 ­million to approximately 91 million between 1890 and 1910 (­Mizruchi, 2008: 139), and with the economy expanding rapidly, industrialisation became increasingly important. As Roger Burt discusses, ‘for the first half of the [­nineteenth century], economic growth was based on the exploitation of natural resources, agricultural and mineral’ (1984: 48). But by 1850, as Burt continues, ‘the US was firmly established in a process of i­ndustrialisation – and by 1900 it was a fully industrialised economy’ (1984: 50). It is cer­ tainly possible to discuss industrial development during both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (marked the Industrial Revolution in Britain). ­Developments in print culture during the mid-nineteenth century, in par­ ticular, can be understood as direct antecedents to a number of the factors I emphasise throughout this book. As Ralf Schneider explains (2016: 118), ‘the ­nineteenth century can in fact be thought of as the age of the novel … [although] the culture of everyday life in the nineteenth century comprised the reading of a broad spectrum of texts, ranging from religious edification to horror stories, and from conduct books to romance novels.’ ­Characterising print culture at this time was class divisions between the working classes – reading ‘cheap literature’ like the gothic horror and crime fiction found in penny dreadfuls and shilling shockers, forms which established serialised, often drillable story worlds that would later typify the pulp fictions and comics examined in this book – and the middle classes, who customarily read novels, which would play a foundational role in the industrial rise of transmedia storytelling in other ways, too. These continuing class-divides and particular media forms will be explored in later chapters in relation to the industrial-cultural contexts of the early twentieth century. However, what is important to stress is that, come the turn of the twentieth century, ‘entirely new forms of mass production technology, which led to a new and characteristically American form of manufacture’ (Burt, 1984: 50) emerged only around the turn of the twentieth century. And this American form of mass production was vital to transmedia storytelling at this time. Consider, for instance, the era’s new archetypal model of industrialised mass production – the assembly line. Developing across the nineteenth cen­ tury and originally associated with the sewing and shipbuilding industries in Europe, the assembly line was soon transformed into a defining model of American industrial production around the turn of the twentieth century. Henry Ford is often credited with this development. Ford produced a range

Contextualising Transmedia Storytelling  47 of new and affordable automobiles known as the Model T, founding the Ford Motor Company in 1903. The Model T, which was produced on a conveyor-belt-based system in a factory with each worker repeatedly work­ ing on individual parts of the production, was first introduced in 1908. This model of mass production, later known as Fordism, created a dominant sys­ tem of mass manufacturing. The assembly line’s significance on what is now deemed transmedia storytelling ties most straightforwardly to the fact that production fast became a reproducible system of adjoining interchangeable parts during this particular time.3 As Ford identified: Every piece of work in the shop moves. It may move on hooks or over­ head chains going to assembly in the exact order in which the parts are required; it may travel on a moving platform; or it may go by gravity, but the point is that there is no lifting or trucking of anything other than materials. (cited in Foster, 1981: 170) If imagined only from a strictly manufacturing perspective, transmedia story­telling is similarly about the reproduction of many media texts as much as it is about the creative expansion of fictional story worlds and the migra­ tion of audiences. If the entire process of transmedia storytelling is ‘like building your Transformer and putting little rocket ships on the side,’ to re-quote Heroes’ Tim Kring from the introduction (Kushner, 2008: online), then those additional ‘rocket ships’ are essentially interchangeable extension parts. And it is for this reason that the assembly line – this very American form of mass production – is so crucial to comprehending the industrial context through which transmedia storytelling emerged as an industrialised practice. In the same way that transmedia storytelling is seen as the ‘integra­ tion’ of ‘multiple forms’, or as a process where ‘elements’ of a larger product work like ‘components’ of a ‘unified experience’ (Jenkins, 2006: 334), so too was the model of early twentieth-century mass production. As Ford had indicated, the assembly line was a process whereby one component is pro­ duced according to its relationship with others, which in turn was designed to be joined with another component, and with each of these adjoining com­ ponents eventually all coming together to form one larger product. Concep­ tually, the assembly line and transmedia storytelling both work on the basis that separate product-pieces are each added one by one to form a larger product, like individual bricks building a house. In short, mass production afforded the sheer spreadability of fiction as multipliable products. Industrialists at the time viewed mass production, epitomised by this assembly line model, as ‘industry on a scientific basis’ (Davis, 2007: 2). Edward Filene, a department store tycoon, even argued that this model of mass pro­ duction represented the second phase of the Industrial Revolution around the turn of the twentieth century (1927). And this so-called second phase of the Industrial Revolution brought entirely new models of mass produc­ tion based not on standardisation alone, but also on differentiation. These

48  Defining Transmedia History particular developments were important for what would become transme­ dia storytelling in a whole other context. For example, developments in more flexible systems of mass production enabled companies to begin diver­ sifying their product lines. One advertisement published in Malay Mail in 1906 highlights how companies such as Cycle & Carriage Co. now began to carry a far wider variety of products in the early years of the 1900s – in this instance, diversifying from Cycle & Carriage Co. sewing machines to also include Cycle & Carriage Co. bicycles.4 In affording diversification, the second phase of the Industrial Revolution was in this way central to the industrial emergence of transmedia story­ telling around the turn of the twentieth century. The emerging models of mass production were rooted in similar conceptual means of producing variation on sameness on an industrial scale. Ford’s first assembly-line pro­ duction system was successful because his product did not vary; it was a process of standardised reproduction. But as important as standardisation was in terms of ushering in a new production mechanism for transmedia storytelling – allowing new media texts to be reproduced over and over and at a much lower cost than had been previously possible – let’s not forget that variety, options and differentiation became hallmarks of the rising con­ sumer culture. Ford’s assembly line was quickly modified to that of a more flexible production line, allowing for both a standardised process of mass production but with greater customisation. And with this modification came an industrial context for the mass production of transmedia stories. In short, the second phase of industrialisation gave the ability to mass manufacture variation on sameness – a concept that epitomises the very idea of trans­ media storytelling.5 Yet understanding industrialisation as historical transmedia ­storytelling – or at least as its broadest industrial context – does not end with mass produc­ tion. Alongside the economic changes of this period were new techno­logical innovations that were closely related to transformations of industrialisation. Such technological innovations included other industrialised production practices such as new printing technologies – including colour lithogra­ phy, which allowed for the reproduction of photographs and drawings at lower cost (Cronin, 2010: 3). Colour lithography developed around the late ­nineteenth century, and businesses began to promote themselves with an array of attractive colour images, extending those images across different products. Michael Saler discusses how the development of new printing technologies at the end of the nineteenth century led to existing media forms such as ‘novels and illustrated fiction magazines bec[oming] more affordable than ever before in America thanks to the dynamics of mass-publishing’ (2012: 37–38). As I demonstrate in the next chapter, lithography led to the rise of colour illustrations in novels, which then were reproduced in news­ papers, extending illustrated characters from one medium to another. Beyond such new technologies, mass communication – which is best characterised by the form of the newspaper – is a further factor used by

Contextualising Transmedia Storytelling  49 Gordon to characterise industrialisation around this particular time. And by mass communication I am really describing the rise of the mass media itself. In reaching so many audiences, the mass media was nothing less than pivotal to transmedia storytelling – in particular, to the process of point­ ing audiences from one form of mass media to another. This point may seem ­obvious, but let’s not forget that before the mid-nineteenth century few forms of mass communication existed – particularly forms that provided all parts of the nation with shared information (Crowley and Heyer, 2010; Fang, 1997; Simonson, 2010; Butsch, 2000). The rising urbanism in ­America at this time ‘provided an arena for the circulation of bodies and goods’ (­Charney and Schwartz, 1995: 3). New forms of mass communication and ­mobility including the automobile and highways, and ‘tramways and tele­ phones, newspapers and advertising, steel construction and e­ levators – all things which tend to bring about a greater mobility and a greater concen­ tration of the urban populations’ (Park, Burgess and ­McKenzie, 1925: 2) – altogether contributed to the rise of mass communication as a system for spreading information across the country. Mass communication was therefore important to the way in which an entire industrialised culture of shared information developed – thus spread­ ing variation on sameness across the emerging mass media. Mass commu­ nications such as the telegraph, newspapers, magazines, cinema and later radio and television each enabled the relaying of information through these media forms to the largest available audience. Mass media hence began to adopt each other’s formats; storytelling styles would become shared across many different media forms. In the early 1900s, for instance, two news­ paper magnates, William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, began the trend of adding special sections to newspapers including comic strips – ­providing readers with the same fictional characters. In doing so, as Saler notes, the likes of newspapers, novels, and illustrated magazines ‘joined earlier resources of popular enchantment, such as … panoramas, phantas­ magorias, magic lantern shows, conjuring acts, and similar amusements’ (2012: 37–38), deve­loping these particular amusements to form mass com­ munication. Moreover, the innate visuality and spectacle of these emerging mass communication forms lay at the heart of what Guy Debord famously characterised later on as the ‘Society of the Spectacle’ (1994) – a term used to encapsulate the rise of mass media and consumer culture paved by the turn-of-the-twentieth-century urban-manufacturing landscape. This ‘Spec­ tacle’ described the multitude of commercial ‘screens’ now lining the city streets, each a spectacled extension of ‘the same old commodity’ (1994: 26). The next chapter will show how the newfound visuality and spectacle of this era, along with related factors such as colour lithography, enabled fictions to extend across media on a more industrialised basis. In fact, according to Mark McGurl, by the turn of the twentieth century, ‘the key elements of a preoccupation with mass visual culture in modern America were in place’ (2011: 686). And pervading strongly through this

50  Defining Transmedia History defining visual culture of the fin-de-siècle and its new forms of mass com­ munication was advertising – itself an added factor of industrialisation, as Gordon noted earlier. In marketing terms, advertising can be most broadly defined as the advancement of a product through publicity and/or promo­ tion (Littlejohn, 2009: 19). As industrialisation hence gave rise to mass production and in turn to an increasing quantity of products, advertising intensified accordingly in order to promote these multiplying products. While it is of course true that rudimentary forms of advertising pervaded both the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, it was not until the turn of the twentieth century – when the mass-produced products of industri­ alisation began to be promoted via the mass media – that media forms suddenly began to be imprinted with strategies designed to promote other products simultaneously. This imprinting technique effectively meant that media forms could now begin to promote other media forms – or rather one media text could now point an audience to another related media texts in a way that clearly echoes transmedia storytelling. Until the end of the 1880s, for instance, magazines relied on subscription revenues only. But the severe economic shifts accelerated by industrial mass production saw ‘magazines arise in the 1890s as a handmaiden of the marketing system … with new products now appearing in profusion’ (Peterson, 1980: 166). Peter Bart fur­ ther demonstrates how many ‘publishers began to realise that magazines could be a vehicle to showcase merchandise’ (1962: 32–33). And this ability to showcase merchandise hints at the way in which the era’s media texts had now suddenly begun to be produced as something akin to ‘adjoining’ parts of a larger product range – almost like media ‘rooms’, as it were, which were designed to connect with others. Furthermore, by the early 1920s the motion picture industry regularly utilised what it referred to as ‘the book store tie-up’. In 1920 The Film Daily acknowledged that ‘the oft suggested idea of co-operating with book-stores in advertising is of special significance to films because of the extensive cir­ culation of novels’ (1205). Thus cutting across multiple media, advertising joined media together as spaces of promotion and consumption. More than that, advertising – developing alongside the concurrent rise of new forms of mass media communication and new printing technologies – could indeed serve to direct readers from one story to another. In Chapter 3 I will explore these factors in depth, and specifically I examine how industrialised forms of advertising in the first two decades of the twentieth century became the driving determinant of transmedia storytelling at that time. I will trace the ways in which the era’s advertising techniques brought about new strategies for world-building across media.

Consumer Culture Beyond mass production, mass communication and advertising, industrial­ isation gave rise to a consumer culture, too, which would further intensify the industrial rise of transmedia storytelling. As Gordon suggested in his

Contextualising Transmedia Storytelling  51 characterisation of the early twentieth century, the rise of consumer culture had an impact on American attitudes. The notion of consumer culture sug­ gests that people can make their lives both richer and fuller by consuming more and more products. This idea also underpins the economic motive of transmedia storytelling. For instance, Jenkins notes that ‘to fully experi­ ence any fictional story world, consumers must assume the role of hunters and gatherers, chasing down bits of the story across media channels … to come away with a richer entertainment experience’ (2006: 21). In economic terms, transmedia storytelling operates on the basis that audiences will gain both a richer and fuller understanding of a given story if they consume more of its media texts. Any attempt to historicise transmedia storytelling must account for consumer culture as a broad contextual backdrop; the consum­ erist ideology ingrained into Jenkins’ definition of transmedia storytelling suggests that its history is closely related to the rise of consumer culture. Specifically, the rise of consumer culture around the early twentieth century was important to the industrial history of transmedia story­telling for two reasons. First, the new models of mass production described above would lead to increased mass distribution, spreading the array of new products across media and audiences while further intensifying the importance of standardised differentiation on the production of products. Second, this mass distribution gave rise to the business of a number of interconnected licensing practices associated with corporate authorship’s managerial function, and in turn transmedia storytelling became corporat­ ised. Put simply: If industrialisation afforded the means to build media on an industrial scale, then consumer culture afforded the means to spread and market that media. Allow me to set the scene a little. Broadly speaking, the emergence of new industries such as retail around the turn of the twentieth century ini­ tiated a consumer culture that by the mid-1910s, as James C. Davis notes, saw Americans ‘growing accustomed to the signature experiences of the new consumer society, such as buying on credit, shopping in department stores, and seeing national brands advertising in local newspapers’ (2007: 1) As sociologist Simon Patten also wrote in 1907, the nation had all of a sud­ den grown into an ‘economy of abundance’ (223). These decades were signi­ ficant turning points in the evolution of the production and consumption of culture – an economics of industrial production intensified an economics of mass consumption. In this vein, Kate Lacey remarks that the ‘challenge facing the capitalist economy was not so much one of production as one of distribution and circulation’ (2001: 21). Indeed, by cutting the cost of his automobiles from $950 to $295, Ford’s model of mass production had led to manufacturers producing more goods than could be absorbed (Foster, 1981: 170). Consumer demand thus needed to increase. Distribution and circulation became important objectives for the industries. Edward Filene, a department store tycoon, asserted in the late 1920s that ‘certain types of retailing are in effect now dams in the stream of distribution – a stream which should be broad, deep, and swift flowing’ (1927).

52  Defining Transmedia History One of the effects of this stream of mass-produced and mass-distributed consumer products was the rise of corporate brand names, which played a key role in this streaming distribution of consumer culture. For as Roberta Sassatelli argues, ‘brands promote consumption as a way of life’ (2007: 126). Brand names became a way of marketing the multiplied products of the industrial age – those very products of standardised differentiation encouraged by the assembly line.6 In the 1920s, for example, Coca-Cola branded its drink as a product of the ‘fun food variety’ (Radio Mirror, 1934: 21). In doing so, Coca-Cola differentiated itself from other products and also targeted a particular audience. Like all good brands, Coca-Cola ‘conveyed certain qualities to the consumer and acted as a guarantee of the origin of the product’ (Johnson, 2011: 2). Coca-Cola, to put it another way, was authored, and hereby encouraged repeat consumption of the brand, be it a drink or a T-shirt. And as brand names rose, so too did media’s attempts to exploit the brand-name familiarity of fictional characters in order to attract audiences. While the early twentieth century was characterised by the proliferation of consumer products, the influx in new forms of mass media meant that the stories of those media quickly began to reappear in different formats and on different screens. In 1903, for example, Biograph produced a film series based on Alphonse and Gaston, a comic strip char­ acter. This same year also saw films based on Richard Outcault’s Buster Brown – spreading and extending the character and his story world across multiple media.7 At this point in the early 1900s films were actually at the peak of their unpopularity in the US, and were regularly reduced to the least desirable spots in vaudeville theatres. Thus even as ‘cinema proclaimed its indepen­ dence from theatre and literature’ (Usai, 2000: xviii), the early years of the film industry saw movies exploiting popular fictions to sustain interest – offering audiences visual extensions of other media’s stories. As Charles Musser explains: The film’s subject or narrative was often already known by the spec­ tators. Especially with the aid of a brief cue (such as a main title) to identify the well-known story or event, viewers brought this special knowledge to bear on the film. When the Biograph Company showed filmed excerpts of Joseph Jefferson performing his stage role in Rip Van Winkle, for example, the audience’s familiarity with the play was assumed. Early cinema thus evidenced a profound dependence on other cultural forms, including the theatre, newspapers, popular songs, and fairy tales. (1990: 2) Importantly, Musser actually defines early American cinema by its depen­ dence on other media, noting that cinema’s ‘representational system could not present a complex, unfamiliar narrative capable of being readily under­ stood irrespective of exhibition circumstances or the spectators’ specific

Contextualising Transmedia Storytelling  53 cultural knowledge’ (1990: 2). Musser is here describing certain techno­ logical factors, but cinema’s reliance on other media forms also reflected the rise of consumer culture, where dialogues between one product and another, between media and related merchandise, intensified. Noël Burch points out that during this period of early cinema, film narratives were not told ‘as if for the first time insofar as they assumed to be a part of the viewers’ previous knowledge’ (1978/79: 92). The American film indeed began as a transmedial phenomenon, aided as it was by an audiences’ knowledge of the stories it told, relying on both literary and theatrical iterations of stories to ‘fill in’ the story gaps of the screen narrative in ways that encouraged audiences to move across to another medium. At a time when encouraging the repeat consumption of a story in another medium would see publishing houses reproduce illustrations from novels in the pages of newspapers and comic-strip characters migrate beyond news­ papers to films, it is hardly surprising, then, that adaptations of different media forms increased accordingly. But this period’s proliferation of mass consumerism and adaptations had a further impact, this time on the corpo­ rations manufacturing products. As consumer culture bolstered spending habits and encouraged mass distribution, different corporations and media companies began to collaborate with one another more frequently. This was important to the ways in which stories linked together across media in the past. For instance, links between particular media forms are hinted at in retrospective accounts published in Public Opinion Quarterly in the late1930s, which revealed ‘a complementary relationship between movies and magazines’ (Lazarsfeld and Wyant, 1937: 32). The publication concluded that there was ‘a clear positive relationship between the number of movie houses in a city and the readers of magazines: Clearly, movies resulted in an increase in reading’ (Lazarsfeld and Wyant, 1937: 32). This increase can be understood in terms of the connections being built between different media companies at this particular time in order to further spread or extend their own texts across media borders. By the 1920s, for instance, the film industry had grown adept at mar­ keting its films in accordance with the film story’s exposure in other media. Consider the marketing campaign that surrounded the release of In Old Kentucky, a silent film produced in 1919 based on the play of the same name. The film’s marketing campaign included ‘a jazz band [that] paraded about town giving concerts before each performance and the stage setting of the original play served as the setting for the [film’s] prologue’ (The Film Daily, 1920: 180). Such innovative marketing techniques created an immer­ sive media experience for In Old Kentucky, with the fictional story world of the film permeating outside the space of the cinema and spread into the streets as audiences were quite literally steered from the venue of the s­ tory’s theatre to the cinema. This was nothing if not a transmedial attraction, as the spectatorial spaces of multiple entertainments all strategically ­functioned together so to extend a story world across media.

54  Defining Transmedia History But this kind of immersive transmedial attraction emerged from a need on the part of the industries to distribute the mass-produced products of the industrial age. An influx in brand names around the early twentieth century had given rise to the licensing of those brands – spreading them further across other products and media. Broadly, licensing can be defined as a strategy of spreading a product or service beyond the confines of one manufacturer, who issues ‘the rights to manufacture products’ under man­ agement (Jenkins, 2006: 107). In many respects, licensing was itself a logical response to the rise of consumer culture and indeed many of the transfor­ mations identified in this chapter. For as Santo writes, ‘as a professional practice, licensing is linked with the development of mass culture indus­ tries and advertising agencies at the turn of the 20th century’ (2006: 11). In granting rights in property without transferring ownership of it, licensing allows a company to ‘sell the rights to manufacture products using its assets to an often unaffiliated third party’ (Jenkins, 2006: 107). Early forms of licensing media included popular comic-strip characters such as The Yellow Kid and Buster Brown, which were both licensed as the faces of particular consumer products and soon became linked with items such as shoes. While acknowledging such examples as Buster Brown, Santo notes that licensing fully ‘emerged in the 1930s, responding to both changes in copyright law and the nation-wide expansion of media and marketing outlets’ (2006: 13). For Santo, though this era’s ‘early generation of licensers’ (2010: 64) had experimented with licensing property for a particular media form, as had been primarily focused on with Buster Brown, they began to concentrate more so on the business of extending the reach of a brand. Thus the function of licensors became to manage intellectual property across media: This earlier generation of licensers saw themselves as ­simultaneously partnering with and policing [their licensees]… Striking this bal­ ance often enabled licensers to actively participate in the creative ­decision-making processes and demand final approval over how a property was represented. These managerial practices were central to how licensers defined their positions within a field of mass production. (Santo: 2010: 64) Even as it operated at this early stage, the licensing of intellectual prop­ erty across multiple media thereby enabled an intellectual property to be spread far further – across many more outlets – than might have otherwise been possible if it were to have been left in the hands of one company (or one author) alone. Licensing was in this way a system of distribution that operated on the principle of spreading variation on sameness – the same principle that I have said epitomises transmedia storytelling.8 For those rea­ sons, licensing would be central to transmedia storytelling. Chapter 4 will explore this centrality in depth, and specifically I will examine how licensing operated alongside the interconnected corporate management practices of

Contextualising Transmedia Storytelling  55 franchising, merchandising and sponsorships as the driving determinant of transmedia storytelling during the 1920s and 1930s, effectively corporatis­ ing transmedia storytelling at that time. I also explore how these corporate practices provided a heightened author-function that afforded new strate­ gies for building transmedia story worlds.

Media Regulation Going beyond what are perhaps the two most immediately prevalent ­industrial-cultural transformations of the early twentieth century in indus­ trialisation and consumer culture, the role of media regulation in shaping media industry operations in the early twentieth century would also under­ pin the workings of transmedia storytelling at that time. If industrialisa­ tion was all about building the models through which transmedia stories were produced on a mass scale, and consumer culture was about spreading transmedia stories far and wide, then media regulation worked to man­ age the building and spreading of transmedia stories. As was defined at the start of this chapter, by media regulation I am most broadly describing the control or intervening guidance of mass media by governments and other external bodies. ­Specifically, there are two categories of media regulation: First, law (meaning the intellectual property laws including copyright, pat­ ents and trademarks), and, second, policy (meaning ‘softer’ but still enforce­ able ­regulatory controls like government intervention). Understanding the ways in which regulators and government bodies have underpinned and intervened in media industries such as film, radio and television – dictating overlaps and alignments in industry activities – can yield insights into how story worlds can flow across these media. Let’s start by broadly considering this first category of media regulation – law. Peter Decherney looks at how copyright law has been vitally important to ‘the structure of media companies and the art of making movies and television shows’ (2012: 1). He understands copyright as ‘one of the most important drivers of the media’ (2012: 1). For Decherney, copyright law is a directive and enduring instance of media regulation, ‘guiding filmmakers’ artistic decisions, underlying Hollywood’s corporate structure [and] deter­ mining how audiences consume media’ (2012: 2). Santo shows how licens­ ing emerged fully ‘just as previous struggles over copyright ownership were being decided in the courts … in favor of granting greater control to regis­ trants and higher penalties for infringers’ (2006: 13). Thus in understanding the industrial practices and processes by which a fictional narrative extends across multiple media in a historical context, copyright law is essential to these processes. By the turn of the twentieth century, of course, US copyright law had regu­ lated most existing forms of creative work, such as novels, photo­graphy and playwriting. As one advertisement published in The Washington Observer instructed its readers accordingly: ‘If you have a play, sketch, photo, act,

56  Defining Transmedia History song or book that is worth anything, you should copyright it!’ (1891: 44). And in 1912 motion pictures also became subject to copyright protection, as a House of Representatives report explained: The production of … motion pictures … has become a business of vast proportions. The money therein invested is so great and the ­property rights so valuable that the committee is of the opinion that the copy­ right law ought to be so amended as to give to them distinct and defi­ nite recognition and protection. (cited in Maloney, 2012: online) In other words, by 1912 almost all available media forms had been pro­ tected under copyright law. Even in the most general sense, the regulatory effect of copyright law – insofar as it grants the creator of a work exclusive rights to its use and distribution – must underpin the production of all transmedia stories, be it in any industrial setting.9 As was argued in the introduction, a key criterion of all transmedia storytelling is that it must produce a series of media texts that function not as versions of the same story but rather as extensions of one larger story, with authorship crucial to making this happen. Yet in the first decade of the twentieth century, prior to the cinema being subjected to copyright protection, many forms of out­ right copying emerged almost as a hallmark of early US cinema (Decherney, 2012: 19). Thomas Edison, as Decherney argues, built ‘an entire industry on the unauthorized adaptation of books, plays and newspaper cartoons’ (2012: 5) – echoing Musser’s point that early cinema was in some sense reliant on other media forms. Thus while I suggested earlier that early US cinema began as a transmedial phenomenon, borrowing as it so readily did from different literary or theatrical iterations of stories, it is equally true that the deficiency of copyright regulation over the cinema at that time also militated against the rise of transmedia storytelling. After all, the ­regulatory messiness that Decherney describes – whereby any film company could create its own negative from the print of a rival company and sell that film as its own product – had led to multiple, contradictory versions of the same fiction becoming commonplace rather than affording regulated, authored extensions of one larger fiction (Decherney, 2012: 19). The film industry’s early, unauthorised adaptations unsurprisingly caused conflicts within the film industry, and many attempts were made to try and combat this outright copying. One attempt led to the birth of the movie serial, which was primarily borne out of newspaper circulation wars at the turn of the twentieth century. But as a way to minimalise the sorts of copying that characterised the early film industry, magazine editors decided to join forces with movie producers. Rather than multiple parties each producing their own version of stories, why not just work together to tell those stories across media? Continuing well into the 1950s, the movie serial was a product that closely emulated the serialisation of narrative found in the magazines and

Contextualising Transmedia Storytelling  57 comic strips of the early twentieth century – but this time across different media so to try and increase overall sales of a story. Thus as Jason Scott notes, movie serials became ‘closely associated with existing characters in comic strips’ – and later with radio serials (2009: online). As Karlton C. Lahue explains: Newspapers and magazines had been publishing serial stories for some time and the effect was to be noticed in their increased circu­ lation. Readers came back, week after week, to find out ‘What hap­ pened?’ Why not the same thing with motion pictures? After all, if one could bring the same people back week after week, wouldn’t it help business? It was a matter of injecting a bit of certainty into the life of both exhibitor and producer. If he could talk a publisher into collabo­ rating with him, both stood to profit handsomely. The stories would be read in the paper, or magazines, then intertwined stories viewed on the screen, or vice versa. (1964: 6–7) The first movie serial is believed to be 1912’s What Happened to Mary?, which was produced by Thomas Edison and released in collaboration with The Ladies’ World publication. Installments of this particular story appeared ‘in print just before the theatrical exhibition of each episode’ (Singer, 1990: 170), with each print installment narrating events that took place in between the movie serial chapters. The movie serial was in that sense founded on the concept of transmedia storytelling. In creating a narrative that was told across two media, the movie serials emerged most decisively out of the regu­ latory protection of copyright across multiple media industries. There was a realisation on the part of those media that forming industry partnerships and telling a story together across media forms (rather than simply copy­ ing one another) could increase sales (rather than fragmenting the audience with different versions of the same story). Just as the arrival of multi-reel motion pictures would mean a further increase in the number of adaptations being produced,10 the movie serial meant a rise in transmedia storytelling on an industrialised scale as more artists, writers, editors and producers began to collaborate. Chapter 5 will show how such collaborations across multiple media industries also underpinned transmedia storytelling in later decades. As I have indicated, then, the role of copyright on historical transmedia storytelling is both complex and contradictory at best. While some forms of media regulation did in fact militate against possible cases of what is now seen as transmedia storytelling, other forms of regulation were sim­ ply fundamental to its historical development. By the second decade of the twentieth century, US copyright law had expanded to cover so many forms of media that it created a landscape fully capable of enforcing the protec­ tion of intellectual property rights subsisting both in and between different media. And yet as I stated earlier, copyright law was not the only form of media regulation. In what ways might policy – the second category of media

58  Defining Transmedia History regulation – have worked to manage the building and spreading of trans­ media stories? One key aspect of policy is government intervention. As Chapter 5 will show, policies of government intervention have actually forged alignments between media-industry operations, particularly during turbulent socio-­ political moments such as war. Consider how the role of the US c­ inema was dictated by changing government policies upon the dawn of the ­Spanish-American War. Musser notes that with the onset of this particular war ‘towards the end of the nineteenth century, the film industry soon dis­ covered a new role and exploited it, gaining in confidence and size as a result’ (1990: 225). This role was in fact that of a visual newspaper, as ‘exhibitors found ways to tell the story of the war with slides and motion pictures’ in a way that forged a narrative correlation between cinema and newspapers (Musser, 1990: 225). Emerging as a mouthpiece for the political agendas of government, the cinema became a transmedia extension of newspapers as a result. In fact, it was the cinema’s use in this way – its technological status as a moving image that could extend the stories in ­newspapers – that contributed to the commercial foundation of the film industry in the early twentieth century.11 In a more general sense that moves beyond the technological status of the cinema, however, Christopher Coyne and Peter Leeson argue that ‘there is scope for understanding government intervention as a ­corrective’ (2009: 78) – that is, as a policy-making initiative designed to serve the pub­ lic interest. When the First Amendment’s provision on freedom of the press was first designed – an initiative of freedom of communication in the media, one implying the absence of interference from an overarching state – it  was for locally owned print media (Coyne and Leeson, 2009: 78). The ­American legal and legislative system protected the freedom of the press in the early twentieth century, but the emergence of broadcast media such as radio and television as well as other big corporations such as the major ­Hollywood studios posed new challenges to media regulation. One of these new challenges concerned the ways in which media regulation could man­ age variation – and this is where media regulation also works to underpin all transmedia storytelling. Essentially, the various discourses surrounding government intervention as a form of regulation speak of a tension between the standardisation of media products – that is, an overarching governance over what all media should be – and simultaneously the need for both cre­ ative autonomy and media differentiation. For example, policymakers at the FCC – established in 1934 so to consolidate the regulatory ­responsibilities of the Federal Radio Commission and other existing agencies – agree that ‘regulation that promotes diversity in programming and services is in the public interest,’ arguing that ‘the government cannot write media regula­ tion in stone for all eternity’ (Croteau, Hoynes and Milan, 2012: 81). Thus in a strictly conceptual sense, media regulation, much like industrialisa­ tion and consumer culture, is all about allowing variation to emerge from

Contextualising Transmedia Storytelling  59 enforcements of sameness – a tension I use throughout this book as a way to understand why certain transformations were vital to the industrial history of transmedia storytelling. For instance, on the one hand, media regulation can be seen to fortify standardisation of media; it speaks of overarching co-ordination across industries in ways that indicate how standardised regulation was crucial to transmedia storytelling, such as in the Spanish-American War example. Yet on the other hand, the intrinsically different nature of each media form allows for some variation on sameness to emerge – the cinema’s unique technological status as a moving image had fostered this medium as more of a transmedial extension of newspaper-published stories rather than a mere duplication of those stories. Chapter 5 will examine this tension in far greater detail, exploring how the regulation enforced by the government during World War II aided transmedia storytelling despite the production of transmedia stories at that time also requiring smaller and somewhat margin­ alised production contexts. Looking at how the media industries operated during World War II actually shows a key reason why regulatory policies were so important to transmedia storytelling in the past. In short, such regu­ latory polices often worked to bring media industries together, which in turn enabled stories to more easily flow across multiple media. As I explore in depth in Chapter 5, many media industries were closely regulated by the US government during the Second World War; President Roosevelt created the Office of War Information (OWI) to liaise with the likes of the cinema and radio industries to regulate content, managing the messages about the war that were being promoted to audiences.12 And in needing to support the war effort with the same kinds of messages, the OWI’s intermediary position between multiple media industries would allow for fictional char­ acters and stories to extend across those media. The OWI released iterations of characters like Rosie the Riveter, for example – the all-American house­ wife who could take on the responsibilities of the absent male work force – across many media such as print texts, radio and cinema. This message to do with feminism and women’s economic power thus needed to be carefully organised across those different media in order to keep momentum for the support of the war. But both throughout and after World War II, policy more generally would play a defining role in dictating the manner by which the media industries did or did not collaborate. Such policies would lead to strategies of trans­media storytelling that were often specific to the historical period in which they took place. For instance, one case of regulatory policy underpinned by AT&T, the telephone company, informed industry partnerships (or rather a notable lack thereof) between the film and radio industries in the mid-1930s. The film industry’s participation in radio programming had occurred through­ out the 1930s, but before 1938 Hollywood’s involvement in the radio indus­ try was sporadic in comparison to post-1938. Industry partnerships were to be enormously important to transmedia storytelling, and  Michele  Hilmes

60  Defining Transmedia History argues that the rise of Hollywood-based radio p ­ rogramming was indeed contingent on regulatory policies at AT&T (1999: 62). Hilmes discusses this policy at length: Up until 1938, although coast-to-coast long lines were in place, and had been since 1915, the telephone company maintained a policy of charging additional fees over and above normal line charges … for broadcast hook-ups emanating elsewhere than New York City. These charges were based on a policy of figuring fees on a cost-per-circuit-mile basis, rather than actual, or air, distance. Because the major transmitting facilities of both networks were based in New York, AT&T charged the broadcasters on a per-mile basis for the Los Angeles to New York cir­ cuit in addition to charges from New York back out to stations across the country … This practice considerably increased the relative cost of West Coast-originated shows, leading to various problems in pre-1938 Hollywood-radio cooperation. (1999: 62) But after 1938, this policy was reversed following a federal investigation, resulting in the telephone company removing its costly double rates change. This removal led to a sharp increase in the number of Hollywood-­produced radio shows. According to Hilmes, ‘after 1938, the appearance of H ­ ollywood talent on radio and vice versa became so commonplace that it became the rule rather than the exception’ (1999: 65). In fact, Hollywood even became known thereafter as ‘a radio centre as well as the movie capital’ (Hilmes, 1999: 71), which as Hilmes concludes, effectively worked to accelerate ‘a fruitful period of borrowing and cross-interests, each contributing to the other in a symbiotic relationship’ (1999: 70). After 1938, moreover, this symbiotic relationship between the cinema and radio industries manifested in different ways. One of these Hollywood-radio symbioses included ‘a new prototype – a radio series based on the characters or situations of a success­ ful film’ (Hilmes, 1999: 70): Of this new radio prototype, Stella Dallas, a long-running soap-opera prototype, appeared in 1937, the same year that King Vidor’s classic remake of the film … was released. The series ran for 18 ½ years. The Adventures of the Thin Man came on the air in 1941, based on the 1934 film (itself based on the novel by Dashiell Hammett) that starred William Powell and Myrna Loy. (Hilmes, 1999: 70) Stella Dallas marked a clear attempt on the part of the US radio industry to profit from the success of the cinema in a way that extended the narrative of the characters already consumed on the silver screen. Stella Dallas did not repeat the same story that had unfolded in the 1937 film version; instead, it proceeded to narrate another piece of the story, offering what was essentially

Contextualising Transmedia Storytelling  61 a sequel to the film insofar as it followed the main character after the events of that film. This emphasis on building characters across media epitomises a particular trend of the 1940s and 1950s, for as I explore in Chapter 5, these trends would bring strategies for building characters across media. Moving into the early 1950s, indeed, government policies often fought to try and keep the cinema and television industries apart having been reluc­ tant to allow the film industry to retain its monopolistic status, as it once had done throughout the 1930s and 1940s (Schatz, 1999). In some ways Hollywood failed to exploit television during the early 1950s as a new dis­ tribution outlet for its films.13 But in other ways this failure led to the rise of marginal independent syndication companies, which began creating a wealth of filmed programming – or ‘telefilms’ – specifically for the television market (Boddy, 1992). In Chapter 5 I will explore why the strategies of small-time indepen­ dent companies and their telefilm products that sat at the margins of the tele­vision industry were in fact so important to transmedia storytelling at that time. Specifically, I examine how different categories and configura­ tions of industry partnerships during the course of the 1940s and 1950s worked as a determinant of transmedia storytelling in that era. I trace how ­regulation-informed industry partnerships brought about whole new strate­ gies for character-building across multiple media. Indeed, while Chapters 3 and  4 both acknowledge the importance of copyright law on transmedia story­telling in the earliest decades of the twentieth century, Chapter 5 looks at how policy-based media regulation underpinned the industry partner­ ships across media industries that determined transmedia storytelling in the 1940s and 1950s. And by industry partnerships I mean the sorts of intensi­ fying working relationships and content-sharing between media industries that enabled creative personnel to work across media industries. As I now look ahead to the rest of this book, at this point it is useful to stress that while much of this particular chapter has gestured to how historically conditioned strategies of transmedia storytelling materialised quite neatly out of certain industrial or cultural configurations of the early to mid-twentieth century, that is not to say that the industrial history of transmedia storytelling was somehow inevitable. Throughout the remainder of this book I will actually show how the often incongruent, incoherent and utterly indecisive pull of history militated against transmedia storytelling as often as it drove its evolution. Nevertheless, in this chapter I have at least begun to show how the industrial history of transmedia storytelling was largely the amalgamation of alignments between three broader contingencies harking back to the turn of the twentieth century. Industrialisation, con­ sumer culture and media regulation were all equally important to transmedia storytelling throughout the first half of the twentieth century; all three would impact equally upon how narratives came to cross media during this time. But my emphasis on exactly how contingencies underpinned trans­ media storytelling will differ across each of the ensuing chapters. While

62  Defining Transmedia History industrialisation, consumer culture and media regulation all impacted on how transmedia storytelling worked in all three of my chosen story worlds, Chapter 3 looks at how industrialisation (particularly its developments in advertising) afforded world-building in the 1900s and 1910s; Chapter 4 looks at how consumer culture (and particularly the practices associated with corporate authorship’s managerial function that emerged at this time) afforded authorship to build story worlds across media in the 1920s and 1930s; and Chapter 5 looks at how media regulation (and particularly the industry partnerships it dictated) afforded character-building in the 1940s and 1950s. I should note that these pairings are not necessarily mutually exclusive; advertising likely afforded as many character-building strategies as it did world-building ones. Equally, the characteristics and principles of character-building, world-building and authorship are equally rele­ vant to each of the story worlds examined throughout this book, and yet ­Chapters 3, 4 and 5 each emphasise one of the three characteristics while still acknowledging the other two. This is done so to most clearly identify the relationships between particular determinants and the specific strategies for telling stories across media that those determinants engender. Taken altogether, then, the remaining chapters will effectively demon­ strate the industrial history of transmedia storytelling between 1900 and 1958 in the US. So let’s now go back to the beginning of this industrial his­ tory, as I explore how the emergence of modern advertising brought about strategies for building the Oz story world across multiple media…

Notes 1. Also see Eric L. Jones, Locating the Industrial Revolution: Inducement and Response (London: World Scientific Publishing Co. Ltd., 2010). 2. See, for example, Daniel H. Borus, Twentieth-Century Multiplicity: American Thought and Culture, 1900–1920 (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009); Susan L. Mizruchi, The Rise of Multicultural America: Economy and Print Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); William Uricchio and Roberta E. Pearson, Reframing Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph Quality Films (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); and Neil Tonge, Industrialisation and Society, 1750–1914 (New York: Nelson Thornes Ltd., 1993). 3. See Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Ano­ nymous History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1969). 4. See “Cycle & Carriage Co. – Look Out!,” Malay Mail (1906). 5. Of course the idea of producing variation on sameness is also what genre pro­ duction is based on. 6. Celia Lury traces branding to the mid-nineteenth century, a time when brand­ ing was first used by soap manufacturers. Branding of soap through packaging was a strategy designed to transform the name of the soap product – and its manufacturer – into ‘a symbol which evokes a series of meanings which come to serve as an interpretive frame.’ As Catherine Johnson notes, ‘consumers were not simply buying soap, but were purchasing a set of attributes created

Contextualising Transmedia Storytelling  63 by the packaging of the soap.’ See Celia Lury, Brands: The Logos of the Global ­Economy (London: Routledge, 2004), 18–19; Roberta Sassatelli, Consumer Culture: History, ­Theory, and Politics (London: Sage, 2007), 127; and Catherine ­Johnson, Branding Television (London: Routledge, 2011), 2. 7. See Matthew Freeman, “Branding Consumerism: Cross-media Characters and Story-worlds at the Turn of the 20th Century,” The International Journal of Cultural Studies 18:6 (2015): 629–644. 8. Johnson argues the process of spreading variation on sameness also ­epitomises media franchises more generally. See Derek Johnson, Media Franchising: ­Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries (New York: New York ­University Press, 2013), 107. 9. Of course, Decherney rightly points out that while copyright does in fact protect authors, it does so only as a by-product of its primary function: ‘At least in the United States, copyright’s goal, at least as it is stated in the Constitution, is to “promote the progress of science.”’ See Peter Decherney, Hollywood’s Copyright Wars: From Edison to the Internet (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 3. 10. The rise in multi-reel films also enabled the cinema to more easily recreate and re-enact the stories of literature and theatre. See Paolo Cherchi Usai, Silent ­Cinema: An Introduction (London: BFI Publishing, 2000). 11. See Charles Musser (1990) The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907. New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, p. 225. 12. See, for example, Clayton R. Koppes, “Regulating the Screen: The Office of War Information and the Production Code Administration,” in Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s, by Thomas Schatz. (Berkeley: University of ­California Press, 1999), 262–284. Also see George H. Roeder, Jr., The Censored War: American Visual Experience during World War Two (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). 13. However, Janet Wasko also reminds us that Hollywood ‘participated in tele­ vision’s evolution during the decade and established a strong relationship that eventually led to the integration of these two industries.’ See Janet Wasko, “Hollywood and Television in the 1950s: The Roots of Diversification,” in Transforming the Screen, 1950–1959, ed. Peter Lev, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 146.

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64  Defining Transmedia History Charney, Leo and Schwartz, Vanessa R. eds. Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995. “Coca-Cola – Fun Food for All!” Radio Mirror, May 1934. “Copyright Will Protect You from Pirates.” The Washington Observer, ­September 21, 1891. Coyne, Christopher J. and Leeson, Peter T. Media, Development, and Institutional Change. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd., 2009. Cronin, Anne M. Advertising, Commercial Spaces and the Urban. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Croteau, David, Hoynes, William and Milan, Stefania. Media/Society: Industries, Images, and Audiences. London: Sage, 2012. Crowley, David and Heyer, Paul. Communication in History: Technology, Culture, Society. Cambridge: Pearson, 2010. “Cycle & Carriage Co. – Look Out!.” Malay Mail, 1906. Davis, James C. Commerce in Color: Race, Consumer Culture, and American ­Literature, 1893–1933. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Cambridge: Zone Books, 1994. Decherney, Peter. Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became ­American. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Decherney, Peter. Hollywood’s Copyright Wars: From Edison to the Internet. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Fang, Irving. A History of Mass Communication: Six Information Revolutions. ­London: Focal Press, 1997. Filene, Edward. “The Present Status and Future Prospects of Chains of D ­ epartment Stores.” Address delivered before the American Economic Association, ­December 27, 1927. Film Daily, The, January 19, 1920. Film Daily, The, June 6, 1920. Foster, Mark S. From Streetcar to Superhighway: American City Planners and Urban Transportation, 1900–1940. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981. Freeman, Matthew. “Branding Consumerism: Cross-media Characters and ­Story-worlds at the Turn of the 20th Century.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 18:6 (2015): 629–644. Giedion, Sigfried. Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1969. Gordon, Ian. Comic Strips and Consumer Culture 1890–1945. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998. Hilmes, Michele. Hollywood and Broadcasting: From Radio to Cable. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Hilmes, Michele. Connections: A Broadcast History Reader. Belmont, CA: ­Wadsworth Publishing Co., 2001. Hilmes, Michele and Loviglio, Jason, eds. Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural ­Artistry of Radio. London: Routledge, 2001. Hopkins, Eric. Industrialisation and Society: A Social History, 1830–1951. London: Routledge, 2000. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Johnson, Catherine. Branding Television. London: Routledge, 2011. Johnson, Derek. Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries. New York: New York University Press, 2013.

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66  Defining Transmedia History Sassatelli, Roberta. Consumer Culture: History, Theory, and Politics. London: Sage, 2007. Schatz, Thomas. Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Schneider, Ralf. “Shocking Readers: The Genres of Victorian Popular Fiction, the Classes and the Book Markets.” In The Making of English Popular Culture, edited by John Storey, 118–130. London: Routledge, 2016. Simonson, Peter. Reconfiguring Mass Communication: A History. Champaign: ­University of Illinois Press, 2010. Singer, Ben. “Female Power in the Serial-Queen Melodrama.” Camera Obscura 22 (January 1990): 90–129. Storey, John, ed. The Making of English Popular Culture. London: Routledge, 2016. Sullivan, Arthur and Sheffrin, Steven M. Economics: Principles in Action. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2003. Tonge, Neil. Industrialisation and Society, 1750–1914. New York: Nelson Thornes Ltd., 1993. Usai, Paolo Cherchi. Silent Cinema: An Introduction. London: BFI Publishing, 2000. Wasko, Janet. “Hollywood and Television in the 1950s: The Roots of Diversification.” In Lev, Peter, ed. Transforming the Screen, 1950–1959. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, 127–146. Wolf, Mark J. P. Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of ­Subcreation. New York: Routledge, 2012.

Part II

Exploring Transmedia History

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3 1900–1918 From Fin-de-Siècle to Fairy-Worlds: L. Frank Baum, the Land of Oz and Advertising

Towards the end of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a novel written by L. Frank Baum and first published in Chicago on May 17, 1900, the ­story’s mystical Wizard is revealed to be nothing more than a circus imposter, a trickster whose hot-air balloon had once accidentally drifted into the magical Land of Oz some time ago. This Wizard of Oz is a professional con man who creates a realm of illusions, each of which – including the ‘spectacular brightness and glory of the Emerald City’ (Baum, 1900a: 80) – ­ultimately owe their glamour to a visual ruse. For Stuart Culver, the ruses of the ­Emerald City symbolise the powerful lure of industrialisation and mass production (1988: 103) that Mark McGurl pinpoints as an embodi­ ment of early twentieth-century urban America (2011: 686). Frank ­Kelleter even goes so far as to describe The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as itself a story both of and about America (2012: 23). He points to the book’s narrative journey from the desolate, grey farmyard of the story’s beginning to the vibrant, colourful Land of Oz experienced thereafter as a transition that mirrors early ­twentieth-century America’s own transformation from what was a predominantly rural-farming economy to what hence became an urban-manufacturing landscape (2012: 23). As indicated in the previous chapter, cities including the likes of Chicago, New York and Los Angeles witnessed the full force of industrialisation as new models of mass production intensified the reproduction of everything from consumer items such as cars to media texts such as books. The turn of the century also became characterised by a cultural turn towards spec­ tacle with its high-rise advertising billboards, glitzy department-store win­ dows, colourful newspaper comic strips and magical, character-filled cinema screens that came to flood the city streets. Each of these forms exploited similar powers of illusion, effectively transforming audiences into buyers, lured towards an Emerald City of industrialisation. In effect, it was the beginnings of what Debord famously characterised as the ‘Society of the Spectacle’ (1994). This chapter examines the industrial-cultural configurations of this period that would enable the Land of Oz story world to be constructed as a transmedial fiction during a historical period rarely discussed in transmedial terms. Understanding how this could have happened can only be done by

70  Exploring Transmedia History contextualising the production of this story world’s texts within the broader transformations of the period. The chapter posits that advertising, which I showed in Chapter 2 to have become a more industrialised practice around the end of the nineteenth century, was the driving determinant of transmedia storytelling around that particular time – enabling story worlds to be both shareable and immensely drillable in their storytelling. Specifically, this chapter has two aims. First, it will consider how in cut­ ting across different media at the turn of the twentieth century, advertising – coinciding with the rise of mass media such as newspaper comic strips and the cinema – formed an alignment across multiple media that enabled story worlds to flow across too. Second, this chapter traces the links between this period’s advertising and the strategies for world-building across multi­ ple media that it afforded. World-building, to re-cite Jenkins’ definition, is ‘the process of designing a fictional universe’ that can hold multiple stories together across multiple media (2006: 335). Chapter 1 highlighted prequels, sequels, the expansion of backstory, the addition of world mythology, the expansion of the known timeline and the exploration of new story settings as components of world-building. I will now identify four categories driven by the advertising of the early 1900s that afforded world-building during this time. These categories revolved around spectacle, comic-strip characters, colour and posters and reviews, which all afforded transmedia stories to materialise both as intertextual and as inter-textual cultural phenomena. So in what ways might advertising have underpinned world-building? In the first part of this chapter I outline these four categories as part of the broader cultural trends related to advertising in the early 1900s. The idea is to lay out the general information concerning these four different categories of advertising at the start of the chapter, before then analysing how those advertising categories informed specific strategies for building the Land of Oz story world in the ensuing sections. I show how the promotional use of spectacle, comic-strip characters, colour and posters all constituted both advertising and storytelling – meaning that fictions could move across media as storytelling and as promotion for further storytelling. The chapter will then move on to demonstrate how advertising strate­gies of colour, spectacle and comic-strip character manifested in the Oz ­novels and their extensions across other media such as theatre productions, news­ paper comic strips and mock promotional newspapers – bringing with them new strategies for building the Land of Oz story world across mul­ tiple media. I also examine how the promotion of materials like posters and reviews in trade press and newspapers functioned as further tools for transmedia world-building. Last, the chapter looks at what happened when the Land of Oz story world moved to the cinema, where I argue that the advertising strategies discussed throughout this chapter were still insuffi­ cient for world-building at a time when strict social-class divides lingered, problematising Baum’s efforts to point audiences from one medium to another. ­Ultimately I show in this chapter how the model of transmedia

1900–1918  71 storytelling in the 1900s and 1910s, informed by developments of indus­ trialisation, would offer wonderful transmedia adventures but often failed commercially. The specific media forms studied in this chapter altogether span novels, maps, theatre plays, newspapers – including comic strips and ‘faux’ newspapers – films, posters and trade press.

Industrialisation and Advertising Mapping the complex ways in which L. Frank Baum constructed The ­Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a transmedial entertainment means first re-­establishing the context of industrialisation at the turn of the twentieth century. As demon­ strated in Chapter 2, the late-nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth century saw the ongoing transformation of America into an urban-manufacturing economy of industrialised mass production. In turn, this ongoing transformation prompted, as James D. Norris writes, ‘a major trans­ formation in the behaviour of American consumers’ (1990: xiii). And nowhere is this transformation better illustrated than in advertising, since its own deve­ lopment triggered or at least coincided with other major industrial-cultural transformations that dictated other industries for decades to come. A 1909 article published in Life magazine entitled ‘New York City, Is It Worth It?’ discussed advertising in the context of the metropolis and its ‘frantic onslaught of spectacle’ (1). A commercially driven institution of cultural reproduction, the newly industrialised advertising of this period played a crucial role in the ‘intense fracturing of the urban experience’ (Life, 1909: 1), but it also formed a rapid alignment between various spectacles of this American urban experience. ‘For the first time’, as Susan Mizruchi notes, ‘advertisements, literature, and images from photographic to painterly became packaged together as mutually enhancing products’ (2008: 139). But while advertising may have underpinned an alignment that cut across mul­ tiple media, both as a concept and as an industry it was certainly not a new phenomenon in 1900. In 1758, Samuel Johnson reputedly said that ‘ads are now so numerous that they are negligently perused’ (Williams, 1980: 172), further arguing that ‘the trade of advertising is now so near to perfection that it is not easy to propose any improvement’ (Williams, 1980: 172). But the ongoing developments in mass production around this particular time – together with the concurrent rise of new mass media – led to modern advertising strategies based around branding potential. The new low-cost printing technologies detailed in Chapter 2 meant an influx in promotional materials. Billboards, posters and shop windows all began to use such new forms of technology and mass production, with spectacle, colour and even comic-strip characters all prioritised as advertising mechanisms. Advertising in this sense formed an alignment that connected different forms of media and cultural spaces together as spaces of promotion and as entertainment simultaneously. As Roberta Sassatelli explains, ‘the advertising world and occupies an intermediate position, between production and consumption,

72  Exploring Transmedia History commodities and art, materiality and symbolic forms. … Advertising may function as melting pots … for complex flows of knowledge’ (2007: 126). Advertising was now essentially a language – a strikingly visual language – that was fast permeating across the borders of many media, ‘linking each institution to its neighbors on the boulevard’ (Sandberg, 1995: 321–322). Much contemporary wisdom assumes that this language of advertising ‘falls under the soulless rubric of promotion’, as David Kushner wrote in Fast Company magazine (2008: online). Kushner argues that fundamen­ tally ‘promotion has nothing to do with developing or expanding an estab­ lished narrative’ (2008: online). In contrast, this chapter will show how ­advertising’s permeation across the borders of different cultural forms and media at the turn of the twentieth century actually enabled fictional ­stories, colourful characters and spectacled story worlds to permeate across the bor­ ders of multiple media. Bill Kovarik asserts that ‘until about 1906, advertis­ ing in the United States resembled a lawless frontier’ (2011: 171). Yet this partial lawlessness allowed for individuals as well as the advertising agencies emerging at this time to carve out new innovations. And the era’s advertising permeation can actually be explored via the early career of author L. Frank Baum. Though I stress that transmedia storytelling at this time should be best understood as the result of far larger contextual contingencies revolv­ ing around developments in industrialisation, the role of authorial agency within these larger contingencies certainly played a crucial function. Baum, writer of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz novel as well as an array of other stories across media, had dabbled in a host of extensive business activities prior to writing novels. He worked as a promoter, a playwright, a news­ paper publisher and was even a pioneer of window dressing. Each of these experiences would be crucial to the construction of the Land of Oz as a transmedia story world. And this importance was rooted in the author’s ability to develop his fictional story world according to the emerging tech­ niques of advertising, using promotional strategies of spectacle, character, colour and even posters as storytelling apparatus. Consider the sort of writing that Baum was doing when he first began writing stories, which revolved around the role of spectacle in promotion. Kovarik notes that the ‘industrial media that emerged in the late-nineteenth century depended on advertising for most of its revenue, and advertisers increasingly discovered that it was the power of imagery that could attract consumers and build fortunes’ (2011: 163). Baum published a treatise on window dressing that epitomised this idea of advertising as a power of imagery. The treatise was titled The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows and Interiors and was published in 1900, the same year, notably, as he also wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. In ‘helping to mould the tastes of the rising middle class’ (Davis, 2006: 292), window dressing was a form of advertising that encapsulated a central alignment between storytelling and promotion; window dressing used the visual artistry of finely dressed store windows precisely to attract consumers before then steering them in-store

1900–1918  73 towards related products. While this use of spectacle as a way to point audiences would bring ways of expanding a story world in the theatre, as I demonstrate later, at this stage Baum describes the fundamental aim of the window dresser as follows: How can a window sell goods? By placing them before the public in such a manner that the observer has a desire for them and enters the store to make the purchase. Once in, the customer may see other things she wants, and no matter how much she purchases under these conditions, the credit of the sale belongs to the window. (1900b: 146 [emphasis added]) Baum’s entire approach to advertising was centered on this simple idea – that promotion can itself be a form of entertainment, and that in turn promotion can lead to the consumption of entertainment time and time again. This idea would have huge implications for how transmedia stories began to manifest; for Jenkins, ‘creating transmedia storyworlds’ is itself the process of ‘under­ standing how to appeal to migratory audiences’ (2008: online). In today’s media landscape, promotional materials such as trailers and online adver­ tising play a central role in the building of transmedia story worlds. But at the turn of the twentieth century, different advertising strategies first began to build transmedia story worlds. But how might dressed windows be useful for understanding transmedia world-building at this time? The answer to this question is rooted in the way that promotional win­ dows became forms of both storytelling and of media consumption. For instance, Baum described a number of strategies for catching the attention of window shoppers and turning them into ‘absorbed spectators’ (1900b: 8) – strategies that concerned spectacle and which later became important to the author’s construction of Oz as a story world across media. Baum termed one of these attention-catching techniques the ‘illusion window’, which was ‘sure to arouse the curiosity of the observer’ (1990b: 82). The ‘illusion window,’ as Stuart Culver elaborates, was ‘an eruption of theatre into the centers of commercial activity, becom[ing] for Baum a whole new medium of artistic expression, one characterized by a tension between commercial and aes­ thetic interests’ (Culver, 1988: 233). These store windows used mannequins, mirrors, lights and curtains – and thus exploited spectacle so to transform, in Baum’s words, the ‘passive throng’ on the street into a migratory audience of ‘absorbed spectators’ (1900b: 8). Of course the basic idea of conceptualising promotional dressed win­ dows as a form of storytelling for encouraging further consumption was not actually Baum’s. This idea was first envisioned by store keepers. The New York Times reported in 1901 that ‘it was not until the department stores appeared, with their wealth of different merchandise, housed in splendid light and airy new buildings, that the full art of window dressing began to spring up’ (5). And during this time, ‘store keepers realized that in the

74  Exploring Transmedia History show window lay a great possibility’, one wherein ‘the objects of the show window can be made to induce customers to enter the place’ (The New York Times, 1901: 5) – transforming window shoppers into media audi­ ences, each gazing upon a screen. But it was Baum’s treatise that had made the storytelling requirement of window dressing most explicit: ‘The window dresser must have both the talent for letting objects tell some legible story’ as well as the ability to ‘induce trade’ (1900b: 233). As Erika D. Rappaport also reinforces, ‘customers were asked to see buying not as an economic act but rather as a … cultural event’ (1995: 132). In this sense, window dressing continued to push the cultural transformation of promotion into entertain­ ment,1 as promotional windows became a way of telling stories, and hence came to resemble the storytelling of media. Unsurprisingly, this transformation of shopping into storytelling estab­ lished a discourse in newspapers and magazines. ‘Most impressive of all,’ wrote the Daily Chronicle in March 1909 of window dressing, ‘were the lights and shadows behind the drawn curtains of the great range of windows suggesting that a wonderful play was being arranged’ (1909a: 21). Another Daily Chronicle report made the theatre connection even more explicit, describing the window-gazing crowd as ‘spectators of a tableau in some drama of fashion’, with the window described as ‘a painted background … depicting a scene’ (1909b: 14). As shop windows therefore contributed to what Rappaport describes as ‘a new visual landscape in which the street had been turned into a theatre and the crowd had become an audience of a dra­ matic fashion show’ (1995: 134), advertising certainly formed an alignment between promotion and entertainment, with both essentially connected by the concept of spectacle. Such a spectacle-based alignment between promotion and entertainment may have served as an apparatus for selling and as an apparatus for selling via storytelling, as Jonathan Gray has discussed in relation to the trans­ media storytelling of the digital age, but this alignment extended far beyond the windows of city-bound department stores to reach the realm of media. One example of entertainment and promotion aligning at the turn of the ­twentieth century was the way in which the leisure of reading new magazines became so closely related with the leisure of shopping, steering r­ eaders from the pages of magazines to the stores of produce. Mizruchi notes that ‘adver­ tising expenditures rose from $50 million just after the Civil War to over $500 million by the century’s end’ (2008: 138). Magazines of this period, developing in the post-Civil War period as a platform to meet the growing need to advertise the new products of the industrial age, built upon many of the same techniques of advertising that characterised window dressing. For one, magazines carried advertisements, enticing readers with images of spec­ tacle with the aim of pointing them elsewhere, typically across platforms to other related products. Popular magazines such as Punch, for example, car­ ried advertisements for various brands of cigarettes, cross-promoting them.2 In tune with catering for the comfort provided by pleasing the senses of spectacle, magazines thus grew glossier.

1900–1918  75 Importantly, this glossy cross-promotion of magazines meant that the relationship between advertisers and magazine editors became understood in terms of their reciprocity; magazines were increasingly perceived as a ­product that promoted a new marketplace. Book publishers, newspaper editors and department-store owners all ‘recognized how fully implicated they were in the business end of their enterprises’ (Mizruchi, 2008: 138). M ­ izruchi reit­ erates that the very idea of ‘readers as consumers, along with a heightened awareness of their own commercial prospects, preoccupied authors of the time in a way never before seen’ (2008: 144). In other words, advertising infiltrated the everyday work of book publishers and newspaper editors to such an extent that both media and advertising began to utilise the same conceptions, such as spectacle, characters and colour. In turn, this created a situation where the fictions of the former could move across into the forms of the latter, operating as both storytelling and as promotion for further storytelling. Michael Saler has explored how the use of advertising inside the diegesis of a fictional media text began to become more common around the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For example, in reference to the novel He, written by Andrew Lang and Walter Herries Pollock in 1887, Saler highlights how the book discusses ways to sell advertising within the prose of the story itself: ‘The wine was procured, as I would advise every African traveler to do, from Messrs’ (2012: 73). Saler suggests that a subtle reference such as this may have pointed readers from text to product. Given that fictional stories such as He began to share this kind of recipro­ cal relationship with advertising, pointing readers from a text to a product, it is understandable why fictional characters soon began to be exploited as forms of advertising. Characters (or rather dressed mannequins) had played a key role in the spectacle of window dressing of course, but that is ­nothing compared to how fin-de-siècle newspapers – and their comic strips, in ­particular – began to use fictional characters as advertising cyphers. It is worth briefly outlining the broader role played by comic-strip characters as advertising avatars within the newspaper industry around this particular time. I do this not to examine character-building specifically, which is the focus of Chapter 5, but rather to show how comic-strip characters as adver­ tising came to epitomise newspaper comics, which worked to build story worlds in the process. The newspaper industry, in particular, became an important media hub for selling fictions and for selling fictions via storytelling. It was around the turn of the twentieth century when the newspaper industry first started to conceive of fictional characters as commercial entities that could cross platforms and point audiences towards other related texts and products. An  article published in Printers’ Ink magazine in 1904 estimated that approximately 50 percent of that year’s total advertising expenditures existed to create property in business trademarks (32). These trademarks, as Gordon continues, ‘contributed to the … creation of a national culture of consumption fixated on images’ (1998: 53). Michael Schudson argues that ‘what people shared was the name, or rather the image of the commodity’

76  Exploring Transmedia History (1993: 221). As an example of this image-sharing, the emerging newspaper comic strips of the early twentieth century further transformed ‘the process of consumption – advertisement, purchase and use – into entertainment’ (Gordon, 1998: 105), in much the same way as shopping. That is to say that the image of a comic-strip character became a commercial tool, an advertising avatar for pointing readers towards other texts. Afforded by the new colour printing technologies of the late nineteenth century discussed previously, newspaper comic strips, as Gordon elaborates, were indeed best understood as promotional devices primarily. Says Gordon: ‘Commer­ cial uses came to define comic art to such a strong degree that comic strip characters, particularly, at times seemed less storytelling devices and more ciphers, or business trademarks, that sold a range of products, which inci­ dentally included comic strips’ (1998: 12). Historians generally agree that the first use of comic-strip characters as advertising avatars in this way was Richard F. Outcault’s The Yellow Kid comic in 1895. The Yellow Kid initiated a kind of cultural craze that demonstrated that a comic-strip character could effectively sell newspapers (Gordon, 1998: 14). In fact, by the end of 1895, the circulation figures for the World newspaper, where the comic strips of The Yellow Kid ran weekly, reached half a million copies – a figure that represented a 100  p ­ ercent increase for the newspaper at this particular time. As such, characters such as the Yellow Kid earned comic strips an institutionalised place in American newspapers, coming to be used as that which encouraged readers to return to newspapers again and again. Much more than this, comic strips soon acquired a mass appeal, and following the success of The Yellow Kid ­Richard Outcault began licensing another popular comic strip, Buster Brown, to the manufacturers of a far wide range of related consumer products and media texts. Gordon argues that only with Buster Brown – a character created in 1902 for the New York Herald newspaper – did comic strips reach their full potential as advertising avatars, noting that ‘the importance of [their] marketing is that they were intended from the start to be licensed to other products’ (1998: 43). As mentioned previously in Chapter 2, popular news­ paper comic-strip characters such as Buster Brown were licensed as the faces of consumer products and became linked with various other items. Beyond becoming the face of consumer products, which included the likes of shoes and toys, Buster Brown became the star of a wealth of other media texts. In fact, 1905 saw the opening of a new Buster Brown theatre production, while a number of Buster Brown novels had begun publication in 1904. It was the character’s construction as an advertising avatar for the sale of other texts and stories that encouraged a transmedial function for the character, facilitating intertextual connections between different texts in ways that pointed audiences across media. Here’s one example: In an advertisement printed beneath the latest Buster Brown comic strip in 1904, readers were asked to ‘send a two-cent stamp’ to the comic strip’s publishing house. In exchange they received ‘a copy of Buster Brown’s Birthday book’

1900–1918  77 (The New York Times, 1904: 11). More than merely pointing readers from one media text to another, moreover, this particular example in The New York Times hints at the ways in which newspaper comic-strip characters were at once apparatus for selling additional texts and apparatus for selling such texts via storytelling – a key dynamic of all transmedia storytelling. What’s more, alongside this strategy of assigning a character to a range of products so to better advertise and sell those products, the application of consistently selected colour schemes to a product or to a series of products hence became understood by many advertisers as a means of advertising products across platforms (Cronin, 2010: 55). Colour, as an actual advertis­ ing strategy, became a way of encouraging consumers to buy more and more related products in a way that echoes the consumerist ideology at the heart of transmedia storytelling. A good example includes the use of colour litho­ graphy in the advertising of cigarette cartons. Tobacco companies would produce colour trade cards and tin tags so to better advertise their tobacco products and build their brand. For instance, taking advantage of the new colour printing technologies, industrialists such as James B. Duke trans­ formed the printing of cigarette cards – once a simple means of stiffening packaging – into an expansive advertising strategy. Duke began printing the brand name of the cigarettes along with a single colour picture that was part of a larger picture and which was designed to be collected. Images of birds, flags, Civil War generals and baseball players were scattered across count­ less cigarette cartons. Each card offered snippets of historical or educational information that could only be fully gauged by collecting the entire series (Hatcher, 1998: online). Conceptually, this colour-coding ­strategy brings to mind the idea of extensions designed to build a larger house, which I have shown earlier in the book to be a way of connecting the mass production techniques of the early twentieth century with the transmedia storytelling of the twenty-first century. Conceptually, indeed, the colour-coding strategies of this period’s ciga­ rette cartons have much in common with transmedia storytelling. Just as the latter is essentially a process where ‘elements’ of a larger product operate as ‘dispersed components’ of a ‘unified experience’ (Jenkins, 2006: 334), so too was the process of colour coding in the tobacco advertising of the early twentieth century. Colour coding signalled the connections between each card in the series, which when collected formed a larger entity in much the same way as a story world. The connection to window dressing is also apparent: Combining spectacle with business, window dressers required, as The New York Times once stated, ‘good artistry and an eye for color com­ binations’ (The New York Times, 1902: 27). Spectacle, character and colour were in fact common advertising techniques that overlapped with story­ telling, allowing fictions to spread across media by becoming promotion. Other prominent instances of this dynamic happening include the period’s rising proliferation of posters, guidebooks and related promotional mate­ rials. These materials, too, had been a preoccupation of Baum’s during his

78  Exploring Transmedia History early career. Baum first produced his own posters and guidebooks to accom­ pany his business role as an agent for his family’s firm, Baum’s Castorine, a role that led to his own fancy-goods business named Baum’s Bazaar shortly before the turn of the twentieth century. In later years posters advertising Baum’s novels commonly emphasised colour and spectacle while using Baum as the ‘character’ that linked each of these various novels together. In one example from 1901, a poster labelled ‘L. Frank Baum and His Popu­ lar Books for Children’, advertising a number of Baum’s works including The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Army Alphabet (1900), Mother Goose in Prose (1897) and Father Goose (1899), Baum’s name and image were centralised in the middle of the poster as the primary selling feature, with the author’s various stories scattered around the edge of the poster, each grouped by colour. The broader significance of the poster on this period’s transmedia story­ telling lay in its visual language. The poster – much like the department-store window – operated as a ‘screen’ that was designed to attract the attention of consumers before pointing them across other media, using things like spec­ tacle, character and colour as both storytelling and as promotion. Maurice Talmeyr, a social commentator writing in 1896, said that ‘the poster is indeed the art of this age’ (216). For Marcus Verhagen, too, the arrival of posters ‘revolutionized the entertainment business’ as a ‘manifestation of the emer­ gence of … other mass cultural forms’ (1995: 136). Essentially, the poster was in this way a component or a part of something else – operating cultur­ ally like an ‘extension’ to a ‘house’ linked together by common features. As I indicated earlier, then, each of these aforementioned promotional strategies of spectacle, character, colour and even posters indeed began to fuse into the fictional writing of authors such as L. Frank Baum – and would therein become fundamental to transmedia storytelling at this particular time. Having outlined a number of the key ways in which new forms of industrialised advertising around the turn of the twentieth century created a cultural moment wherein promotion and storytelling aligned, I will now move on to explore how these various promotional strategies manifested first in the early Oz novels and second in their narrative extensions in other media. If advertising strategies based around spectacle, comic-strip charac­ ters, colour and posters exemplified the ability to both sell and to sell via storytelling, then in what ways might these particular promotional strate­ gies have afforded storytelling strategies for holding fictional story worlds together across multiple media and for pointing audiences across those media? Let’s start by digging into the advertising strategy of colour.

Colour So, how did Baum use advertising strategies to both establish and build his Land of Oz story world? First, indeed, he used colour. Understanding colour as an advertising-based strategy for world-building actually goes straight to

1900–1918  79 the heart of what Saler understands to be a key relationship between ‘the emergence of a new form of children’s literature’ that emerged around the late nineteenth century and this particular style of literature’s turn towards ‘creating notable imaginary worlds’ (2012: 39). Saler even begins to sug­ gest that ‘the sheer profusion of visual representations, abetted by a con­ current rise of professional advertising’ (2012: 39) was behind this kind of world-building, working to ‘absorb young readers in worlds of fantasy’ that best characterised this new form of children’s literature (2012: 38). Baum in fact combined much of his aforementioned early career experi­ ences and insights in publishing, entrepreneurship and advertising with his creative imagination when writing his children’s literature about scarecrows, witches and a mysterious land called Oz. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was published by the George M. Hill Company, a small trade bindery based in Chicago that happened to side-line in book publishing. The iconic story sees Dorothy, a young Kansas farm girl, whisked away from her K ­ ansas farmhouse by a destructive cyclone only to emerge in a magical fairy-world known as the Land of Oz. There she is greeted by a host of colourful char­ acters such as the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman and the Cowardly Lion. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was both written and indeed promoted whole­ heartedly as a children’s novel of the popular American fairy-tale tradition, albeit one that promised ‘a modernized fairy tale,’ as Baum famously put it, where ‘the wonderment and joy are retained and the heart-aches and night­ mares are left out’ (1900a: 1). And so to articulate this wonderful world of modernised wonderment, Baum drew readily on the power of colour. First off, Baum very much believed that in order to capture the attention of the child readership, the book’s intended demographic, he required colour illustrations. Remember that ‘advertisers increasingly discovered that it was the power of imagery that could attract consumers’ (Kovarik, 2011: 163). Baum and his illustrator W. W. Denslow hence created twenty-four colour plates and a hundred two-colour illustrations. Even with the new colour printing techno­ logies that made this plan a reality, the use of such extensive colour illustra­ tions was an ambitious and expensive scheme at the time. In a move that would repeat itself in many of Baum’s later ventures, the author self-financed much of the printing costs himself. And yet the colour printing technologies readily associated with the era’s advertising gimmicks – such as the earlier outlined tobacco example – afforded Baum a chance not only to include illustrations in the book but also to apply those same methods of colour-­ coding used for tobacco cards to his storytelling, constructing the Land of Oz by colour. Geographical cornerstones of Baum’s story world were actually divided according to colour: The Gillikin Country was purple; the ­Munchkins lived in a blue space; the Winkies were yellow; the Quadlings were red; and the denizens of the Emerald City were famously green. Hence as Dorothy journeyed through the fairyland throughout the pages of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the book’s colour illustrations changed, signifying

80  Exploring Transmedia History to readers Dorothy’s entrance into a new country of the story world. And thus with each region of the Land of Oz story world branded with formations associated with advertising, as was seen earlier in the tobacco cartons and their printed colour-branded cigarette cards, Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz novel demonstrates one of the ways in which ideas of world-building were conceived via the same promotional methods as brand-building. Moreover, not only did Baum’s innovative use of colour inform the author’s early world-construction strategy for Oz, but it was to be the first of his many strategies for forming his works as visually intertextual compo­ nents of an even bigger story world. Colour not only linked the story world together but it also signalled to readers that the story-spaces discovered in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz were merely parts of something far larger – thus working in much the same way as the printed images of birds and flags included in cigarette cartons, which similarly signalled to consumers their sense of being spread across something that in fact adjoins as a larger ­product. Baum spread his story world across sequel novels, for instance, which continued to explore the geography of the larger Land of Oz. The ­Marvelous Land of Oz, Baum’s second Oz novel published in 1904, began its story in the country of the North, which had been only mentioned in passing in the first novel without name as the home of the Good Witch. But in this second novel readers were introduced to a whole new bunch of protagonists, with Dorothy nowhere to be seen. Given Dorothy’s absence, what actually linked the two stories together was the story world itself, since readers were presented with new story information about this world – namely that the country of the North was called the Gillikin Country. And these new spaces were again represented through colour coding. Accordingly, the colour coding of the story world served to ­geographically – and, by extension, narratively – connect the story of The Marvelous Land of Oz with the story of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. As the reader came to gradually build an accumulated knowledge of where and when both sets of adventures occurred in relation to the other, Baum’s strategy was effectively one of world-building. And more to the point, this strategy – wholly informed by the advertising of the era – resulted in a sequel that expanded the world mythology and its known timeline and incorporated new fictional settings, all of which I identified in Chapter 1 to be key features of world-building practice today. This example serves as a demonstration of how very different industrial configurations in the past led to the same transmedial results. What’s more, though driven by advertising and afforded mostly by the arrival of new colour printing technologies, the use of colour in this way reinforces the larger importance of mass production on transmedia story­ telling at this time. As shown in Chapter 2, the assembly line – perhaps the epitome of American mass production – industrialised a production sys­ tem wherein one component was built to be part of another component and with each of these adjoining components eventually coming together to form one even larger entity. The Oz story world was one such larger

1900–1918  81 entity: One component being added to another, building the story world and linking its mystical countries via strategies of promotional colour coding. Also underpinned by these same colour printing technologies and the era’s mass-production techniques was the form of the printed map, which became a highly popular feature of fiction advertising around the late n ­ ineteenth century. Printed maps were a popular way of holding story worlds together and contributing new narrative information to a story world, and often did so via a similar use of advertising-driven colour coding. In this case, how­ ever, forms such as printed maps were less about purposeful intertextual references within a text to other texts, and more about allowing the Land of Oz to escape its textual constraints and also exist inter-textually elsewhere. Writing about turn-of-the-twentieth-century fiction, for instance, Saler notes how authors had started to use ‘maps in particular … for establishing the imaginary world as a virtual space consistent in all its details’ (2012: 67). Saler points to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island novel in 1883 as inaugurating this particular trend (2012: 67). Treasure Island’s maps used similar colour-coding techniques to those highlighted earlier in relation to the period’s tobacco advertising campaigns. In much the same way as Baum’s geographical colour-coding strategy worked to extend the Land of Oz story world across the illustrated pages of the early Oz novels, printed maps – which were most typically given away as free promotional items – characteristically came to provide ‘a geography of the imagination’ (Saler, 2012: 67). In effect, printed maps extended the imaginary of the spectacular into the real life city-streets of Debord’s ‘Society of the Spectacle’ (1994).3 And Baum, who in some respects was at the cultural forefront of the peri­ od’s most cutting-edge promotional developments,4 perhaps unsurprisingly opted to exploit printed maps himself. For The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays, a little-seen and short-lived stage show that opened in September 1908, for example, the author provided his audience with a printed map of the Land of Oz, the first ever to have been produced. This printed map showed the four coloured countries of the Land of Oz, revealing the geographical loca­ tion of each of the mystical countries in relation to the others. Thus as the above mentioned The Marvelous Land of Oz novel had provided readers with new narrative information concerning the names and colours of each individual country, the printed map expanded this understanding even fur­ ther by revealing the geographical location of each country. For example, while readers of the novels may have already known that the purple Gillikin Country existed in the North of Oz, the blue Munchkins in the East of Oz, the yellow Winkies in the West of Oz, and the red Quadlings in the South of Oz, only now by gazing over the map did audiences know that the great Emerald City – famously visited during the finale of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz – was situated at the centre of Oz. Those who had consumed the Oz novels as well as their various extensions across media could therefore use this printed map as a detailed transmedia tool for learning about new and previously uncharted cornerstones of the fictional story world. In that

82  Exploring Transmedia History sense, too, the case of The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays and its accompany­ ing printed map functioned as an early exemplar of what Jenkins has since characterised as immersion versus extractability, since the immersion of the theatre allowed ‘consumers to enter into the world of the story’ before tak­ ing an extractable ‘aspect of the story away with them’ (2009: online). Promotional strategies related to colour may have informed Baum’s world-building strategies in his Oz novels and maps, then, but looking beyond print media this geographical colour coding would also extend across into other media forms, too. For 1902’s The Wizard of Oz, for example, a popu­ lar and acclaimed Broadway theatre show, Baum began to exploit colour coding as a structural visual motif that connected the Land of Oz story world built on stage with the Land of Oz story world illustrated in books. On stage the colours of the countries of Oz continued into the set design, adding finer details to the world’s fictional spaces. But in what ways could Baum adapt other advertising-based strategies to his storytelling – and do so across multiple media? Many years before the aforementioned Fairylogue and Radio-Plays, the media of theatre, for one, would often make extensive use of spectacle-based forms of advertising in order to build a given fictional story world. And so let’s now explore how another category of advertising technique from the era – spectacle, as it came to manifest in the theatre – afforded Baum new ways of building a story world across novels and theatre.

Spectacle Advertising strategies based around colour may have afforded one means of building the Land of Oz story world across print media like novels and maps, but extending that same story world even further across into the ­theatre meant exploiting the advertising strategy of spectacle. But why exactly was spectacle a useful mechanism for producing Oz across media? For one thing, the spectacle of the theatre meant employing certain theatrical genres that resulted in audiences being pointed across media and a given story world being expanded accordingly. It is therefore important to first establish why what Saler has characterised as the fantastical children’s literature of the fin-de-siècle, which contextualises the rise of imaginary worlds like Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, was so attractive to the adult audience of the Broadway theatre at the turn of the century. Briefly establishing this ­context will allow me to explain how in needing to appeal to the tastes of this t­ heatre-going middle class, Baum’s fairy-tale inherited features of spectacle that the earlier cited Life magazine discussed as being a character­ isation of the metropolis at large around the turn of the twentieth century. Specifically, I will then pinpoint how the spectacle of a promotional strategy such as window dressing – a conception of the period that used spectacle as an apparatus for selling via a form of storytelling – infused into the produc­ tion of The Wizard of Oz stage production in 1902, which presented Baum with further ways to build the Land of Oz story world across media.

1900–1918  83 So, why did the fantastical children’s literature of this period appeal to a Broadway-going adult audience in the first place, leading to such lite­ rary forms expanding into the theatre? Earlier in the chapter I pointed to a fundamental relationship between ‘the emergence of a new form of ­children’s lite­rature’ around the late nineteenth century and this litera­ ture’s turn towards ‘creating notable imaginary worlds’, as identified by Saler (2012: 39). Saler argues that ‘many authors of the fin-de-siècle who created notable imaginary worlds,’ including Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson and L. Frank Baum, exemplified ‘the spirit of … the new ­children’s literature [that] sowed the seeds for the fantastic texts of the era’ (2012: 39). Examples including Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Stevenson’s ­Treasure Island (1883), Doyle’s The Lost World (1912), not to mention Baum’s fairy-tale, followed in the footsteps of the fantasy novels of the nineteenth century, such as those of Jules Verne. Importantly, stories such as those by Jules Verne and the later examples of Carroll, Stevenson and Doyle all ‘absorbed readers in autonomous worlds of fantasy’, as Saler puts it (2012: 38), and were in fact all ‘written for children and adults alike’ (Saler, 2012: 39). There was a strong middle-class correla­ tion between the audiences of literature, the Broadway theatre and shop­ ping in general that points to why what is ostensibly children’s literature appealed to adults and children alike at this particular time, affording such fiction to cross into the theatre. Shopping was a predominantly middle-class activity, and those in a position to cater for the seemingly middle-class tastes of the era typically imposed commonalities between shopping and other leisure activities including the theatre. Broadly speaking, Broadway theatre had come to epitomise the pinnacle of middle-class entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century. It was often perceived as the respectable ‘legit­ imate’ side of theatre while other theatrical forms like vaudeville attracted a lower middle-class demographic. Broadway’s audiences thus overlapped with the audience of novels. In terms of primary readership, the novel – a media form now thriving under the new publishing affordances of mass production – was also predominantly associated with the middle class. And this correlation is reflected in the average cost of buying a novel at this time compared to seeing a Broadway play. For instance, a ‘handsomely bound and profusely illustrated’ novel like The Wonderful Wizard of Oz cost around $1.50, whereas the average admission price to see a Broadway show was around $1 to $2, depending on where one elected to sit (Los Angeles Times, 1904: 5). And precisely because this correlated middle-class audience shared an interest in the period’s fantastical children’s literature, stories befitting such literature crossed over into the middle-class terrain of Broadway on a regular basis – as did their authors. Popular children’s authors such as J. M. Barrie regularly crossed from literature to theatre, transferring his notably fantas­ tical novels of the new children’s fiction tradition back and forth from the stage to the page, spreading the stories across both media. Barrie’s famous

84  Exploring Transmedia History story Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, for example, had debuted on Broadway in 1904 before becoming a novel in 1911, re-titled Peter and Wendy. This sort of transference of story from stage to page also highlights the promotional function of the theatre to point its correlated audience towards the purchasing of particular novels. Earlier in the chapter I noted how the promotional spectacle of window dressing was perceived by audiences as itself a form of theatre: ‘The lights and shadows behind the drawn curtains of the great range of windows suggest that a wonderful play is being arranged’ (Daily Chronicle, 1909: 21). The reverse was also true, and therein provided a model for pointing audiences across literature and the Broadway theatre. Window dressing was itself a kind of frame of lavish spectacle, of course, as was the stage of the Broadway theatre. In other words, the spectacle that characterised both forms meant that the theatre was as much now an ‘illusion window’ for the sale of further related products as was any other department store window lining the city streets. Mark Swartz suggests that a play’s ‘audiences were often familiar enough with the book [upon which it was based] that they were able to fill in parts of the story’ having been guided across media (2000: 156). In effect, the transference of story from page to stage and vice versa was a kind of transmedial crossover in and of itself. And with the stories and authors of children’s literature crossing back and forth from the writing of novels to plays, soon enough the story worlds of such literature also began to expand across these media divides. But understanding how the principally advertising-based strategy of specta­ cle worked to build a story world across media means highlighting the genre tendencies that characterised the Broadway productions of the era. Indeed, though the fantastical literature of the period appealed to children and adults alike, and children certainly attended Broadway as Richard Butsch has shown how ‘from the 1880s children assumed a new prominence in the middle class family, which was restructured around child rearing’ (2007: 7), Broadway audiences still typically demanded lavish spectacles from their evening’s escapist theatre. Accordingly, many Broadway plays inherited fea­ tures of prominent spectacle – the sorts that had been seen in the promo­ tionally dressed shop windows in the streets – that afforded further ways to build a story world. Allow me to explain. Let’s consider 1902’s The Wizard of Oz, a lavish spectacle of world-building if there ever was one. With the success of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in print – one commentary reveals that ‘before the end of [the decade] the novel had become the fastest selling children’s book in America’ (Gardner, 1957: 21) – Baum drew on his early experience as a playwright and as a theatre production manager to disperse his popu­ lar fairy-tale to Broadway. The Wizard of Oz, a lavish Broadway produc­ tion written by Baum, opened in June 1902 at the Grand Opera House in ­Chicago. The production ran for fourteen weeks before moving to New York in 1903 for 293 performances. It played for eight years, touring the country

1900–1918  85 as it performed in other prestigious theatres such as New York’s Harlem Opera House and The Majestic. But in order to attract the Broadway-going middle-class community – and thus the same readership as Baum’s novel – The Wizard of Oz stage show needed to cater to the commercial tastes of the period. The primary readership of fantastical children’s literature may have overlapped with Broadway appetites, but the latter demanded specta­ cle, and spectacle afforded world-building, pointing audiences across media. The era’s desire for spectacle in the theatre meant that theatrical genres such as the musical comedy were very popular. Musical comedies prioritised a broad commercial tone, highlighting dance, colour, romance and lavish amounts of spectacle. In 1903, one hundred plays opened on Broadway across America, and twenty-eight of these were musical comedies.5 Hence The Wizard of Oz similarly took the form of a spectacular musical comedy, and doing so meant adding a range of new settings and events to the story so as to fulfil the requirements of this genre. The first generic necessity of the musical comedy that found its way into The Wizard of Oz was to make the show colourful. Hence Baum’s earlier discussed use of colour-coded countries in the Land of Oz story world con­ tinued across into the set design of the show. Characters traversed different areas of the story world, including some not previously visited in the novel in ways that served to broaden the fictional settings of the story world. But beyond this use of colour, The Wizard of Oz’s construction as a spectacular musical comedy – one populated with the sorts of dance sequences that did not appear in the original fairy-tale, for example – meant creating a spec­ tacle that appealed as much to adults as it did to children. In a published interview from 1902, Baum discussed how in attempting to transform the book into a stage production he ‘selected the most available portions [of the novel] and filled up the gaps by introducing several new characters and minor plots’ (Chicago Tribune, 1902: 24). Making the show a spectacle thus meant world-building, as the musical comedy’s need for dancing and romantic subplots served as an indirect strategy for expanding the timeline of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz story and for including new events and exploring new settings. One of the most prominent examples of these new story events involved Pastoria, a character created by Baum especially for the stage show whose narrative developed across subsequent stories in different media. While introduced in the 1902 Wizard of Oz stage show as a dethroned former Ruler of the Land of Oz banished from the fairyland, the character’s subplot was then integrated and made expansively intertextual two years later as part of the narrative in The Marvelous Land of Oz – the first sequel novel in 1904. This novel focused on the search for Princess Ozma, ‘the only child of the former Ruler of Oz’ (Baum, 1907: 9). Baum’s fourth Oz novel, too, Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, published in 1908, also later revealed that King Pastoria was removed from his rightful place as Ruler of Oz by the wicked witch Mombi – a villain who was also introduced in The Marvelous

86  Exploring Transmedia History Land of Oz – prior to Dorothy’s first visit to the magical Land of Oz in the first book. In a review of the play, The Washington Post identified this intertextual expansion and addition of new story events as a point of praise, noting that ‘while all the characters have been retained, a subplot has been added and new personages introduced to telling effect’ (The Washington Post, 1902: 30). In doing so, these new settings and story events produced for The Wizard of Oz stage show – having only been incorporated in order to fulfill the generic need for spectacle – functioned effectively to both link the Land of Oz story world of the page with the Land of Oz story world of the stage by building this story world across literature and theatre. For Frank ­Kelleter, accordingly, ‘the transmedia experience of the Oz universe was already evident in the 1902 musical, which was the first Oz text to men­ tion ­Dorothy’s surname, Gale, before it was picked up in the literary series’ (2012: 23). Moreover, the expansive intertextuality used by Baum across the play and the various books mentioned above highlights how audiences at this time were being pointed from literature to the theatre and back again. The world-building on display across these two media forms encouraged audiences to consume one Oz adventure as itself promotion for another Oz adventure – rather like one of Baum’s ‘illusion windows’. The fusing of dressed shop windows and theatre as spectacles may have underpinned this particular strategy of world-building across literature and the theatre, then, but as I outlined earlier in the chapter, much of this activity was going on amidst other related practices of advertising. The promotional use of newspaper comic strips, in particular, was already seizing the use of characters as a new way of pointing audiences across media to related texts and products. So how might the use of newspaper comic-strip characters as advertising avatars have led to new strategies for building the Land of Oz story world across media?

Comic-Strip Characters Previously I discussed how around the early twentieth century the relation­ ships between advertisers, book publishers, magazine editors and news­ paper editors became increasingly understood in terms of reciprocity. With the very idea of ‘readers as consumers preoccupying authors of the time in a way never before seen’ (Mizruchi, 2008: 144) I noted that advertising had infiltrated the work of book publishers and newspaper editors in profound ways. In fact, newspaper advertisements for novels began to function as added illustrations for novels, relocating the book’s illustrated characters to newspapers. This meant printing inter-textual extensions of the story’s char­ acters across media. For example, artfully crafted newspaper advertisements for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz functioned as additional illustrations for that novel, essentially extending and relocating the characters of the novel into the newspaper medium. The success of character-based advertising was

1900–1918  87 acknowledged quite broadly at the time; The New York Times devoted an entire page-long feature to the commercial value of advertising novels via the use of character illustrations in newspapers as early as 1898 (10). More than being commercially valuable, Baum’s imminent Oz newspaper comic strips show how this kind of advertising of characters in newspapers led to further strategies for world-building across media. Much of these strategies coincided with Baum’s relationship with a particular publisher. With the bankruptcy of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’s George M. Hill Company and the establishment of the Reilly & Britton Company, in 1904 Baum soon allied himself with a new publisher that actively applied the period’s shift towards the exploitation of fictional characters as advertising avatars to great effect. Peter E. Hanff, historian and a former president of The International Wizard of Oz Club, insists that ‘Baum learned from his experience of seeing the transformation of his novel into a stage vehicle how differently his work could be conveyed for an audience, and certainly his comic pages expand our sense of what the characters of Oz are like’ (2012). Clearly influenced by the newspaper comic-strip industry’s effectiveness at expanding fictional characters by promoting them across media, Baum wrote a series of Oz newspaper comic strips titled Queer Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz. Importantly, Queer Visitors, a series of twenty-six comic strips, each written by Baum and syndicated by the Philadelphia North American to the Sunday comics sections of newspapers across the country, was devised principally as a means of promoting Baum’s second Oz novel, the aforementioned The Marvelous Land of Oz published in 1904. Queer Visitors was published weekly from August 28, 1904, to February 26, 1905, keeping the Land of Oz in the public eye for an additional six months following the release of the second book. Far more than just keeping the Land of Oz publically visible, however, the Queer Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz comic strip exploited fictional characters as its principle strategy for promoting The Marvelous Land of Oz, which as I have shown was an especially common strategy in the newspaper comic-strip industry by this time. Gordon points out that the newspaper comic-strip industry assumed that the ‘development of popu­lar characters accounted for a comic strips’ success’ (1998: 14). And so Queer Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz elected to re-establish popular characters from the original novel. While The Marvelous Land of Oz actually replaced core protagonists such as Dorothy with a range of new and unfamiliar faces, the comic strip returned to the first novel’s far more recognisable heroes, including the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman and indeed Dorothy, each of whom were now familiar to a general mass audience. And in re-establishing the most familiar faces from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, mainly for promotional reasons, Baum’s approach to writing his newspaper comic strip was to offer readers a further series of sequels set in between The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and The Marvelous Land of Oz, which just happened to be published in newspapers rather than in novels. In other

88  Exploring Transmedia History words, in making use of seriality and its ‘breaking up [of] a narrative arc into multiple discrete chunks or instalments’ (Jenkins, 2009: online), these particular newspaper comic strips came to exemplify notable features of world-building. That is to say that these comic strips were serialised sequels to one novel, prequels to another; the promotionally minded comics added to the world mythology and expanded the known timeline of the stories to include new events and even explored new fictional settings. Specifically, new story events and fictional settings chronicled in Queer Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz included the aftermath of the ­second novel, which saw the Oz characters travel to America. Here’s a nice example: Queer Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz began its story shortly after the end of The Marvelous Land of Oz novel. The character of Ozma, having been announced earlier as the new ruler of the Land of Oz during the denouement of The Marvelous Land of Oz, performs her first act of diplomacy in the comic strips – authorising the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman and the Woggle-Bug to visit the US where the adventures of the comic-strip series takes place. Readers of the novel had already read about the dismantling of a strange flying contraption known as the Gump, and the Gump was reassembled in the first of the comic strips so to provide the Oz characters with transportation to America. The original story world of the Land of Oz was hereby expanded to include a wider universe of settings; characters – performing a promotional function – held the fictional story world together as it expanded across multiple media. In further world-building fashion, Queer Visitors also expanded the known timeline of the earlier Oz novels. From their initial landing point in Missouri, for example, the comic’s Oz characters travel to the Kansas farm from the first novel, where both the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman are reunited with Dorothy for the first time since that first novel, extending the known timeline of these protagonists’ stories across different media. And of course new story information about the wider story world, which now included the US, was built upon the foundation of existing story informa­ tion. In one of the comics called ‘How the Saw-Horse Saved Dorothy’s Life’, for instance, published in late 1904, the once grey and weathered Kansas farm was revealed to be more prosperous; readers learnt of Uncle Henry’s mortgage that he took out to rebuild the farm after its destruction in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. These world-building tactics evidently worked, since The Marvelous Land of Oz became one of the five most in-demand novels of the year, at least according to a report in The New York Times (1904: 92). But the use of fictional characters as advertising avatars did not stop with Queer Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz. In fact, this strategy for world-building, emerging from the growing alignment between promotion and story­telling that characterised the affordances of the period’s advertising, bled far beyond newspaper comic strips and also reached the outer pages of those news­papers. In turn, a further strategy for world-building presented itself,

1900–1918  89 as  again Baum’s characters linked the story world and pointed readers across media. Specifically, this strategy concerned the role of newspapers more generally as a way, as Jenkins would put it, to fill in backstory and pro­ vide missing scenes to build ‘an ever-expanding and richly-detailed fictional world’ (2007: online). In the case of the Land of Oz, the story world spread across many newspapers, providing readers with new snippets of story about events from either the books or the comic strips. That is to say that while Queer Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz was itself devised as advertising for The Marvelous Land of Oz novel – exploiting fictional char­ acters as mechanisms for linking the different texts together and for point­ ing readers from one to the other – the comic strip was itself part of an even larger advertising scheme. Beginning on August 18, 1904, many newspapers such as the Philadelphia North American and the Chicago Record-Herald became part of this larger advertising scheme by publishing mock news stories that foreshadowed story events from the comics. These included announcements declaring that a mysterious unidentified flying object was approaching Earth. In the first of the comics, this mysterious flying object was then identified as the now fully restored Gump transporting its com­ rades from the Land of Oz to the US. This use of newspapers had indeed emerged as a historically conditioned strategy for ‘filling in back story and providing missing scenes’ across different media, which Jenkins identifies as common features of transmedia storytelling (Jenkins, 2007: online). Moreover, this kind of use of newspapers during the early twentieth cen­ tury, undoubtedly driven by strong advertising agendas, echoes Doležel’s work on intertextuality from Chapter 1, which I argued to be that which underpins how transmedia story worlds are textually held together. Doležel suggested that intertextuality can ‘extend the scope of the original story world by adding more existents to it, by turning secondary characters into the heroes of their own story, and by expanding the original story though prequels and sequels’ (2010: 207). More than just a principle of ­character-building, the expansive intertextuality underpinning the Gump’s backstory across newspapers further broadened the mythology of the Land of Oz story world, even as the promotional status of newspaper comic strips at this time means that such stories were as much inter-textual pieces that allowed the Land of Oz to exist in the gaps of its textual exploits. In effect, these newspaper snippets playfully implied to readers that they had known about the magical Land of Oz for a very long time; every time the story of a UFO surfaced, might that unidentified flying object actually have been the Gump? That is to say that the characters of Oz had escaped their tex­ tual constraints, operating intertextually and inter-textually – the distinction between these two concepts seemingly broken down and blurred together in ways that I argued previously to be important to transmedia storytelling. Characters such as the likes of the Gump, as well as others such as the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman and the Woggle-Bug, continued to build the Oz story world in other ways, too. Competitions became a further inter-textual

90  Exploring Transmedia History strategy for world-building at this time, which were woven into the tex­ tual stories of the Queer Visitors comic strips. Baum began to use competi­ tions as a means of exploiting his fictional characters even further, used in this case to point readers towards Oz merchandise, which in doing so led to new fictional settings being added to the story world. Consider ‘What Did the Woggle-Bug Say?’, which was a popular competition used in the Queer ­Visitors comic strips and which built a weekly contest around the Woggle-Bug character in the first seventeen editions. Throughout the course of each comic, the Woggle-Bug was posed a question from his fellow Oz comrades, though his answer was not revealed to readers. At the end of each story, readers were then asked ‘What did the Woggle-Bug say?’ and were invited to submit their guesses to the newspaper in the hope of win­ ning items of Oz merchandise and cash prizes. But these responses did more than promote merchandise; they also dictated the storytelling direction of upcoming comic strips, as the often highly creative and imaginative ideas of readers came to influence and inspire Baum to explore further untapped terrains of the already expanding Land of Oz story world. Such an instance of promotion and storytelling aligning shows how early twentieth-century newspaper comic strips came to exemplify fea­ tures of world-building, while the competitions published inside those ­newspapers also provide us with an historical example of how ‘fan ­produced ­performances … invited by the creator … become part of the transmedia narrative itself’ manifested at this time (Jenkins, 2009: online). These news­ paper comic strips served to hold the Oz story world together across media and to point its readers across such media, and yet Baum, as Hanff puts it, ‘first thought of these comic pages purely as a way of promoting his new book’ (2012). As with the earlier colour coding, in other words, the use of fictional characters as advertising in comic strips serves as another striking demonstration of how different historical determinants led to similar trans­ medial results as those seen today. But that is not to suggest that all of the historical determinants described earlier in this book led to transmedia storytelling. In fact, some of the deter­ minants of this period actively militated against world-building across media and transmedia storytelling more generally. Industrialisation may have brought new systems of mass production that allowed media texts to spread across different forms, but in the early years of the twentieth cen­ tury media regulation was still in its infancy. Not all media forms were yet protected under copyright law, such as the cinema, which as I explored in Chapter 2 often led to outright copying of motion pictures and in turn com­ peting versions of a fiction, rather than the extensions of a fiction n ­ ecessary for transmedia storytelling. And of course even those media forms that were protected were still at the mercy of authors understanding how to properly protect their fictions at this early stage. Baum, for all his business acumen and creativity, did not actually own Oz completely; rather, the rights were divided equally between himself and William Wallace Denslow, the illustrator

1900–1918  91 of the original The Wonderful Wizard of Oz novel. This division of rights meant that, at least between 1904 and 1905, Baum’s Queer Visitors from the Marvelous of Oz was in fact not the only Oz newspaper comic strip on the market. Around the same time there was also Denslow’s Scarecrow and the Tin-Man, which was syndicated by the McClure S­ yndicate and ran weekly from December 4, 1904, to March 12, 1905. Denslow’s comic strip thus overlapped – and competed – with Baum’s Queer Visitors from the Marvelous of Oz for almost three months. Denslow had a bitter dispute with Baum over the profits from The Wizard of Oz stage production, and this dispute effectively ended their partnership. However, since both men effectively owned copyright to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, both were free to exploit its story world in any way they both saw fit. As the title suggests, then, Denslow’s Scarecrow and the Tin-Man – like Baum’s Queer Visitors – featured the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman. But despite the overlap of these characters, Denslow’s Scarecrow and the TinMan served mostly to split the story world into two distinct creations – one authored by Baum and the other by Denslow. This case of world-splitting is complicated. Denslow’s Scarecrow and Tin-Man characters are direct extensions of the characters seen in the 1902 Wizard of Oz play, and yet Denslow’s Scarecrow and Tin Man are not Baum’s Scarecrow and Tin Man. Here’s an example of what I mean: Denslow’s comic strip characters sing popular songs from the earlier theatre production in 1902; his comic strips even offer punch-lines to jokes that were made during that particular play. Denslow’s comic strips thus make intertextual reference to specific narrative events from the stage show, providing a kind of comic-strip sequel to the stage play. For in the first comic strip edition, titled ‘Dorothy’s Christmas Tree’, the comic cites the ‘good fairies which brought down the frost upon the wicket poppies’ (Denslow, 1904: 1) – a scene that was familiar to ­Broadway audiences. This scene was even visualised on the stage show’s poster. Yet Denslow’s Scarecrow and Tin-Man also brought outright changes to the mythology of the Land of Oz story world, changes that contrasted known information. For instance, while Baum’s Land of Oz existed somewhere on the surface of Earth, albeit a surface hidden from the eyes of civilisation, Denslow’s Land of Oz exists high up in the sky, directly above the clouds of New York City. In other words, the Land of Oz, as both a fictional story world and as a commercial piece of intellectual property designed to inspire product consumption, refracted in a way that severely distorted key features of seriality – at this point no longer functioning as a system of advertising that pointed its audience across multiple media but rather as a system of direct competition, one which split the Oz audience in half. And this potential splitting of audiences is problematic for our purposes. Remember how in the introduction I argued that transmedia storytelling must ultimately work to produce a series of media texts that function not as versions of the same story but rather as extensions of one larger story, with authorship crucial to building characters and story worlds across media.

92  Exploring Transmedia History Baum and Denslow’s two competing interpretations of the Land of Oz story world reinforce this general observation in a historical setting, and equally work to reinforce the importance of both copyright law and authorship on producing transmedia fictions. Still, and despite seeing his fictional story world split into two, Baum continued to test the exploitation of charac­ ters as advertising. Specifically, the author dabbled in a new strategy that afforded additional world-building across media. This time, he proceeded to build the Land of Oz story world not by producing media texts as a form of promotion, but instead by producing promotional texts themselves. By promotional texts I naturally mean items such as posters, advertisements, billboards and so on, and Baum turned his attention to the form of the mock promotional newspaper, which had become a popular form of adver­ tising during this era. A prominent example includes the ‘faux’ newspapers that were produced to promote the HMS Discovery’s trip to Antarctica in late 1901. Baum’s equivalent was called The Ozmapolitan, a series of mock promotional newspapers that exploited comic-strip characters as a way to, among other things, re-join the refracted Land of Oz story world together via seriality. The first issue of The Ozmapolitan materialised in early 1905, shortly after the publication of The Marvelous Land of Oz novel and while the Queer Visitors from the Marvelous of Oz comic strips were still running. Again written by Baum and released as nothing more than a giveaway item inside a number of select newspapers, The Ozmapolitan was devised as a further strategy for promoting Baum’s second Oz novel. It did so by includ­ ing advertisements for the release of this book. But beyond more blatant advertisements, The Ozmapolitan was also brimming with new narrative information relating to events from inside the Land of Oz story world, offering readers various ‘in-universe’ interviews with its fictional characters. Many of these new narrative events also expanded the known timeline of the story world. Here’s an example: The debut edition of The ­Ozmapolitan published an interview with the Scarecrow, who discussed the circumstances of his proposed visit to the US – a visit that was actually narrated in the Queer ­Visitors from the Marvelous of Oz comic strips. ‘We will start’, he  said, ‘about the first of August and will expect to land somewhere on American soil early in September’ (Baum, 1905: 1).6 The Ozmapolitan not only promoted the Oz characters’ impending reunion with Dorothy – an event taking place in the newspaper comic strips – but it also revealed that it was in fact Dorothy’s desire to see her old Oz friends again that sparked the Queer Visitors trip in the first place. Dorothy, readers discovered via The Ozmapolitan, had written a letter of request to the rulers of the Land of Oz following the events of the first novel, asking to be reunited with her old Oz comrades (Baum, 1905: 3). In other words, The Ozmapolitan serves as an early case of what Jenkins has since called subjectivity, since the focus of many of the newspapers was indeed to explore ‘the central narrative through new eyes, such as secondary characters or third parties’ (2009: online).

1900–1918  93 All of which is to say that The Ozmapolitan, a promotional item for a newspaper comic strip, which itself was a promotional item for a novel, thus further developed the transmedia story world. And once again an item of Baum’s writing occupied the proverbial status of a shop window: In com­ bining visual artistry with business flair, Baum continued to steer his reader­ ship across multiple media forms to a multitude of texts – this time via the use of comic-strip characters, each of which were framed in a spectacle of colour, and with each frame effectively working to build the fictional story world one ‘illusion window’ at a time. Indeed, the promotion-orientated Queer Visitors from the Marvelous of Oz comics and The Ozmapolitan newspapers exemplify how advertis­ ing drove the industrial configurations and strategies for world-building in the early twentieth century. Just as ‘advertisements, literature, and images became packaged together as mutually enhancing products’ (Mizruchi, 2008: 139) at this time, so too did the stories of the Land of Oz world across media. As I have shown, these stories prompted readers to ‘assume the role of hunters and gatherers, chasing down bits of the story across media’ (Jenkins, 2006: 21) in much the same way as Jenkins notes of transmedia storytelling today. But again the process of binding a fictional story world together across multiple media did not stop here; in the case of Baum’s Land of Oz, this process also involved the likes of posters and reviews, as I discuss in the next section.

Posters and Reviews So far in this chapter I have examined the ways in which a number of dom­ inant cultural trends related to industrialised advertising around the turn of the twentieth century came to manifest in the Oz novels and their exten­ sions across theatre, newspaper comic strips and mock newspapers. Key categories driven by this era’s advertising – colour, spectacle and comic-strip characters – had afforded historically conditioned strategies for building story worlds across different media, but understanding the various strate­ gies via which fictional story worlds were held together at this time also means looking beyond the advertising functions of these three principles. It even means looking beyond actual texts like novels, theatre shows and newspaper comics, and instead starting to consider how the likes of p ­ osters and newspaper review taglines worked as more discursive, inter-textual world-building tools. Earlier in the chapter I began to touch upon the general importance of posters as a tool for world-building during the early years of the twentieth century. Much of this importance stems from the ways that posters have the potential to link different texts together as parts of a story world via the information that is presented on them. Consider the posters produced to promote the spin-off texts based on the Woggle-Bug, for example, a char­ acter that was first introduced in the Oz novels but later spun-off into his

94  Exploring Transmedia History own adventures taking place within the same larger story world. In a poster published in The New York Times in December 1905, The Woggle-Bug Book was advertised next to a re-promotion of The Marvelous Land of Oz novel. This link is very deliberate: The Woggle-Bug Book was sold to readers as that which shared a strong affiliation with The Marvelous Land of Oz, discursively helping to build both stories together as equal compo­ nents of a larger story as if adding an extension onto a house. Hence when audiences attended The Woggle-Bug stage play, a musical comedy opening at the Garrick Theatre in Chicago on June 18, 1905, they were treated to a sequel to the earlier released stories featuring the Woggle-Bug character. The production incorporated all new narrative events that also expanded the larger Land of Oz story world. Additional narrative events included the titu­ lar character’s now-discovered tendency to fall in love with anyone wear­ ing a bright plaid – a plaid that featured in a different capacity in Baum’s The Woggle-Bug Book, published towards the end of the comic strip’s run around early 1905.7 The stage show also featured a new romance between General Jinjur, a villain from The Marvelous Land of Oz novel, and the regent of Oz’s Emerald City. With plots weaving across media, this may have been a case of elaborately authored transmedia storytelling, but on this occasion it was also posters that served to link each of these stories together as a story world in the eyes of potential audiences, with posters also work­ ing to direct audiences across media. In terms of the actual processes by which a poster could hold the Land of Oz story world together and in turn point audiences across media, most responsibility rested on words – in particular, the importance of the connotative associations between particular words. The idea of words as world-building is something that I will continue to explore shortly in rela­ tion to the Oz films, but the use of words as world-building was equally a characteristic of the theatre shows mentioned above. Note one poster for The Woggle-Bug stage show. Front and centre on this play’s poster was the assertion that The Woggle-Bug stage show was the ‘sister play’ of The Wizard of Oz play (Variety, 1905: 20). The word ‘sister’ of course evokes a family tie. Similar wording was emphasised on the posters for later spin-off Oz texts, such as The Tik-Tok Man of Oz, another musical comedy written by Baum that opened on Broadway in Los Angeles on March 31, 1913. The Tik-Tok Man of Oz, which followed the adventures of Tik-Tok, a robot first appearing in the 1907 novel Ozma of Oz, served as a kind of loose prequel to Tik-Tok of Oz, itself a sequel novel released in June 1914. As well as further exemplifying Jenkins’ earlier cited principle of subjectivity – with the likes of The Woggle-Bug and The Tik-Tok Man of Oz shows explor­ ing ‘the central narrative through new eyes’ (2009: online) – the poster for the latter play accentuated its status as ‘A Companion Play to The Wizard of Oz’ (Los Angeles Times, 1914: 26). Importantly, the word ‘companion’ connoted a close, friendly connection between the Oz adventures of novels and the theatre.

1900–1918  95 Even more importantly, these kinds of print-based linguistic connectors also extended into the realm of the cinema. Advertising, in general, came to afford new strategies for telling the cinema’s stories across other media. For the release of their Cleopatra adaptation in 1910, for example, studio Pathé issued ‘explanatory booklets’ with cinema tickets. Pathé coupled these booklets with an advertising campaign that saw particular newspapers pub­ lishing additional narrative details that had been deliberately left out of the promotional booklets so as to better promote the film and steer readers to the cinema (New York Dramatic Mirror, 1910: 20). Advertising campaigns such as this one were very much products of the period, and were under­ pinned by developments in mass communication, printing technologies and, let’s not forget, the emergence of the cinema itself. And with the rise of the cinema came the rise of industry trade papers and film magazines. Publi­ cations such as Variety, New York Clipper, The Film Index and the above cited Motion Picture World all began publication during the early years of the twentieth century. Fan magazines based around the cinema, such as Photoplay, Picture-Play Magazine and Screenland also became popular during the mid-1910s. Magazines and industry trade papers such as these were important to how a fictional story world continued to be held together across multiple media in the eyes of audiences. In fact, the words published by journalists in magazines and trade papers actually provided a sort of indirect strategy for how Baum linked the Oz of one medium with the Oz of another. Consider the various published reviews for The Patchwork Girl of Oz, the first of the films to be produced by Baum’s The Oz Film Manufacturing Company, an independent motion picture production company founded by Baum in 1914 (Los Angeles Times, 1915: 156). The Oz Film Manufacturing Company was originally conceived ‘for the purpose of making and featuring in five reels or more famous fairy tales of Baum, producer of the most characteristic specialties known to ­children life’ (Los Angeles Times, 1915: 156). As the Los Angeles Times wrote, ‘L.  Frank Baum, the creator of the modern fairy-land, the “maker of fairies” whose Oz people are known the world over, has turned from the pen to the camera, and as president of the Oz Company has become wizard of the reel’ (1914: 17). The Patchwork Girl of Oz film, renamed The New Wizard of Oz by the Alliance Film Programme, its distributor, premiered in cinemas on September 28, 1914. Baum both wrote and pro­ duced The Patchwork Girl of Oz, and the film was very much devised as a new adventure that would continue Baum’s attempts to try and expand the Land of Oz story world across multiple media. No matter how indirectly or ‘un-­authored’ a strategy it may have been, the film’s published news­paper reviews emphatically promoted the film as that which extended earlier Oz stories and expanded the Land of Oz story world via the medium of film. ‘The Patchwork Girl of Oz’, stressed Moving Picture World in October 1914, ‘is a star to which Mr. Baum, the maker of modern fairy stories, does not hesitate to fasten to his galaxy’ (15). Writing about fictional lands that

96  Exploring Transmedia History comprise of multiple stories, or in this case ‘stars’, all of which are connected as parts of a ‘galaxy’, statements such as these accentuate ideas of a larger fictional story world. Such talk of galaxies under the co-ordination of Baum even echoes the descriptions of the earlier The Woggle-Bug and The Tik-Tok Man of Oz stage play posters, which were both characterised in relation to other Oz texts in other media as ‘sister plays’ or ‘companion plays’, respectively. Looking across other critical responses to The Patchwork Girl of Oz film, the use of this family relations analogy continued. ‘This fantastic feature’, declared Variety, ‘is a close relative of “The Wizard of Oz.” Indeed, both pro­ ductions have the same father and the family likeness is striking’ (­Variety, 1914: 48). By repeatedly making reference to proverbial family connections and even hinting towards notions of fictional story worlds via carefully chosen words such as ‘galaxy’, magazine and trade-paper reviews such as these exemplify how such forms became a way of selling fiction in the early twentieth century.8 Moreover, this use of particular words printed in reviews also high­ lights how magazines and trade papers could effectively hold transme­ dia story worlds together discursively. Hence when audiences went to see The ­Patchwork Girl of Oz in cinemas, they were treated to a sequel to The ­Patchwork Girl of Oz novel, which was published a little over a year earlier in July 1913. So rather than being a straight adaptation of the book, the film narrated events taking place after the novel, adding new characters, new settings and broadening the known timeline. Moving Picture World described the film as an ‘original plot, if a fairy tale pure and simple’ (Moving Picture World, 1915: 48), and in fact while the novel primarily cen­ tred on a character named Ojo, a young Munchkin, and his quest through the Land of Oz, the film instead focussed on the daughter of the magician Dr. Pipt, himself a secondary character from that book. This notably trans­ medial narrative, with Baum writing his latest Oz sequel on film rather than in print, combined features of world-building by developing the known timeline of the Land of Oz to add all new events and by exploring new set­ tings, and yet it was a strategy that relied rather ironically on journalists to signal the film’s place in the story world. Putting it another way, the promotional form of posters and reviews thereby ‘linked each institution of the visible to its neighbors on the ­boulevard’, as Sandberg noted earlier of the broader industrial-cultural trans­ formations of the era (1995: 321–322). However, journalists’ promotional reviews may have afforded a further strategy for holding the Oz story world together across media, but that is not necessarily to assume that audiences were always successfully steered across multiple media – particularly when the cinema was involved. As will be explored in the next section, one factor that militated against transmedia storytelling in the early years of the 1900s was the cinema-going audience, or rather the social-class divides standing between this audience and the audiences of literature and Broadway.

1900–1918  97

The Limits of Advertising Indeed, promotional items such as posters and reviews may have worked especially well to hold the Land of Oz story world together across media in the eyes of certain audiences, but that is not to assume that such pro­ motional strategies consistently pointed those audiences across media. Advertising had provided a useful model for how to point audiences across different media at the turn of the twentieth century, particularly across lite­ rature and the theatre, where the media forms in question shared a strong social and cultural correlation in terms of class demographics. But this parti­ cular advertising model for how to achieve transmedia storytelling at this time was still mostly insufficient with regards to the cinema. Understanding why transmedia storytelling mostly failed in the cinema in the 1910s is com­ plicated, not least of all because this was not always the case. To begin to understand this complexity I shall now examine some of Baum’s film ven­ tures under the aforementioned Oz Film Manufacturing Company amidst the cinema’s transitional era around the mid-1910s in order to show how promotional strategies failed to steer audiences from literature or theatre to the movies, offering transmedia stories for the Land of Oz but with little financial reward. As I showed in Chapter 2, then, the emergence of the cinema represented an extremely important transformation in the US that also played a key role on historical strategies of transmedia storytelling. Prior to the 1910s, in fact, the cinema, as Richard Maltby writes, was a medium that sought mostly to integrate itself into ‘the local norms of their communities, [with] cinema fitting into existing social and cultural routines’ (2011: 20). One existing cultural routine that cinema integrated itself with was, as Miriam Bratu Hansen notes, ‘an emerging culture of consumption ranging from world expositions to department stores, a culture marked by an accelerated prolife­ ration of sensations and styles’ (1995: 363). The cinema, as Hansen goes on to elaborate, was ‘not just one among a number of perceptual techno­logies, [but] was above all the single most expansive discursive horizon in which the effects of industrialisation were reflected’ (1995: 365). And the effects of industrialisation, as showed in Chapter 2, afforded stories to be built and to be spread across multiple media under models of mass production and the new developments in technology and advertising. If industrialisation was all about building, then it certainly makes sense that the cinema – ‘the most expansive discursive horizon in which the effects of industrialisation were reflected’ (Hansen, 1995: 365) – afforded the building of stories. Earlier in the book I noted that early cinema in some ways began as a transmedial phenomenon, borrowing from both literary and theatrical iterations of popular fictions. And yet other factors militated against transmedia storytelling in the cinema, not least of all the fact that the medium encompassed a largely different class of audience to other media such as literature and the theatre. Indeed, pointing audiences across media to the cinema in the 1910s was difficult. As was explored earlier, the audience

98  Exploring Transmedia History composition that built up the Oz novels and the Oz stage shows belonged to the rising middle class – the same class of Americans that were associ­ ated with shopping and its window-dressing style of consumption. Yet the cinema at this time – even amidst the rise of increasingly sophisticated citybound movie palaces during its transitional era – was still mostly associated with its lower-class nickelodeon origins. This lower-class perception was reflected in the price of buying a novel compared to the cost of seeing a film: A nickelodeon entry admission was around five cents, and the Los Angeles Times noted in 1915 that while Baum’s Oz books ‘were formerly sold at a much higher price of $1.50 each, Mr. Baum … conceived the idea of making alike stories into pictures so that all the children could see them acted’ (156). But as was noted earlier, by comparison the cost of seeing a Broadway stage show was between $1 and $2. In other words, novels and Broadway were drastically more expensive than the cinema – hence the latter’s continued lower working-class associations. Crucially, at a time in American cultural history that was still visibly divided according to social class, the divides between these social classes often prevented fictions from extending across multiple media. The corre­ lation between the white-collar middle-class readership of Baum’s Oz novels and the regular attendee of Broadway may have enabled both the stories and the audiences of those two media forms to cross back and forth during the early part of the twentieth century, each promoting the other in a rather overtly transmedial fashion, but the same was not true for cinema. The ­Patchwork Girl of Oz film actually exemplifies this problem. Almost the entire output of The Oz Film Manufacturing Company was exhibited in theatres on ‘Saturday mornings from 9 to 11 as the weekly offering to the children of the city’ (Moving Picture World, 1915: 1681). The ­Patchwork Girl of Oz may have screened ‘at the Strand Theatre in New York’, as the Los Angeles Times reported, which was ‘the finest playhouse in that great city, [where] the picture was shown to 65,000 persons in one week’ (1915: 156). But the morning screenings reserved for Baum’s film failed to attract the ‘tired businessman’ – a colloquial phrase used to describe the B ­ roadway audience that attended the ‘frivolous entertainments’ of the stage as a source of evening escapism (Pearson, 2004: 326). And in failing to appeal to the Broadway-going and book-buying audience of the middle class, The ­Patchwork Girl of Oz was almost entirely ignored by audiences, and as such would fail to function as a continued extension of the larger Land of Oz narrative across media in the same successful way that many of the earlier non-cinematic stories had achieved. What’s more, even cinematic genre fashions of the era in some respects worked against Baum’s attempts to direct audiences across media, making Baum’s decision to turn from the pen to the camera an especially dubious business move. For instance, whereas the fantastical children’s literature of the fin-de-siècle had mostly worked to cut across different audience and media divides, box-office reports indicate that the fairy-tale film, along

1900–1918  99 with the similarly fantastical ‘trick’ films of Georges Méliès – cinematic ­manifestations of that same fantastical children’s literature – had fallen mostly out of fashion on screen by around 1905 (see Moving Picture World, 1905: 757). And in failing to find a sizeable audience, the output of The Oz Film ­Manufacturing Company also failed commercially. The loss hit Baum hard, for in the midst of the cinema’s transitional era came widespread changes to film-industry structure and exhibition sites9 that also led to a number of independent filmmaking production companies emerging, with The Oz Film Manufacturing Company being just one of many (Maltby, 2011: 20). That is to say that Baum paid for much of The Oz Film ­Manufacturing Company’s expenditures himself (including a good proportion of production costs), thus mirroring the same self-funding model the author was required to adopt in order to publish the expensive colour illustrations inside the pages of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz fourteen years earlier. Accordingly, the financial burden of self-financing The Oz Film Manu­ facturing Company eventually took its toll on Baum. By the end of 1915, The Oz Film Manufacturing Company had ceased to exist, leaving Baum in a great amount of debt after struggling to capture the audience that had once been so captivated by the Land of Oz on stage and whom admittedly continued to read his stories in novels. In fact, the financial burden of found­ ing and managing The Oz Film Manufacturing Company left Baum bank­ rupt, as Los Angeles Times reported: Mr. Baum had sought to follow the whimsical “Wizard of Oz” series with other productions along the same line, in which fairies and hob-goblins ran riot in motion pictures. The venture has Mr. Baum oppressed by the debts contracted in trying to exploit his creations and has now sought the relief of the bankruptcy courts. (1916: 16) Baum’s bankruptcy may seem at least partially unrelated to the precise focus of this book, and yet it is also apparent that the loss of Baum’s fortune was closely tied to the financial failures of his most transmedial business ven­ tures. That being said, I do not necessarily wish to overstate advertising’s ‘failure’ as a model for producing transmedia storytelling by my signalling of Baum’s personal financial struggles. On the contrary, this chapter has given countless examples of how advertising afforded the adventures of the Land of Oz to extend across a whole range of media, each contributing to the expansion of the story world and to the process of pointing audiences across multiple media. The broader contingencies to do with industrialisa­ tion around the turn of the twentieth century were nothing less than pivotal to the world-building strategies identified throughout. ­Nevertheless, what was lacking during this particular era was indeed an industrial business model that could afford its authors and other fictional creators to more viably create in one medium and to sell across a multitude of them with­ out incurring the heavy financial damages such as those experienced by

100  Exploring Transmedia History Baum – who wrote his final Oz book in 1918 before passing away the fol­ lowing year. In the next chapter I examine how the turn to licensing during the 1920s and 1930s provided certain authors with a financially viable model for telling transmedia stories under the housing of corporate author­ ship, spreading the media of the industrial age across the consumer culture.

Conclusion This chapter has examined the impact of industrialisation around the early twentieth century on industrial strategies of transmedia storytelling, picking up on some of the specific ways in which mass production, new techno­logies, mass communication and, most emphatically, advertising ­encouraged – if not directly enabled – stories to be told as transmedial fic­ tions across multiple media forms. I have thus demonstrated the importance of breaking down contemporary critical assumptions about distinctions between the ‘soulless promotion’ of advertising’s past, to return to Kushner’s earlier dichotomy, and the ‘transmedia storytelling of the digital era’ (2008: online); promotion in actuality permitted authors to build and expand fic­ tional story worlds across media. As noted in the book’s introduction, the strategies used to achieve transmedia storytelling today – such as the likes of websites, Facebook pages and other digital media forms – are for the most part underpinned by digital convergences and are of course not the same strategies as those used over a hundred years ago. Transmedia storytelling is always conditioned by the industrial determinants of its period, and as I have demonstrated throughout this chapter, advertising – as it operated around the turn of the twentieth century – was the driving determinant of transmedia storytelling at that time. Indeed, in tracing the links between this period’s advertising and the strategies of world-building across media that it afforded, I identified the importance of colour, spectacle, comic-strip characters and also posters and reviews as key promotional mechanisms for building story worlds and point­ ing audiences across media. Specific strategies of world-building at this time tended to include the use of colour coding, spectacle as a principle of both storytelling and as promotion and popular fictional characters in newspaper comic strips. In addition, the role of printed maps, posters and circulated reviews in magazines and industry trade papers must also be emphasised as key world-building strategies around the early twentieth century, which quite similarly worked to tie the larger Land of Oz story world together across a whole range of media forms. Fittingly, then, just as the authority of the Wizard in Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz rests on his promise to give the people that which they desire the most – luring characters towards consumption via smoke and mirror tactics – so too was the authority of this era’s industrial advertising: Luring the middle classes towards the continued purchase of related products via the strategic use of colour, character, spec­ tacle and posters. As Stuart Culver once wrote of the fictional Emerald City,

1900–1918  101 located so famously at the heart of Oz, transmedia storytelling in the early years of the twentieth century was ‘an endless consumption cycle of visual fascinations’ (1988: 103). The complex ways in which ‘advertisements, lite­rature, and images became packaged together as mutually enhancing ­products’ (Mizruchi, 2008: 139) enabled fictional stories to begin mani­ festing as both intertextual and inter-textual phenomena in ways that have since defined transmedia storytelling, with the meaning of Oz and its inhabi­ tants not located solely within the actual texts (novels, stage plays, films, etc.), but also folded across multiple sites of media paratext (printed maps, posters, reviews, competitions, faux newspapers, etc.). And in that sense, the concept of the active, media-migrating audience – one with a performative, fan-producing role that is invited by the creator (Jenkins, 2009: online) – was as much an emerging feature of early twentieth-century industrialisa­ tion as it is of early twenty-first-century convergences. Culver’s description of US culture as an endless consumption cycle of visual fascinations aptly characterises the transmedia world-building strate­ gies of the early twentieth century, then, and transmedia storytelling does indeed have an innate capitalism at its core. But even withstanding Baum’s recognised struggle to steadily make money out of his most transmedial of world-building experiments, his Land of Oz story world still very much epitomises the model for producing transmedia storytelling at the turn of the twentieth century.10

Notes 1. For a thorough examination of the cultural role of window dressing during this period, see Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (California: University of California Press, 1994). 2. Advertising was significantly helped by the distribution of free or subsidized branded cigarettes to troops during World War I. See Randy James and Scott Olstad, “Cigarette Advertising,” Time (June 15, 2009), accessed March 25, 2014, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1905530,00.html. 3. This extension of fiction into real life actually forms the basis of Saler’s inter­ rogation of the characteristics of the early twentieth century forms the literary prehistory of virtual reality. See Michael Saler, As If: Modern Enchantments and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 4. Max Mosher argues that Baum was himself in some ways instrumental to usher­ ing in an age of modern advertising. See Max Mosher, “Window Dressing: The Art and Artists,” UTNE Reader (March/April 2012), accessed June 2, 2012, http:// www.utne.com/media/window-dressing-zm0z12mazsie.aspx#axzz2fchP334z. 5. Figures based on data recorded in The New York Dramatic Mirror, ­December 18, 1903, 23. 6. See “The Newspaper of the Land of Oz!,” accessed June 4, 2012, http://www. hungrytigerpress.com/tigertreats/ozmapolitan.shtml. 7. For details see David L. Green and Dick Martin, The Oz Scrapbook (New York: Random House, 1977), 129.

102  Exploring Transmedia History 8. The use of words to forge connections between stories across media echoes the importance of ‘interconnections’ as emphasised by Jenkins, who of course ana­lyses contemporary transmedia storytelling according to the same inter­ linked connections between storylines across media. For examples see Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 102. 9. The American cinema’s transitional era is usually demarcated between 1908 and 1917. See Charles Keil and Shelley Stamp, American Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices (California: University of California Press, 2004). 10. Baum did, however, continue to write about Oz in novels, releasing The Tin Woodman of Oz, The Magic of Oz, and Glinda of Oz in 1918, 1919, and 1920, respectively. Following Baum’s death on May 6, 1919, an additional twenty-six official Oz books were published over the ensuing decades – nineteen by Ruth Plumly Thompson, three by John R. Neill, two by Jack Snow and one each by Rachel Cosgrove Payes and by Eloise Jarvis McGraw and her daughter.

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4 1918–1938 From Fairy-Worlds to Jungles: Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc., Tarzan and Corporate Authorship

By 1975, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., a family owned corporation founded in March 1923, was reported to be earning in the region of $1 million ­annually from the sales of merchandise and stories based on the character and adventures of Tarzan. ‘The world-wide gross of Tarzan products sold under license to us is at least $50 million a year,’ asserted Robert Hodes, the man in charge of the Tarzan business empire at that time (The New York Times, 1975: 59). ‘Besides the income from Tarzan motion pictures, there are also royalties from two million Burroughs books published annu­ ally and comic strips in 250 newspapers’ (ibid.). In addition, Hodes conti­ nued, ‘manu­facturers pay royalties on Tarzan products.’ Author Edgar Rice ­Burroughs, once branded ‘the modern Jules Verne’ of the day, had in fact transformed the fictional tales of his imagination into a thriving business empire that stretched across an array of popular media forms and products (ibid.). Perhaps accordingly, as Burroughs’ grandson once claimed, ‘next to Coca-Cola, Tarzan is the best known name in the world’ (ibid.). Such a claim may well be an exaggeration, but it is certainly significant that Tarzan should be compared to Coca-Cola in this instance. For to dis­ cuss Tarzan in this context of both fictional tale and business empire is to discuss it not exclusively as a character, or as a series of media texts, or even as a fictional story world, but equally as a distribution of licensed trademark that spreads under the ownership of a company. As was explored in the pre­ vious chapter, transmedia storytelling existed in the early years of the 1900s, but was at that time dependent on advertising and did not afford authors a particularly viable business model to earn much money. Moving forward, this chapter examines the industrial and cultural configurations of the 1920s and the 1930s that would enable the Tarzan story world to span multiple media during this time. As with the previous chapter, understanding how the Tarzan story world could have worked as a transmedia entertainment means contextualising the production of this story world’s products within the era’s broader transformations. The chapter posits that corporate author­ ship was now the driving determinant of transmedia storytelling at this time. Specifically, this chapter has two purposes. First, it considers how in cut­ ting across different media during the 1920s and 1930s, the emerging and interconnected practices associated with corporate authorship’s managerial

1918–1938  109 function – such as licensing, franchising, sponsorship and merchandising – formed an alignment across multiple media that enabled stories to flow across those media. By showing how the rise of these corporate authorship practices encouraged transmedia storytelling to spread beyond media texts and promotional materials to also include merchandise and other licensed products amidst the broader influences of the rising consumer culture, I argue that transmedia storytelling became corporatised in the 1920s and 1930s. Second, this chapter explores how this period’s corporate authorship equipped authors such as Burroughs with a heightened author-function that actually afforded new strategies for holding a fictional story world together across media and for pointing audiences across media. Authorship in this case refers to the governing role played by a central author figure over the extensions of a transmedia story across different media, be it a sole writer or a company. As noted above, I will examine how franchising, sponsorship and merchandising each equipped Burroughs with a heightened author-function, bringing with them new strategies for holding story worlds together and for pointing audiences across multiple media. In the first part of this chapter I recite some of the broader cultural trends related to consumer culture. I use the early Tarzan stories published inside pulp magazines in the mid-1910s to show how the rise in consump­ tion amplified the desire for more and more stories, as adventures now sprawled across countless magazine editions, building fictional story worlds in the process. Having gestured towards the role of the author-function on building story worlds in pulp magazines, I then go on to contextualise the rise of licensing as a key practice associated with corporate authorship’s managerial function, establishing its development amidst the turn towards related developments in retail franchising, corporate sponsorship and mer­ chandising. As with the last chapter, the idea is thus to lay out the general information concerning these corporate authorship practices at the start of the chapter, before then analysing how those different practices informed specific strategies for authoring the Tarzan story world across media in the ensuing sections. I here stress that all of these various corporate practices each afforded reciprocal links between media and merchandise, which I later show to be very important to how authorship held a story world together at this time. This authorial importance will be made especially visible as I then move on to look at the early fragmentation of the Tarzan story world upon the character’s move to cinema, pointing to the lack of a licensing model as the cause of the fragmentation. Subsequently, the chapter will chart Burroughs’ decision to incorporate himself in the 1920s before I begin to examine how some of the affordances of the era’s corporate practices – ­franchising, radio sponsorship deals and merchandising – each informed the Tarzan productions of the early 1930s, equipping Burroughs with a heightened author-function across newspaper comic strips and radio serials that led to new strategies of transmedia storytelling across these particular media

110  Exploring Transmedia History forms. Last, and somewhat paradoxically, the chapter looks at Burroughs’ later film ventures amidst the rise of the Hollywood studio system to show how licensing became an imperfect vehicle for implementing transmedia storytelling at this time, bringing vast financial reward but at the expense of the author-function, which as I have shown is crucial to holding a fic­ tional story world together across media and for pointing audiences across those media. Ultimately I demonstrate in this chapter how the model of trans­media storytelling in the 1920s and the 1930s, driven by the consumer culture, succeeded commercially but often by fragmenting story worlds into contradictory, competing versions that did not always work to point audiences across media. The media forms to be examined throughout this chapter shall span pulp magazines, motion pictures, newspaper comic strips, radio serials and novels.

Consumer Culture and Corporate Authorship Understanding how Edgar Rice Burroughs constructed the adventures of Tarzan as a story world stretching across multiple media means re-establishing the context of the rising consumer culture that followed industrialisation during the early decades of the twentieth century. If industrialisation was about new models of production, then consumer culture was about new models of distributing and marketing the new products of the industrial age. By the mid-1910s, to reiterate James C. Davis, many Americans had since ‘grown accustomed to the signature experiences of the new consumer society, such as buying on credit, shopping in department stores, seeing national brands advertising in local newspapers’ (2007: 1). As shown ear­ lier in Chapter 2, these first two or three decades of the twentieth century were significant turning points in the evolution of the mass production and consumption of culture. Importantly, ‘the industrial revolution had enabled the manufacturing of more and more goods’, as Davis clarifies, and so ‘the long-term stability of the economy required that demand be manufactured as well’ (ibid.). ‘Mass production has made mass distribution necessary’, asserted Edward Filene, a department store tycoon, in 1927. Consumer culture was about spreading products further and wider, encouraging con­ sumption so to keep demand at the same high level as supply. And spread­ ability, of course – referring ‘to a process of dispersal [and] scanning across the media landscape in search of meaningful bits of data’ (Jenkins, 2009: online) – remains a key principle for defining transmedia storytelling. Consumption, moreover, was characteristically promoted through mass media such as magazines. The magazine embodied the rising consumer cul­ ture, forming strategies that encouraged sustained consumption over time. These strategies quite often meant extending stories and building story worlds, as can be seen in the early Tarzan stories published inside the pulp magazines of the 1910s. Tarzan of the Apes was a story first published in the October 1912 edition of The All-Story, a popular pulp magazine. The story

1918–1938  111 is now that of legend: Apes in the African jungles raise the son of British aristocrats Lord and Lady Greystoke after they are marooned and killed. Known as Tarzan, a ruthless man-beast, the orphan grows to rule over the savage beasts of his jungle domain. But remember that by the 1910s socio­ logist Simon Patten had commented that readers had now become accus­ tomed to the era’s ‘economy of abundance’ (1907: 223). In turn, and with such abundance in the air, it was common for many magazine readers of the period to often demand more and more story from what was seemingly just a single media text. Note one reader’s response to Tarzan of the Apes, whose letter, published inside The All-Story in 1912, stressed: I have just finished reading “Tarzan of the Apes,” and to say that it is the best story I ever read would be putting it mildly. It is full of life and action, besides being unique in its plot. I did not lay down the magazine until I had finished “Tarzan,” and since then I have been burning to know why it need end. What did Tarzan do next? Cannot you persuade the author to write a kind of sequel? I know many of the other readers feel as I do. (A.J.J., 1912: 962) Other reader letters echoed the same sentiment: ‘Have read The All-Story for about four years, and never in all that time have I read anything like “Tarzan of the Apes” in your magazine or any other. Give us more of that please’ (E.M., 1912: 968). This demand for sequels and ‘more of that’ was indeed a common feature of a magazine’s letter page, and one that encap­ sulated the period’s economy of abundance and the increased distribution and consumption of products. Moreover, the demand for more and more led to pulp stories operating like extensions added on to a house that never stopped being built. For pulp fiction was itself rather like a proverbial house of fiction that exploited adjoining narratives so as to sustain a high reader­ ship at a time when the manufacturing of more and more products also meant more and more choice for readers. Hence why many of this period’s pulp magazines constructed their narratives in the assembly-line fashion, as the stories of one character joined with those of another; each of these adjoining stories would then come together to form a larger story world. The assumption on the part of many magazine editors at the time was that readers who responded favourably to one particular story or one particular character would be more easily persuaded to read a different story featuring a different hero – and thus purchase further editions of the same magazine – if both sets of characters were seen to be sharing the same fictional story world, intertextually linking the exploits of one hero with those of others. No pulp author of the era did this more than Burroughs. For example, in one of his pulp serials called At the Earth’s Core, also published inside The All-Story, this time in 1914, Burroughs created a world called Pellucidar, a land inhabited by a species of pterodactyls called Mahars. Later entries in the series featured visits from Tarzan. The crossover narration was

112  Exploring Transmedia History in turn reciprocated when, in a later story titled Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar, published in 1916 in The All-Story, Tarzan stumbled across the lost ­civilisation ­discovered in At the Earth’s Core. The All-Story’s Editor Thomas Metcalf had explicitly encouraged Burroughs to develop these crossover techniques for commercial purposes: ‘The mystical appeal of all these r­ ivers, valleys and seas, which you mentioned only casually in “Tarzan of the Apes,”’ Metcalf wrote in a letter to Burroughs, ‘I believe would be very strong for sales’ (1912). ­Burroughs’ intention for his first Tarzan sequel story, titled The Return of Tarzan, was hence for his hero to ‘encounter a strange race l­iving in the ruins of a former great city’ (Burroughs, 1912). Correspondingly, in another of Burroughs’ stories called The Land That Time Forgot – this time published in Blue Book Magazine in 1918 – readers were presented with a vision of this former great city, here called Caspak, a place inhabited by dinosaurs. But Caspak, as was revealed only at the end of this story, bordered the same jungle as Tarzan’s adventures. Burroughs’ pulp fictions had developed into intertextual – if not yet transmedial – stories. Indeed, ­Burroughs’ pulp fictions can be seen as an early exemplar of what Jenkins has since characterised as ‘drillability’ in relation to contemporary trans­media story­telling, with these stories granting readers ‘the ability for a person to explore, in-depth, a deep well of narrative extensions when they stumble upon a fiction that captures their attention’ (2009: online). This expansive intertextual linking of Burroughs’ fictional stories – exploiting the popularity of one creation to boost the readership of the others – on the one hand constituted a form of world-building, providing readers with prequels and sequels that offered new fictional settings and new information to do with world mythology and known timelines. But this expansive intertextual linking also highlights the role of the author-­ function on holding a story world together and pointing readers from one story to the next. Chapter 1 revealed two important standards of the author-­ function, and it is worth reiterating these here. The first standard, which I called the textual author-function, is about how an author may impose and maintain the description of what does and does not constitute a particular story world – as in Tarzan’s jungle bordering The Land That Time Forgot’s Caspak but not bordering, say, The Shadow’s New York City. The second standard, which was based on Foucault’s ideas and defined as the market author-function, concerns the way that the presence of an author’s name on a media text – as in on the title-page of a pulp magazine – can point audi­ ences to other stories that constitute that same story world. Earlier in the book I argued that both of these standards of the author-function are crucial to holding fictional story worlds together. Both of these author-functions were indeed present and correct in Burroughs’ pulps. In fact, the pulp magazines of the early twentieth century exemplify how authorship facilitated the building of a story world across different texts, at least in magazines. For on one level, Burroughs had an important textual author-function to play as the author of various pulp adventures,

1918–1938  113 building a description of what did and did not constitute his fictional story world – as in the revelation that Caspak bordered Tarzan’s jungle. And on another level, this description-building also led to readers understanding this now-adjoined story world not only as Caspak or as Tarzan’s jungle but also (and perhaps more commonly) as the ‘Burroughsian universe.’1 The phrase ‘Burroughsian universe’ indicates how the name of an author – in this case, Burroughs – signalled to readers the relevance of one story in relation to others, with one story leading and pointing to another. Take one letter, addressed to Burroughs and written by The All-Story’s editor in 1912, which acknowledged that ‘reader letters come in so often and ask for more of your Tarzan work that I am tempted to believe we had better call the magazine the “All-Burroughs Magazine”’ (Metcalf, 1912). In other words, the name Edgar Rice Burroughs had acquired a vitally important market-function for selling Tarzan. But this kind of market author-function extended far beyond the form of pulp magazines. In some respects it characterised many of the newly developing industry practices of the rising consumer culture – most nota­ bly, licensing practices associated with corporate authorship’s managerial function. As defined earlier in the book, licensing is about granting rights in property without transferring ownership of it, and allows a company to ‘sell the rights to manufacture products using its assets to an often ­unaffiliated third party’ (Jenkins, 2006: 107). Early forms of licensing included the ­comic-strip characters of the previous chapter, such as Buster Brown, which had been licensed as the face of merchandise such as Buster Brown shoes. With the rise of consumer culture came the further rise of licensing and indeed what Santo described in Chapter 2 as the early generation of licensors who simultaneously ‘partnered with and policed’ their licensees (2010: 64). By the early 1930s licensers began to concentrate on ‘the busi­ ness of extending the reach of a brand’ across as many media platforms as possible (Santo, 2006: 13). For that reason, corporate licensing would become central to transmedia storytelling, affording authors a heightened market-­function that led to new ways of building fictional story worlds and pointing audiences across media. Even in the context of retail rather than media, one of the interconnected practices associated with corporate authorship that developed around the 1920s was franchising, which exploited the market-function of an owner’s name so to spread that owner’s business further, pointing consumers from one product or service to another. Franchising was one of the driving indus­ trialised means of spreading products and services far and wide in the midst of the rising consumer culture. David J. Swartz identifies the franchise as an agreement between stakeholders – a franchisor who develops the system and a franchisee who invests in that system: ‘The franchisor … attempts to create public recognition of the franchised outlets. The franchisee, follow­ ing the merchandising and business procedures outlined by the franchisor, proceeds to operate as an independent establishment’ (1968: 3–4). However,

114  Exploring Transmedia History unlike some forms of licensing that provide the licensee with some creative control and authorship, with franchising all franchisees must adopt the name of the franchisor; the name of a franchisee is thus publically hidden in favour of the franchise owner. Hence a franchised McDonald’s restaurant still looks, feels and operates just like any other McDonald’s restaurant. And in the 1900s, franchising was first a phenomenon of transportation sectors, utilised exclusively for extending roads, tram lines and railways across the country. The franchise, in that sense, was between different transportation agencies. Offers to buy into these sorts of franchises were typically advertised in news­ papers: ‘Bids will be opened for the purchase of the ­Eleventh-street electric railway franchise,’ published the Los Angeles Times in May 1904 (6). ‘The franchise purchaser will connect with the ­Main-street line of the Los Ange­ les Railway Company and if built the road will be operated by that pur­ chaser’ (ibid.). Even as it operated at this early stage, franchising – a practice of distribution emerging as part of the consumer culture – was thus about enabling property or services to spread among consumerism. Kristen Thompson and, most extensively, Derek Johnson have both demonstrated how franchising developed from these earlier historical sys­ tems associated with consumerism (2007: 4; 2013: 41–46). Indeed, in the 1920s franchising quickly expanded to include food and retail establish­ ments. The Coca-Cola Company was one of the earliest manufacturers of a consumer product to use franchising as its business model.2 In this case, the business model itself evolved accordingly by allowing independent ­operators to use the name, logo, supplies and trademark in exchange for a fee. But franchising’s intended effect of fostering wide, sustained and vast distribution still remained intact. Most importantly, franchising meant that the given product or service in question – in this case, Coca-Cola – was able to be spread far further than if it were to have remained in the hands of the original manufacturers only. More than spreading products further, moreover, retail franchising stimu­ lated brand loyalty. As with the earlier example of the adjoining fictional story worlds in the pulps, retail franchising – though certainly requiring consumer loyalty to be built over time – did encourage the repeat consump­ tion of the same products over and over again by reassuring said consum­ ers about the value of sameness, thus inspiring the sustained purchasing of their most accustomed products in much the same way that pulp maga­ zine editors had prompted readers to keep consuming their most accus­ tomed heroes. ‘Insist on the nationally known product – the product that has always given you the best result,’ instructed one advertisement in the Radio Mirror in 1924 (Radio Mirror, 1924: 1). ‘Then you are sure of getting exactly what you pay for’ (ibid.). Take Fredericks, a hair salon franchise, as a case in point, who warned its customers in one advertisement that ‘not all permanent waves are Fredericks Permanent Waves. To be sure of get­ ting a true Fredericks Permanent Wave, patronize an authorized Fredericks shop. Look for the Fredericks Franchise Certificate, guaranteeing the use

1918–1938  115 of a Fredericks machine’ (Hollywood, 1928: 310). Franchising thus came hand in hand with a m ­ arket-function – the presence of a name on a product pointed consumers across products in ways that would be important to how authors pointed audiences across stories. Yet the role of franchising on transmedia storytelling at this time is a complex one. Johnson has argued that ‘whereas transmedia storytelling sug­ gests cultural artistry, “franchising” recalls popular yet culturally maligned systems of mass production’ (2013: 33). In both Chapters 2 and 3 I showed the foundational importance of systems of mass production on the industrial history of transmedia storytelling, highlighting how transmedia storytelling was actually borne out of systems of mass production around the turn of the twentieth century. Later in this chapter I will hence further demonstrate how licensing-associated practices including franchising and merchandising worked to directly enhance and inform the ‘cultural artistry’ of transmedia storytelling at this time. Indeed, a further interconnected practice associated with corporate authorship’s managerial function is merchandising. While the term has many definitions, in the context of media production merchan­ dising refers to the practice of using the brand or image from one product or service to sell another. Trademarked brand names, logos or character images are licensed to manufacturers of products such as toys or clothing, which then make items in or emblazoned with the image of the license. Exam­ ples might include jigsaw puzzles, for instance, and Santo notes that ‘Buck ­Rogers ray guns were amongst the most successful toys sold throughout the 1930s, as were Buck Rogers space suits and toy spaceships’ (2006: 31). In other words, and building on work by Will Brooker (2002) and Jonathan Gray (2010) that shows how toys can expand or reshape a transmedia nar­ rative, I examine the specific ways in which strategies of merchandising in the past enabled the stories and story world of Tarzan to extend and expand even further through performance. Merchandising often came as a result of corporate sponsorship – a fur­ ther practice of corporate authorship that is relevant to how Burroughs would author Tarzan across media. According to A. J. van Zuilen, radio sta­ tions gathered commercial sponsorship in the 1920s (1977: 47), with NBC forming the first formal commercial radio network in 1926 (Salvaggio and Bryant, 1989: 23). By the late 1920s radio programmes in the US were often sponsored by third-party companies, many of which already manufactured consumer products and so began branding their own products in line with the radio programme. In affording the ‘co-operate enterprise’ of corporate authorship to diversify its operational capacity, forging deeper collabora­ tions with producers and sponsors alike, sponsorship could work to further spread the characters and story worlds of a popular fiction across media (Johnson, 2013: 35). More than that, corporate collaborations between producers and sponsors meant that media and merchandise were now manu­factured under largely the same systems. In turn, media could work to point consumers to merchandise and merchandise could point consumers

116  Exploring Transmedia History to media; the guiding of consumers was reciprocal. This meant, as André Jansson notes, that ‘in such a context, consuming goods and media texts becomes pretty much the same thing’ (2002: 5). By the 1930s, magazines such as Business Screen were publishing articles about ways to ‘use films in business’, offering tips for how films could spread the products of shops to a wider audience (Business Screen, 1936: 29–36). Feature films were pro­ duced as a means of marketing consumer goods. Examples of this particular trend included Coolerator, a company specialising in ice refrigerators, who produced a ‘Coolerator consumer picture’ called Husbands Are Good For Something, precisely as a way to market and more effectively spread their product to a mass consumer audience (Business Screen, 1936: 45–46). David Welky argues that marketing strategies such as the likes of ­Husbands Are Good For Something essentially ‘threatened to turn the art of writing into just another product’ (2008: 94). Culturally speaking, media and mer­ chandise were now firmly adjoined together as related b ­ uilding-blocks of much larger products, in much the same way that pulp magazines adjoined different fictional story worlds together as building-blocks of far larger media texts. In effect, the rise of consumer culture and the corporate prac­ tices described above had created a cultural moment during the first three decades of the twentieth century in which the mass-produced products of the industrial age had begun to spread under new systems of distribution. The likes of licensing, franchising, sponsorship and merchandising led to media texts and other cultural phenomena spreading far and wide across a plethora of products. In turn, licensing’s ability to extend and spread products across borders would soon come to drive the way in which stories soon began to be told across media. Or to put it another way, media and merchandising – joined together by corporate authorship’s managerial practices – could both build story worlds and both point audiences across media. However, before I examine how these particular practices each manifested in the production strategies of Burroughs’ Tarzan stories, I will first show how Burroughs’ initial experiments with licensing actually caused the Tarzan story world to splinter through lack of authorship.

Under-Licensing The previous chapter may have shown how early forms of licensing materi­ alised in the first decade of the twentieth century, as comic-strip characters such as Buster Brown became the face of products, but as Santo rightly notes licensing became more prevalent only in 1918 when the Supreme Court tightened trademark legislation laws. This act was ‘intended to protect the public against confusion and deception that might be caused by competing businesses using similar marks/logos/slogans, etc.’ (Santo, 2006: 14). Given that the first Tarzan motion picture appeared in early 1918, just before the licensing policies had been tightened, it is a fitting coincidence that this

1918–1938  117 production marked a moment of fragmentation for the Tarzan story world. But why might the story world have fragmented at this time and what might this actually mean? In short, the lack of a licensing model in place for this production deprived Burroughs of a strong author-function over the Tarzan of the silver screen, fragmenting the Tarzan story world rather than building it across multiple media. Allow me to elaborate and set the scene a little. Tarzan of the Apes, the first motion picture based on Burroughs’ pulp hero, was produced by the National Film Corporation and premiered on January 27, 1918, at New  York’s Broadway Theatre. Burroughs reportedly sold the film rights to both this story along with its sequel, The Return of Tarzan, published in New Story Magazine in 1913, in exchange for a record $5,000 as well as 5 ­percent of all gross receipts (Fury, 1994: 8). The fragmentation of the Tarzan story world in cinema at this early stage can be traced to Burroughs’ decision here to sell – rather than to license – the motion picture rights outright to his early Tarzan stories to a number of different motion picture producers in 1917, in turn handing control to those producers. In a move reflective of the era, Tarzan of the Apes was promoted in ways that emphasised its ability to sell in mass volume: ‘Circulation of the story,’ one poster asserted, ‘includes 17,000,000 books sold [and] 6,000 newspapers published it serially over a period of one year’ (Moving Picture World, 1918: 486–489). What was not publicised on the film’s posters, however, or at least not to the same extent, was the name Edgar Rice Burroughs. Having sold the rights, Tarzan of the Apes, at least on the movie screen, was not Burroughs’ property. From the point of view of movie producers, Burroughs’ name was likely a little too closely associ­ ated with the oft-maligned ‘trashy’, ‘trivial’ and ‘cheap’ works of pulp fiction to warrant branding his name on the movie (Stanfield, 2011:  26). In turn, and despite Burroughs playing a fairly active role in the film’s development (­Variety, 1917: 22), the outright selling of his story rights to the National Film Corporation cost him his official authorial control over all creative aspects of the film. In a letter he wrote to his brother in 1922, Burroughs hence complained: The producers never read the stories, and it is only occasionally, I ­imagine, that the director reads them … As far as I know, no one con­ nected with the making of a single Tarzan picture has had the remotest conception of either the story or the character, as I conceived it. (Porges, 1975: 491) Tarzan, as a story world, had diffused its description into largely incongruent splinters of textual incoherence. As David Fury reasserts, ‘since ­Burroughs sold the film rights to the motion picture companies, [they] were able to characterize Tarzan as they thought the movie-going public wanted him to be’, rather than how Burroughs had established him (1994: 9). On the one hand, the textual author-function that I have shown to be important to

118  Exploring Transmedia History transmedia storytelling was thereby undermined. In this author-function, the author imposes and maintains the description of what does and does not constitute a story world – as in a Tarzan that is a ruthless British aristo­ crat as opposed to the civilised American family man that was portrayed in the 1918 Tarzan of the Apes motion picture by actor Elmo Lincoln. And this diffusion of the story world into two different versions with no inter­ textual tissue had another side effect. Burroughs’ own name, as I demon­ strated earlier in relation to pulp magazines, had acquired an important market author-function for selling the stories of Tarzan. This market author-­ function thus became comprised, too. Note the following letter, which was written to the Burroughs estate in June 1920, as one aggrieved audience member remarked: I am much disappointed in this latest Tarzan [motion picture]. It seems that the universal opinion is that it is a sort of sacrilege on the Tarzan of the book. Every guy I asked said the picture was rotten, and the reason they hated it was because it was nothing like your books … It was apparent from the get-go that this was never going to be the Burroughsian universe. (Weston, 1920) As it had done in the pulps, then, the phrase ‘Burroughsian universe’ conti­ nued to function as a signalling device to certain audiences about the relation­ship between one Tarzan story and others. The 1918 Tarzan of the Apes movie, as the above audience member acknowledged plainly, was indeed not part of this same Burroughsian universe, and as such failed to hold the larger story world together across media and point core audiences across those media. Nevertheless, Burroughs did aim to restore his authorial control over the Tarzan story world, and did so by more closely integrating the Tarzan of the cinema with the Tarzan of print media, extending the story of the latter across into the story of the former. And yet without the structure of a proper licensing agreement in place, Burroughs’ attempts to accomplish such trans­ media storytelling across into the cinema brought a number of severe copy­ right infringement accusations. As I indicated in Chapter 2, the cinema may have begun as a transmedial phenomenon, borrowing as it so readily did from literary or theatrical iterations of popular stories, but copyright regu­ lation equally militated against transmedia storytelling. In this case, for instance, the National Film Corporation’s legal ownership over Tarzan of the Apes on screen led to tangled legal problems when Burroughs sought to extend that story. Consider The Adventures of Tarzan film production. This movie premiered on December 1, 1921, and was devised as a joint collabo­ ration between Burroughs, the Evening World newspaper – where Tarzan of the Apes had also been serialised in print format – and producer Louis Weiss. The aim of this collaboration was to narrate a new Tarzan adventure

1918–1938  119 whose narrative began precisely where The Return of Tarzan, Burroughs’ second pulp adventure, had ended, but before The Son of Tarzan, his third story, began. The story was to unfold across newspapers and cinema, build­ ing upon pulp stories to construct a larger transmedia story world – each text like a new room added onto the house of this story world. Publicity emphasised as much with a full-page advertisement in The Film Daily stressing: ‘New stories – not a re-hash of any stories already filmed – not like anything you ever saw or heard of!’ (The Film Daily, 1921: 4). But in order to achieve what was effectively a new story – not a re-hash of an old story, but an intertextual extension of the old stories across media – Burroughs again sold the film rights to multiple Tarzan stories to different producers. And while this model did give Burroughs a heightened textual and market author-function over the Tarzan story world that worked to create a serialised story across multiple media that broke up ‘a narrative arc into multiple discrete chunks or instalments’ (Jenkins, 2009: online), it also caused what The Film Daily called a ‘wrangle over rights’ (1921a: 2). This report disclosed that Numa Pictures Corporation, distributor of 1920s The Romance of Tarzan film, which was itself based on the latter half of ­Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes and the first half of his The Return of Tarzan pulps, attempted to shut down the production of The Adventures of Tarzan movie. What, then, was the reason for this particular confrontation? The reason was simple: Burroughs had effectively sold too many rights to too many people. The Adventures of Tarzan’s producer, Louis Weiss, had obtained the motion picture rights from Burroughs to ‘other stories and from one of these the film “The Adventures of Tarzan” will be made’ (The Film Daily, 1921: 2). But Numa Pictures insisted that the film’s story affili­ ation with their own The Romance of Tarzan film (the former’s narrative began where the latter ended, thus overlapping very slightly) was a clear vio­ lation of rights agreements in place between the company and Burroughs. The company declared that The Adventures of Tarzan movie was therefore ‘absolutely without foundation … Mr. Burroughs disposed of all his rights to “The Return of Tarzan” to the Numa Pictures Corp. and Mr. Weiss has no rights growing out of this book, nor did he in any manner retain any production rights’ (ibid.). The conflicts left ‘a very bitter Burroughs’ (ibid.) allegedly declaring that ‘the motion picture producer is the one man I care to have no further dealings with’ (Fury, 1994: 21). Harsh words, perhaps, but this declaration was a sign of the limits of working across media in the 1920s without a strong licensing model in place. Indeed, at a time when the rise of consumer culture meant the increased circulation of more and more texts and products, the market-function of ­Burroughs’ name was somewhat integral to the Tarzan media texts func­ tioning as a brand in the eyes of many of the audience. Burroughs’ early collaborations with motion picture producers showed the author that pro­ ducing Tarzan as an expanding story world across media – as opposed to incongruous splinters of textual incoherence – meant not only collaborating

120  Exploring Transmedia History with third parties across media, but managing those third parties across media. In effect, it meant elevating Burroughs’ status over the entire Tarzan story world from that of author to that of supplier of corporate Tarzan goods, rather like the owner of a shop.

Franchising The analogy of a shop owner is a fitting one, for Burroughs responded to the mixed results of the early Tarzan movies by applying the model of retail franchising to the production of his Tarzan media texts. Ever since ­Burroughs, ‘a creative tyrant and businessmen [who] was never satisfied’, as the Los Angeles Times described him (1975: 2), learned of the commer­ cial value of adjoining his works together as building-blocks of a larger fictional story world in the pulps, he henceforth sought to expand his Tarzan story world more successfully to other media. In effect, franchising afforded Burroughs a heightened market author-function that led to the creation of authored extensions of the transmedia Tarzan story world, enabling the author to point audiences from one medium to another rather than con­ fusing audiences with the incongruous splinters of textual incoherence that characterised the earlier Tarzan movies. The origins of Burroughs’ attempts at franchising Tarzan began on March  26, 1923, when Burroughs founded Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., a ­California Corporation (Porges, 1975; 489). He trademarked the name ­Tarzan and granted all rights, titles and interests in his works to this corpora­ tion, establishing a franchising-based model that would start issuing licenses to Burroughs’ characters and stories. This franchising model would effectively enable the author to create in one medium and sell in a variety of them, in much the same way as retail franchisors had been doing with shops. By 1933 Burroughs himself described Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. as an ‘emporium’ (Burroughs, 1933), a word that derives from merchant, as in a commercial dealer, which historically denoted outlets such as a marketplace or a trading centre or a large shop that would sell a variety of goods. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. was very soon to become, as Matt Cohen reiterates, ‘the most spectacular in a series of efforts to take control of the means of his fictional production’ (2005: 23). Crucially, the company also marked the author’s transition from an individual author to a corporate author, a move that represented the first known instance of an author successfully incorporating himself.3 Suddenly Tarzan was so much more than just a textual creation; far more than a char­ acter or even a story world, Tarzan was now a fully corporatised entity – a distribution of trademark that could spread across multiple media under a series of legally protected rights. Just as retailers had emerged as franchises in and of themselves, Burroughs’ incorporation would affirm his status as a franchise figure and as the creator of his own media franchise. Trade papers and newspapers of this era indicate that franchising, specifi­ cally, was beginning to be carried over into more media-based territories a

1918–1938  121 few years after the incorporation of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. By 1930, for example, the exploits of a national theatre company were news­worthy for representing ‘another step ahead in the production stride toward stage-show entertainment’ when the company ‘verified the franchise which includes the development of branches all over Los Angeles’ (Los Angeles Times, 1930: 11). Thus while Johnson indicates (perhaps rightly) that ‘only after World War II did franchising move to the center of corporate ­strategy’ (2013: 41–46), the start of the 1930s actually represented the true beginnings of what would now be called media franchising.4 And this turn towards media franchising began to equip Burroughs with a heightened market author-function that in turn enabled the author to point Tarzan audiences from one medium to another. Consider the very popular Tarzan newspaper comic strip, whose daily edition was first published on January 7, 1929, with a Sunday edition first appearing on March 15, 1931. By this time newspaper comic strips had evolved and were no longer perceived as the simple advertising cyphers like in the earliest years of the twentieth century. Instead, newspaper comics were now more actual products than promotion; that is to say that many readers now selected which newspaper they bought based on the comic strips it published rather than the news it featured. Polls indicated as much, with one poll in particular showing that by 1936 while 70 percent of ­readers – nearly 80 million Americans – acknowledged reading a newspaper’s comics, only 40 percent read the front-page story (San Francisco Examiner, 1936: 32). Comic strips thus contributed, as David Welky observes, to the ‘creation [of] the mass consumer culture’ in the US (2008: 80) – owing in large part to the systems of mass production and consumption of culture. ­Moreover, comics came to represent the shareability that Jenkins characterises as key to the entire culture of transmediality (2009: online), since as Shawna ­Kidman adds, ‘times were tough, comics were affordable, and unlike radio and film, they constituted a possession – one that could be traded, re-read, or ­cherished’ (2015). With newspaper comics coming to be perceived as shareable products just like any other, the Tarzan comic strip began life when the C ­ ampbell-Ewald Advertising Company approached Burroughs with a proposal to p ­ roduce and market a Tarzan newspaper comic strip in 1927. Concerned by his ­readers’ earlier messages of disgruntlement over the ‘sacrilegious’ ­Tarzan motion pictures that had little in common with the literary works, ­Burroughs used his corporate status to approve a franchising model over the Tarzan comic strip, personifying what Santo characterised earlier as ‘the earlier gene­ration of media licensers’ (2010: 64). Burroughs refused to sell the rights this time, and instead opted to licensing them under a model inspired by the retail franchises around him whereby all licensed franchisees, follow­ ing the business procedures outlined by the franchisor, proceed to operate under the guidance and name of the franchisor. Burroughs thus licensed the rights to ten of his own Tarzan stories along with the ‘pictorial rights’ to the character (Los Angeles Times, 1950: 2). Burroughs received 50 percent

122  Exploring Transmedia History of newspaper payments with the comic strip licensed to Hearst newspapers at a rate of $1.50 per day per 10,000 subscribers (ibid.). Developing the ­Tarzan comic strip as if it were a franchised consumer product like CocaCola, Burroughs’ corporate status facilitated a similar legal right over the control of his works. In this sense, and operating under a more collaborative model than the one used in earlier decades by Baum, Burroughs’ corpora­ tisation meant that the Campbell-Ewald Advertising Company was essen­ tially a supervised licensee working under the ownership of Burroughs. This model would restore Burroughs’ author-function over Tarzan, and specifi­ cally pronounced the author’s name with a heightened market-function that held the Tarzan story world together. For one thing, this market author-function was made especially visible by the title of the Tarzan comic strip itself. Every single edition of the Tarzan comic strip during the 1930s was published as either ‘Tarzan–By Edgar Rice Burroughs’ or as ‘Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan’ despite the story for these comic strips coming from a mostly uncredited team of Campbell-Ewald Advertising Company writers. This model was indeed a strategy informed by the model of retail franchising, wherein the brand name of a franchisee was hidden in favour of the franchise owner – in this case, Burroughs. Even industry documents such as the Variety Directory tended to credit B ­ urroughs as the ‘scripter’ of each comic strip despite the author not writing a single edition (Variety Radio Directory, 1937–1938: 151). Moving Picture World, similarly, made reference to the comic strip as a ‘by-product’ of ‘the stories of Burroughs’, thus signalling how Burroughs’ name pointed readers across media (1931: 2). Going forward, this market author-function conti­nued to be pronounced. The Son of Tarzan, for example, a newspaper comic strip from 1930, was publicised by the Los Angeles Times as ‘a swift moving and thrill­ ing series of pictorial exposition for the stories of Mr. Burroughs’ (1930: 2). In 1932 the same newspaper also billed the comic strip as a whole as ‘inven­ tive stories sure to charm Burroughs fans new and old’ (Los ­Angeles Times, 1932: 55). By this point, Burroughs and his Burroughsian universe was in some ways as much the franchise product as Tarzan; the mere ­presence of the author’s name at the top of the comic strip held the Tarzan story world together across media rather than splitting into two versions. And so if the consumer culture of the 1910s and 1920s was a process of distributing and marketing the multiplied products of the industrial age, encouraging brand loyalty from one product to the next, then franchising was essentially one of the industrial embodiments of consumer culture. More than just spreading the Tarzan story world further, franchising afforded the Tarzan comic strip brand loyalty in the same way as the Fredericks ­Franchise Certificate guaranteed consumers of ‘getting a true Fredericks Permanent Wave’ (Hollywood, 1928: 310). Looking forward, however, franchising may have come hand in hand with a heightened market author-function that pointed audiences across media, but in what ways could Burroughs use this heightened author-function to continue building the Tarzan story world

1918–1938  123 like he had done with his earlier pulp stories? Let’s now explore how an interconnected practice associated with corporate authorship – sponsorship, specifically radio sponsorship – presented Burroughs with new models for authoring his fictional story world across media.

Sponsorship ‘Right now’, Burroughs once wrote in a private letter to his brother in 1933, ‘Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. is blossoming and Tarzan is everywhere, like Coca-Cola. Things are really growing’ (May 13). More than just hinting at the profound impact of this era’s franchising on the strategies by which he built the Tarzan story world, Burroughs’ letter acknowledges the broader importance of corporatisation on these strategies. In the context of the rising consumer culture, perhaps no medium played a greater role in corporatis­ ing transmedia storytelling than radio, which became the nation’s dominant mass medium by 1930, with 40 percent of all households carrying radio receivers by this time (Lacey, 2022: 23). It was around this time that radio programmes began to be sponsored by corporations, switching from local to national sponsorship models amidst what Santo characterises as ‘intense pressures for social conformity’ upon the turn of the Great Depression in the early 1930s (2006: 14). In this section I will first outline the broader role of corporate sponsorship in the radio industry at this time, which is important for understanding how these sponsorship models intertwined with pressures for social conformity, and also how radio hence became a vessel for spread­ ing stories. Drawing on Burroughs’ sponsored Tarzan radio serials as exem­ plars, I demonstrate how radio sponsorship equipped the now incorporated Burroughs with a heightened market author-function over these radio seri­ als that actually afforded new strategies for building the Tarzan story world across pulps, novels, comics and indeed radio. After the arrival of the cinema at the turn of the century, the radio indeed played a key role in launching the consumer culture – emerging as the new mass medium through which advertising worked its magic, spreading the products of the industrial age further and wider across the airwaves. ‘By the late twenties’, Theodore Peterson once wrote, ‘radio was becoming an important competitor for consumer appropriations; the gross advertising carried by the networks jumped from $4,000,000 in 1927 to £10,000,000 in 1929’ (1956: 10). As discussed in Chapter 2, this period had witnessed the beginnings of commercial sponsorship for radio stations and their pro­ grammes (Zuilen, 1977: 47), and this sort of sponsorship model was highly important in the way that audiences could be pointed across media. Let’s consider the Tarzan radio serials as examples. Burroughs entered negotiations with Frederick Dahlquist of American Radio Features ­Syndicate to adapt Tarzan of the Apes and The Return of Tarzan into fifteen-­minute, thrice-weekly radio serials in 1931. Produced under a licensing model, the production of the radio serials was supervised by Burroughs, though

124  Exploring Transmedia History an uncredited team of radio scripters once again wrote the actual scripts. Maintaining complete creative ownership under this managerial model that licensing afforded, Burroughs stipulated his right to cancel the serials at any time. In a letter dated January 1932, Burroughs wrote to finalise his approval to Dahlquist: ‘I am confident [the] broadcasts will cause even greater thrills to [Tarzan’s] old friends and be the source of winning new ones. Your method of presentation will appeal to everyone with its swift action and suspense’ (January 5). And so to take care of the distribution of the Tarzan radio serials, the Signal Oil and Gas Company signed on as the sponsor of a new ­Tarzan radio programme in 1932. The sponsorship deal meant that consumers soon purchased Tarzan gasoline, and in return received a mock ‘Signal Tarzan Radio Premier’ stub. The stub was essen­ tially a sort of mock receipt that issued a promotional ticket to tune in to the Tarzan radio serial, thus effectively pointing Tarzan audiences from one text to another. In effect, the stub had an important inter-textual role to play, shaping the social organisation of Tarzan’s consumption in the gaps of the character’s textual exploits (Bennett and Woollacott, 1987: 45). Important to such inter-textuality was the fact that the sponsorship deal between the Signal Oil and Gas C ­ ompany, American Radio Features Syndicate and Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. was operating on a national level, thereby allowing Tarzan’s adventures to spread across the country just as they did its media. Meanwhile, transitions from local to national radio sponsorship such as this were actually intertwined with pressures for social conformity. For the start of the 1930s was the start of what would be known as the Great Depression, a time when media like radio sought to combat scarcity with paradoxical visions of accelerated product consumption. Marilyn Lavin notes that ‘radio was a basic instrument for the national, day-to-day dissemi­ nation of a single consumption ideology’ (1995: 87). In 1930, furthermore, Merlyn Aylesworth, then head of NBC, professed that in the face of severe social upheaval radio must serve ‘to preserve our population … We  must know and honor the same fictional heroes, love the same songs, and realize our common interests together’ (Reports on Advisory Council: 3). In other words, by reassuring consumers of their most recognised products, thus encouraging the sustained consumption of familiarity in the face of severe social upheaval, radio ‘contributed a sense of stability and preserved the essentials of the country’s capitalist system’ (Welky, 2008: 3). In turn, radio also became a useful vessel for spreading fictional story worlds. Mark J. P. Wolf reinforces this ‘steadying influence’ of radio and its role as a vessel for spreading story worlds when pointing out that many of the radio’s most popular series at this time did not actually originate on radio but crossed into radio from other media (2012: 123). William H. Young Jr. notes that the spreading of story worlds to radio was often based on heroes such as Dick Tracy, Buck Rogers and Tarzan (1969: 405). Hence as radio emerged as a mouthpiece for hero-sharing, or, as Johnson argues of media franchising, ‘storyworld-sharing’ (2013: 109), the adventures of

1918–1938  125 Tarzan were spread far further than they had been before. But more than affording the spreading of story worlds, radio – and specifically licensed sponsorship deals – afforded Burroughs a model of producing Tarzan that made the author lots of money: Since those simple days of twenty years ago, when I blithely gave away a fortune in rights that I did not know existed, many changes have taken place, bringing new rights with them. Today I am closing a radio contract covering the presentation of my stories over the air. What a far cry from second magazine rights. (The Winter’s 1932 Year Book & Market Guide: 160) Burroughs continued, flippantly: ‘Perhaps in my radio contract I shall insist upon the reservation to me of the interplanetary rights. Why not? Radio rights and sound and dialog rights would have seemed as preposterous twenty years ago’ (ibid.). With Burroughs here hinting at the creative power and financial rewards he had found via the interconnected practices associ­ ated with corporate authorship, one cannot help but compare Burroughs’ financial success in the 1930s to Baum’s financial failure in the early 1900s. In 1934, Variety verbalised the importance of a more corporate model of transmedia storytelling in a nutshell, writing that the ‘big royalties coming from the side lines of [Burroughs’] literary production’ enabled the author to ‘set himself up and to build himself as Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. … and handle profitably all his serial, radio and movie rights’ (3). Or to put it another way, Burroughs could now license, franchise and sponsor others to pay the cost of producing work in other media while pointing audiences across those media via his market author-function. In fact, Burroughs was so aware of the value of his authorship as a ­market-function that he was careful to use the synonymy between ‘Tarzan’ and ‘Burroughs’ when promoting the Tarzan radio serials. ‘We are about to start the production of our own Tarzan radio program’, he asserted in a news­paper interview (The Winter’s 1932 Year Book & Market Guide: 160). Many Americans in the 1930s had become somewhat uneasy about the rapid economic transformations that they were witnessing, most notably as a result of the seeming facelessness of the flourishing corporations that now extended and expanded across the country. But at least to many ­people, Burroughs was not one of these faceless corporations; he was more of a ­corporatised author, and this authorship shone through his Tarzan radio serials. Here’s a good example: The narrator of each Tarzan radio episode would announce (rather misleadingly given the fact that Burroughs had a strictly managerial role), ‘from the immortal pen of Edgar Rice B ­ urroughs – Tarzan, the bronzed, white son of the jungle! And now, in the very words of Mr. Burroughs …’ Hence as the ‘radio program [brought] a lot of atten­ tion to Tarzan and his Creator’, as one reader letter declared in 1934, ­Burroughs continued to exploit the power of his market author-function

126  Exploring Transmedia History to point audiences across media (Allen, 1934). Notice how the comic strip publicised the radio serial: ‘Tune Into KHJ At 8 A.M. Tomorrow—“Tarzan” Comes To Radio’ (Los Angeles Times, 1938: 12). In turn, the ‘Tarzan radio ­program announces the names of the local newspapers carrying the new Tarzan page,’ pointing audiences across both comic strips and radio (Signal Dealer News, 1938). Yet the power of Burroughs’ author-function extended far beyond mere audience-pointing. The model of radio sponsorship used to bring Tarzan to the air also led to a number of new strategies for actually nar­ rating the adventures of Tarzan across media. Understanding how these ­strategies worked means discussing merchandising. In the next section I will examine how merchandising brought highly sophisticated instances of transmedia storytelling across Tarzan novels and pulp magazines, with things like toys contributing as much to the process of building the story world and Burroughs’ textual author-function over that story world as the actual fictional texts published in media forms. But merchandising was important to the industrial history of transmedia storytelling in other ways, too. For one, merchandise was closely related to the system of radio sponsorship, as by the late 1920s the sponsors of radio programmes often branded their own products in direct line with the radio programme, or  even manufactured items of branded merchandise especially for the radio programme. One of the ‘merchandise tie-ins’ that the Signal Oil and Gas Company produced as part of a campaign to sell Tarzan on radio was a Tarzan ­jigsaw puzzle. ‘A new puzzle section will be given away each week for six weeks’, announced Signal Dealer News, ‘and when the completed puzzle is assembled it will unfold one of the most thrilling of all Tarzan’s adven­ tures’ (­Signal Dealer News, 1932). Both transmedia storytelling and jigsaw puzzles were underpinned by mass production, at least partly explaining why these mass-produced products of the industrial age acquired trans­ medial tendencies. Think of it in these terms: Much like the coloured cards located inside the cigarette boxes I discussed in the previous chapter, which I showed to have offered consumers a single picture that was actually part of a much larger picture that could only be fully gauged by collecting the entire series, jigsaw puzzles similarly involve many mass-produced compo­ nents each designed to be assembled as a whole.5 If transmedia storytelling is, as Marie-Laure Ryan elaborates, essentially like ‘imagining various media eagerly reaching towards a fixed content to grab a piece of it’ (2013), then those pieces are indeed rather like individual extension-pieces of a larger puzzle of mass-produced assemblage. And with mass-produced assemblage underpinning both jigsaw puzzles and the production of transmedia stories, it is understandable why the aforementioned jigsaw tie-in, itself driven by the system of radio sponsorship, gave Burroughs the idea of forming a num­ ber of his recent Tarzan stories as equally tied-in elements of a fiction that was designed to be collected across multiple media.

1918–1938  127 Burroughs, wrote Signal Dealer News, ‘has become so excited over the potential of this new cross marketing phenomenon that he starts to think of ways he himself can adapt it to the marketing of his books’ (1932). Tarzan and the Diamond of Asher exemplifies precisely how Burroughs adapted the cross-marketing of a licensed jigsaw puzzle to author a story across multiple media. Burroughs began to conceive of his story world as puzzle pieces; so long as each piece of the fictional story world was branded with his name, Burroughs could effectively distribute various parts of the story across different media, pointing his readers from one to the other as if they were collecting parts of a jigsaw puzzle. Building the story world in this way commenced with the narrator’s voice on radio, who declared the start of ‘an entirely new story of strange and thrilling adventure.’ Given that this strange and thrilling adventure was actually based on a pulp story called The Red Star of Tarzan, the pronounced newness of the Tarzan and the Diamond of Asher radio story was somewhat deceptive. The Red Star of Tarzan was published as a pulp story in Argosy Weekly between March 19 and April 23, 1938. Burroughs wrote another story stemming from this one for the Tarzan comic strip, titled Tarzan and the Forbidden City, published in newspapers from May 9 to October 8, 1938. The story was reused as the basis of the Tarzan and the Diamond of Asher radio serial, itself broadcast between May and September 1938. Finally, Burroughs published the story as a novel, Tarzan and the Forbidden City, on September 15, 1938. The story of each of these various texts was ostensibly the same, one that followed an expedi­ tion to find the lost city of Asher, a strange land that was also the location of a priceless treasure known as the Father of Diamonds. The quest to this lost city of Asher encompassed an ensemble of different characters in rival expeditions all hunting for the same treasure. And despite all versions of the story sharing the same basic plot, each presented different perspectives on the unfolding of the story from different temporal vantage points in a way that connected each version together as puzzle pieces of a larger ­product. Like the Tarzan jigsaw puzzle, the telling of a Tarzan adventure in this par­ ticular way, once completed, likewise worked to unfold one of the most thrilling of all Tarzan’s adventures across multiple media. Here’s how it all worked. The unfolding of this thrilling Tarzan adventure began with the ‘red star’ of the pulp title being mentioned in the prologue to the novel, connecting the latter’s adventure with the former: ‘… the red star will lead him to a world long dead and forgotten’ (Burroughs, 1938: 1). The novel then gave readers some insight into how and why the pulp story’s plot occurred as it did. For example, the novel incorporated a new kidnap sequence, which explained how the map of Asher was attained by particular characters in the pulp story, whose own narrative began after the map was stolen. New characters were added into the novel – one that was revealed to have kidnapped Magra, a character rescued by Tarzan in the pulp story. This narrative then continued over into the newspaper comic strip and the radio serial, which, crucially, were published and broadcast almost concurrently

128  Exploring Transmedia History to one another. For example, in the first edition of the comic strip, readers were told that Tarzan had ‘travelled fast and far’ to hold a meeting on the ‘outskirts of Bobolo, a town on the Congo River hundreds of miles inland’ (Los Angeles Times, 1938: 12). Though readers were not told where Tarzan had actually travelled from – until, that is, the broadcast date of the radio serial, when exactly four weeks later on May 31 listeners were informed that Tarzan had in fact travelled from ‘the village of Loango, a town which lies one hundred miles downstream the Congo River from Bobolo’ (Tarzan and the Diamond of Asher, 1938). Thus with a quest narrative comprising a large number of supporting characters, each in rival expeditions with hid­ den agendas, the story across these media was like a serialised puzzle. More­ over, the case of the ‘red star’ story across pulps, novels and radio serves as a further historical example of what Jenkins calls subjectivity, allowing audiences to see ‘the central narrative through new eyes, such as secondary characters or third parties’ (2009: online). Constructing narrative as serialised puzzle pieces that all added up to form one expansively intertextual story across media worked wonders, even in the face of industry experts warning Burroughs that the radio serials ‘might compete against the syndication of the Tarzan comic strip’ (­Taliaferro, 1999: 259). But Burroughs’ own conviction that one medium could nurture, not harm, another was proved true when newspaper royalties increased by 24 percent during the first nine months the Tarzan radio serials were on the air (ibid.). Moreover, this example serves once again as another important demonstration of how very different determinants and strategies ultimately led to much the same transmedial results. However, radio s­ ponsorship may have afforded Burroughs a heightened market-­function that gave the author a means of continuing to build the stories of the Tarzan story world across novels, pulp magazines, comic strips and indeed radio serials with the aid of licensed merchandise, but the roles of merchandising on transmedia story­ telling during this era are complex and pivotal. So let’s now move on to explore the further ways in which merchandising specifically heightened Burroughs’ textual author-function over the Tarzan story world as he con­ tinued to apply new strategies for authoring transmedial adventures across novels and pulp magazines alike.

Merchandising Michelle Ann Abate and Annette Wannamaker observe that ‘long before it became commonplace for books and films to spawn their own lines of merchandise, Burroughs’ King of the Apes lent his name to a variety of commercial products’ (2012: 2). Merchandising, particularly in connection with media texts such as books, films and so on, typically consists of items such as toys or clothes made in the likeness of the text’s characters or items which those characters use in the context of the fictional story world. How­ ever, sometimes merchandising works the other way around, with the media

1918–1938  129 text written to include the toys or clothes as a way of pointing audiences. ­Earlier in the chapter I established that corporate collaborations between producers and sponsors meant that media and merchandise were by this time manufactured in these terms. Since ‘consuming goods and media texts had become pretty much the same thing’, as Jansson argued (2002: 5), ear­ lier examples like the Husbands are Good for Something film showed how, as one article also stated, at this time ‘a good film is known by the merchan­ dise it sells’ (Business Screen, 1936: 9). In other words, a common industry strategy was to have media texts point to merchandise items and merchan­ dise items in return to point back to media texts; the pointing of audiences was a reciprocal process. Audiences effectively had begun to consume media as extensions of other merchandise. Franchising and sponsorship may have come hand in hand with a market author-function that pointed audiences across media through, in ­Burroughs’ case, his incorporation, but in what ways could Burroughs use merchan­ dise as textual extensions of other media? How might merchandising have worked to heighten his textual author-function over the Tarzan story world so as to further build that story world across multiple media? I noted ear­ lier in the book that certain scholars including Jenkins tend to suggest that merchandising usually creates products that are ‘peripheral’ to the act of expanding a fictional story world (2006: 107). But I will now further demon­ strate how in the 1930s licensed merchandise such as toys, j­ewellery and so on operated not as peripheral by-products of a fictional story world but instead as the actual driving force behind how authors such as B ­ urroughs used transmedia storytelling. In order to understand precisely how merchandising may have driven transmedia storytelling, let’s consider an example. Tarzan and the City of Gold, a story first serialised in The Argosy magazine between March and April 1932, was published as a novel less than a year later in early 1933. Not so much a straight adaptation from pulp to book, the Tarzan and the City of Gold novel was more of an intertextual expansion of the pulp story. That is to say that the novel explored narrative events that took place between edi­ tions of the pulp story, building its own narrative on the foundations of the pulp editions. Of course, this strategy had been used to good effect in pulp fiction more generally, which I showed at the start of the chapter to be rather like a proverbial house of fiction that exploited the adjoining of intertextual stories not only to form a larger story world but equally to sustain a high readership. The Tarzan and the City of Gold novel was rather similar in this respect, as it strived to unfold its story across multiple media. In one chapter of the novel, for example, readers learnt of Tarzan’s attempts to defend the city of Athne – one of the lost civilisations mentioned, though not actu­ ally visited, in the original jungle-set pulp story. For the novel Burroughs had decided to break free from his central hero’s jungle domain (where the pulp story had been set) and instead opted to re-explore a lost civilisation that was only mentioned in the equivalent pulp story. Burroughs had an

130  Exploring Transmedia History important textual author-function to play as the writer of both this novel and of the pulp adventure, building a description of what constitutes his expanding story world – as in the geographical proximity between Tarzan’s jungle and the lost city of Athne. But on this occasion, more importantly, Burroughs’ textual author-­ function over the story world across multiple media – authoring what was a kind of ‘midquel’ novel set in between the pulp editions – was actually driven by his merchandising deals. By this point Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. had issued a total of twenty-six companies with a license to manufacture Tarzan merchandise (Porges, 1975: 489–492). Items made in the likeness of Tarzan or branded items which that character used in the context of the story world included Tarzan bread, Tarzan knives, Tarzan belts, ­Tarzan household kitchen utensils and Tarzan ornamental bows and arrows, to name just a few.6 Importantly, though many of these items of merchandise could not credibly feature within the fictional backdrop of the wild African jungles, they could believably exist as the artefacts of a more civilised fic­ tional backdrop. Hence when Tarzan seeks to defend the lost city of Athne in the Tarzan and the City of Gold novel, it is no coincidence that he does so with the aid of archery sets and knives that he found in this lost city. In other words, Tarzan’s visit to the lost city of Athne in the pages of the Tarzan and the City of Gold novel gave Burroughs the chance to represent items of fash­ ion, statuary, ornaments and household utensils. Many of these ‘fictional’ artefacts were in fact based on the designs of Tarzan merchandise that Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. had licensed. On the one hand, this merchandise, care­ fully inserted into the fictional milieu of the novel – which itself was an expansion of the story world published in the pulps – allowed Burroughs to impose and maintain a description of what constituted the Tarzan story world, thus preserving his textual author-function. On the other hand, this Tarzan merchandise was an inter-textual cornerstone of the fictional story world that impacted on how the narrative actually unfolded across media. And in so doing, it was the merchandise – functioning as both textual and inter-textual artefacts, both part of the story itself and a physical, extract­ able item – that informed said description of what did or did not constitute the story world. In one sense, these items of Tarzan merchandise provide us with an historical example of how the performative actions of audiences – each invited by the creator – ‘become part of the transmedia narrative itself’, as Jenkins describes of transmedia storytelling (2009: online). In another sense, these items of Tarzan merchandise arguably contributed equally as much to the process of building the Tarzan story world as any of the media forms in which its stories unfolded. Burroughs’ incorpora­ tion, working under models of licensing that, as Harry Kursh insists, ‘united diverse practices as a recognisable sense of cultural unity’ (1968: 25), indeed exemplifies how corporate authorship cut across media and, in doing so, formed an alignment between media and merchandise that enabled ­stories to flow across domains. In an unpublished biography, Burroughs

1918–1938  131 acknowledged this alignment between media and merchandise himself when referring to his own preferred ‘brand of advertising’ the many Tarzan ­products as ‘the all-fiction variety’ (‘Autobiography’: 55). As Matt Cohen discusses, ‘Burroughs rejected the discourses of high literature and made literal, or at least legal, his status of author as a producer of goods for the marketplace of incorporation’ (2005: 46–47). In other words, as well as affording a transition in status from author of stories to producer of goods, the likes of merchandising along with the other interconnected practices associated with corporate authorship’s managerial function afforded the era’s fictional story worlds to spread beyond the forms of media texts and promotions to also include merchandise as well as other licensed products, effectively corporatising the practice of transmedia storytelling. The wealth of licensed Tarzan merchandise that appeared in the 1930s may have afforded Burroughs a strong textual author-function over how he henceforth authored his story world across media, then, but let’s not forget that merchandising also continued to afford a strong market author-­ function. The items of Tarzan merchandise I have described all pointed audi­ ences to the media texts as ‘all-fiction advertising’, with those media texts pointing audiences to Tarzan merchandise. And in the case of Tarzan and the City of Gold, only when aligned together did media and merchandise build the fictional story world across media7 – the former maintaining a sense of intertextuality between stories with the latter inter-textually positioning how those stories were read, both author-functions thereby present and correct.

Over-Licensing Media and merchandise may have come to align themselves rather neatly under Burroughs’ corporate authorship, but not all of the author’s business ventures at this time proved to build the fictional story world of Tarzan across media. Earlier in the chapter I argued that audiences had become rather accustomed to the economy of abundance, with audiences demand­ ing more and more story from one media text – a symptom, most likely, of the rising consumer culture itself. But the general demand for more and more had one particular downside in terms of the development transmedia storytelling – that is, proliferation also risked the temptation to over-license and, with it, the birth of one too many Tarzans. Indeed, I will now examine the complex contingencies of production sur­ rounding the later fragmentation of Tarzan’s fictional story world upon the character’s move back to cinema, mirroring the first part of this chapter. Specifically, I look at some of Burroughs’ film ventures amidst the rise of the Hollywood studio system in the 1930s to show how licensing was an imperfect vehicle for implementing transmedia storytelling in some ways, bringing vast financial reward but at the expense of the author-functions, which I have shown on multiple occasions to be crucial to holding a story world together across media and to pointing audiences across those media.

132  Exploring Transmedia History Understanding licensing’s imperfections as a vehicle for implementing trans­ media storytelling first means outlining some of the changes to the US film industry since the days of Baum’s world-building ventures. Many studies of the Hollywood studio system during the Depression highlight its strict modes of internal regulation and vertical integration that befitted the film industry at that time, suggesting that its product was formed internally out­ side of other entertainments.8 In many respects this is true, for since the days of the transitional era of American cinema explored in the previous chapter, Hollywood had developed into a modern business enterprise by the late 1920s.9 By circa 1927, with the conversion to sound underway, the film industry had settled into a structure known as the Hollywood studio system, whereby the entire industry was largely dominated by five ‘major’ studios (Paramount Pictures, MGM, RKO, Fox Film Corporation and Warner Bros.) along with three ‘minor’ studios (Columbia Pictures, United Artists and ­Universal ­Pictures). Forming a dominant oligopoly, the five ‘major’ studios were all vertically integrated producer-distributor-exhibitors, thus internally ‘con­ trolling the manufacturing, marketing and retailing of their product’ (Jewell, 2007:  52). One by-product of the major film studios’ dominance was the block booking policy, a practice, as Tino Balio describes, ‘by which the s­ tudios forced exhibitors to take a studio’s entire annual output’ 1995: 13). The idea, Richard B. Jewell elaborates, was for the studios ‘to convince exhibitors to commit to a block of the company’s films … from 12 features upwards, [which] often included shorts, newsreels and cartoons as well’ (2007: 77). And so with strict modes of internal regulation and self-­governing vertical integration now characterising Hollywood, the film industry may have been interested in Tarzan, but it was not interested in Burroughs. For Tarzan’s big-budget, studio-fronted return to cinema screens under MGM, therefore, Burroughs took a step back and had little to no direct involvement in MGM’s processes. In early 1931 MGM had negotiated with Burroughs to produce a new motion picture based on Tarzan, which came out in 1932 as Tarzan the Ape Man starring Johnny Weissmuller in the titular role. The deal was finalised with Burroughs receiving a cheque for $20,000 (there was also an option for two additional sequels, which became Tarzan and His Mate [1934] and Tarzan Escapes [1936]). MGM’s budget for the aforementioned first sequel film in 1934 was reported to be ‘upward of a million dollars’, an extremely high figure at the time (Taliaferro, 1999: 251). In a letter written to his son Hubert, Burroughs discussed this bud­ get with discernible trepidation: ‘I am fearful that they are going to spend too much. They are very anxious to make it outshine Lesser’s picture to such a degree that there will be no comparison’ (Fenton, 2010: 112). The ‘Lesser’ mentioned here referred to Sol Lesser, an independent film producer who had bought out one of Burroughs’ earlier (and as-of-yet unrealised) contracts to see Tarzan the Fearless produced as either a feature film or as a movie serial (Taliaferro, 1999: 251). It was not long after Burroughs

1918–1938  133 had signed that initial contract with MGM that the author learned about Lesser’s buy-out and intention to produce his own version of Burroughs’ creation. And so Burroughs’ discernible trepidation over whether the MGM Tarzan would overshadow the Lesser Tarzan came from his vested finan­ cial interest in both productions. Licensing the film rights to two separate film producers might have lined Burroughs’ pockets nicely (MGM had paid Burroughs $45,000 for the rights to produce Tarzan and His Mate, and the film became one of the top 15 money-makers of 1932) (Fury, 1994: 78), but neither MGM nor Lesser were too pleased to hear about what Variety described as Burroughs’ ‘enlarged picture production activities’ (1934: 3). Perhaps understandably, just as MGM’s filming of Tarzan the Ape Man proceeded, Lesser filed a lawsuit against Burroughs, claiming that the author ‘had reneged on his promise’ and was now trying to suppress Tarzan the Fearless from ‘polluting the market’ (Fenton, 2010: 40). According to John Taliaferro, Burroughs led MGM to believe that they were the only studio with the rights to a Tarzan movie, meaning that MGM ‘could just as easily have filed a suit of their own’ (1999: 251). As it turned out, however, they chose not to, but MGM did target Sol Lesser, and negotiated for the occa­ sional postponed release date so to try and prevent audiences from becom­ ing confused or disillusioned by a swarm of Tarzan pictures. In fairness to Burroughs, the author believed that he had been careful to avoid the mistakes of the earlier Tarzan films, where different rights between multiple parties became crossed. For the Tarzan of MGM’s motion pictures, at least, the title character bore very little resemblance to the character created in pulps, novels or on radio. But as Taliaferro stresses, ‘the contract with MGM had never stipulated that it should’ (1999: 252). In  fact, the deal MGM struck with Burroughs was that their own films would use the author’s characters but would not be based on his actual works.10 As a ­Variety report (discussing the third MGM Tarzan film) made clear, ‘arrangements lined up will give Metro privilege [to] an original story with ­Tarzan as the central character; Metro will get film rights and all other story rights go to Burroughs’ (1934: 3). Burroughs was actually paid an additional $1,000 per week for five weeks to read the various versions of the films’ scripts as they developed, pointing out any material that poten­ tially infringed on his origi­nal stories so as ‘to be sure they were not based (in whole or in part) on his own works’ (Behlmer, 1987: 48). This particular deal meant that MGM were thus strictly prohibited from using specific plots from the Burroughs works, or any particular aspects of the story world created by Burroughs that did not include characters. Prohibited aspects included such things as  the author’s fictional ape language described in a number of the pulp stories and novels (Fury, 1994: 67). Specifically named spaces from the Burroughsian universe, such as the lost city of Athne, were also off-limits to MGM. Regardless, however, of whether such prohibitions over story-spaces breached contractual agreements or not, what is clear is that Burroughs’

134  Exploring Transmedia History multiple licenses of Tarzan intellectual property to various film producers did destroy his ability to author the story world across multiple media, particu­ larly in a textual sense. In a private letter Burroughs even notes that MGM had changed the pronunciation of Tarzan from the ‘TAR-zn’ of his own imagination to the ‘Tar-ZAN’ of MGM’s Johnny Weissmuller (­Burroughs, 1934). Just as one fan remarked of the first Tarzan movie in 1918, this was not the Burroughsian universe. As noted earlier, too, Burroughs had a cen­ tral textual author-function to play as the writer of so many Tarzan stories, building a description of what did and did not constitute his fictional story world – as in the revelation that Caspak bordered Tarzan’s jungle, or that Tarzan’s jungle was in close geographical proximity to the lost city of Athne, or that Tarzan himself was a ruthless British aristocrat. But this key category of Burroughs’ author-function was certainly missing from the Tarzan films of this period, diluted across multiple fragmentations of the story world that, under the terms of licensing, could not acknowledge the others on any intertextual level. Not so much a series of ‘extensions’ added onto an enlarg­ ing ‘house’, then; this was more a series of builders all competing to see who can build their own proverbial house the quickest. And the race to build various Tarzans the quickest got even more com­ petitive when Sol Lesser ‘purchased the rights to five more of Burroughs’s stories’ (The New York Times, 1936: 29). ‘Tarzan is to transfer his activities from the jungle on Metro’s back lot to the trees and streams of Sol Lesser’s near-by studio’, wrote The New York Times, who also reported that ‘Lesser has and is negotiating with Metro for the services of Johnny Weissmuller to continue the series’ (ibid.). But as Robert Fenton notes, ‘Weissmuller was under contract at MGM, and the giant studio was not about to release their jungle lead to a competitor’ (Fenton, 2010: 138). And so for Lesser’s next Tarzan film, Tarzan’s Revenge in 1938, a new actor – Glenn Morris – was cast in the lead role, and in competing with the glossier MGM ­movies ­Lesser’s Tarzan’s Revenge certainly did not hold the larger story world together or even attempt to point its audiences across media. This was still not a part of the Burroughsian universe. Furthermore, this proverbial race to build various Tarzans the quickest soon got even more competitive when the race found itself an additional player – Burroughs himself. Indeed, Burroughs had benefitted immensely through the deal with Lesser, ‘being paid both an advance and a percentage of the profits’, and so he decided to set up his very own motion picture pro­ duction company called Burroughs-Tarzan Enterprises (Fenton, 2010: 101). According to Fury, the mission statement of Burroughs-Tarzan E ­ nterprises, founded in 1934, was ‘to produce, distribute, and exhibit talking motion pic­ tures based on the works and characters created by Burroughs’ (1994: 129). It could well be argued that all of these different versions of Tarzan appear­ ing at this time in fact represent an early exemplar of what Jenkins has since called ‘multiplicity’ in the contemporary era of transmediality, which ‘celebrates multiple versions of the same stories … and allows fans to take

1918–1938  135 pleasure in alternative retellings, seeing the characters and events from fresh perspectives’ (Jenkins, 2009: online). However, at this time, the multiplicity of Tarzan was still about competition, not celebration, or even diversifica­ tion. Intended as a business venture,11 Burroughs-Tarzan Enterprises was actually borne out of a whim on Burroughs’ part to re-establish his own textual author-function over the Tarzan story world of the cinema. As Fury elaborates: Burroughs had always wanted motion picture producers to depict the creation Tarzan as he was described in his novels: a savage raised by apes in the jungle, but as an adult, a man who claimed his birth­ right as Lord Greystoke of England and who was a highly intelligent gentle­man. But MGM’s Tarzan was an uneducated savage who did not understand a word of English. This was the negative image that the author wished to dispel by producing his own Tarzan motion pictures. (1994: 129) Nevertheless, no matter how noble Burroughs’ intentions may have been, Burroughs-Tarzan Enterprises marked a further diffusion of the story world into incongruous splinters of textual incoherence. In competing with two existing versions of the story world already out there, the first of two outputs – a film called The New Adventures of Tarzan, filmed on location in Guatemala and released in 1934 – lost money. MGM pushed Burroughs’ independent production out of the major movie houses with its block book­ ing policy. And so with MGM issuing exhibitors an ultimatum – ‘book our expensive Tarzan pictures in a few months or this cheap Tarzan picture now’ (Fury, 1994: 129) – The New Adventures of Tarzan was seen by only a fraction of those who had enjoyed MGM’s Tarzan.12 It was an era where audiences were essentially asked to choose which Tarzan they wanted to buy – MGM’s, Lesser’s or now Burroughs’. And to make matters worse, the licensing streams across the three parties broke out into dispute. Motion Picture Magazine reported that ‘Metro [was] preparing a new Tarzan fea­ ture, despite the fact that Edgar Rice Burroughs has been making an inde­ pendent on his own with another star’ (1935: 47). Meanwhile, Burroughs asserted that Burroughs-Tarzan Enterprises ‘will not be affected by his fiveyear deal with Sol Lesser’, insisting that his other existing deal with Lesser ‘does not by any means give [Lesser] the exclusive rights to my services as an author, [nor does it] imply that Burroughs-Tarzan would give up its production and distribution activities’ (Variety, 1936: 3). Yet Lesser’s deal was in fact said to have ‘exclusive rights to the character’ (The New York Times, 1936: 29). And so with all of these deals and promises of exclusiv­ ity crossing MGM’s, Lesser’s and Burroughs’ legal departments, it did not take long for all those involved to see that the market share for Tarzan was being split – and so were each company’s profits. It is notable that the mis­ sion statement of Burroughs-Tarzan Enterprises mirrored that of Baum’s Oz

136  Exploring Transmedia History Film Manufacturing Company exactly. And like Baum’s own film company before it, Burroughs-Tarzan Enterprises was a short-lived commercial fail­ ure. Burroughs signed a $50,000 loan to finance the company, but by 1937 Burroughs-Tarzan Enterprises was in debt (Variety, 1936: 1). Eventually Burroughs was able to pay off the loan and clear his debt, but by 1939 the company ceased to exist. Unlike Baum’s The Oz Film Manufacturing Company, however, ­Burroughs-Tarzan Enterprises epitomises the dangers of over-licensing intellectual property at this particular time. Transmedia storytelling is about ­‘storyworld-sharing’, as Johnson put it (2013: 109). But by licensing so many different bits and pieces of the story world here and there, the Tarzan story world on screen did not so much expand as dilute. What was perhaps the most famous and popular movie Tarzan of the era (MGM’s Tarzan) was perhaps the least transmedial in nature. Though transmedia storytelling has a noted capitalism at its core, the over-licensed fragmentation of the Tarzan story world shows that at this time transmedia storytelling was not neces­ sarily synonymous with that which was most famous or with that which made the most money. It seems that as the media industries became bigger and more dominant in the twentieth century, it became harder to author a story across multiple media. What was needed to rectify this problem of authoring stories across media was a large cultural energy that could drive different industries together – like another world war. As I explore in the next chapter, ­America’s entry into the Second World War actually provided authors with a way to cross between multiple media industries and produce stories across media as opposed to merely licensing others to do so. But that is not to overstate licensing’s ‘­failure’ as a mechanism for implementing transmedia storytelling at this time, nor its ability to afford authorship across multiple media. There are plenty of examples in this chapter where licensing afforded the adven­ tures of ­Tarzan to extend across a whole host of media, with each story con­ tributing to the story world and pointing audiences across media. But where Burroughs had ‘partnered with and policed’ (Santo, 2010: 64) his comics and radio-based licensees – building his own author-function – the movie Tarzans saw the author taking a step back, over-licensing so to maximise profits. As The New York Times concluded, ‘Edgar Rice Burroughs has carried his “Tarzan” through a series of adventures set forth in print, on radio, in comic strips and in films’ (1932: 17). The films were just too heavy to carry.

Conclusion This chapter has examined the wider impacts of consumer culture in the 1920s and 1930s on transmedia storytelling, highlighting specifically the ways in which interconnected practices associated with corporate author­ ship’s managerial function afforded stories to be told as transmedial fic­ tions across multiple media. In turn, I have demonstrated the importance of

1918–1938  137 breaking down distinctions between the so-called ‘cultural artistry’ of trans­ media storytelling and the ‘culturally maligned systems of mass production’ that the likes of licensing and franchising tend to recall (Johnson, 2013: 33); licensing, franchising, sponsorship and merchandising in actuality provided an author such as Burroughs with entirely new strategies for building his fictional Tarzan story world across a whole range of media forms. And of particular significance to these emerging corporate practices was Burroughs’ decision to incorporate himself in 1923, which gave Burroughs a financially lucrative business model to spread his fictional story world across multiple media and sites of merchandise. As Abby Wolf reinforces, ‘well before the age of the multimedia corporation, Burroughs was a multimedia corpora­ tion unto himself’ (2010). Hence when a famed motion picture producer approached Burroughs in 1918 about the possibility of changing the name of this producer’s own company to Tarzan Pictures Corporation, Burroughs refused outright, insisting that ‘the Tarzan name is worth more to me than the rights to any of my stories’ (Fury, 1994: 130). Specifically, media-based franchising meant that Burroughs and his ‘­Burroughsian universe’ was as much the franchise product as Tarzan; the mere presence of the author’s name on texts could hold the Tarzan story world together across media discursively, and in many instances ‘the grouping of a set of texts under the name of an author articulated the her­ meneutic demand for consistency of meaning’ (Bennett and Woollacott, 1987: 46). Burroughs’ use of merchandising the fictional artefacts from the story world, too, highlights more broadly the fact that corporate authorship forged alignments between multiple media – or, as Johnson acknowledges, ‘a chain or network of cooperating outlets’ (2013: 34–35) – that allowed ­stories to flow across media. It is telling that Burroughs himself once referred to Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. as an ‘emporium’ (Burroughs, 1933). In effect, Burroughs was nothing if not the manager of a series of cooperating ‘media shops’, each of which was working to produce and distribute pieces of an increasingly corporatised Tarzan story world across multiple media. Where the likes of radio serials and novels intertextually linked the story world together via purposeful references within a text to other texts, merchandise allowed Tarzan to escape his stories and shape how those stories were con­ sumed inter-textually as transmedia adventures. The operations of a corporate author – producing and distributing ­product-pieces of a story world – may have characterised how one of these story worlds was produced across media in the 1920s and 1930s, then, but it is also important to remember that this corporate model did not always work. With the exception of the Burroughs-Tarzan Enterprises case, licens­ ing consistently made Burroughs plenty of money, which is more than can be said for all of Baum’s earlier attempts at transmedia storytelling. But licensing still came with its own set of problems and pitfalls. As I have shown, licensing practices were far from a perfect vehicle for implement­ ing transmedia storytelling; at different points in his career, Burroughs both

138  Exploring Transmedia History under- and over-licensed intellectual property, which in both cases led to the fragmentation of the Tarzan story world, which at different times both frus­ trated certain audiences and left a number of licensed partners all competing with one another. The use of Burroughs’ author-function and its power to point audiences across multiple media thus became similarly fragmented. Transmedia storytelling may require stories to function as continuing inter­ textual extensions of the same fiction rather than as versions of a fiction, but even withstanding Burroughs’ various legal tangles and over-licensing that split the Tarzan story world into often competing and contradictory iterations, his work as Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. still epitomises the model of producing transmedia storytelling in the 1920s and 1930s.

Notes 1. The phrase ‘Burroughsian universe’ was first coined by readers of The All-Story magazine to describe the fictional world created by Burroughs that stretched across Tarzan’s jungle and other story-spaces like Pellucidar and Caspak before being adopted by further audiences when Tarzan began to move into cinema and radio. The term offers an example of seemingly contemporary frames such as the idea of a fictional universe being in play quite early in mass media cul­ ture. For an example, see E. M., “Table-Talk,” The All-Story, September 18, 1912, 968. 2. Founded in 1886, The Coca-Cola Company first exploited franchising as a method of production and distribution in 1899. 3. Mark Twain had attempted to incorporate himself in the nineteenth century but without success. 4. Though Johnson emphasises the rise of media franchising in the post-World War II period, he does also explore the significance of the 1920s and 1930s on this practice while also noting some important differences between media and retail franchising during this period. 5. Jigsaw puzzles, though commercialised around the 1760s and originally pro­ duced on wood rather than cardboard, fittingly only began to be produced under assembly-line models of mass production during this same period of the early 1930s. And let’s not overlook the fact that the production of merchandise was similarly organised around these same models of mass production, thus highlighting not only the connections between merchandising and transmedia storytelling but also explaining to some extent why the former was integral to the latter. 6. For a thorough breakdown of the range of Tarzan merchandise available during this era see Alex Vernon, On Tarzan (London: University of Georgia Press, 2008), 34–35. 7. Michael Kackman makes a similar claim: ‘In the case of Hoppy [Cassidy], merchandising and sponsorship contracts were the primary site of industrial exchange, and may well have been the primary site of cultural encounter with the character. In other words, merchandise was not used to extend the viability and popularity of the primary texts; instead, in both economic and cultural terms, it eventually became the primary text, supported by the films, television programs, and other adaptations.’ See Michael Kackman, “Nothing on but

1918–1938  139 Hoppy Badges: Hopalong Cassidy, William Boyd Enterprises, and Emergent Media Globalization,” Cinema Journal 47: 4 (Summer 2008): 83. 8. See David Welky, The Moguls and the Dictators: Hollywood and the ­Coming of World War II (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2008); Tino Balio, Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930–1939 (­Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); and Peter Decherney, H ­ ollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 9. See Tino Balio, Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 10. A contract dated April 15, 1931, specified that ‘Burroughs grants rights to Metro to write an “original story,” using character of “Tarzan,” and any other charac­ ters used in stories heretofore written by author.’ See Rudy Behlmer, “Tarzan: Hollywood’s Greatest Jungle Hero!,” American Cinematographer 68:1 (January 1987): 48. 11. According to Variety, Burroughs-Tarzan Enterprises was made up of ‘Ben S. Cohen … as president of B-T, in charge of sales, advertising and exploitation; Ashton Dearholt is vice president in charge of production, with George Stout, treasurer. Edgar Rice Burroughs is associated with the organization as story consultant. Harry Rathner functions as sales manager, with headquarters in New York. See “Tarzan Goes Indie for State Right Programs,” Variety, January 8, 1936, 15. 12. The New Adventures of Tarzan even faced poor reviews: ‘Slow and lacking sus­ pense’ deemed one Variety review. See “[REVIEW:] New Adventures of Tarzan,” Variety, March 26, 1935, 3.

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1918–1938  141 “Famous Funnies Here to Stay.” The New York Times, June 24, 1934. Fenton, Robert W. Edgar Rice Burroughs and Tarzan: A Biography of the Author and His Creation. Jefferson: McFarland & Co. Inc., 2010. Film Daily, The, February 11, 1921a. Film Daily, The, January 19, 1920. Film Daily, The, June 6, 1920. Film Daily, The, March 10, 1921b. Filene, Edward. “The Present Status and Future Prospects of Chains of Depart­ ment Stores.” Address delivered before the American Economic Association, ­December 27, 1927. Foster, Mark S. From Streetcar to Superhighway: American City Planners and Urban Transportation, 1900–1940. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981. “Fredericks Vita-Tonic and Vitron Permanent Waves.” Hollywood, March 1928. Fury, David. Kings of the Jungle: An Illustrated Reference to “Tarzan” on Screen and Television. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc. Publishers, 1994. Gaines, Jane M. Contested Culture: The Image, the Voice, and the Law. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1991. Gordon, Ian. Comic Strips and Consumer Culture 1890–1945. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998. Gottdiener, Mark, ed. New Forms of Consumption: Consumers, Culture, and Commodification. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000. Goulart, Ron. Comic Book Culture: An Illustrated History. New York: Collectors Press, 2000. Grainge, Paul. Brand Hollywood: Selling Entertainment in a Global Media Age. New York: Routledge, 2007. Gray, Jonathan. Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts. New York: New York University Press, 2010. Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009. Harmon, Jim and Glut, Donald F. The Great Movie Serials: Their Sound and Fury. London: Routledge, 1972. Hilmes, Michele. Connections: A Broadcast History Reader. Belmont, CA: ­Wadsworth Publishing Co., 2001. Hilmes, Michele and Loviglio, Jason, eds. Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural ­Artistry of Radio. London: Routledge, 2001. Hilmes, Michele. Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 2010. Hopkins, Eric. Industrialisation and Society: A Social History, 1830–1951. London: Routledge, 2000. “Inside Stuff – Radio.” Variety, February 24, 1943. Jacob, Robin, Alexander, Daniel and Lane, Lindsay. A Guidebook to Intellectual Property: Patents, Trademarks, Copyrights and Designs. London: Sweet & ­Maxwell, 2003. Jansson, André. “The Mediatization of Consumption: Towards an Analytical Frame­ work of Image Culture.” Journal of Consumer Culture 2:1 (March 2002): 7–30. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Jenkins, Henry. “The Revenge of the Origami Unicorn: Seven Principles of Trans­ media Storytelling.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry

142  Exploring Transmedia History Jenkins. December 12, 2009. Accessed February 20, 2012. http://henryjenkins. org/2009/12/the_revenge_of_the_origami_uni.html. Jewell, Richard B. The Golden Age of Cinema: Hollywood, 1929–1945. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. “Jig-Saw Puzzle Contest to Start Tuesday, Sept. 20.” Signal Dealer News 1:3, ­September 1932. Johnson, Catherine. Branding Television. London: Routledge, 2011. Johnson, Derek. “A History of Transmedia Entertainment.” Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. Accessed April 2, 2013. http:// spreadablemedia.org/essays/johnson/#.UpsNJdiYaM9. Johnson, Derek. Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries. New York: New York University Press, 2013. Kackman, Michael. “Nothing on but Hoppy Badges: Hopalong Cassidy, William Boyd Enterprises, and Emergent Media Globalization.” Cinema Journal 47: 4 (Summer 2008): 76–101. Kerr, Paul, ed. The Hollywood Film Industry: A Reader. London: BFI Publishing, 1986. Kidman, Shawna. “Comic Books Incorporated: Industrial Strategy and the Legitima­ tion of Lowbrow Media.” PhD diss., USC School of Cinematic Arts, 2015. Kingsley, Grace. “Film Flams.” Los Angeles Times, September 26, 1914. Kirschenbaum, Matthew. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. Kursh, Harry. The Franchise Boom. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1968. Lacey, Kate. “Radio in the Great Depression: Promotional Culture and Propaganda.” In Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural History of Radio, edited by Michele Hilmes and Jason Loviglio, 21–40. London: Routledge, 2002. Lahue, Karlton C. Continued Next Week: A History of the Moving Picture Serial. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964. “Latest Tarzan Tale Intrigues.” Los Angeles Times, October 18, 1930. Lavin, Marilyn. “Creating Consumers in the 1930s: Irna Phillips and the Radio Soap Opera.” Journal of Consumer Research 22 (June 1995): 75–89. Lazarsfeld, Paul F. and Wyant, Rowena. “Magazines in 90 Cities: Who Reads What?” Public Opinion Quarterly, October 1937. Lenthall, Bruce. Radio’s America: The Great Depression and the Rise of Modern Mass Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Lesser, Robert. Pulp Art: Original Cover Paintings for the Great American Pulp Magazines. New York: Sterling Publishing, 2005. Littlejohn, Stephen W., ed. Encyclopaedia of Communication Theory 1. London: Sage, 2009. Lury, Celia. Consumer Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996. Lury, Celia. Brands: The Logos of the Global Economy. London: Routledge, 2004. Maltby, Richard, Bilteryst, Daniel and Meers, Philippe, eds. Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. McDonald, Paul and Wasko, Janet, eds. The Contemporary Hollywood Film Industry. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008. “McGaugh Seeks $410 in Tarzan Wages.” Variety, May 6, 1935. “MGM Is Gunning for Third Tarzan.” Variety, March 14, 1934. Metcalf, Thomas Newell. Letter courtesy of ERB, Inc. dated December 10, 1912. “Metro Folds on Tarzan after This Remake.” Variety, February 4, 1936. “Motion Pictures in the Department Store.” Business Screen 1, August 1936, 29–36. Motion Picture Magazine, August 1935.

1918–1938  143 Murray, Simone. The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Literary Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2011. Musser, Charles. The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907. New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1990. New York Times, The, April 10, 1932. New York Times, The, January 9, 1937. New York Times, The, October 6, 1936. Patten, Simon. The New Basis of Civilization. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1907. Peterson, Theodore. Magazines in the Twentieth Century. Urbana: University of ­Illinois Press, 1956. Peterson, Theodore. “Successive Threats Peril Magazines: Editorial Values Keep Medium Vital.” Advertising Age 51, April 30, 1980. Porges, Irwin. Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Man Who Created Tarzan. Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1975. “Railway Franchise.” Los Angeles Times, May 22, 1904. “[REVIEW:] New Adventures of Tarzan.” Variety, March 26, 1935. Richards, Jeffrey. Cinema and Radio in Britain and America, 1920–60. Manchester: Manchester Press, 2010. “Rothstein Dares Tarzan, Sues for His Cut.” Variety, December 12, 1935. Saler, Michael. As if: Modern Enchantments and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Salvaggio, J. L. and Bryant, J. Media Use in the Information Age: Emerging Patterns of Adoption and Consumer Use. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1989. San Francisco Examiner, April 4, 1936. Santo, Avi. “Transmedia Brand Licensing Prior to Conglomeration: George Trendle and the Lone Ranger and Green Hornet Brands, 1933–1966.” PhD diss., University of Texas, 2006. Santo, Avi. “Batman versus The Green Hornet: The Merchandisable TV Text and the Paradox of Licensing in the Classical Network Era.” Cinema Journal 49:2 (Fall 2010): 63–85. Sassatelli, Roberta. Consumer Culture: History, Theory, and Politics. London: Sage, 2007. Saunders, David. “The Pulps and the Comics.” Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson. (June 22, 2012). Accessed September 21, 2012. http://malcolmwheelernicholson. com/2012/06/22/the-pulps-and-the-comics/. Schudson, Michael. Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society. New York: Routledge, 1993. Scott, Jason. “The Character-Orientated Franchise: Promotion and Exploitation of PreSold Characters in American Film, 1913–1950.” Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies (November 2009): http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/scope/. Shingler, Martin and Wieringa, Cindy. On Air: Methods and Meanings of Radio. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 1998. Simonson, Peter. Reconfiguring Mass Communication: A History. Champaign: ­University of Illinois Press, 2010. Singer, Ben. “Female Power in the Serial-Queen Melodrama.” Camera Obscura 22 (January 1990): 90–129. Slater, Don. Consumer Culture and Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997. Smith, Erin A. Hard-Boiled: Working-Class Readers and Pulp Magazines. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000.

144  Exploring Transmedia History Staiger, Janet and Hake, Sabine, eds. Convergence Media History. New York: Routledge, 2009. Stam, Robert. Literature through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005. Stam, Robert and Raengo, Alessandra, eds. Literature and Film: A Guide to the ­Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004. Stanfield, Peter. Maximum Movies – Pulp Fictions: Film Culture and the Worlds of Samuel Fuller, Mickey Spillane, and Jim Thompson. London: Rutgers University Press, 2011. Sullivan, Arthur and Sheffrin, Steven M. Economics: Principles in Action. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2003. Swartz, David J. Research Paper Series: The Franchise System for Establishing Independent Retail Outlets, Research Paper 14, Bureau of Business and Economic Research, School of Business Administration (Atlanta: George State College of Business Administration, 1968). Taliaferro, John. Tarzan Forever: The Life of Edgar Rice Burroughs, the Creator of Tarzan. New York: Scribner, 1999. “Tarzan and the Forbidden City.” Los Angeles Times, May 31, 1938. “Tarzan and the Lost Empire.” Los Angeles Times, December 21, 1932, 55. “Tarzan for M-G-M.” Moving Picture World, June 1, 1931. “Tarzan Goes Indie for State Right Programs.” Variety, January 8, 1936. “Tarzan of the Apes.” Moving Picture World, January 26, 1918, 468–469. Van Zuilen, A. J. The Life Cycle of Magazines: A Historical Study of the Decline and Fall of the General Interest Mass Audience Magazine in the United States during the period 1946–1972. Uithoorn, The Netherlands: Graduate Press, 1977. Variety, January 12, 1917, 22. Variety Radio Directory, 1937–1938. Vernon, Alex. On Tarzan. London: University of Georgia Press, 2008. Wannamaker, Annette and Abate, Michelle Ann, eds. Global Perspectives on Tarzan: From King of the Jungle to International Icon. New York: Routledge, 2012. Wasko, Janet. How Hollywood Works. Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2003. Welky, David. Everything Was Better in America: Print Culture in the Great Depression. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Welky, David. The Moguls and the Dictators: Hollywood and the Coming of World War II. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2008. Weston, H. T. Letter courtesy of ERB, Inc. dated June 17, 1920. Williams, Raymond. Problems in Materialism and Culture. London: NLB, 1980. “Wily Tarzan Lives On, Dollarwise.” The New York Times, August 29, 1975. Wolf, Abby. “The Golden Age of Children’s Literature: An Introduction.” PBS. Accessed August 27, 2014. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/railway/age_ text.html. Wolf, Mark J. P. Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation. New York: Routledge, 2012. Young Jr., William H. “The Serious Funnies: Adventure Comics during the Depres­ sion, 1929–1938.” Journal of Popular Culture 3:3 (1969): 404–427.

5 1938–1958 From Jungles to Krypton: DC Comics, Superman and Industry Partnerships

In October 1955, Variety reported that by the end of the shooting s­ chedule for the Adventures of Superman, a television series broadcast during the 1950s, National Allied Publications, the corporate owners of Superman, had $3,000,000 invested in the series (18). The company also had a host of further Superman investments in other media. In fact, by the mid-1950s National had developed a highly lucrative production model that saw the company operating across a range of media industries, exploiting particular industrial and cultural conditions that allowed the comic book proprietor to produce Superman texts as components of a larger transmedia story world. Such was the degree of confidence in this model that by the aforementioned date in mid-1955, Whitney Ellsworth, the company’s editorial director, boasted: ‘With Superman, I don’t think we can reach a saturation point’ (Variety, 1955: 18). Such speak of saturation is apt, since this chapter will examine the industrial-cultural configurations of the 1940s and 1950s that would enable ­Superman – ‘a progenitor in the pop folklore of the twentieth ­century’ (Arnold, 1978: 11) – to span multiple media at this particular time. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, transmedia storytelling may have oper­ ated under a more corporatised and financially viable model than it had done so previously, but it was largely dependent on licensing to a third party who produced their own texts with different personnel. The previous chap­ ter showed how licensing, instead of always working to extend a fictional story world, sometimes fragmented a story world into competing versions. Moving into the 1940s and 1950s, however, this chapter shows how indus­ try partnerships were by now the driving determinant of trans­media story­ telling. This meant that working relationships and content-sharing between the media industries intensified, affording creative personnel from one media industry to work across other media – creating stories in and across multiple media industries before the days of industrial convergences. Specifically, the chapter has two overriding but overlapping aims. First it considers how, in cutting across different media industries in the 1940s and 1950s, industry partnerships formed an alignment across media that afforded fictional characters to move across media and for audiences to be pointed across media. I will show how media regulation, in particular

146  Exploring Transmedia History government intervention as well as other regulatory policies during and after World War II, underpinned these industry partnerships. Second, this chapter traces links between this period’s industry partnerships and the strategies for building fictional characters across media that those strategies afforded. Character-building, as I defined earlier in the book, refers to the construction and development of a fictional character through the use of backstory, appearance, dialogue, psychology, interactions with other char­ acters and so on. I will demonstrate how four categories driven by industry partnerships during the 1940s and 1950s afforded strategies for building a fictional character across multiple media industries. These four categories revolved around propaganda, the war film, movie serials and telefilms. In the first part of this chapter I will outline these four categories along­ side some of the broader trends influencing industry partnerships during the 1940s and 1950s. I show how propaganda and the war film – u ­ nderpinned by government regulation policies throughout the Second World War – ­effectively drove particular industry partnerships. Here I focus on the partner­ships developing across the film and radio industries, the film and comics industries, and the film and television industries, while in relation to the latter I also highlight the importance of movie serials and telefilms on ­forging further industry partnerships around the late 1940s and the early 1950s. This first section thus highlights two different types of industry part­ nerships: war-driven partnerships in the 1940s and minor-status partnerships in the 1950s. Once again, my intention is to lay out the general information concerning these four categories of war-driven or minor-status partnerships at the start of this chapter, before then analysing how those four categories informed specific strategies for building elements of Superman’s character across media in the ensuing sections. But before war-driven or minor-­status industry partnerships are explored in relation to Superman specifically, I will first examine an industry partnership between National Allied ­Publications and the McClure Syndicate, a newspaper publisher. While gesturing towards some of the strategies for character-building across media in the earli­ est Superman comic books and comic strips that came as a result of this partner­ship, I use this case to show why industry partnerships across media were crucial to how transmedia storytelling worked in the 1940s and 1950s. Subsequently, and framed around America’s entry into World War II, the first half of the chapter explores how war-driven partnerships – underpinned by government regulation policies that surrounded propaganda and the war film – afforded new strategies for building Superman’s character across the publishing, radio and film industries throughout the early to mid-1940s. As  I  will discuss, propaganda was important to transmedia storytelling since it took the form of mass communication aimed towards influencing the actions of audiences, directing them across multiple media. The sec­ ond half of the chapter will then look at how minor-status partnerships – ­underpinned in this case by other regulation policies typifying movie serials and telefilms – also afforded character-building across the film and television

1938–1958  147 industries in the late 1940s and the early 1950s. By ‘minor-status’ I mean the smaller or independent producers and companies occupying a lesser sta­ tus compared to the ‘majors’ that dominated the film industry or the more domi­nant networks of the radio industry or the later television industry. Some of these companies may even be deemed industrially marginal. Ultimately I will thereby demonstrate throughout this chapter how the model of transmedia storytelling in the 1940s and 1950s – underpinned by forms of media regulation – offered both profitability and transmedia stories that built characters and pointed audiences across multiple media, but relied on contingencies of war or else needed to operate as a minor-­ status production. The media forms examined in this chapter will altogether span comic books and newspaper comic strips, radio serials, cartoon shorts, ­novels, movie serials and telefilms.

Media Regulation and Industry Partnerships Understanding how the Superman character (and of course his fictional story world) was built across multiple media industries during the course of the 1940s and 1950s means first re-establishing the contextual changes brought about by media regulation. If industrialisation was about building the ­models through which texts were produced across media, and consumer culture was all about spreading those texts further, then media regulation worked to manage those processes of building and spreading. As discussed in Chapter 2, there are two key categories of media regulation: law (meaning the intellectual property laws including copyright, patents and trademarks) and policy (meaning regulatory controls such as government intervention). As was suggested previously, understanding the ways by which regulators and government bodies have worked to underpin and intervene in media industries such as film, radio and television – and in turn forge closer ­industry partnerships, dictating overlaps and alignments in media-industry activities – can yield insights into how new strategies for building a fictional character across media emerged during the 1940s and 1950s. Since ­Chapters 3 and 4 have already alluded to examples of how copyright regulation either drove or militated against transmedia storytelling, it is now time to focus on how regulatory policy has underpinned transmedia storytelling. In this section I shall therefore outline some of the trends and influences related to p ­ olicy that encouraged partnerships across media industries to develop. This is done so as to set up the larger framing for how Superman could be built as a fic­ tional character across the different media industries. And at no time did this happen more emphatically than between the late 1930s and the late 1950s. These particular decades were in fact significant turning points in terms of the relationships developing between multiple media industries, which as I suggest above would be important to how fictional characters were built across multiple media at this time. For one thing, I showed in C ­ hapter 2 via reference to the work of Hilmes how the rise of Hollywood-based radio

148  Exploring Transmedia History programming was contingent on the regulatory policies of AT&T, the tele­ phone company, which led to a ‘symbiotic relationship between ­cinema and radio’ (Hilmes, 1999: 70), and afforded ‘radio series based on the ­characters … of a successful film’ (ibid.). As was also noted earlier, examples like Stella Dallas emphasised the building of characters across multiple media industries; character-building would in fact become an effect of the industry partnerships that were to develop throughout the course of the 1940s and 1950s.1 And these effects would bring new strategies for building characters across media, as I will explore in relation to Superman. Moving into the 1940s, for instance, the regulation that began to drive industry partnerships across media and afford strategies for character-building stemmed not from AT&T policies but instead from war-driven government intervention poli­ cies. For the turn of the 1940s marked America’s entrance into World War II, and the Second World War would forge an important alignment of inter­ ests and genres between the film and radio industries, in particular, which was itself driven by the government’s intervention policies, in turn dictating many of the operations and priorities of these two industries. Let’s briefly look at how some of these alignments across media indus­ tries took shape. By the 1940s, the film industry regularly kept a watchful eye on other media industries such as radio and publishing in order to main­ tain a firm understanding of the sorts of products that were appealing to audiences. As Tino Balio elaborates: In deciding what to produce in any given year, moguls did not rely on hunches or attempt to foist their personal tastes on the public; rather, studios organised story departments in New York, Hollywood, and London to keep in close contact with Broadway, publishing, and the literary world. (1995: 10) Hollywood may have kept in close contact with the likes of Broadway, pub­ lishing and the wider literary world, but let’s not forget that by the turn of 1940 the Hollywood film industry was enjoying its most economically suc­ cessful period under the studio system. With the five ‘major’ film ­studios – Paramount Pictures, MGM, RKO, Fox Film Corporation and ­Warner Bros. – forming a dominant oligopoly of vertically integrated producer-­ distributor-exhibitors, internally ‘controlling the manufacturing, marketing and retailing of their product’ (Jewell, 2007: 52), it was far more difficult for collaborative efforts within and across media industries to occur on a con­ sistent basis.2 I hinted at this difficulty in the previous chapter in relation to Tarzan, when in that case I showed what happened when Burroughs licensed Tarzan to MGM, one of these five major studios: MGM took control and left Burroughs side-lined, which fragmented the Tarzan story world into two or even three very different and competing versions. Since the major ­Hollywood film studios were by this time thriving, why would they even bother attempting to collaborate with other media industries?

1938–1958  149 And yet industry partnerships across media became much more prevalent after 1939 when the Second World War began. Soon after the US declared war on Germany in 1941, the film and radio industries, in particular, were placed under almost constant pressure from the government to collabo­ rate with each other so to provide a mouthpiece for the war-­propaganda messages of the entire US nation. Entertainments that could address those messages were quickly prioritised and soon began to transcend the borders of multiple media. Thomas Schatz shows how in the early 1940s President Roosevelt ‘allowed Hollywood to continue commercial operations so long as it co-operated with Washington in actively supporting the war effort’ (1999: 2). The Hollywood studios started producing a large number of warthemed documentaries, features and military films (Schatz, 1999: 2). And it was indeed Roosevelt’s involvement in various media-industry policies that led to deep collaborative arrangements across media industries so as to better organise the new policy needs of the government and its propaganda. That is to suggest that the war propaganda of the era was afforded through alignments between different media industries. Propaganda, a form of mass communication aimed towards influencing the actions of audiences – and, in a more consumerist sense, towards selling new products and ideologies to the masses – worked to disperse information across media. Thus the need for Hollywood and radio to support the war effort and to produce coordinated propaganda across media facilitated characters to be built across media – as long as those characters were seen to be relevant to war propaganda. One of the most striking examples of how collaboration across media industries would afford characters to be built across media was the estab­ lishment of initiatives like the earlier cited Office of War Information (OWI) in June 1942. The OWI amalgamated a number of government agencies, all of which ‘developed policies aimed at regulating the media as a politi­ cal and social mouthpiece’ (Croteau, 2012: 81). As Schatz notes, the OWI served to ‘enhance public understanding of the war at home and abroad, to co-ordinate government information activities, and to serve as a liaison with press, radio, and motion pictures’ (1999: 141). A similar move occurred in 1941 just after Pearl Harbour, when Roosevelt appointed his aide – a former journalist who had been an editor at Washington Daily News – to serve as coordinator of government and war-themed films. Roosevelt’s aide acted as a liaison between the government, all the major newspapers and indeed the film industry (Schatz, 1999: 141). It did not take long for such policy-driven initiatives to start extending the characters of war films across media. In fact, believing the movies were crucial to the propaganda war, Roosevelt charged the OWI with establishing a liaison with the motion picture industry, which sought to work together to ‘promote a war in which rights and wrongs were clear’ (Koppes, 1999: 269). War documentaries such as The Battle of ­Midway (1942) began to appear, but far more commonly the war film was ‘one of glory and adventure’ (Jewell, 2007: 221), as exemplified by films

150  Exploring Transmedia History such as I Wanted Wings (1941) or Desperate Journey (1942), which both provided ‘a strong measure of pride and reassurance’ for the nation at large. While Clayton R. Koppes indicates that the government’s intervention into media-industry operations at this time was an arguably ‘softer’ form of regulatory policy than laws like copyright (with some moguls ‘fighting their new regulators over how far they would go in the OWI’s crusade’) (1999: 270), the OWI still had enormous regulatory power over the media industries at this time. Far more than just offering advice or instruction, in fact, the OWI actually stipulated strict guidelines about what could or could not appear in a film, radio show or newspaper article. For instance, photographs to be published in newspapers and taken on the battlefront first had to be submitted and reviewed by the government, who approved or denied publication.3 Furthermore, in the context of the cinema, the OWI codified its view of the war in the forty-two-page Manual for the Motion Picture Industry. Koppes discloses how the first question put forth in this manual to all film-industry moguls and executives was to do with justify­ ing the production of a potential movie according to its propaganda value; the manual’s opening question being ‘Will this picture help win the war?’ (1999: 269). Koppes also argues that regulatory polies such as those pub­ lished in the Manual for the Motion Picture Industry ‘regulated morality and poli­tics on the screen more than at any other time in American film his­ tory’ (1999: 262). For Koppes, ‘the US government decided wartime movies were too important to be left to the moviemakers. Through most of the war, the Office of War Information, the Roosevelt administration’s propaganda agency … regulated the American screen more tightly than at any time in its history’ (1999: 262). And thus in serving to regulate screen content more tightly than ever before, the film industry’s major conversion to war-themed product in 1942 indeed helped to intensify collaborative relationships between many ­different media industries. Films about the war spoke to the government’s propaganda needs; as Schatz continues, tellingly, ‘never before had the inter­ ests of the nation and the industry at large been so closely aligned’ (1999: 1). As such, war films also spoke to the demands and tastes of other media indus­ tries at this particular time, too – such as the comic book industry. Comic book superheroes, in particular, characteristically dealt in themes of combat, heroism, hope and strength, as well as in themes of glory and adventure that characterised the glamorous embellishment of the H ­ ollywood war film at this time. As industry partnerships began to intensify between H ­ ollywood and radio, the film and comic book industries became equally collaborative. Before long comic book superheroes were co-opted by Hollywood as forms of commercial war propaganda. In one review of Spy Smasher, a war-themed movie serial released in 1942, to give one example of this kind of co-option, The Film Daily discussed how the movie serial’s plot – revolving around a male hero who is ‘captured in Germany while trying to obtain information about the head of the German

1938–1958  151 spy ring in America’ – was ‘reminiscent of “Superman”’ (1942: 16). The film was based on the Spy Smasher character appearing in Whiz Comics. America’s entry into World War II and the changing socio-­political demands of government effectively reconfigured the superhero mythos; virtually all comic book superheroes – including the likes of Batman, C ­ aptain Midnight and indeed Superman – were co-opted into the national war effort, their adventures spread across a host of available media forms.4 However, that is not to imply that all industry partnerships were wardriven and strictly an effect of the government’s need for coordinated war propaganda across industries. Propaganda and war films were indeed two factors that drove the period’s industry partnerships in the early to mid1940s, but moving into the late 1940s and 1950s other factors became more important. Such factors included movie serials and telefilms, which were two notable products of this period’s minor-status partnerships. Again, by ‘minor-status’ I mean the small or independent producers/companies occu­ pying a lesser or even marginal status compared to the ‘majors’ that domi­ nated the film industry or the leading networks of the radio or later television industry. Therefore, if Paramount, MGM, RKO, Fox Film ­Corporation and Warner Bros. all represented the majors of the American film industry, then the likes of Columbia, United Artists and Universal (the ‘Little Three,’ or the ‘minors’, as they were known), together with smaller, far more marginal companies such as Republic Pictures, represented its minor league. With a similar idea of majors versus minors in mind, Michael ­Kackman observes that ‘it’s easy to think of transmediation … as opportunistic empire-­ building strategies for media corporations at the height of their game’ (2008:  94). Much contemporary scholarship often assumes – or rather implies – that transmedia storytelling is a phenomenon of dominant con­ glomerates and huge corporations (West Coast transmedia, to re-cite Phillips (2012)), since it is so often the case that such work turns to lavish and major productions such as Time-Warner’s The Dark Knight Rises or the BBC’s Doctor Who to make its cases. But the latter half of this chapter will pro­ vide, as Kackman puts it, ‘ample evidence that [transmedia storytelling] can be better understood as survival strategies for relative outsiders’ (2008: 95). For instance, the movie serials of the late 1940s are best understood as products of the film industry’s outsiders that sought to retain movie-­going audiences amidst the broader decline of the Hollywood studio system and the rise of television. Chapter 2 noted that the movie serial had materi­ alised out of newspaper circulation wars in the early twentieth century when despairing magazine editors joined forces with movie producers to try and retain the audience of a particular story by collaborating across media and extending the story across media. Factors may have differed, but the same was also true in the late 1940s, by which point ‘the film industry had begun a steady, seemingly inexorable slide’ (Hurst, 1979: 3) and the movie serial was being wiped out. Borne out of remarkably similar ­desperate ­measures, then, parts of the film industry at this time would commonly use,

152  Exploring Transmedia History as Gary Grossman writes, ‘the audiences’ support for their daily print favou­ rites [by] constructing film adventures around them’ (1977: 17). With the Western and the action/adventure genres featuring heavily in comic books, it was these genres that came to characterise the movie serials from the late 1930s through to the early 1950s. Prominent examples included Buck Rogers (Universal Pictures, 1939) and Batman (Columbia, 1943). And those ‘parts’ of the film industry making such serials were indeed the ones occupy­ ing a minor status, for it was through more minor companies where industry partnerships across media proved most sustainable after the war had fi ­ nished forcing them together but before convergences became the normality. Movie serials – as well as the likes of newsreels, comedy shorts and ­inexpensive B-features – constituted B-movie formats, which stood in oppo­ sition to ‘A’ films. As Richard B. Jewell explains, ‘in Hollywood, production was conceptualized in terms of “A” and “B” films. “A” films had substantial budgets and generous shooting schedules, featured recognizable stars in key roles, and replied upon … experienced personnel to bring the project to fru­ ition’ (2007: 69). Although the discipline of film studies tends to concentrate on the feature film, a movie theatre programme in the 1940s complemented these ‘A’ features with the kinds of B-movie formats I list above. Of course, the B label should not be regarded as any kind of diminishment of these formats. Instead, as Tino Balio writes, ‘it simply recognises the industrial conditions under which they were made and shown’ (1995: 342). And those industrial conditions were important to how industry partnerships across multiple media befell throughout the 1940s. Ironically, while propaganda and war films became exemplars of how regulation drove partnerships across media industries, B-movie formats such as movie serials would afford industry part­ nerships precisely because they were not regulated. Or  rather B’s were not burdened by the same studio regulation and internal control that character­ ised the Hollywood feature film. B-movies, as Jewell elaborates, ‘were made inexpensively on abbreviated shooting schedules, contained casts lacking in stars and represented the handiwork of a second echelon of talent’ (1979: 65). Hurst goes on to argue that because B-movie productions were ‘a training ground’ (1979: 65), their creators ‘were given more artistic freedom as long as they brought in a marketable film on schedule and within the budget’ (ibid.). As hinted by the examples listed above, B-movie serials were typi­ cally the work of the ‘Little Three’ studios – Columbia, United Artists and Universal – or smaller independent companies, and thus far outside of the rigidly governed studio system of the majors. And amidst the film industry’s ‘steady, inexorable slide’ (Hurst, 1979: 3), the B-movie serial – produced by minor-status companies – enabled for greater partnerships among both its crew and its licensors across media, as I discuss later. Evidence that transmedia storytelling can be better understood as sur­ vival strategies for relative outsiders – as a product of more minor-status ­partnerships – can also be found in the emerging television industry of the early 1950s. Television at this time was indeed a medium built up of the sorts

1938–1958  153 of partnerships across media that afforded stories and characters to be built across those media, even if those all-important partnerships were to take place on the outer margins of the television industry itself. C ­ hapter 2 pointed out that government policies in the late 1940s and early 1950s strove to keep the cinema and television industries apart, having been reluctant to allow the film industry to retain its status as a monopolistic enterprise as it once had been throughout the 1930s and 1940s.5 And yet it is far too easy to over-­emphasise the competitive opposition that marked the film and television industries at  this time. As Superman movie serial director Tommy Carr argued, it is very tempting to over-state certain assumption that ‘television killed every­ thing in the theatre business’ (1977: 57). But assumptions such as these often tend to overlook the activities of the entrepreneurial minor players or the smaller independent television p ­ roducers in the 1950s – the kinds of people, as ­Kackman argues, ‘who couldn’t crack the dominant industry’ (2008: 83). It was here, on the margins of the emerging television industry, where indus­ try partnerships across media developed exponentially. One important factor related to minor-status partnerships was the production of telefilms; early 1950s television was marked by a transition from mainly live studio broad­ casting to externally produced telefilms.6 As Derek Kompare discusses: Although television remained in principle a “live” medium, the sheer demand for programming on local stations still necessitated the use of film. This demand would be met from two sources: recirculated theatrical film, and films specifically made for television distribution – i.e., “telefilms,” or, in Variety’s argot, “vidpix.” While the networks tentatively dabbled in telefilm distribution during the late 1940s and early 1950s, other firms had more definite plans to provide recorded programming for the new medium. Accordingly, the majority of filmed programming on television at this time had not passed through net­ work origination, and was instead syndicated directly to local spon­ sors and/or stations. (2005: 44) Jerry Fairbanks, for example, was perhaps the first independent producer to sell a series to television when he marketed The Public Prosecutor to NBC in 1948. Fairbanks subsequently specialised in the syndication of low-­budget juvenile series, most pointedly in the style of B-picture Westerns, such as Roy Rogers (1951–1957) and The Lone Ranger (1949–1957). William Boddy has hailed the period of 1952–1956 as first-run syndication’s ‘Golden Age’, as a large number of other independent producers began creating programming specifically for the market of television (1992: 140). Among these indepen­ dent producers were Vitapix, Screen Gems, MCA, United ­Television Pro­ grams (UTP), Flamingo Films and the Frederick W. Ziv Company. Indeed, the Frederick W. Ziv Company, while originating in radio, became one of the most prominent independent figures in 1950s US television. Ziv had devel­ oped what Derek Kompare calls ‘a network-like reputation for programming

154  Exploring Transmedia History through several shrewd principles: exploiting “presold” proper­ties by acquiring the television rights to established characters and texts; pursuing Hollywood-level talent wherever possible; and making ­program sales and promotion the firm’s top priority in every market’ (2005: 33). One exam­ ple is Hopalong Cassidy (1952–1954), which Kackman describes elsewhere as a ‘transmedia commercial intertext’ (2008: 98) insofar as its characters extended across comics, radio, movie serials and television. Importantly, Hopalong Cassidy exemplifies how independent compa­ nies including Ziv, Flamingo and Screen Gems produced such transmedia commercial intertexts. And industry partnerships between the film and the television industries were crucial, since Hopalong Cassidy was ‘made for television distribution’ but actually filmed on Hollywood back lots, as were the other productions of these independent companies such as Adventures of Superman, as shall be shown later on in this chapter (Kompare, 2005: 44). The activities of these small syndication players – driven tangentially by regulatory policies that compelled the major Hollywood studios to stay out­ side of network television – forged profound industry partnerships between film and television. Through such profound partnerships on the margins of the industry, independent telefilm companies would effectively carve a niche for themselves in the television industry by eschewing the more cultur­ ally respected live programming that had been associated with television in favour of low-budget, pre-recorded telefilms. What’s more, these telefilms – packaged as pre-sold properties that made use of industry partnerships so to attract audiences from other media – can be understood as a survival strategy, as an attempt to try and compete with the dominant networks. In cutting across media industries during this time, then, industry partner­ships formed dialogues and alignments across media industries that were based on the sharing of – or the shared need for – propaganda, the war film, movie serials and telefilms. Hence fictional characters that fit the needs of propaganda, war films, movie serials and telefilms could thus be built as transmedia story worlds across multiple media. One character that would fit the needs of all four categories was Superman. But Superman came before the Second World War, emerging just before propaganda and war films became central to how many different media industries collaborated and brought about further strategies for building characters across media. I will now move on to demonstrate how comics-based industry partnerships in the days just before World War II (and of course before any industrial convergences) enabled elements of Superman’s character to be built across comic books and newspaper comic strips.

Comics-Based Partnerships Released two to three decades after the goings-on outlined above, S­ uperman: The Movie (1978) took the adventures of Superman – stories that had been permeating media as diverse as comics, radio and television for up

1938–1958  155 to forty years by that point – and moulded them to the newly flourishing blockbuster movie format. The film begins by acknowledging its superhe­ ro’s roots in media forms other than cinema, opening with a highly self-­ conscious recognition of multiple media forms. We see a shot of Action Comics, presented as if on a screen atop of an old-fashioned theatre stage. The notably intertextual nature of this opening shot alludes to an important fact – that being that Superman, along with his story world, belongs to a host of different media. In just one shot, it seemed, Superman was defined as if by his associations with the pages of comics, the screen of the cinema, the stage of the theatre and – through the voice of a narrator – the airwaves of the radio. The black-and-white visuals even presented these various media forms with connotations of the past, effectively establishing the Superman of the then-present with a clear sense of the historical. This recognition of history is rather appropriate, since it was 1938 when Superman first flexed his way into the American consciousness – and the first of the American superheroes was born. Superman, a Herculean char­ acter and an inveterate protector of the oppressed, became a symbol of freedom, justice and the American way. Created by writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, Superman is the last survivor of a dead alien planet, a planet once populated by beings of astounding strength. The original story sees an alien infant sent to Earth in a spaceship barely seconds before this planet’s destruction. On Earth he is found and raised by the Kents, a pair of humble farmers in Kansas. Upon reaching maturity, his super-powers – ­consisting of flight, great strength and speed, x-ray vision and almost com­ plete ­invulnerability – become apparent, and he takes on the civilian identity of Clark Kent before moving to the city of Metropolis where he works at the Daily Planet, a major metropolitan newspaper. Before long Clark becomes Superman and fights endlessly for truth and justice. But Superman: The Movie’s recognition that Superman belongs to a host of historical media is appropriate for a whole other reason. Insofar as the basis of the character – his backstory, his appearance, his voice and dia­ logue, his psychology, his interactions with other characters, etc. – was built across many media, Superman did not really belong to any one medium specifically. Character-building occurred across radio, across movies, across ­novels and across television to make Superman the character that he became. And in the days before industrial convergences, character-building across so many media required particular contingencies and collaborative part­ nerships between companies working in these different media industries. And the importance of collaborative partnerships between different media industries on how character-building strategies worked across media can be measured – if not yet fully understood – by looking at how the earliest Superman comics were produced. Appreciating this importance of production context means understand­ ing comic books more broadly. Let’s start, then, by looking at some of the developments in comic book publishing. Paul Lopes has argued that comic

156  Exploring Transmedia History books were formed as ‘a product of recombinant culture: a new hybrid born from pulp fiction and illustrative art’ (2009: 46). In the previous chapter I showed how pulp magazines of the 1910s reflected the emerging consumer culture of the era and its demand for more and more products by constructing story as that which unfolded as adjoining stories across editions, linking one character or story world with another. As products of this recombinant culture, comic books would utilise many of these same character-building or world-building strategies going forward.7 There was even an overlap between pulp magazines and comic books in terms of cul­ tural status: Jean-Paul Gabilliet sees comic books in the 1930s as occupying a ‘culturally marginalized position in the reading priority of the everyday cultural universe of Americans’ (2005: 207). More to the point, many per­ sonnel who had made a solid career for themselves in pulp fiction crossed over to the emerging comic book industry in the mid-1930s when the pulps began to fade out. As David Saunders writes, ‘the comics as we know them are rooted in that late great period of American writing known as Pulp Fiction … For one thing, many of the artists and illustrators crossed over from the pulps to the comics’ (2012: online). Many of these same artists also moved into newspaper publishing, and this spread of editors, writers, illustrators, publishers and so forth across the industrial borders of comic books and newspapers quickly established strong collaborative working relationships across those two media. One man who made especially good use of these collaborative relation­ ships between comic books and newspapers was ‘a pleasant, sociable chap named Harry Donenfeld, a prosperous printer, publisher and distributor of “pulp” magazines’ (The Film Daily, 1942: 10). Donenfeld partnered with Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, a pulp writer, and in 1935 founded National Allied Publications. Then in 1937 Wheeler-Nicholson and Donenfeld formed a small company called Detective Comics, Inc. (known later and referred to hereafter as DC Comics). Vin Sullivan and Whitney Ellsworth soon joined as editor and editorial director, respectively. DC Comics’ first comic book, Action Comics, effectively popularised the American comic book format, which had since evolved from the predominantly advertising-based format of comic strips inside newspapers into distinct media products that existed independently of newspapers.8 And in popularising the comic book, Action Comics also triggered a superhero boom, for Action Comics #1, released in June 1938, featured the debut appearance of Superman. The character was actually based, at least partly, on none other than Burroughs’ Tarzan; writer Jerry Siegel, when asked in interview to name his inspirations for the Man of Steel, stated: ‘Well, there was Tarzan, who was certainly the greatest action hero of the time…’ (Saunders, 2012: online). Like Tarzan before him, Superman proved an instant success, particularly with children, who had become the demo­ graphic most clearly associated with comic books since their beginnings circa 1934 as the ‘funny books’ (see The New York Times, 1934: 6).

1938–1958  157 But unlike Tarzan, Superman’s early authorship was more complicated. Though Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman, Donenfeld was essen­ tially ‘Superman’s foster father’ (The Washington Post, 1940: 19) – reports indicate that staff working at DC Comics during these years joked that these initials could stand for ‘Donenfeld Comics’ given his dominance over ­Superman. And under Donenfeld’s dominance the sales of Action ­Comics began to increase rapidly, with the first few issues selling 500,000  copies (­Benton, 1989: 23). Soon, Donenfeld began to speculate whether it was in fact ­Superman, rather than Action Comics per se, which was bringing in these high sales. To confirm such suspicions, Donenfeld conducted a news­ stand survey in 1940 and found that children were not actually asking for Action Comics at all; instead, they just wanted ‘that magazine with S­ uperman on it’ (Goulart, 2000: 78). As such, Donenfeld quickly a­ ccelerated plans to expand Superman into other media. The first plan was for Donenfeld to follow in the footsteps of earlier media licensors – such as Burroughs, the first author to have successfully incorporated himself. In a similar move, Donenfeld founded Superman, Inc., a subsidiary corporation of DC Comics, and one devoted likewise to managing all licensing agreements to stem from Superman. Various items of licensed Superman merchandise began to ‘roll off the assembly line in 1939  … Kids could wear the image of Superman on playsuits and shirts while keeping their cash in a Superman billfold and dining on Superman bread’ (Daniels, 2004: 47–50). Such items of Superman merchandise exem­ plify a form of ‘extractability’, with audiences able to ‘take aspects of the story away with them as resources they deploy in the spaces of their everyday life’ (Jenkins, 2009: online). However, where Donenfeld’s approach differed to Burroughs’ was in the fact that when it came to expanding Superman to other media, he often avoided traditional licensing in favour of exploiting the partnerships with former pulp editors I mentioned previously, which allowed Superman’s character to be built across multiple media. Let’s take the Superman newspaper comic strip as an example, which appeared in January 1939 inside nearly 300 daily newspapers. The Superman comic strip actually exemplifies the different model through which DC Comics produced Superman across media: Unlike Burroughs’ more managerial approach to authoring the Tarzan story world across media in the 1930s, DC Comics ensured that its staff crossed from one medium to another, cre­ ating Superman in multiple media as opposed to licensing other personnel to produce the Superman comic strip. Underpinning this particular arrangement where creative personnel from the comic book industry crossed over into the newspaper publishing industry was an industry partnership between DC Comics and the McClure Newspaper Syndicate, who syndicated the Superman strips to newspapers across the country. A partnership that stemmed from the earlier noted indus­ trial evolution between pulp magazines and comic books, then, ­Donenfeld licensed rights to the Superman character to the McClure Newspaper

158  Exploring Transmedia History Syndicate. But unlike many arrangements made by comic-strip syndicators around this time, he insisted that his own editorial staff – at this point, that being Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster – handle all editorial work on the comic strip. And such a strong demand was not a problem, since the man said to be running the McClure Newspaper Syndicate was M. C. Gaines, a man who had retained an association with Eastern Color Printing – the company that printed Wheeler-Nicholson’s comic books, including those of DC Comics. Much like Donenfeld, Gaines had also been a publisher and a distributer of various pulp magazines in the past. According to his son, William, while Gaines did not actually own ‘any part of DC’, he did go ‘into business with Donenfeld, [and] at that time had a working arrangement with what is now DC Comics’ (The Comics Journal, 1983: online). This working arrangement, fortified by the fact that both men developed similar careers before moving from the pulps to comics, allowed for a friendlier licensing agreement whereby McClure occupied a role of distribution rather than production. Thus with McClure distributing Siegel and Shuster’s work across 300 newspapers, the Superman newspaper comic strip became more of an extension of the comic book’s Superman rather than a distinct version of the comic book’s Superman. In fact, this arrangement between DC Comics and the McClure Newspaper Syndicate meant that elements of the character – in particular, his backstory – quickly began to be built and further expanded across the pages of the comic book and the newspaper comic strip. In the first week of the newspaper comic strip, for example, Superman’s backstory was expanded – his home planet now given a name, Krypton. Readers of the comic strip were also given new narrative information concerning the events behind its earlier destruction, with ‘scenes which round out the action depicted [in other media]’ being used in much the same way as Jenkins writes of transmedia storytelling today (2007: online). As for Superman, the newspaper comic strip provided readers with a never-before-heard ­scientific explanation for the character’s super-human strength, ‘filling in character back-story’ (Jenkins, 2007: online). Relatedly, names were given to ­Superman’s Kryptonian parents, Jor-El and Lora, before the comic strip revealed the real Kryptonian name of Superman to be Kal-El, a first for readers at the time. In that sense, too, the Superman newspaper comic strip provided readers with opportunities to drill down into the deep well of story extensions surrounding the Superman mythology. So by ‘flesh[ing] out characters’, as Jenkins puts it (2007: online), and by expanding character backstory across the comic books and newspaper comic strips, character-building encouraged the readership of the news­paper strip to purchase the comic books – steering these new readers across both media. The estimated circulation of this newspaper comic strip was well over 20 million, a figure greatly surpassing that of any comic book of the period (Daniels, 2004: 37). The sales figures for Action Comics further increased upon the publication of the newspaper strip in 1939 (Goulart, 2000: 74).

1938–1958  159 And in that sense, expanding a fictional character’s backstory across the pages of different media was about far more than just storytelling; in this case, at least, character-building equalled audience-building. In an interview published in 1940, Donenfeld openly correlated his ratio­ nale for using character-building as a way of audience-building with his company’s need to sustain attention from its child readers. ‘A kid is the smartest buyer in the world’, he argued (The Washington Post, 1940: 19). ‘You can’t fool him. He has a dime, and he spends that dime with better judgement than any grown person. We need to keep him interested’ (ibid.). This emphasis on engaging audiences echoes Jason Mittell’s assertion seven decades later, who proposed that ‘for many within the industry, transmedia is a magnet to sustain viewer engagement and attention’ (2012: online). In the case of Superman, by employing audience-building as a strategy for sustain­ ing attention, DC Comics’ profits from Superman stood at $1,500,000 by 1940 (Goulart, 2000: 74). The model, in other words, clearly worked. Moreover, and as I will show throughout this chapter, in some ways the DC Comics/McClure Syndicate partnership exemplifies how many trans­ media stories would be produced in the 1940s and 1950s. With the staff from one medium moving into another, an industry partnership between DC Comics and the McClure Newspaper Syndicate – one driven by a trend in the industry where personnel from pulp fiction crossed into comics and newspapers – had given DC Comics a way of building the Superman char­ acter via purposeful intertextual references to other texts that were then expanded and elaborated upon within another text. But the relationship between industry partnerships and transmedia character-building at this point in time is a complex one. Different types of industry partnerships, informed by different factors, across different media industries, led to differ­ ent forms of character-building. As I indicated earlier, the imminent indus­ try partnerships formed on account of the shared need for (or sharing of) propaganda, the likes of war films, B-movie serials and telefilms all aligned with comic book heroes. Each of these media forms would afford different elements of Superman’s character to be built across media. Let’s begin, then, with the first, and see how propaganda built a character across comics and radio come the start of World War II.

Propaganda Donenfeld, ‘the man who you might say was in charge of wholesaler relations’ (The Comics Journal, 1983: online) for Superman, as Gaines once noted, quickly sought to extend his model of producing Superman across media borders into non-print media. Shawna Kidman argues that ­Superman’s original medium – comic books – ‘have always functioned as a springboard for transmedia; never bound by its printed form, this medium and the stories it has generated have long lived between and across other media’ (2015). The  first non-print medium that Superman lived across

160  Exploring Transmedia History was radio. But at a time predating industrial convergence, which indus­ try partnerships could Donenfeld exploit to expand Superman beyond his own publishing network? To answer this question, I begin this section by exploring how the government’s need for coordinated propaganda across media at the dawn of the Second World War made Superman relevant to the radio industry. As I will show, during this time DC Comics began to transform Superman into a national emblem of war propaganda – a figure capable of inspiring hope and courage in the face of national turmoil, and thus one attractive to a larger audience across the comic book and radio industries alike. For at the start of the war, the government was required to coordinate propaganda material across multiple media industries, which in the simplest sense meant that the comic character of Superman was propelled to radio, which was still the nation’s dominant mass medium. William C. Ackerman of the Columbia Broadcasting System said in 1945 that ‘more Americans spend more time listening to radio programs than they spend doing any­ thing else, except working and sleeping’ (2). Indeed, a Decennial Census provided a country-by-country record of radio ownership at this time and revealed that, as of 1940, there were 34,854,532 families in America and 28,838,203, or 82.8%, of this number owned a radio receiver (Ackerman, 1945: 2–3). The percentage of families owning a radio subsequently rose to 88.9% in 1944, and then rose again to 90% in 1945 (ibid.). Radio’s domi­ nance was why the government placed so much pressure on it to provide a mouthpiece for the nation’s propaganda messages. By the early 1940s, more­ over, radio broadcasts, like other forms of entertainment at that time, were regulated by the government and were instructed to keep citizens informed about war efforts and encourage citizens to help the cause. In other words, propaganda became an important source of spreadability for media. Enter­ tainments that could effectively communicate and address the messages and causes of war were therefore prioritised and quickly transcended multiple media forms and industries. Superman was to become one of these entertainments, and the general spreading of the character as propaganda fodder was to be important to his character-building insofar as this spreading developed his psychology (and not to mention gave him a voice). Let’s look at the Superman radio serial to see how this worked. The Adventures of Superman was as a fifteen-­minute thrice-weekly radio serial, debuting on February 12, 1940, and starring Bud Collyer as the voice of Superman and Joan Alexander as Lois Lane. It  achieved the highest rating of any juvenile broadcast on the air at this time, receiving a Crossley rating of 5.6 ten weeks after its debut (‘Superman On Radio’: online). But the success of the serial was not immediately fore­ seen by the radio industry. Donenfeld had begun pitching Superman to the major radio networks towards the end of 1939, preparing audition tapes with the hope of attracting sponsors. But despite being enormously popular in comic books, Superman was rejected by all of the major radio networks.

1938–1958  161 As Variety reported in January 1940, ‘[t]here will be no radio version of the cartoon strip Superman as far as the major networks are concerned’ (1). The major networks perceived Superman as ‘a protagonist of too much horror stuff’ (Variety, 1940: 1). The reason for the dismissal of the character was simple: Superman, emerging in a comic book medium that drew from the minds of pulp writers, was known for his violent solutions to crime, such as tearing the wings from a plane full of criminals, leaving it to crash. Such violence was deemed ‘far too much to unload on adolescent listeners’ (ibid.). In the early days of the character, in fact, Superman’s psychology was rooted in acts of violent comeuppance against petty thugs and small-time criminal ganglands. It took the character’s broader transformation into a symbol of propaganda on radio for that psychology to develop – b ­ uilding the character across media as a more moral hero. For instance, almost immediately the Superman of the radio became affiliated with the Second World  War, and Donenfeld himself publically voiced the character’s new­ found status as an American defender against the threats of war: ‘“­Superman is going over there to Germany, Italy and Japan, and he’s going to clean them up!” insisted Donenfeld, presiding genius of the Man of Steel’ (The ­Washington Post, 1940: 19). Donenfeld continued, emphatically: ‘I  have hopes that he’ll bring Hitler and Mussolini to this country and set them down in New York’s East Side. He’ll sweep the world for democracy!’ (ibid.). Democracy had not appeared to be at the top of Superman’s priorities when tearing the wings from planes, of course, but the need for propaganda now meant that by 1942 trade papers such as The Film Daily were reporting on ‘the ­possible use of the Superman character in national defence.’ (1942: 2). ‘The significance of the new radio Superman is not only that he is a reflec­ tion of these times’, also argued The New York Times, ‘but that now he is to be a constructive participant in them’ (1946: 7). In other words, the close working partnerships between DC Comics and the McClure Syndicate may have afforded strong intertextual possibilities for Superman’s storytelling across media, but come the turn of the 1940s it was the inter-textual work­ ings of propaganda paratexts – themselves situated around and in the gaps of the character’s textual exploits – that worked to socially organise how Superman was read across media (Bennett and Woollacott, 1987: 45). In a very general sense, propaganda, which worked to recuperate optimism and romantic ideals across media, strived ‘to rally patriotism in the face of enemy perfidy’ and to ‘promise eventual and righteous triumph’ (Finney, 2011: 3). Reframed as an ideal of this righteous triumph, Superman – a beacon of hope, virtue and strength dressed in the colours of the nation’s flag – was indeed optimum propaganda to be dispersed across the country’s media. Perhaps accordingly, references to Superman in trade papers and news­ papers at the time hint at the extent to which radio serials such as The Adventures of Superman came to be consumed as a transmedial form of entertainment. In fact, the medium’s status as a mouthpiece for the mes­ sages of the nation had come to enable listeners to make sense of such

162  Exploring Transmedia History entertainment according to its presence in other media forms: ‘We recognize the familiar swoosh of Superman landing, red cape streaming behind him’, wrote one radio writer in The New York Times (1942: 34). ‘Though comic books and publicity pictures give us a visual image to start with, radio completes the process by providing the imagination’s animation. Sparked by the words, the sounds, the intonations, and the silences, the radio cre­ ates the landscape for us as well as the action and the special effects of the heroic world’ (ibid.). In a further commentary in 1946, The New York Times ­reiterated this link between propaganda and a transmedial process of consuming media messages, aptly noting that ‘if Superman holds an iota of the influence attributed to him by his critics, then his adoption of a new way of life must be regarded as an encouraging augury transcending the radio itself’ (1946: 7). Propaganda may have afforded Superman to transcend comic books and to find a new role on radio, then, but in a far more specific sense propa­ ganda also helped to develop Superman’s character across these particular media by operating within the generic constraints of propaganda-inflected radio serials. Superman was far from the only fictional character to become co-opted into the national war effort. By 1940, in fact, adventure radio seri­ als had become particularly effective at communicating stories about heroes fighting foreign enemies. Helen Scinto, writing in The New York Times in 1942, says that ‘after the attacks on Pearl Harbour it was the adventure serial that went to war in a big way’ (34). The likes of The Lone Ranger (1933–1954) and the Captain Midnight (1938–1949) radio serials gave thousands of listeners just the right balance between escapist fantasy and real-life war themes of combat, heroism, strength and hope. The generic for­ mat of such propaganda-inflected radio serials dictated how Superman was represented on radio, and this was crucial to building his character. Richard Match, for example, again in The New York Times, wrote: Their common formula of daily adventure serials is physical danger encountered on a hunt – for an enemy base, for a treasure, for a miss­ ing “defence plan.” Subtle characterizations are avoided. The hero is a simple, modest fellow, all courage, all virtue. His opponent, very often a “master criminal,” bent on control over the world or the destruction of the United States, is the epitome of evil. (1942: 12) In other words, the construction of Superman as a moral, m ­ odest  defender of Earth – a man whose psychology was best characterised by ­virtue and democracy – was shaped by his radio incarnation. With the g­ overnment’s need for regulated forms of propaganda on radio propelling Superman across  media, notable character-building opportunities based around psycho­logy came accordingly. Thus the need for the radio industry to actively support the war effort and to produce coordinated propaganda across media facilitated characters to be built across multiple media – as long

1938–1958  163 as those characters were seen to be relevant to the government’s objec­ tives. This example is again a demonstration of how different industrial configurations contingent on a different cultural moment led to similar transmedial results. But propaganda afforded strategies for character-building across media in another way, too. Earlier in the chapter I indicated how the government’s strong need for coordinated propaganda across different media industries in the early 1940s led to industry partnerships across media industries so as to better organise the new policy needs of the government and its war propaganda. In the case of Superman, these sorts of industry partnerships afforded a means of further building Superman’s character across media – this time via his interactions with other characters. The Adventures of Superman radio serial was in fact the result of one such industry partnership across multiple media industries. The need for propaganda further propelled Superman into the public consciousness, but partnerships across media companies were central to expanding Superman across media through­ out the 1940s and 1950s. The Mutual Broadcasting System, home to The Adventures of Superman, formed one such partnership with DC Comics. Mutual had already described Superman as an ‘audience-puller’ (The Film Daily, 1942: 10) on account of his construction as war propaganda. As with the newspaper comic strip, once again Donenfeld did not just license the radio rights to Superman to a third party on radio (as Burroughs might well have done in the 1930s), but instead produced the radio serial through Superman, Inc., appointing his own editorial staff to write the serial while working collaboratively with the team at the Mutual Broadcasting System to co-produce and broadcast it. Arrangements such as this one were highly sporadic before the days of World War II, and entirely absent before the AT&T charge reversal in 1938. Now, the DC Comics team could effectively cross over into the radio industry. The DC Comics personnel in charge of The Adventures of Superman was producer Robert Maxwell, who was also now running Superman, Inc. (­Daniels, 2004: 47) and went on to occupy a governing role over all ­Superman productions throughout the next decade. But while Maxwell managed editorial duties on the radio serial and was a kind of ‘promotional legislator for “Superman”’, as The Film Daily once described him (1940: 3), the scripts were written by a man called George Lowther, who was working in radio as a scriptwriter and went on to oversee the Superman radio serial as its ‘general director’ (The Washington Post, 1975: 16). With govern­ment intervention into media-industry operations making these kinds of closeknit industry partnerships across multiple media industries commonplace during the Second World War, DC Comics were thus able to continue build­ ing elements of Superman’s character on radio. As Thomas V. Powers rein­ forces, ‘the producers of the serial were given a relatively free hand to shape the show to their liking, and many of these creations were ultimately incor­ porated into the Superman legend’ (2005: online).

164  Exploring Transmedia History Specifically, cross-industry partnerships between DC Comics and the Mutual Broadcasting System afforded character-building across comics and radio via Superman’s interactions with secondary characters. For exam­ ple, in the first few editions of Action Comics, Clark Kent had worked for George Taylor at the Daily Planet. But only in the second episode of the radio serial – broadcast on February 14, 1940 – Taylor was replaced with Perry White. With this character recognised on radio as the new editor of the Daily Planet, DC Comics subsequently narrated the firing of George Taylor in their comics, as Superman #7, published in November 1940, began with an already established Perry White as the new editor of the Daily Planet. This particular comic was thereby a sequel to the February 14 episode of the radio serial. Similarly, Jimmy Olsen, who like Perry White became a longstanding secon­dary character of the story world, defined his friendship with Superman across media. The character was introduced in print inside Action ­Comics #6 in November 1938. Though he was identified only as ‘an inquisitive office-boy’ in that comic book, defining elements of characterisation were in place, such as his tenacious curiosity and his trademark bow tie (3). But this bare-bones introduction in the comic book was soon followed by a detailed explora­ tion of the character on radio, when on April 15, 1940, The Adventures of Superman introduced Jimmy Olsen to Clark Kent, unveiling new narrative information such as how Jimmy began working at the Daily Planet. The character then reappeared inside the pages of Superman #13 in 1941, where the friendship previously developed between Clark and Jimmy on radio came to define the characters’ relationships in the comic book going for­ ward. In this case, the April 15 episode of The Adventures of Superman in 1940 was therefore a direct sequel to Action Comics #6 and Superman #13, intertextually building one of Superman’s friendships across two distinct media forms. Much like the contingencies of advertising surrounding news­ paper comic strips in the early 1900s had afforded strong impulses towards seriality across different media, in this case the industry partnerships across media afforded by contingencies of war in the early 1940s provide us with a further example of how seriality and its ‘breaking up [of] a narrative arc into multiple discrete chunks or instalments’ (Jenkins; 2009: online) deve­ loped as an important and enduring manifestation of trans­media story­ telling in the past. This kind of character-building across comics and radio was actu­ ally remarkably common at this time. Greg Smith argues that ‘character ­relationships … are some of the easiest qualities to import across media because they appear to be the properties of a diegetic world and not characteristics distinct to a medium’ (1999: 32). Much the same can be said of artefacts from a story world, and so beyond defining friendships The Adventures of Superman also introduced kryptonite – a green-glowing piece of radio­active rock from Superman’s home planet – in 1943. Kryptonite was ­Superman’s greatest weakness, a substance that would be used by many villains to try

1938–1958  165 and kill the hero. Kryptonite was a defining part of the character’s biog­ raphy, and the industry partnerships developing across media at this time meant that Maxwell and Lowther, creatives from the comic book and radio industry respectively, henceforth shared the rights to kryptonite. And with that sharing of rights would come a shared narrative building of kryptonite’s usage in the wider Superman story world.9 Partnerships across the comics and radio industries such as Maxwell and Lowther’s may have afforded strategies for building Superman’s character across media, but the specific direction that this character-building took was once again the result of Superman’s propaganda function on radio. That is to say that the character’s role as propaganda for the nation at large had carved Superman a wider audience than the children reading his adventures in comic books. For instance, The Adventures of Superman may have been aimed at audiences aged between seven and fourteen (‘Superman on Radio’: online) – broadcast as part of the era’s ‘children’s radio hour’ between five and six o’clock – but a survey revealed that 35% of listeners were adults (ibid.). Consequently, in 1944 the Journal of Educational Sociology showed that ‘the phenomenon of “Superman”’ had seen monthly comic book sales rise to ‘twenty million copies, read by more than seventy million children and adults, many more of the latter taking precedence’ (The New York Times, 1944: 22). And so with his role as a propaganda vehicle propelling ­Superman across multiple media – where an adult audience began to take greater and greater precedence over children – it was thus crucial that elements of his actual character appealed not only to the government’s propaganda policy but now increasingly to the tastes of a far broader adult audience. And that broader audience included women. Consider the character’s depiction as a monthly feature inside Radio Mirror, which was a widely read radio-listings magazine aimed at adults. Radio Mirror started the ‘exciting new monthly feature’ called ‘Superman in Radio’, in which ‘for the first time the newest hero of the air comes to you as a thrilling story’, in January 1941 (33). This magazine feature emphasised Superman’s more romantic inclinations so as to appeal to a female readership. For exam­ ple, the February 1941 edition, again written by DC personnel, began: ‘When we last saw Superman, he had rescued an unconscious girl from the blazing inferno of the North Star Mining Company’ (Radio Mirror, 1941: 33). ‘Superman’, the feature continued, ‘leaned over the hospital bed of June Anderson, the girl he had saved from flaming death’ (ibid.). In Radio ­Mirror, at least, S­ uperman now made personal hospital visits to see the women he saves, waiting patiently bedside to present them with a kiss. Superman, it seemed, was now a ladies man, exemplifying once again how ­character-building equaled audience-building. But building audiences via building characters was about more than just increasing audience numbers. It was also about pointing those new audiences back and forth across the different iterations of the character across multiple media, essentially so as to urge those who had purchased Superman before

166  Exploring Transmedia History to purchase Superman again – a symptom of the consumer culture. For example, The Adventures of Superman radio serial pointed its listeners back to the comic strip, with the serial’s narrator reiterating: ‘Now listen boys and girls, be sure to follow the adventures of Superman in your local newspaper.’ Correspondingly, Action Comics advertised The Adventures of Superman, pointing readers to this new incarnation of the character: ‘­Superman is on Radio’, a panel inside Action Comics #23 declared (1940: 63). Radio Mirror also pointed audiences across multiple media, but here this was done via the interactions between Superman and other characters. In the aforementioned February 1941 edition, for example, the unconscious girl that Superman rescued from the blazing inferno was named June Anderson, a char­ acter that had appeared in a recently broadcast episode of The ­Adventures of Superman titled ‘The Stabbing of June Anderson’. Thus the romantic feelings Superman felt for the character, as narrated in Radio Mirror, harked back to his earlier saving of the character on radio. As well as offering sequels to radio episodes, Radio Mirror pointed readers to The Adventures of ­Superman on radio via editorial instruction: ‘Read the daring exploits of Superman, each month on this page – an exclusive Radio Mirror feature. Then tune in to the Superman broadcasts on stations coast to coast’ (1941: 33). Most fundamentally, then, it is clear that the government’s intervention into media-industry operations – and specifically its need for coordinated propaganda – built the Superman character across comics and radio as a heroic defender of Earth, one less violent and more romantic in his actions. Eschewing the pulp-inspired petty thugs and criminal ganglands of the early comic books, The Adventures of Superman instead favoured more power­ ful, often alien villainous forces that re-moulded themes of violence for the context of war. Thus it was not the fact that Superman re-appeared in The Adventures of Superman having started in Action Comics that served to construct a transmedia story world around his character; rather, it was that the radio serial built upon the comic books, working together to build new elements of the Superman character across media. The role of propaganda on transmedia storytelling may have been underpinned at this stage by a collaboration between DC Comics and the Mutual Network, but the fuel­ ling of war propaganda on transmedia storytelling does not stop there. This period also coincided with the rise of war propaganda films in the cinema, a trend that dictated Hollywood operations throughout the early 1940s and worked to further bind many media ‘industries together in the common cause’ (Manvell, 1974, 108). How, then, might the industry partnerships and contingencies surrounding the Hollywood war film have afforded new ways of building Superman’s character in the cinema?

The War Film Earlier in the chapter I established that early 1940s Hollywood was a period defined by substantial government intervention. I noted that R ­ oosevelt allowed Hollywood to continue its commercial operations only if it actively

1938–1958  167 supported the war effort and cooperated with the policy needs of the govern­ ment. One of those needs was the war film, which spoke to the government’s propaganda needs while also serving as much-needed commercial entertain­ ment. To reiterate Schatz, ‘never before had the interests of the nation and the industry at large been so closely aligned’ (1999: 1). With that in mind, let’s now consider how these aligned industry partnerships across cinema and radio – underpinned by government regulation policies that surrounded the war film – afforded new strategies for building Superman’s character across those media industries. First, I will demonstrate how war films and Superman’s transformation into a war-film hero in the early 1940s specif­ ically afforded further elements of his character to be built on film, such as the development of his super-powers. Second, I will then examine how Hollywood’s increasingly symbiotic relationship with the radio industry, as Hilmes described it earlier, afforded ways of pointing Superman audiences from one medium to another, effectively binding the comic book, radio and cinema iterations of the character as equal components of the larger story world. Around the time of the film industry’s conversion to war-themed product in 1942, Hollywood was indeed under so much pressure from the govern­ ment to produce war films that could inspire optimism and align with the coordinated propaganda that it actively chased appropriate characters and stories from other media industries. Radio may have exploited its symbiotic relationship with the cinema by producing radio series based on the char­ acters of films, like Stella Dallas, but the film industry did exactly the same thing. Hence at a time of ‘intense debate about the “entertainment value” of war films, with theater owners continually lobbying for more escapist fare or at least for more upbeat war-related efforts’ (Schatz, 1999: 3), Paramount Pictures adopted Superman from radio, making use of the symbiotic rela­ tionship shared by the two industries. As Variety put it, Paramount planned ‘to capitalize on the recognition given the Superman cartoon character in mags, radio, and syndicated newspaper features’ (1940: 5). As explored pre­ viously, Superman was already an ideal vehicle for showcasing the realities of the war film through the paradigm of upbeat and escapist typologies, and in September 1940, accordingly, Variety reported that DC Comics had agreed to a deal with Paramount Pictures to distribute and exhibit seventeen Superman cartoon shorts. The production side of things was to be handled by the Fleischer Studio, who was known for its popular Betty Boop and Popeye cartoons and who had distributed their outputs under Paramount Pictures since the mid-1930s. The first of these Superman shorts, The Mad Scientist, was released in cinemas in September 1941. A new short came every month thereafter over the next three years. With Superman to emerge as an icon of the war film, handled by Paramount Pictures – one of the five major Hollywood studios of the era – the character had now fully stepped out from behind his ‘cultur­ ally marginalized’ shadow in comic books (Gabilliet, 2005: 207). Moreover, in stepping out from behind the shadowed margins that still characterised

168  Exploring Transmedia History comic books, Superman’s co-option into the war film served to build addi­ tional elements of his character. For example, with regards to biographical elements such as his super-powers, it was the Fleischer-­Paramount cartoons that incorporated the power of flight; in the early editions of Action ­Comics, Superman could not yet fly but could ‘make giant leaps of up to ⅛ of a mile’, as Action Comics #1 had revealed. But the Fleischer team based their designs for Superman’s flying scenes on the movement of a bird. This deci­ sion was made for two reasons. One, it was simply easier to animate a flying bird-like creature than it was a man leaping. Two, and far more impor­ tantly, a hero that can fly was deemed to elicit a stronger sense of power, pride, and protective reassurance against the threats of war by the Office of War Information – the committee in charge of liaising with press, radio and cinema so as to coordinate the government’s war activities (Horten, 2003: 152). Indeed, a feature in The New York Times in 1942 wrote that ‘parents who haven’t been keeping up with Superman may not be aware of the high moral tone pervading his exploits, or aware that a ­serious-minded government committee, including educators and psychologists, advise on editorial policy’ (22). The government’s editorial policies on how Hollywood made war films thus began to build – but not necessarily change – Superman’s character in the cinema. In fact, upon his inception in 1938, Superman was originally a far weaker character than he is known to be today. Not only could he not yet fly, but in the early editions of Actions Comics Superman was only fast enough to pass an express train, and would likely have been killed if hit by that train. He was only durable enough to withstand bullets – again, anything more powerful likely would have killed him. In effect, S­ uperman accumu­ lated more powers and became more invincible in the Paramount-Fleischer shorts (and as the years went on) precisely so to make the character seem that much more authoritative, mighty and unbeatable as a war-film hero for the 1940s. In this vein, Marek Wasielewski suggests that the Paramount-Fleischer Superman was ‘constructed more as a mechanized automaton rather than an organic alien entity’ (2007: 10), noting how ‘the shorts depict Superman as a war machine explicitly involved in hostilities.’ This war machine repre­ sentation is apparent in episodes such as Terror on Midway, for example, in which the Japanese are portrayed as a killer ape, and Japoteurs, first exhi­ bited on September 18, 1942, where Superman saves a man from Japanese saboteurs. These cartoons were big, bombastic affairs that showed ­Superman as a one-man weapon amidst scenes of cataclysmic urban destruction – or as Les Daniels argues, the cartoons ‘were science fiction spectaculars com­ pressed into a mere seven minutes’ (2004: 57). And in time, all of these ­character-building traits would begin to cross over into the comic books: From Action Comics #60 onwards, Superman was a ‘being who can fly like a bird’ (1943: 2), and in the June/July Superman #23 from 1943 he was referred to as ‘America’s Secret Weapon’ (14).

1938–1958  169 Speaking of crossing media, things like slogans also provide another good example of how the war film afforded character-building across media. It was common at the time for propaganda posters to use slogans that emphasised inspirational ideals to do with strength and power. One particularly characteristic poster for the US Army from 1942, to cite just one example, led with the slogan, ‘In the face of obstacles – courage’. The propaganda slant that dictated how the war film looked meant that this genre also used similar slogans on posters and in the dialogue. And since Superman was adopted into this very genre, the Fleischers were instructed by the OWI to create their own Superman slogan, which provided further narrative information about the workings of Superman’s super-powers. ‘Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive!’ was one of the slogans that first appeared in the Paramount-Fleischer cartoons, and was then almost immediately incorporated into both the Superman radio serial and the later television series. As well as providing new information about exactly how fast and strong Superman really was, the slogan was also a means of holding the larger story world together across multiple media. Slogans were of course not specific to any specific medium, and as such they provided DC Comics a useful way of linking the Superman of one medium with the Superman of another, both textually and discursively – be it across radio, film or comic books. Thus as soon as the Paramount-Fleischer slogan revealed that S­ uperman was faster than a speeding bullet, Action ­Comics integrated this fact into its stories, when in issue number 62 from July 1943 Superman’s speed is able to save a ‘helpless girl reporter’ from a bullet: ‘Simultaneous with the explosion, Superman sprints parallel with the bullet in the strangest race the world has ever seen!’ (14). Contingencies surrounding the war film may have afforded Superman’s character-building in the cinema, but on top of building the character’s superpowers those same contingencies that had surrounded war films also worked to point audiences across media. As it had been with the earlier radio serial, such pointing of audiences across media was dependant on industry partnerships. Earlier I outlined how Roosevelt’s involvement in film-industry policies, as epitomised by the aforementioned OWI, led to deep collaborative arrangements across the film and radio industries so to better organise the policy needs of the government. And those needs also meant guiding audiences. With regards to the Paramount-Fleischer ­Superman cartoons, for instance, these broader industry partnerships mani­ fested as specific strategies for guiding audiences across media. In 1942, trade papers such as Variety described the various Superman texts as ‘market tie-ups’ and noted that The Adventures of Superman radio serial ‘open[ed] up an opportunity for theatres playing Superman shorts, who can try for announcements at breakdown time’ (12). In 1943, a Variety report stated even more explicitly that Superman’s ‘popular cartoon stories will be used in connection with the radio program as well as with the mags and newspaper features’ (30).

170  Exploring Transmedia History Hence as audiences continued to be pointed to different iterations of Superman across media, the industry partnerships across the film and radio industries outlined earlier – underpinned by regulation policies that sur­ rounded the likes of the war film – also meant that it was now common for the stars of the radio industry to cross over into the film industry. Hilmes had characterised these sorts of contractual agreements as ‘a fruitful period of borrowing and cross-interests’ (1999: 63). In this case, Bud Collyer and Joan Alexander – both of whom were under contract at the Mutual N ­ etwork to voice Superman and Lois Lane, respectively – crossed over to film to also voice the Paramount-Fleischer shorts. If nothing else, the use of familiar voice actors held the story world together across media, signalling as it did a clear relationship between the film and radio iterations. And this kind of sig­ nalling of relationships between the stories of cinema and those of radio was indeed nothing if not characteristic of the government’s broader wish to see romantic portrayals of the war being won by, in this case, a US-symbolised Man of Steel, his image cutting across multiple media forms. Going forwards, strategies for linking Superman stories together as parts of the same story world continued to revolve around character biography – especially in novels, which also made use of the war trend. With the cultural relevance of Superman as a propaganda symbol and war-film hero carving the character a potent niche across the radio and film industries, the DC Comics character was at the peak of his cultural prominence by 1942. The war had made Superman both a radio and a movie star, cutting across child and adult audiences alike. As The Film Daily wrote in August of that year, ‘not the least of the attributes of the Superman shorts is their ability to slake the entertainment thirst of the rising generation, and amuse as well as astonish their elders’ (1942: 8). Superman, as The Film Daily suggested, was ‘a “buy” word among the current generation of Americans’ (1941: 6). And Superman’s entertainment thirst in the midst of the war opened up a further market for Superman: Servicemen. I will therefore now look at what happened when Superman was made into a novel in 1942, and specifically I shall explore how The Adventures of Superman – which is believed to have been the first ever full-length novel based on a comic book superhero – utilised both contingencies of the war and also the industry partnerships emerging accordingly so to continue building Superman’s character across a further medium. As indicated above, on the one hand any novel based on the Superman character in 1942 was always going to be a product of contingencies sur­ rounding World War II. Because of radio and the cinema, Superman was now a household name, and one that spoke to the values and ideals of war as much as to the fantasies of children. Yet since the Superman of the c­ inema had become such a popular and effective icon that articulated romantic ­ideals of a US-symbolised Man of Steel winning the war, the fact that the troops and servicemen actually fighting in the war did not get to see many of those films was almost a violation of the government’s efforts. While

1938–1958  171 cartoons may not have been consumable for the servicemen overseas, a novel certainly was. The Adventures of Superman, published in 1942 by Random House, thus printed a special Armed Services Edition that was issued espe­ cially to American servicemen. Later chapters in this novel unsurprisingly dealt with Superman fighting the Nazis. But the novel was a p ­ roduct not just of the war but also of the industry partnerships across multiple media industries that had developed during and as a direct result of the war. Specifically, in this case, the novel was a product of those partnerships developed across the comics and radio industries – as in between DC C ­ omics and the Mutual Broadcasting System. For The Adventures of ­Superman novel was written by none other than George Lowther, the radio script­ writer based at Mutual who continued to write scripts under DC Comics for The Adventures of Superman radio serial. Lowther ultimately left a job in radio to join DC Comics full time (Radio Mirror, 1943: 60), but at this point his involvement in the Superman novel was a strategy designed to mediate the adult audience that was watching Superman in cinemas and the child audience reading or listening to Superman in comic books or on radio. After all, the earlier discussed Paramount-Fleischer cartoon shorts had been screened mostly alongside adult war films. The ninth Superman cartoon, for example, titled Terror on Midway, was exhibited in cinemas in September 1942 alongside The Battle of Midway, a film that captured the Japanese attack (The Washington Post, 1942: 41). Thus with Lowther writing for what was a predominantly child-based audience on radio, DC Comics employed the scriptwriter-turned-author to write the first Superman novel. And to mediate these adult and child audiences, The Adventures of Superman novel opted to depict more of Superman’s teenage years, opening the character out to an as yet untapped adolescent market. Tellingly, The Film Daily’s review of The Adventures of Superman novel described it as both a ‘juvenile thriller’ and as a ‘stimulant to adult credulity’ (1942: 4). And this need for The Adventures of Superman novel to be a bridge between the children reading the comics or listening to the radio serial and the adults watching the cartoons or fighting overseas actually afforded strate­ gies for building elements of Superman’s character. For example, ­readers of the novel learnt for the very first time how Superman came to receive his iconic costume (it was made for him by his mother so that a t­ eenage Clark could attend a masquerade party). Furthermore, the death of Pa Kent, Clark’s adoptive father, was first narrated in the novel. Only here did r­ eaders discover that it was in fact Pa Kent’s dying wish to see Clark commit his life to fighting the enemies and criminal of America, and as such the name Superman was coined by his father moments before his death (since every super-solider needs a code-name!). By revealing so much biographical con­ tent to do with Superman’s teenage years, The Adventures of Superman novel thus carved itself out as one proverbial ‘room’ that adjoined with an expanding and much larger transmedia story – essentially building the ‘house’ that is Superman’s character across media. Lowther himself even

172  Exploring Transmedia History hinted as much in the foreword at the start of the novel, which provides a useful insight into just how transmedial a character Superman had become by this point in 1942: Superman! Most of you who will read this book already know him. Perhaps you have followed his adventures in the comics where first he was introduced to an astonished world. You may have heard his challenging voice on the airwaves of the radio or watched his flaming red cape as he streaked across the screen at the movies. His fame has spread to the four corners of the earth … Many who have followed his adventures with breathless interest have wondered about him: Where did he come from? Whence came his super-strength and marvellous powers? … So here is his story, from the beginning. (Lowther, 1942: ix–x) If nothing else, Lowther’s foreword acknowledges that the novel was designed to offer audiences an expansive biographical backstory as well as some deepened character development – both of which were detailed by Jenkins earlier in this book as traits of transmedia storytelling that contri­ bute to ‘a richly-detailed fictional world’ (2007: online). The Adventures of Superman novel further exemplifies how industry partnerships and, in this case, contingencies of war drove key industrial strategies for character-­ building throughout the 1940s. Just as the war had ‘bound all media indus­ tries together in the common cause’ (Manvell, 1974: 108) across comics, radio, film and now novels, so too did the character of Superman. As I have shown, the partnerships developing across multiple media industries amidst needs for propaganda and war films prompted the audiences for Superman to ‘assume the role of hunters and gatherers, chasing down bits of the story across media’ (Jenkins, 2006: 21). Make no mistake about it: In the 1940s transmedia storytelling was itself an effect of World War II. So, then, what happened to transmedia storytelling at the end of that war?

Movie Serials Though Wasielewski rightly argues that ‘wartime Superman … had success­ fully established a highly profitable brand’, and one that ‘DC Comics did not particularly wish to change’ (2007: 12), the fact remained that by the end of 1945 the Second World War was over, and so was Superman’s cultural role as a war-combatting Man of Steel. In this post-war period, the audience parameters of Superman were required to change; the end of the character’s role as an idealised war-combatant meant a return to both the domestic pulp themes of the comics and their child readership. Moreover, Superman’s postwar appearances were characterised by a far more minor-status style of pro­ duction. In fact, by the time Superman came back to cinema screens in 1948, the film industry’s minor studios now produced the character’s adventures. If not in the margins per se, this was a world away from Paramount Pictures.

1938–1958  173 In 1948, Superman returned in the form of a movie serial, a B-movie format. However, to reiterate Balio’s earlier words, the B label should not be regarded as a diminishment of these formats; rather, ‘it simply recog­ nises the industrial conditions under which they were made and shown’ (1995: 342). And as I insisted earlier in the chapter, the industrial conditions that typified B-movie formats were important to how industry partnerships across media befell. Propaganda and war films became exemplars of how regulation drove collaborations across media industries, but B-formats like movie serials afforded industry partnerships precisely because they were not burdened by the same internal regulation that characterised the typical ‘A’ film. Remember that the creators of B-movies ‘were given more artistic free­ dom as long as they brought in a marketable film on schedule and within the budget’ (Hurst, 1979: 65). And for that reason a movie serial afforded more substantial industry partnerships amongst both its own crew and, in some cases, its licensors across multiple media industries. Both the Superman and the Atom-Man vs. Superman movie serials, released in 1948 and 1950, respectively, were the result of such industry partnerships among licensors across media industries. The need for propa­ ganda might have propelled Superman to a major film studio like Paramount during World War II, but partnerships with more minor-status media compa­ nies were now central to how Superman expanded across media during the late 1940s and 1950s. In this section I shall thus examine how the greater collaboration amongst licensors across minor-status companies afforded ­Donenfeld, M ­ axwell and Lowther and colleagues a way of crossing into the film industry and co-producing both Superman and Atom-Man vs. ­Superman, just as they had done in radio throughout the earlier part of the decade. So why exactly were B-movie serials useful for producing Superman across media? For one thing, without the contingencies of war to propel Superman across media, the more minor-status B-movie serials of the late 1940s allowed DC Comics to dictate the terms of their agreed partnerships. The film industry as a whole was now struggling, and forging partnerships with other media companies was nothing if not a survival strategy for those struggling on the edges of the industry. It was Columbia Pictures – one of the smaller, more minor ‘Little Three’ studios of the era – that caught the attention of DC Comics. Variety reported in January 1948 that Columbia was to produce a new movie serial based on ‘the comic strip and radio serial Superman, filmed as a 15-chapter cliff-hanger’ (3). Columbia Pictures, operating outside of the majors – had by now developed a reputation for specialising in B-picture movie serials based on pulp or comic book char­ acters. Examples included The Shadow in 1940, Captain Midnight in 1942 and The Phantom and Batman both in 1943. In a move that echoes Donenfeld’s earlier agreement with the McClure Syndicate for the production of the Superman newspaper comic strip, wherein DC’s appointed staff oversaw editorial production with McClure merely on distribution duties, DC Comics outlined a strikingly similar con­ tract for the proposed Columbia film serial. This contract outlined ‘a clause

174  Exploring Transmedia History [that] is reported to reserve to Superman, Inc. the right to cancel, if after the release of the first series, it is found that the serial detracts from the popularity of the Superman radio program or the Superman comic strip appearing in Action Comics Monthly and via syndicates’ (Variety, 1948: 3). This report, published in Variety, verbalises explicitly the production model employed by Superman, Inc. that is described throughout much of this chapter. The use of DC personnel, working across media industries, again underpinned the proposition with Columbia: ‘A representative of Superman, Inc. … is to have the right to be present on the Columbia lot, developing themes, and to okay script and production’ (ibid.). In this case, the responsibility of developing themes, approving all cast­ ing choices and okaying scripts fell to Whitney Ellsworth, who was now the editor of Action Comics and had been appointed as the ‘movie studio contact’ for Superman, Inc. Ellsworth served as editorial director for both Columbia movie serials (Harmo and Glut, 1972: 208). At the same time he also contributed scripts to the still-running Mutual radio serial. Thus despite the ‘low cultural visibility of comics artists’ that Kidman (2015) identifies as characteristic of this period, the production of the Superman movie serials was far from a suppression of authorship. Working on numerous Superman productions across multiple media industries, Ellsworth was in a position to essentially craft a story world that built Superman’s character piece by piece. But dictating which pieces of Superman’s character were to be built in the movie serials was actually the result of the audience groups and the genre tendencies that characterised the B-movie serials of the period. Movie serials, as Jason Scott notes, became ‘closely associated with pre-existing characters in the Sunday comics’ (2009: online). On the one hand, in writ­ ing that minor B formats ‘like matinee movie serials were aimed at a quick payoff in minor houses attracting the juvenile audiences’, Balio hints at the fact that the audiences for such B-movie serials, such as the likes of the aforementioned Captain Midnight, The Shadow and Batman, was largely the same youthful, juvenile audience most visibly associated with comic books at this time (1995: 326). And thus Superman was perfectly tailored to largely the same demographic across the comic book and film industries in the late 1940s. On the other hand, in also observing how ‘B’s and serials have similar adventure-orientated action heroes, displaying fisticuffs, athleticism, and cheery youthfulness’ (1995: 334), Balio acknowledges a further correla­ tion between the actual genres or story types that characterised both super­ hero comics and the period’s B-movie serials. Balio continues: ‘B’s move ­rapidly, loading the narrative with action-filled incidents’ (1995: 334); both formats place an emphasis on ‘simple, standardised, and character plots’ (1995: 333). This need for such simple character plots based around ­youthful ­fisticuffs (a partial result of the limited funds afforded to B-movies, of course) meant a move away from the science fiction spectaculars that were the ­Paramount-Fleischer cartoons and instead meant placing more emphasis

1938–1958  175 on smaller, individual villains for Superman to fight. Because of the reliance on ‘the audiences’ support for their daily print favourites [when] construct­ ing film adventures around them’ (Grossman, 1977: 17), movie serials were quite often Westerns or adventures. The B-Western, in particular, usually featured ‘a populist hero’, ‘a bringer of justice’ against ‘a variety of villains who cheat, steal and lie’ (Jewell, 2007: 198). The heroes of B-Westerns, as Jewell further elaborates, were out to ‘protect peace, not war’ (2007: 198). More to the point, the B-movie serial’s customary emphasis on the sorts of petty thugs and small-time Westerner crooks who cheat, steal and lie – the sorts that had once featured so prominently in the pages of Action Comics – influenced strategies for how Superman’s relationships with his notorious enemies were developed across multiple media. For example, the spinsterly Spider Lady, a dangerous, greed-fuelled villain, was chosen to be the anta­ gonist for the first Superman movie serial in 1948. Shortly before the serial appeared in theaters, efforts were being taken by Ellsworth to ensure some degree of character-building across both the movie and radio serials. Indeed, barely one week before the first chapter of the Superman movie serial was released, the radio serial began a story arc that preceded the upcom­ ing movie serial. In a radio story titled ‘The Voice of Doom’, a story that unfolded over four weeks, Superman fought against the Scarlet Widow  – a  recurring character and one of the few female master criminals to fea­ ture in The ­Adventures of Superman radio show. Despite having different names, the Spider Lady of the Columbia movie serial and the ­Scarlet Widow of the Mutual radio serial were one and the same; the latter’s four-week story – broadcast between September 26, 1945, and October 10, 1945 – was reworked so that it played as a kind of prequel to the movie serial in 1948 when, to the surprise of many audiences, the Scarlet Widow returned as the spinsterly Spider Lady.10 Here’s another (and perhaps more famous) example of how the B-movie serial’s tendency to favour fisticuffs with villains defined one of Superman’s central villains (and his relationship with Superman). In Atom Man vs. Superman, the second movie serial produced in 1950, Atom Man, the ­villain of the piece, was also carried over from an earlier appearance on radio. The villain had been enormously popular on air, conceived originally as an atomic super-soldier with a deadly form of kryptonite permeating through his veins. Atom Man had actually starred in the Superman radio serial’s longest story that stretched from October 11, 1945, to December 3, 1945. Given his popularity, Ellsworth subsequently incorporated this character into Atom Man vs. Superman, where there the villain was revived and his story was extended. In fact, Atom Man had been something of a mystery to listeners on radio, and it was Atom Man vs. Superman that finally revealed the villain’s alter-ego to be none other than Lex Luthor, Superman’s famous arch-nemesis since 1940. The origin of Lex Luthor changed many times in later decades, but in 1950 the character’s beginnings as a super-soldier with kryptonite permeating through his veins worked to explain how Lex Luther

176  Exploring Transmedia History came to acquire kryptonite as a weapon to try and hurt Superman. In other words, the character of Lex Luthor came to epitomise the cheaters of the B-Western that wanted to exploit the genre’s ‘farmers, merchants, and inn­ keepers incapable of protecting themselves’ (Jewell, 2007: 198). The Superman and Atom Man vs. Superman movie serials of the 1948–1950 era thus built upon earlier and concurrent Superman texts to shape elements of Superman’s character (in this case his relationship with his villains) across media. In building character dynamics across media in this way, these films serve as yet another important demonstration of how different industrial con­ figurations could lead to the same transmedial results. The working arenas of the era’s minor-status B-movie serials may have afforded the creative per­ sonnel from one media company to work across multiple media industries (in this case Whitney Ellsworth from DC Comics), but as I move on to exam­ ine in the next section, looking ahead to the 1950s shows that this prerequi­ site for minor-status industry partnerships in fact continued into the emerging television industry, albeit operating out of a different set of configurations.

Telefilms At the very start of this chapter I established that by the mid-1950s DC Comics had over $3,000,000 invested in a Superman television series. I noted that the company was operating across a whole range of industries, producing Superman across media. I have since shown how the means by which DC Comics actually did this – moving across the borders of distinct media industries as if they owned them – depended largely on contingencies of war or else on the minor status of their partnerships. In many respects, the rise of the television industry as we know it was dependent upon equally minor-status (if not marginal) partnerships. Earlier I began to discuss how the early 1950s was a time of transition for American television – from live to telefilms. There was much debate about whether television should even be a principally live medium or whether filmed programming was the better option. By 1953, Business Week reported that on the national networks (ABC, CBS and NBC) the proportion of total programming originating on film was only 22 percent, while 78 percent of the shows remained live. On non-affiliated stations, however, the proportion of filmed programming was far higher. In April 1955, KTTV, an independent Los Angeles station, reported that 62 percent of its programming originated on film (Hilmes, 1999: 151). The major networks, in other words, tended to favour live pro­ gramming whereas more minor, non-affiliated stations tended to opt for filmed content. As Janet Wasko explains, ‘the networks and their critics insisted … that their live, dramatic programming was of higher quality than the cheaply made action-adventure shows and situation comedies produced by film companies’ (203: 137). It was common for a number of television critics at the time to make the argument that live shows retained a sense of excitement and spontaneity that they felt was absent in film (ibid.).

1938–1958  177 But these less respected action-adventure shows were, understandably, cheaper to make. As Hilmes notes, ‘filmed programming worked especially well for medium-to-smaller size companies that could not afford the costs of sponsoring an entire show over a major network’ (1999: 150). E ­ ventually the major networks would come to accept filmed programming on account of the lower production costs compared to those associated with live pro­ gramming. But in the early years of the 1950s, at least, the growing demand to watch films and filmed programmes on television provided indepen­ dent telefilm companies a niche on the margins of the television industry by eschewing the more culturally respected live programmes in favour of low-budget, pre-recorded telefilms. Such telefilms also provided a way for independents to compete with the majors. But in what ways might these telefilms have afforded strategies for character-building across media? ­Answering this question first means looking at the production model of independent telefilms – those being produced by smaller production compa­ nies working on the margins of the television industry – in the early 1950s. First, then, I will demonstrate how telefilm production afforded partnerships across the margins of particular media industries, providing DC ­Comics’ personnel with an opportunity to cross over into the television industry and produce a Superman television series that also worked to point its audi­ ences across multiple media. Second, I will then showcase how Superman’s transformation into a television hero of the early 1950s specifically afforded additional elements of his character to be built on television, such as fur­ ther developing aspects of his psychology, as a direct result of the genres that began to be transferred to the television market in the 1950s and the ­patriotic values of post-war US television. Understanding these kinds of developments means remembering the wider context set out in Chapter 2 – namely, that governmental policies had fought to try and keep the cinema and television industries apart, with the government being reluctant to allow the film industry to retain its status as a monopolistic enterprise as it had done throughout the 1930s and 1940s. But I should clarify at this point that governmental policies such as these were mostly geared towards the television industry’s major networks rather than the independent companies or syndicators sitting on its margins. And for that reason aforementioned independents such as Flamingo Films or Ziv filled a gap in the market by focusing exclusively on telefilms – ­typically half-hour episodes shot on film. ‘Nearly all of this filmed programming was produced in Hollywood, [and] most of it came from small independent producers, who often leased studio space from the major studios’ (Hilmes, 1999: 151). The likes of Ziv and Flamingo effectively exploited the sorts of industry partnerships now available on the margins to carve itself a valuable and profitable niche – a niche that would also be crucial to developing prac­ tices of transmedia storytelling in the television industry. Demonstrating the importance of this niche on transmedia storytelling means looking no further than the adventures of Superman. In May 1951,

178  Exploring Transmedia History Variety announced that Superman would be coming to t­ elevision. This ­Variety report also emphasised how DC Comics were to be actively involved in the funding (30). The arrangement actually saw DC C ­ omics ­self-­financing twenty-six black-and-white telefilms (‘Adventures of S­ uperman: From ­Inkwell to Backlot’). In July 1951, Variety reported that a $400,000 bud­ get had been allocated by DC Comics for the production of these telefilms, each of which was to be filmed at the RKO Pathé s­ tudios (8). Variety later reported that a thirty-year deal for the ­television rights to Adventures of Superman was to be completed by Flamingo Films and Robert ­Maxwell, who by now was vice president at DC Comics (1951: 8). ­Flamingo, one of the period’s independent telefilm producers, handled distribution to local television stations, while Maxwell, as the producer, ‘set up production faci­lities’ and was responsible for all creative decisions on behalf of DC Comics (ibid.). Maxwell worked with Whitney Ellsworth on the telefilms, now head of Superman, Inc. and who again retained his authorial com­ mand over the development of all Superman productions in Hollywood (Variety, 1953: 12). As is evident, then, the fundamental business agendas of this period’s inde­ pendent television producers, such as those of Flamingo Films – based on prioritising pre-sold properties while pursuing ‘backdoor’ agreements with Hollywood for their studio space – afforded significant partnerships across the likes of the comics, film and television industries. Just as it had done so previously in radio and film, these kinds of industry partnerships across mul­ tiple media industries also meant that DC Comics could effectively point its comic book readership to Superman’s adventures on tele­vision. ‘Superman is on Television’, one panel inside Superman #74 declared (May 1951: 63). ‘Yes, America’s favorite adventure character comes right into your home in thrilling live action!’ (ibid.). The minor industry status of companies such as Flamingo Films – spared from the regulation that had for the most part kept the larger film and television industries apart – may have afforded partner­ ships across the comics, film and television industries, then, but the specific influences of the telefilm format on further building Superman’s character came more from the sense of patriotism that came to epitomise much of the post-war American television around this particular time – a moment in US television history when television was becoming more popular than ever. Television’s Adventures of Superman eventually aired between S­ eptember 19, 1952, and April 28, 1958.11 But by 1948, as Hilmes observes, ‘the signs of television’s future inroads into the theatre audience had made themselves felt’ (1999: 116). In that year, the manufacturing of television receivers quadru­ pled over that of 1947, and by the end of 1948, 932,318 homes in 36 ­cities possessed television sets in their homes (Hilmes, 1999: 116). Tele­vision became the cheaper, more popular entertainment, and echoing the way that personnel from pulp magazines had crossed over to the comic book industry in the mid-1930s, many of the personnel who had worked on movie serials in the film industry now moved over to telefilm production when movie

1938–1958  179 serials faded. Hence personnel such as Tommy Carr  – a ­Hollywood vete­ ran who directed half of the episodes for the first of Columbia’s Superman movie serial in 1948 – later moved into the tele­vision industry, where he also directed many of the Adventures of Superman telefilms. As such, this period of US television history might in fact be seen as a kind of transmedial crossover in and of itself, as creative personnel and entire genres came to be steered across multiple media industries. Indeed, as matinee movie serials began to fade amidst television’s rise to being the cheaper, more popular entertainment of the period, the television industry adopted many of the genres associated with those cheap, minor seri­ als and B-formats. For example, television began to make extensive use of science fiction, Westerns and adventure (Rothenbuhler and Tom McCourt, 2002: 375–376), ‘taking advantage of shorter run times and fast shooting schedules’ (Balio, 1995: 350). The telefilms being produced by the likes of Ziv and Flamingo, in particular, exploited a transference of these genres that encouraged audience to migrate to television. With this transference came further determinants for how Superman’s character was built. ‘With the coming of television as a major entertainment force’, writes Hurst, ‘the B genres with their philosophies, formats and impact also transferred often intact over to the television screen where the B film as television series … maintained a continuing existence’ (1979: 65). And as audiences who had previously consumed Superman in other media now steered across to the television, Adventures of Superman thereby provided what was an expan­ sion of the character across media. For by 1950 many of this era’s telefilms were not only based on B-film genres such as the Western, but they were also ‘steeped in heroics and patriotism’ (Belkin, 2012: 27) following the return of millions of servicemen who began marrying and starting families (Schatz, 1999: 3–4). With the troops returning home to their families and with the ‘suburban migration’ and baby boom that soon followed, the likes of the Western and the adventure telefilm became enormously patriotic in terms of tone – not in an overt propaganda way, but rather in a proud, reflective kind of way (ibid.). The innate patriotism of the telefilm actually served to build Superman’s character in two ways. First, it is notable that while Superman had fought for truth and justice since the early days of the Superman radio serial, it was only on television that he began to ‘fight for truth, justice, and the American way!’ In the post-war period, Superman was more than a war-­ combatting Man of Steel; moulded in the form of the patriotic telefilms of the 1950s, Superman developed into a hero who advocated the idea that upward ­mobility is achievable by any American through good old-fashioned hard work – an apt message indeed for the thousands of troops looking to return to work. Second, the patriotism of the telefilm built Superman’s psychology in the aftermath of the war. Producer Robert Maxwell, as Allan Asherman reinforces, ‘really wanted a television extension of the Superman radio show’ – and that meant lacing the lasting memory of World War II

180  Exploring Transmedia History beneath its textual surface (2006). As a television critic writing for The New York Times asserted, ‘these Superman telepix have a dark, cramped feel, and their heavies are not colorful figures like Lex Luthor but cheap crooks in boxy suits and crumpled fedoras’ (Kehr, 1952: 4). Here’s the sort of thing that this particular critic was talking about: In one early telefilm, two thugs discover Superman’s identity and try to blackmail him. When the thugs become trapped on a cliff, rather than saving them Superman instead decides to let the thugs die, protecting his identity. ‘This Superman is a complex, conflicted figure, at least as conflicted as any of the explicitly neurotic protagonists now flourishing our cinema screens’ (ibid.). As this critic elaborated: Scratch the metaphorical surface a little, and the character might almost be a 30-year-old veteran of World War II, still marked by the horrors he has witnessed, the awful skills in violence he has acquired, and the permanent sense of never quite fitting in with those “normal” folks who did not march off to war. (Kehr, 1952: 4) In other words, this Superman – played by George Reeves – was designed principally to be the same man who fought America’s battles during the ­Second World War. A ‘system of references to other texts which can be dis­ cerned within the internal composition of [this] specific individual text’ (Bennett and Woollacott, 1987: 45), Superman was here a war veteran, as this critic described him, complete with haunting memories of lasting postwar scar tissue. In building the character’s values and psychology in this way, the Adventures of Superman telefilms – forged from the partnerships made on the margins of multiple media industries – ultimately produced, as Grossman points out, ‘a forceful, direct descendent of Bud Collyer’s ­Superman of war’ (1977: 110). Adventures of Superman was, in effect, an early example of how the makers of television sought to ‘foster an ongoing coherence to a canon in order to ensure maximum plausibility among all extensions’ (Jenkins, 2009: online).

Conclusion This chapter has examined the impact of media regulation in the 1940s and 1950s on the industrial configurations of transmedia story­telling, ­picking up on some of the specific ways in which policy – including such ­regulatory ­influences as government intervention – drove ­industry ­partnerships ­across ­multiple media industries. I have demonstrated how these regulation-­ underpinned industry partnerships afforded a range of new ­strategies for building fictional characters across the publishing, radio, ­cinema and tele­ vision industries throughout the 1940s and 1950s. If ­audiences wished to consume the Superman story world during these two decades, they were

1938–1958  181 in fact required to act like hunters, to paraphrase ­Jenkins, and gather their story information from a variety of sources as different media forms special­ ised in different elements, building different aspects of the character across many media (2006: 21). Whereas today’s industry partnerships are usually related to industrial convergences, in the 1940s and 1950s such partnerships were driven by very different factors. For one thing, the noted importance of propaganda and the war film in the early 1940s emphasises the central role of the Second World War on transmedia storytelling. Broadly, the government’s need for coordinated war-propaganda had enforced a regulatory control across mul­ tiple media industries that not only worked to propel a fictional character like Superman across media, but it also influenced the ways in which that character was built across media – shaping both the intertextual features of the character itself and the wider inter-textual dynamics of how the char­ acter was read across media. Specific examples of this dynamic at work included the use of propaganda ideals to impose a stronger sense of moral­ ity onto Superman, and the use of the war film and its slogans to define the limits of Superman’s powers. More than that, the government’s need for coordinated war-propaganda dictated partnerships between the film and radio industries, in particular. These partnerships afforded Donenfeld, Maxwell and Lowther et al a means of crossing over into the radio indus­ try, building Superman’s character and even his adventures across media under the contractual agreements that Hilmes characterised as ‘a fruitful period of borrowing and cross-interests’ amongst the media industries of the 1940s (1999: 63). The industrial-cultures contingencies surrounding this era’s transmedia storytelling thus strongly enforced seriality; anything different would have muddled the clear messages about the war that were so important to the government. This emphasis on the government’s strict propaganda objectives also meant that other transmedia principles such as subjectivity and performance were not well evidenced during this period. But in tracing links between the cross-industry partnerships of the late 1940s and 1950s and the strategies for character-building across multiple media industries that they afforded, I have also identified the importance of much more minor-status partnerships. I have shown how in the late 1940s the industrial configurations surrounding the production of cheap movie serials made by less dominant film companies afforded industry partnerships to continue, and in this case for further elements of Superman’s character to develop across multiple media forms. Whereas earlier instances of propa­ ganda or war films tended to dictate aspects of Superman’s biography or his psychology, the generic conventions of B-movie serials dictated altogether different aspects of his character, such as his relationship with m ­ embers of his notorious rogues’ gallery. Yet my discussion of B-movie serials in this chapter also works to highlight how marginality became important to the way in which transmedia stories came to be produced on television in the 1950s. As I have shown, the telefilms of this period may have extended

182  Exploring Transmedia History characters across media and afforded ample opportunity for collaboration, but such telefilms were produced by small independents, many of which were simply trying to compete with dominant networks. Or as Kompare puts it, the work of these small independents was to ‘exploit the gaps in the networks’ interconnections’ (2005: 51). And let’s not forget that back in 1939 when Superman first moved to newspaper comic strips, DC Comics were still minor-status themselves, and character-building was a way for the company to rather anxiously try and sustain attention from its core readership. As such, this chapter demonstrates the importance of moving away from critical assumptions implying that transmedia storytelling is mainly a phenomenon of the dominant media corporations. While the historical conditions of this chapter are very different to the East Coast model of transmediality conceptualised today – which concerns the use of inexpen­ sive digital technologies such as social media to present smaller parts of a story (Phillips, 2012: 15) – to re-cite Kackman, there is indeed ‘ample evidence that [transmedia storytelling] can be better understood as survival strategies for the outsiders’ (2008: 95). Marginality – in addition to the wider socio-political contingencies of World War II earlier on in the decade that had also informed how the character of Superman came to be built across multiple media industries – epitomises the model of transmedia story­ telling in the 1940s and 1950s.

Notes 1. Jason Scott also notes the importance of characters on transmedial prac­ tices at this time by suggesting that this period made use of what he calls ‘the ­character-oriented franchise.’ For Scott, ‘[t]he character-oriented franchise involves the exploitation of pre-sold or familiar characters. That is the selling of media or ancillary products based upon a proven property, with an established market, where the focus of advertising is on the name of the character, rather than around a star.’ In this way, then, ‘the character-oriented franchise is distinct from the dominant focus of classical Hollywood studios upon the star [since] the featured actors or stars are interchangeable, or without proven box office appeal.’ See Jason Scott, “The Character-Orientated Franchise: Promotion and Exploitation of Pre-Sold Characters in American Film, 1913–1950,” Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies (November 2009), http://www. nottingham.ac.uk/scope/. 2. However, while the Hollywood studio system would occupy a very different infrastructure to the more synergised industrial convergences of today, the major studios were not opposed to using the product of their competitors in their own theatres. As Richard Maltby writes, ‘MGM made money in its the­ atres by showing the best product of Paramount, Warner Bros. and RKO as well as MGM, and thus benefiting from the success of its offspring’s rivals.’ See Richard Maltby, Hollywood Cinema: Second Edition (London: Blackwell Pub­ lishing, 2003), 121.

1938–1958  183 3. See George H. Roeder, Jr., The Censored War: American Visual Experience During World War Two (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 8. 4. According to a report published in The New York Times in 1943, the only popu­ lar children’s radio drama character not to have been co-opted into the war was The Lone Ranger; other characters such as Superman, Dick Tracy, Batman, Captain Midnight, The Shadow, and Chick Carter, amongst others, all had been exploited as symbols of war propaganda by this time. See “Tracy, Superman, et al Go to War,” The New York Times, November 21, 1943, 14. 5. Also see Thomas Schatz, Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 6. See Janet Wasko, “Hollywood and Television in the 1950s: The Roots of Diver­ sification,” in Transforming the Screen, 1950–1959, ed. Peter Lev, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 137. 7. I have explored elsewhere how staples of pulp-fiction storytelling came to inform transmedia storytelling during this time. See Carlos A. Scolari, Paolo Bertetti and Matthew Freeman, Transmedia Archaeology: Storytelling across the Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines (Basingstoke: ­Palgrave Pivot, 2014). 8. Famous Funnies appeared in mid-1934 as a collection of reproduced newspaper comic strips; it is often assumed to have been the first of the American comic books. 9. Six years after kryptonite first appeared on radio it debuted in the Superman comic book in issue #61 in 1949. 10. The alternation in name was reworked to make narrative sense, though the real reason for the change was to do with copyright. This actually marked one of the few occasions during the 1940s and 1950s when DC’s industry partnerships across media industries led to copyright conflicts. 11. The episode was broadcast in Los Angeles on KECA; audiences in New York saw it shortly after.

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Conclusion Crossing the Shifting Sands

In Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), one film in a string of ­contemporary superhero blockbusters whose adventures spread across mul­ tiple films and multiple media, begins with the titular character struggling to adapt to living in the twenty-first century. Captain America – a 1940s hero frozen in the past – is presented as something of a paradox: He is at once old and new, both a relic of World War II and a force of the modern world. In the war-torn 1940s, Captain America was a symbol of US propa­ ganda, enthusiastically patriotic as he goes off to defeat the evils spawned from Hitler’s camp. In the post-9/11 age of corrupt surveillance officials and ambiguous foreign politics, however, Captain America is now just another hired gun in a crowd of agents, none sure of the goals for which they fight. As a man out of time and out of date, the character’s historical roots thus inform his decision to defeat a contemporary enemy. And understanding the actions of Captain America means understanding him as part of a far longer and far more complex historical trajectory. The same is true of transmedia storytelling. Though transmedia story­ telling was not frozen in the past only to re-emerge in the present, Captain America and transmedia storytelling do have something in common. Both have long histories that stretch across many decades, and both even look pretty much the same in the past and in the present despite being driven by changing cultural contexts and evolving industrial and political influ­ ences across time. Like Captain America’s actions, transmedia storytelling’s existence is historically conditioned, underpinned and informed by different things in different ways at different times. Throughout this book I have thereby attempted to show that there is far more to transmedia storytelling than meets the eye. It may be a practice of industrial convergence that affords media content to spread across the sub­ sidiaries of a conglomerate. It may be a system of technological convergence that grants audiences the power to spread stories across a web of digitally connected media. But transmedia storytelling is also a form of historical production, distribution and regulation, and one that existed long before such modern convergences. The model of transmedia storytelling today is indeed not the only one; past builders of fictional story worlds employed many different strategies

190 Conclusion that showcase just how many possibilities there really are for telling tales across multiple media. Character building, world-building and authorship may together provide a general description of the characteristics that make up transmedia storytelling, but only by looking to the past have I ­uncovered a greater number of the strategies that can be used – and have been used – to build story worlds across multiple media and develop principles of spread­ ability, drillability, immersion, seriality, extractability, subjectivity and per­ formance that Jenkins identifies as key to all transmedia stories (2009: online). Only by digging into the past have I been able to reveal more about the contingencies that afford those strategies, providing the growing field of transmedia studies with a reconceptualisation of the configurations that drive transmedia storytelling and the story worlds it engenders. Focusing on such configurations, this conclusion summarises the earlier chapters’ insights into transmedia storytelling’s past, draws on these insights to make sense of transmedia storytelling’s present and contemplates transmedia story­telling’s future.

The Past Let’s be clear: Transmedia storytelling is about taking a story and making it bigger by extending it across media. It is both an expansive form of intertex­ tuality and inter-textuality that builds textual connections between stories while allowing stories to escape their textual borders and exist in between them as well as across them, folding paratext into text. It gives audiences more of what they liked about a story, but does not just rehash that story; rather, in expanding a story into a story world, transmedia storytelling builds variation on sameness – like proverbial extensions added to a house. And let’s be clearer still: Transmedia storytelling works best as alignments across media forms, industries, cultures and audiences. But if this book highlights anything it is that those all-important alignments can come from practically anywhere. In the past, industrialisation, consumer culture and media regulation all provided the necessary alignments that underpinned how transmedia storytelling worked in the early to mid-twentieth century. Though the industrial determinants driving the transmedia stories of the past (most notably, advertising, corporate authorship and industry partner­ ships) are all more or less important to the transmedia stories of today, the broader contingencies revolving around industrialisation, consumer culture and media regulation were totally different, as were the various strategies for telling stories across multiple media that came as a result. Industrialisation brought many changes at the turn of the twentieth century, and one of these was how advertising looked. As industrialisation afforded mass production, advertising intensified to market the multiplying products of the industrial age. While there were of course rudimentary forms of advertising in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was not until the turn of the twentieth century – a time when mass-produced products began

Conclusion  191 to be promoted via mass media such as newspapers – that media first started to promote and sell related products. Chapter 3 demonstrated how Baum took advantage of the era’s advertising to build his Land of Oz story world across media. Perhaps Chapter 3 best showcases just how differently trans­ media storytelling worked in the past, emerging as an industrial practice out of the wider developments of industrialisation itself, with no sign of convergences in sight. Industrialisation, moreover, brought about bigger transformations – most notably, consumer culture. If industrialisation was all about production then consumer culture was all about distribution. And as has been demonstrated, the rise of consumer culture was crucial to transmedia storytelling for two key reasons. First, the new models of mass production led to increased mass distribution, spreading new products across multiple media and audiences. Second, this mass distribution gave rise to the business of licensing and related corporate practices like franchising, merchandising and sponsor­ ship, which coincided with the corporatisation of transmedia storytelling. Chapter 4 showed how Burroughs self-incorporated and exploited intercon­ nected practices associated with corporate authorship’s managerial function to forge new ways of authoring Tarzan’s story world across media. It is no coincidence that the practices or developments that were most significant to the industrial rise of transmedia storytelling were those that afforded sys­ tems of building or spreading. Mass production enabled the multiplication of products on an industrial level; advertising worked to build and spread public knowledge about a product; franchising emerged in the early 1900s as a means of spreading the transportation sector and building new rail­ roads; licensing, similarly, worked to spread cultural phenomena to other creative parties, giving those outside parties a means to build upon its foun­ dations; and industry partnerships are themselves a mechanism for spread­ ing such phenomena from one media industry to another. And alongside industrialisation and consumer culture, media regulation also played a guiding role on transmedia storytelling, and not always in the way one might expect. Chapter 5 demonstrated how the kind of regu­ lation enforced via government intervention during World War II drove transmedia storytelling in the 1940s. At that time, media industries were under constant pressure from the government to provide a mouthpiece for the war-propaganda messages of the nation. Fictional characters that could ably address those messages, such as the popular adventures of a patriotic hero like Superman, hence transcended multiple media forms. The need for industry partnerships even afforded personnel from a small comic book pro­ prietor like DC Comics to work across multiple media industries as diverse as publishing, radio and cinema, steadily building new aspects of S­ uperman’s character across those media industries. But by the time the war had ended, industry partnerships became relegated to the minor leagues; transmedia storytelling certainly continued, but most often via B-movie serials or the independently produced telefilms of the emerging television industry.

192 Conclusion The above few paragraphs are a quick snapshot of the key emergences and developments that were most important to transmedia storytelling across the first half of the twentieth century in the US. Though it is perhaps more accurate to understand transmedia storytelling at that time in terms of the relationships between broader contingencies and the strategies they came to engender at a particular historical moment, the pages of this book have also worked to highlight a number of key phases of transmedia story­ telling across the first half of the twentieth century. If advertising primarily drove transmedia storytelling during the first two decades of the twentieth century, then corporate management practices became the more important determinant circa 1918 right through to the late 1930s, before industry partnerships driven by various factors began to take precedence around the early 1940s and throughout the 1950s. Throughout each of these phases, importantly, the likes of advertising, franchising, merchandising and propa­ ganda ideals all served to produce objects that turned the textual experience of an imaginary story world into a public or even performative one, thus ‘opening a door to let the transmedial universe into the real world’ long before the textual productivity and networked user engagement of digital media emerged (Tosca and Klastrup, 2016: 118). Thinking beyond these macro phases of historical development and larger understandings, allow me now to probe a little deeper and highlight a few fur­ ther important insights about transmedia storytelling’s past. The first of these insights concerns the specificity of comics in this context. Comics run through all of my case studies, and in each case were arguably more important to the transmedia expansion of the three story worlds than any other surrounding media form. With the Land of Oz, the newspaper comic strip marked that story world’s first foray out of novels and into a new medium; with ­Tarzan, newspaper comic strips marked Burroughs’ first licensing venture under Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.; and with Superman, it of course all started with a comic book published in June 1938. So why exactly were comics so important to industrial strategies of transmedia story­telling across these historical periods? For one thing, comics were linked to advertising at the turn of the ­twentieth century. In many ways, comics were a direct product of i­ndustrialised adver­ tising. At that time, comic strips existed solely inside newspapers, which ­altogether provided them with a mass readership that made them very attrac­ tive to advertisers. Comic-strip characters quickly became advertising avatars for the industrial age, and their vibrant imagery made them highly effective in their ability to point readers across media to other related media texts or products. Comics were thereby nothing short of pivotal to industrialising the use of storytelling as promotion, which itself remains key to conceptualising how transmedia storytelling operates even today. Perhaps accordingly, Shawna Kidman positions ‘comic books as being, fundamentally and quintessentially, a transmedia form’ (2015). And for ­Kidman, ‘one factor in particular, more than any other, has played a determining role in comic books’ ability to cross between media: copyrightability’ (2015).

Conclusion  193 This copyrightability stems from the way in which ‘comic book characters are among the easiest properties to copyright and trademark, a quality that has long made them attractive to licensors as well as corporations interested in exploiting synergies’ (Kidman, 2015). Certainly comics have come to epito­mise a number of the key questions common to trans­media story­telling. This book has showcased how, at different points in time, comics came to exemplify core characteristics of world-building and character-building, not to mention important logics of shareability, seriality and drillability, which are indeed all fundamental to the process of extending stories and expand­ ing shared narrative universes.1 My second observation concerning transmedia storytelling’s industrial history is the reverse of my point about comics and concerns the trouble with the cinema. Where comics afforded transmedia storytelling, the cinema almost consistently militated against the telling of stories across multiple media. The problem with the cinema was not inherent to the medium itself, but was rather related either to its cultural distinction from other media around the turn of the twentieth century or to the mode of vertical integra­ tion that had come to typify Hollywood by the 1930s. The system of vertical integration amongst the major studios meant that such studios occupied a producer-distributor-exhibitor model and had thereby grown accustomed to working internally. Without a regulatory influence like World War II forcing different media industries to work together, it was much more difficult for creative personnel to author story worlds that crossed in and out of the ­cinema. Hence why most of Burroughs’ Tarzan films were the least trans­ medial of all his Tarzan ventures, and indeed why DC Comics resorted to producing their later Superman films with relatively minor-status companies. A third observation about transmedia storytelling in the early to mid-twentieth century concerns the way in which its production, distri­ bution and regulation generally occupied the ‘the emergent (as opposed to planned) nature of the narrative aspects of transmediality’ discussed by Fast and Örnebring previously (2015: 2). Rather than operating as ‘a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across mul­ tiple delivery channels’ in the way that Jenkins defined of contemporary transmedia storytelling (2007: online), early twentieth-century transmedia storytelling ‘accrued characteristics that [were] more ad hoc/contingent than planned’ (Fast and Örnebring, 2015: 2). The reason for this ad hoc forma­ tion of transmedia storytelling in the past is quite simply because many of the strategies that underpinned how stories were told across media in the past were themselves emergent, with the likes of Baum, Burroughs and DC Comics reacting to new developments. Authors and corporations at the time were able to make use of specific historical emergences – be it mass production technologies, modern adver­ tising, consumerism, propaganda and so on – in ways that built on existing trends of seriality that had long characterised print culture. It is no coin­ cidence that the vast majority of the media forms discussed throughout

194 Conclusion this book – newspaper comic strips, pulp magazines, movie serials, radio serials, comic books and even television – were characterised most exten­ sively by their reliance on serialised storytelling. More than the intertextu­ ality that serial storytelling affords, moreover, the developments in printing technologies and mass production technologies that came to characterise the early twentieth century directly afforded fictions to escape their textual constraints and exist in the gaps in between their textual exploits via maps, newspapers, posters and merchandise. In that sense, to understand trans­ media storytelling’s past it is crucial – as Bennett and Woollacott have done so previously – to ‘stress the historical variability of the cultural and ideo­ logical business that has been conducted around, through and by means of texts’ (1987: 268). A fourth and final insight about transmedia storytelling’s past concerns the role played by individuals. It is remarkable to note that, with the excep­ tion of the copyright feud that led to Denslow’s Scarecrow and Tin-Man comic, the story told in each and every Oz text produced across novels, comics, theatre and films between 1900 and 1918 came from the imagina­ tion and the pen of L. Frank Baum.2 Though the same cannot be said of Edgar Rice Burroughs and the many Tarzan stories that emerged between 1918 and 1938, what is clear is that the most effective transmedia story­ telling strategies to emerge during this period came when Burroughs care­ fully managed his licensing contracts himself. And this latter rule concerning the importance of carefully managing all contracts was also true of DC Comics and the Superman stories that materialised between 1938 and 1958. Here, only a very small handful of creative personnel worked on S­ uperman across multiple media. What’s more, across the cases of Oz, Tarzan and indeed Superman, almost all of the authors and creative personnel that brought these story worlds to life often relied on the continued transmedial growth of their story world to make a living. And the fact that these authors depended so heavily on their story worlds growing perhaps even serves to explain why many of the strategies used to tell stories across media and to point audiences across those media in the past were so varied. But how different really were the transmedia storytelling strategies of the past? On account of advertising developments come the turn of industriali­ sation in the US, strategies for holding a story world together across media were often print or at least visual phenomena – revolving around colour coding, spectacle, comic-strip characters, printed maps, posters and maga­ zine review taglines. By the time corporate authorship got a foothold on transmedia storytelling in the 1930s, strategies took the form of licensing, franchising, merchandising and sponsorship. More than just affording the spreading of stories, these corporate practices inspired new ideas regarding how a story could be told across media. And come the early 1940s, surely no one could have ever predicted that the Second World War would itself forge new strategies for transmedia storytelling. This is where this book makes its most valuable contributions: In revealing how differently structured media

Conclusion  195 industries still had very strong impulses towards transmedia storytelling, this book has served as an important example of how contemporary deve­ lopments can serve to re-focus the ways in which we think about the past, and indeed the ways in which bygone historical perspectives can in turn reframe current scholarly debates. Perhaps above all else, I have sought to demonstrate throughout the pages of this book that historicising an ostensibly contemporary media pheno­menon such as transmedia storytelling can allow us to better under­ stand what this phenomenon really is, how it emerged as an industrial acti­ vity, how it has changed over time, and accordingly what it might one day become. With that idea in mind, I shall now briefly explore how transmedia storytelling has changed. Beyond basic notions of convergence, what are the key configurations that afford transmedia storytelling today, and how do these configurations compare to those of the past?

The Present I have attempted to show throughout this book that different industrial con­ figurations drove the transmedia storytelling practices of the past, and I have emphasised how changing industrial structures can present ever-­varied ways of building story worlds across media. For as Anthony Smith has argued, ‘media are not stable entities, but rather protean cultural formations, each with ele­ ments that vary greatly, including the capacity of techno­logies, the composi­ tion of audiences, the organisation of markets and the economic strategies of media institutions’ (2012: 5). Media industries are defined by ever-changing conditions, and as these conditions align and sometimes re-align over time – forged alongside specific cultural moments – the models of transmedia story­ telling have been re-aligned and re-configured accordingly. In Convergence Culture (2006), Jenkins gave a seminal overview of how the contemporary convergences between media industries and digital technologies have pro­ vided new models for telling stories across media. I am certainly not going to repeat Jenkins’ substantial claims here, but by returning to the same three story worlds examined throughout this book, I will now briefly consider what the current state of the Oz, Tarzan and Superman story worlds, as well as a few others, say about transmedia storytelling in the contemporary era of con­ vergence. I do this so to highlight the contingency of present configurations, the story worlds that they engender, and how these configurations may change in the future. Today’s overriding model of transmedia storytelling – underpinned by industrial convergence that establishes a ‘new synergy amongst media com­ panies and industries’ (Hay and Couldry, 2011: 473) – has certainly fortified transmedia storytelling to gain urgency as producers make use of a host of internal corporate interconnections to ‘systematically disperse integral ele­ ments of [a] fiction across multiple delivery channels’ (Jenkins, 2011: online). But urgency has not necessarily equated to the most ‘planned, strategic aspects’

196 Conclusion of transmedia storytelling described by Fast and Örnebring (2015:  2). In fact, industrial convergence arguably facilitates ‘emergent narrative aspects that are ad hoc/contingent’ (Fast and Örnebring, 2015: 2). That is to say that, when looking at a number of contemporary examples, industrial con­ vergence often breeds a form of transmediality based on multiplicity. As was hinted in Chapter 4, a model of transmediality based on multiplicity, as Jenkins puts it, ‘routinely uses alternate versions of characters or parallel universe versions of their stories to reward mastery over the source material’ (Jenkins, 2009: online). Jenkins is in some ways right to classify transmedia storytelling as ‘entertainment for the age of media convergence’ (2006: 97), and yet it is fair to say that under this system of industrial convergence, story worlds are now in the hands of so many personnel, working across many sub-divisions and subsidiaries (and farmed out to different consul­ tancy companies such as Starlight Runner Entertainment) that they tend to be short-lived projects that come with a high turnover rate. Even when today’s converged media conglomerates bring a story world back in a big way – such as Time-Warner did with Superman in ­Superman Returns (2006) and then again with Man of Steel (2013), or with Tarzan in The Legend of Tarzan (2016) – such story worlds are often distinct or ‘rebooted’ versions of other older versions, like The WB’s Smallville (2001–2011) or Disney’s Tarzan (1999). My point is simple: Because of the highly concentrated time periods under which today’s faced-moving media conglomerates must operate, whose expensive productions do not always gene­rate substantial profits, industrial convergence does not always work to extend fictional story worlds across media so much as this model tends to build the first proverbial ‘brick’ all over again, ending one version before starting another. Jenkins acknowledges this multiplicity himself, noting that transmedia storytelling’s ‘high level of coordination and creative control … is hard enough to achieve [even] across the multiple divisions of the same produc­ tion team’ (2011: online). This is a problem that echoes the over-licensing of intellectual property experienced in Burroughs’ time. By way of further com­ parison, remember that my own exemplars of historical transmedia story worlds continued to be built for a comparatively longer period of time – for twenty years in some cases. As was noted earlier, these historical cases – and unlike the conglomerate-produced cases of today – were typically produced by one author, or at least by a smaller number of creative personnel working together across media. While transmedia storytelling has certainly gained greater visibility in the present moment, industrial convergence is arguably still some way short from being the ideal model for building fictional story worlds across media. In some sense, the rise of modern digital media agencies – themselves based on technological convergence and the ‘hybridity that folds the uses of separate media into one another’ (Hay and Couldry, 2011: 493) – feels like a response to ‘developing new models where industry cooperation and

Conclusion  197 collaboration is more key’ (Johnston, 2014: online). Indeed, the reliance on digital agencies to produce contemporary transmedia stories is reflected in transmedia’s funding models right now. Brian Clark notes that most of the transmedia projects based in the US and UK today are funded through promotional and marketing funds (2011: online). Let’s not forget that the exemplar of contemporary transmedia storytelling I cited right at the very beginning of this book – the ‘Go inside Gotham City’ website and Gotham Observer faux newspapers – were promotional materials for The Dark Knight Rises film. Clark goes on to say that the creatives involved in such materials continue to make a forceful argument that their work should be understood as ‘content’ and not simply as ‘promotion’, with economic and labour relations issues at stake in the dispute between the two terms (2011: online). My chapter on the Land of Oz showed how these disputes were shaped by the emerging industrial logics of advertising well over a hundred years earlier, and we have now come full circle. In the age of convergence culture, in fact, the job of continuing to expand the Land of Oz across media rests most emphatically in the hands of marketing teams and digital agencies. For example, a website called findy­ourwaytooz.com, created by Disney and UNIT9 and devised as an offi­ cial promotional website for Oz the Great and Powerful (2013), allowed audiences to walk around the fictional spaces seen throughout the narra­ tive of that film. The website made use of digital convergence by blending 3D  ­animation, video, audio, gameplay and text to take audiences on an ‘interactive journey through a Kansas circus, which leads you to the Land of Oz after you are swept up by a massive storm’ (UNIT9, 2013: online). Transmedia websites such as findyourwaytooz.com are typically prized for their ability to blend the affordances of multiple media forms to create, in that instance, at least, ‘a fun, immersive experience that users can form a strong connection with’ (UNIT9, 2013: online). Yet a model of transmedia storytelling based on modern digital convergences faces notable challenges of its own. Even the act of watching television on a computer screen, some­ thing that exemplifies the changes brought about by digital media such as the Internet, brings notable problems in terms of how audiences consume stories across media. One of the implicit points running through this book that is useful to highlight here is the sense that culturally imposed demar­ cations between media forms tend to impact negatively on how transmedia storytelling is perceived and consumed. Remember how Tarzan worked far better as a story world across multiple media that pointed audiences across those media when all of its media texts – be it novels, comic strips, radio, etc. – were seen by audiences as equal-standing products of the rising con­ sumer culture? Or how Baum failed to point Oz audiences from the theatre to the cinema at a time when social-class divides separated the two media? In a similar vein, today may mark what Jenkins sees as a time where old and new media collide, but media collision is not the end of the story; divides between old and new media are still very much visible. And with that

198 Conclusion visible distinction brings barriers for transmedia storytelling. For exam­ ple, take the perceived distinction that stands between analogue media, such as television, and digital media, such as the Internet. Despite the fact that technological convergence means that so much of television is now watched online, many would still automatically distinguish between tele­ vision and the Internet. And those distinctions mean that online episodes of something like Doctor Who continue to be perceived as less important or less ‘canonical’ than the television episodes broadcast on BBC One on Saturday nights. Consider The Night of the Doctor, an episode available online in 2013. Story-wise, this online episode is a great example of transmedia storytelling: It tells the tale of the previously unseen last moments of the eighth Doctor while serving to introduce the next television episode. In other words, it is a prequel that foregrounds character-building – a continuing characteristic of all transmedia storytelling. But production-wise, The Night of the Doctor was made on a very low-budget – filmed using the remaining marketing funds, and during the final stages of the production schedule assigned to pro­ duce the television episodes. This episode was not broadcast on television, but was made available on the BBC’s iPlayer service. Crucially, the viewing figures reflect this television versus Internet distinction: While the overnight ratings of the Doctor Who television episodes in 2013 averaged between 6.47 million and 8.44 million, The Night of the Doctor was watched by only 2.5 million during its entire week online.3 In some ways, the strategic, planned production of digital agencies and affiliates – hired to create transmedia extensions for the likes of Doctor Who and Oz the Great and Powerful – ends up reinforcing hierarches and cultural demarcations; both between old and new media, and also between content and promotion. It is likely that only a complete shift to the digital sphere will see all iterations of Doctor Who become equally as essential to the storytelling of the Doctor’s adventures in time and space. As its show­ runner Steven Moffat insists, only then ‘will we stop calling [online e­ pisodes] webisodes or prequels or minisodes or whatever else. We’ll just call them Doctor Who’ (Eames, 2014: online). It is certainly ironic to suggest, but in some important ways online media – a platform celebrated for its pervasive connectedness and global accessibility – is actually the marginal home of transmedia storytelling right now. Keith M. Johnston goes even further by claiming that transmedia story­ telling has ‘struggled to find itself a foothold in the UK’ (2014: online). According to Johnston, ‘transmedia [storytelling] may have seen some recent successes, but the evidence … suggests that the multi-platform world is still largely at the stage of “porting” projects across media’ (ibid.). As such, as transmedia content on UK television screens has evolved there has been a noticeable shift in industrial strategy. More recently, Elizabeth Evans argues that experiments with transmedia storytelling have been twinned with – and sometimes overtaken by – transmedia strategies that are based more on the

Conclusion  199 proliferation, and integration, of distribution avenues (2015). These distri­ bution strategies emerge, Evans insists, in the concept of ‘digital estates’ – a term increasingly being used by major television broadcasters to classify digital technologies and catch-up services as a core part of their activities. Evans has used the concept of ‘digital estates’ to explore transmediality as something that emerges through the daily lives of audiences, pointing to the domestic routines that audiences display when moving across multiple plat­ forms and interconnected digital services (2015). Above all, Evans’ recent work in this area highlights how moments of transmedia storytelling are always likely to be bound up with the technological, social and temporal dynamics of daily life. And by considering transmediality according to the more mundane and even passive modes of viewing that have come to shape the contemporary digital media landscape, Evans points to the importance of understanding the future of transmediality not as storytelling but rather as a system of creating and consuming highly ephemeral experiences (2015). Again, then, signs point to modern convergences as being the producer of fleeting trans­ media experiences, and so just as relying on an advertising model in the 1900s was limited, Johnston and Evans imply that transmedia storytelling needs a new model that goes beyond digital marketing. History has showed us that new models of producing transmedia story­ telling manifest every couple of decades, and once came from corporate practices or industry partnerships propelled by a World War (of all things). So, models of transmedia storytelling will likely change, but in what ways? And how can the past provide an understanding of where they are heading?

The Future This book may have stressed the value of uncovering the history of trans­ media storytelling, but I do agree with those who say that transmedia story­telling is the future. Now, then, it is time for me to pose an import­ ant question: Industrialisation, consumer culture and media regulation all underpinned transmedia storytelling throughout different points in the past, and industrial or technological convergence underpin transmedia story­ telling in the present. Both sets of models are very different, so what might drive the future of transmedia storytelling? In some sense, the future of transmedia storytelling seems contingent on acknowledging the very multiplicity of transmediality and its many pos­ sible potentials. And doing so means, as this book has done, broadening our understandings of the transmedia phenomenon beyond the singular and quite limited framing of convergence culture. James Hay and Nick ­Couldry (2011: 498), hinting at this very idea, argue that the oft-cited model of trans­ mediality is indeed far from the only model: ‘Differences are obscured by the generality of the term “convergence culture”, and it can be helpful to consider convergence “cultures” in the plural.’

200 Conclusion Looking towards the future, we may well describe two types of trans­ media storytelling that may prove to represent its future. Let’s call the first of these experiential convergences. This model reflects the enormity of the changes dictated by digital technologies, and may be seen to epitomise a logical extension of technological convergence. Scholarly discussions in the present often concern the multi-platform potentials of the digital media economy (Holt and Sanson, 2014; Evans, 2015; Doyle, 2016). Jennifer Holt and Kevin Sanson (2014: 1), for instance, discuss ‘connected viewing’, which refers to ‘a multi-platform entertainment experience, and relates to a larger trend across the media industries to integrate digital technology and socially networked communication with traditional screen media practices.’ But whereas important technological shifts towards connected viewing may have led in some cases to ‘the migration of our media and our atten­ tion from one screen to many’ (Holt and Sanson, 2014: 1), in other ways perhaps it is now time to theorise transmedia storytelling not as a pheno­ menon that relates directly to multi-platform or to migratory audiences or even to crossing media, but instead as a single experience of drillable multi-­media consumption. Or as Susana Tosca and Lisbeth Klastrup (2016: 108) observe, ‘while stress is laid on the importance of different platforms when they investigate transmedia practices, little attention is usually paid to the aesthetic properties of the worlds or products themselves.’ Tosca and ­Klastrup have also proposed a shift in thinking from focus on platform alone to ­studies of media experience and ‘the kinds of personal or shared experiences users are constructing and re-enacting through them’, often within the experience of a single screen (2016: 108). Consider the role played by Blu-Ray formats on how films and tele­vision series are now watched at home and across multiple media. Aaron Barlow (2005: 27) argues that the affordances of the DVD and Blu-Ray platform have long altered the experience of watching films. Part of this change stems from the digital and interactive interface of the Blu-Ray menu screen, which allows audiences to manoeuvre their way across different features, select par­ ticular options, watch extras and participate more deeply in the textual and paratextual narrative of a film. Put simply, the Blu-Ray menu screen epito­ mises the concept of experiential convergence, bringing together as it does multiple stories and multiple pieces of different types of media ­content – text, audio, comics, video, game, etc. – within the same disc, bringing together different forms of engagements, pleasures and media experiences. This experiential convergence of multiple media forms afforded by the interactive Blu-Ray menu format enables for additional story content to be buried within the Blu-Ray disc. Most traditionally this has taken the form of the extra feature or the Easter egg, but now this comes to manifest as innovative story-within-story formats, where audiences can opt to interrupt the film-watching experience to drill deeper into the production of the film and learn more about the story as they go along. Consider the Blu-Ray disc for Man of Steel (2013), which includes an option called ‘Journey of

Conclusion  201 Discovery: Creating Man of Steel’. This option sees the film’s director, Zack Snyder, as well as its cast and crew, interrupting the film periodically to explain how they went about creating Man of Steel, and in particular the alien world of Krypton. Added pieces of narrative information excluded from the film are also provided. This sort of juxtaposition between textuality and paratextuality – that is, between the story of the film itself and that of an added documentary about the making of said film – encapsulates understandings of transmedia story­ telling presented in this book. In other cases, too, this same technique allows audiences to follow a particular story in distinctly transmedial fashion by making use of the unique digital interface of the Blu-Ray format itself. For instance, the Blu-Ray for Inception (2010) includes an ‘Extraction Mode’ much like the aforementioned feature on the Man of Steel disc, allowing audiences to go deeper into the story. Furthermore, the Blu-Ray includes a 15-minute motion comic called Inception: The Cobol Job, which offers back-story to the film’s story, explaining the narrative events that led to those at the beginning of the film. This motion comic is a notable exemplar of transmedia storytelling, extending the textual narrative of the film onto a new media platform. But as well as encouraging audiences to migrate across platforms, i.e. from cinema to home media, the Blu-Ray also comes packed with secrets and inner depths. Audiences who chose to hunt and gather additional pieces of the narrative experience of Inception from cinema to Blu-Ray to the Web might have found a password; if 528491 is typed on the Blu-Ray remote control while perusing the special features, these audi­ ences will then be treated to a second comic hidden deep within the digital interface of the disc’s menus, one that added even further narrative insight into the events of the film. Home media formats like Blu-Ray are thereby changing properties of today’s transmedia storytelling, especially at a time when culturally imposed demarcations between online and offline media continues to impact how such transmedia stories are consumed. At a time when the innate connectivity and shareability of the Internet is perhaps also making certain strands of transmedia stories ironically fleeting, it seems that home media products – valued as commodities, shaped by technological advances and layered with new narrative intricacies – are keeping audiences engaged for longer. The likes of ‘Journey of Discovery: Creating Man of Steel’ and Inception: The Cobol Job may at first seem to represent a mode of transmedia story­ telling that is specific to the format of DVDs and Blu-Rays – one that invites audiences to follow the storytelling experience not across media platforms, but rather within a media experience. However, the experiential convergen­ ces at the heart of these examples indeed characterise a number of the most innovative transmedia projects now underway. By way of example, in May 2014 Variety reported that a 3D transmedia project titled Call Her Lotte had been added to the Cannes Market’s Next programme, an initiative designed to showcase new innovations in the film industry (Barraclough,

202 Conclusion 2014: online). The Call Her Lotte project was based around a short film that told the story of two friends living in 1930s Munich amidst the rise of Nazi Germany. The film, of course, was only part of the story; accompanying the short was a Google Glass game, which the creators claim to be the world’s first ever transmedia project to make use of Google Glass, ‘allowing people to be more immersed in the story’ (ibid.). New technologies such as Google Glass – a wearable technology designed to offer a mass-market ubiquitous computer in the form of a head-mounted display – exemplify the future of experiential convergences. Google Glass was initially being talked about in terms of what it can offer transmedia ­storytelling – notably, greater immersion and multi-timeline storytelling (­seeing a story unfold from multiple angles in real time). And if the experien­ tial convergence of this storytelling indeed represents the next logical step for multi-platform consumption – with content from different sources and media outputs folded into a single experience rather than being streamed across different media outputs – how long before we stop calling such phenomena ‘transmedia’? How long, in other words, before we simply call it ‘media’? Digital and online platforms may well embody a central model for carry­ ing transmedia storytelling into the future, then, but with such develop­ ments one might wonder what will happen to modes of authorship and the way in which authors go about building characters and story worlds across media. As of 2017, the divides between old and new media may still be visi­ ble, but for how much longer will that be true? As multi-platform continues to advance towards experiential convergences, it is likely only to be a mat­ ter of time before old and new media share a more equal footing and the divides fully blur. And once those divides fade and merge into a single site of media experience, will it become easier or perhaps harder for creatives to fully understand the ingredients and mechanisms of a fictional story world? In light of such uncertainties, we can assess another type of transmedia storytelling that goes beyond experiential convergences. Let’s call this second model localised convergences – by which I mean the different ways in which local cultures and communities are now beginning to make use of trans­ media storytelling around the world. In some ways, at least, it seems that the responsibility for finding new models of producing transmedia storytelling rests on the shoulders of people who are not as prominent in the media industries as one might expect. Says Keith M. Johnston (2014: online): ‘For the industry to develop there is likely a need for some new producers who can see the opportunity (financial and creative) to develop projects across media.’ Television showrunner and movie writer/director Joss Whedon agrees: There’s someone out there who will no doubt figure out how to relate the Internet as a tool of narrative beyond my old-fashioned notions. But I think whoever cracks that is not going to be someone who’s made it big in television or film. It’s going to be some guy we just don’t know about yet. (Kushner, 2008: online)

Conclusion  203 As with my study of the past, then, once again the importance of indi­ viduals rather than big corporations (à la L. Frank Baum and Edgar Rice Burroughs) – and indeed individuals who are sometimes at the margins of media industries working through them rather than at their centre (à  la DC Comics) – are emphasised as key to transmedia storytelling going for­ ward. The aforementioned Call Her Lotte, moreover, was authored by far less renowned creatives and was funded by small companies. Director ­Annekathrin ­Wetzel’s MiriquidiFilm, an independent production company, produced the pioneering project in collaboration with a small national broadcaster as well as with a number of other independent bankrollers. And these themes of localised national production and independent bank­ rollers characterise the sorts of transmedia projects now underway around the world. Indeed, emerging research into global transmediality is beginning to show the different ways that transmedia storytelling is manifesting around the world, most of which are far removed from systems of advertising, licensing and other more commercial practices. For instance, while in the US we might associate transmediality with storytelling and with building franchise fictional story worlds like Batman and Star Wars, in the European context, trans­ mediality can occupy a form of promotion for independent filmmakers, a site of construction for social reality games, or even serve as education or as polit­ ical activism (Scolari et al, 2014). In Spain, meanwhile, entire curricula are being developed around the potential application of transmedia as a tool for educational and literacy enhancement for students seeking global citizenship skills (Scolari, 2013). In Canada, transmedia has been used as a way to enforce religious radicalisation while in Colombia it is seen as a tool for re-building local communities and for re-making lost memories (Freeman, 2016). The different ways in which transmediality is hereby being interpreted as local­ ised convergences around the world points to the importance of mapping the different faces of transmediality, both trans-historically and transnationally. While I am in no position to assess the impact or nuances of what these different faces of transmediality might be, I will say this: No matter how industry, technology, audiences or even local communities develops in the future, it will be key for creatives to continue to probe and explore the workings of what makes a good fictional story world transcend media. For without a story world that an audience wants to get lost in, no amount of technology will work to migrate people across media. And as I have shown in this book, understanding the strategies for world-building is a task that both the past and the future can help us with. Whatever happens in the future, then, the timeline of transmedia story­ telling will be one of many events, filled with many different characters, and is likely to expand in many ways. In showing how transmedia story­ telling began as an industrial phenomenon, I may have filled in the start of this particular ‘story’, giving it some important backstory while fleshing out the intricacies of its historical mythology and adding some much-needed new information. But who really knows how this story will expand next, or indeed if it might ever reach its end.

204 Conclusion

Notes 1. Aaron Clayton reinforces this significance, pointing to the role of crossover characters – itself a feature of both historical pulp fictions and contemporary transmedia fictions – in far more recent comic book iterations of the character such as Tarzan vs. Predator: At Earth’s Core and Batman/Tarzan: Claws of the Cat-Woman, published in 1997 and 2000, respectively. See Clayton, 2012: 181. 2. The exception to this was The Wonderful Wizard of Oz – a thirteen-minute silent film released in 1910 – which was produced without the involvement of Baum. William Selig, a figure who in many ways was instrumental to the development of the American motion picture industry, made this film. Selig had been hired by Baum in 1908 to produce short films for Baum’s Fairylogue and Radio-Plays. After incurring enormous debt from financing that multi-media lecture tour, Baum owed Selig $3,000. Unable to repay the money, Baum agreed to provide Selig with the motion picture rights to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Selig obliged, and the first Oz motion picture was born. 3. Figures taken from “Doctor Who Series 7 Ratings Accumulator (2013)” at ­Doctor Who TV. See http://www.doctorwhotv.co.uk/doctor-who-series-7-­ratingsaccumulator-2013-46939.htm.

Bibliography Barlow, A. (2005) The DVD Revolution: Movies, Culture and Technology. London: Praeger. Barraclough, Leo. “Cannes: Transmedia Project ‘Call Her Lotte’ Added To Cannes’ Next Program (EXCLUSIVE).” Variety, May 13, 2014. Bennett, Tony and Woollacott, Janet. Bond and Beyond: The Popular Hero. London: Routledge, 1987. Clark, Brian. “Brian Clark on Transmedia Business Models (Part Two).” Confessions of an Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins. (November 8, 2011). Accessed August 30, 2014. http://henryjenkins.org/2011/11/brian_clarke_on_ transmedia_bus.html. Clayton, Aaron. “Evolution and Race on the Island of Caspak: How Tarzan and T-Rex Decode Manhood in the Comic That Time Forgot.” In Global Perspectives on Tarzan: From King of the Jungle to International Icon, edited by Annette Wannamaker and Michelle Ann Abate, 180–198. New York: Routledge, 2012. “Doctor Who Series 7 Ratings Accumulator (2013).” Doctor Who TV (May 26, 2013). Accessed February 12, 2014. http://www.doctorwhotv.co.uk/doctor-whoseries-7-ratings-accumulator-2013-46939.htm. Doyle, Gillian. “Resistance of Channels: Television Distribution in the Multiplatform Era.” Telematics and Informatics 33:2 (2016): 693–702. Eames, Tom. “Steven Moffat Promises More Online Doctor Who Episodes.” ­Digital Spy. (August 6, 2014). Accessed August 8, 2014. http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/ tv/s7/doctorwho/news/a588772/steven-moffat-promises-more-online-doctorwhoepisodes.html#~oMbhYJ3JOO7v1p. Evans, Elizabeth. “Building Digital Estates: Transmedia Television in Industry and Daily Life.” Media Futures Research Centre Seminar, Bath Spa University, Bath, November 11, 2015.

Conclusion  205 Fast, Karin and Örnebring Henrik. “Transmedia World-Building: The Shadow (1931–present) and Transformers (1984–present).” The International Journal of Cultural Studies (September 15, 2015): doi: 10.1177/1367877915605887. Freeman, Matthew. “‘Real’ Transmedia: Cultures and Communities of Cross-­ Platform Media in Colombia.” Antenna: Responses to Media and Culture (January 27, 2016). Accessed June 14, 2016. http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/ 2016/01/27/real-transmedia/. Hay, James and Couldry, Nick. “Rethinking Convergence/Culture: An Introduction.” Cultural Studies 25:4 (2011): 473–486. Holt, Jennifer and Sanson, Kevin, eds. Connected Viewing: Selling, Streaming and Sharing Media in the Digital Age. New York: Routledge, 2014. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Jenkins, Henry. “Transmedia Storytelling 101.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins. March 22, 2007. Accessed September 30, 2011. http://henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html. Jenkins, Henry. “The Revenge of the Origami Unicorn: Seven Principles of Trans­ media Storytelling.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins. December 12, 2009. Accessed February 20, 2012. http://henryjenkins. org/2009/12/the_revenge_of_the_origami_uni.html. Jenkins, Henry. “Transmedia 202: Further Reflections.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins. August 1, 2011. Accessed November 2, 2012. http://henryjenkins.org/2011/08/defining_transmedia_further_re.html. Johnston, Keith M. “Has Britain Got Transmedia Talent?” CST Online. (May 23, 2014). Accessed May 24, 2014. http://cstonline.tv/has-britain-got-transmedia-talent. Kidman, Shawna. “Comic Books Incorporated: Industrial Strategy and the Legitima­ tion of Lowbrow Media.” PhD diss., USC School of Cinematic Arts, 2015. Kushner, David. “Rebel Alliance: How a Small Band of Sci-Fi Geeks Is Leading ­Hollywood into a New Era.” Fast Company. May 2008. Accessed September 21, 2013. http://www.fastcompany.com/798975/rebel-alliance. Scolari, Carlos A. “Transmedia Literacy: The Project.” Transmedia Literacy (2013). Accessed 1, May 2016. https://transmedialiteracy.org/. Scolari, Carlos A., Bertetti, Paolo and Freeman, Matthew. Transmedia Archaeology: Storytelling in the Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Smith, Anthony. “Media Contexts of Narrative Design: Dimensions of Specificity within Storytelling Industries.” PhD diss., University of Nottingham, 2012. Tosca, Susana and Klastrup Lisbeth. “The Networked Reception of Transmedial Universes: An Experience-Centered Approach.” MedieKultur 32:60 (2016): 107–122. UNIT9, “Case Study: Find Your Way to Oz.” html5rocks (February 5, 2013). Accessed June 14, 2016. http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/casestudies/oz/.

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Index

24 27, 38 24: The Game 27 adaptation 21, 23, 39, 41–2, 56, 95–6, 129, 142–3, 184 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 5, 83 All-Story, The 110–13, 138 Animatrix, The 26 Alphonse and Gaston 52 AT&T 59–60, 148, 163 At the Earth’s Core 111–12 Balio, Tino 132, 139, 148, 152, 174, 179 Batman 1, 4, 15, 17, 35–7, 40–1, 65, 143, 151–2, 173–4, 183, 187, 203–4 Battlestar Galactica 37 Baum, L. Frank 7, 19–20, 27, 79–84, 87–97, 99–113, 116, 132, 135, 142, 145–7, 152–3, 196, 201, 203–4, 207, 213–14 Bennett, Tony 31, 36–7, 40, 102, 124, 137, 139, 161, 180, 184, 194, 204 Bertetti, Paolo 6, 16, 18, 23, 38, 40, 42, 183–4, 187, 205 Blu-Ray 200–201 B-movies 152, 159, 173–6, 181, 191 brand 14, 17, 42, 52, 54, 62–5, 71, 77, 80, 113–15, 117, 119, 122, 131, 141–3, 172, 185, 187 Broadway theatre 82–5, 91, 94, 96, 98, 117, 148 Brooker, Will 36, 40, 115 Burroughs, Edgar Rice 10–11, 14, 36, 108–13, 115–138, 148, 156–7, 163, 191–4, 196, 203 Burroughs-Tarzan Enterprises 134–7, 139 Buster Brown 52, 54, 76, 102, 113, 116 Captain America: The Winter Soldier 189 Carroll, Lewis 5, 83 Cola-Cola 52, 64, 108, 114, 122–3, 138, 140

colour 29, 32, 48–9, 70–2, 75–82, 85, 90, 93, 99–100, 194 colour lithography 48–9 consumerism 53, 114, 193 convergence; Experiential convergence 200–2; Industrial convergence 3, 5, 9, 34, 160, 189, 195–6; Localised convergence 202–3; Technological convergence 3–4, 189, 196–200 corporate authorship 6–7, 11, 13–14, 51, 62, 100, 108, 109–10, 113–16, 123, 125, 130–1, 137, 190–1, 194 Couldry, Nick 3, 16, 195–6, 199, 205 Dark Knight, The 31 Dark Knight Rises, The 1–2, 27, 36–7, 151, 197 Dark Knight Rises, The: The Official Novelization 27 Davies, Máire Messenger 23–4, 29, 41 DC Comics 35, 37, 145, 156–61, 163–4, 166–7, 169–73, 176–8, 182, 191, 193–4, 203 digital age 2, 18, 42, 74, 104, 205 Doctor Who 2, 38–9, 41–2, 151, 198, 204 Doležel, Lubomír 24–5, 40, 89 Donenfeld, Harry 156–61, 163, 173, 181 drillability 29–30, 112, 190, 193 DVD 1, 183, 200, 204 east coast transmedia 3–4, 182 Ellsworth, Whitney 146, 156, 174–6, 178 Enter the Matrix 26 Evans, Elizabeth x, 3, 4, 6, 16, 21, 33, 39–40, 198–200, 204 extractability 30, 82, 157, 190 Fast, Karin 6, 16, 22, 27, 32, 40, 193, 196, 205 fin-de-siècle 7, 53, 60, 79, 85, 92–3, 108, 117

208 Index Flamingo Films 153–4, 177–9 Fleischer Studio 167–71, 174 Foucault, Michel 36, 40, 139 franchise 3–4, 15–16, 23, 28, 42, 55, 63–4, 106, 109, 113–16, 120–5, 129, 137–8, 142–4, 182, 187, 191–2, 194, 203 Frederick W. Ziv Company 153–4, 177, 179 Green Hornet, The 5, 17, 65, 143, 187 Gomez, Jeff 2, 16, 23, 40 Gordon, Ian 45, 49–50, 64, 75–6, 87, 103, 141 Gotham Observer 1, 2, 4, 197 Hanff, Peter E. x, 87, 90, 104 Harry Potter 6, 30, 31, 40 Hay, James 3, 16, 195–6, 199, 205 Hearst newspapers 49, 122 Heroes 26, 29–30, 34, 37–8, 41, 47, 104, 187 Hilmes, Michele 13, 59–60, 147–8, 167, 170, 176–8, 181 Hobbit, The 29 Hollywood; early cinema 52, 53, 56, 97–8; transitional era 97–9, 102, 104–5, 132; studio system 110, 131–2, 148, 151–2, 182; and radio 59–61; and television 61, 147–8, 152–4, 177–80 Hopalong Cassidy 6, 17, 139, 142, 154, 186 Huhtamo, Erkki 9, 16–17 illusion window 72, 84, 93 immersion 30, 82, 190, 202 Inception 201 Industrialisation; assembly line 46–8, 80, 157; mass production 43–8, 50–1, 54, 69, 76, 71, 77, 80, 83, 90, 97, 100, 110, 115, 121, 126, 137–8, 190–1, 193–4; mass communication 45, 48–50, 64, 66, 95, 100, 103, 106, 140, 143, 146, 149; mass distribution 44, 51–4, 108, 110–11, 114, 116, 120, 191; modern advertising 45, 49–50, 62, 71; urbanization 45, 49, 70–1 industry partnerships 7, 11, 13–14, 27, 57, 59, 61–2, 145–52, 154, 157, 159, 163–7, 169–73, 176–8, 180–1, 183, 191–2, 199 intertextuality 14, 24, 26, 28, 32, 37, 70, 76, 80–1, 85–6, 91, 101, 112, 119, 128–9, 134, 155, 159, 161, 181

inter-textuality 31–2, 37, 40, 86, 89, 93, 101, 124, 130, 161, 181 In Old Kentucky 53 Jack Sparrow 23, 25 James Bond 31, 40, 102, 139, 184, 204 Jane Eyre 25 Johnson, Derek 4–7, 15–16, 18, 42, 64, 114–15, 121, 124, 136–8, 142 Johnson, Catherine 52, 62–4, 142 Johnston, Keith, M. 197–9, 202 Kackman, Michael 6, 17, 138, 142, 151, 153–4, 182, 186 Kidman, Shawna 5, 17, 104, 121, 142, 159, 174, 186, 192–3, 205 King Arthur 6 Kinder, Marsha 24, 41 Kompare, Derek 44, 65, 153–4, 182, 186 Kring, Tim 29–30, 47 Kristeva, Julia 24, 41 Land of Oz; Ozma of Oz 94, 102; Oz the Great and Powerful 197–8; Queer Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz 87–93; The Marvelous Land of Oz 85, 92, 94, 102; The Patchwork Girl of Oz 95–6, 98, 102, 106–7; The Tik-Tok Man of Oz 94, 96; The Wizard of Oz 82, 84–6, 91, 94, 96; The Woggle-Bug 94, 96; The Wonderful Wizard of Oz 2, 10, 13, 69, 71–2, 78–88, 91, 99–100, 112; Tik-Tok of Oz 94, 102 Land That Time Forgot, The 112 Lesser, Sol 132–5 licensing 5–6, 11, 14, 35, 51, 54, 76, 100, 109, 110, 113–19, 121, 123–4, 130–8, 145, 157–8, 191–2, 194, 195, 203 Lucas, George 34–5 Lone Ranger, The 5, 17, 65, 143, 153, 162, 183, 187 Lord of the Rings, The 5, 29 Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson 156 Mann, Denise 5, 16, 41 market author-function 37–8, 112–3, 118–9, 120–3, 125, 129, 131 Matrix, The 26, 33–4, 38 Matrix Reloaded, The 26, 34 Maxwell, Robert 163, 165, 173, 178–9, 181

Index  209 McClure Syndicate 91, 146, 157–9, 161, 173 McGurl, Mark 49, 69 media archaeology 9, 16–17 media regulation; copyright 5, 54–7, 61, 63–5, 90–2, 118, 147, 150, 193, 194; law 54–7, 61, 90, 92, 147; policy 55, 57–61, 132, 135, 147, 149–50, 163, 165, 167, 169, 180 merchandise 6, 15, 35, 50, 53, 55, 73, 90, 108–9, 113, 115–16, 126, 128–31, 137–9, 157, 191–2, 194 MGM 132–5, 148, 151, 182 Moffat, Steven 198 movie serials 56–7, 132, 150–3, 173, 175, 179 multiplicity 134–5, 196, 199 Musser, Charles 52–3, 58, 63, 65, 105, 142 Mutual Broadcasting System 163–4, 166, 170–1, 174–5 National Allied Publications 145–6, 156 Office of War Information 59, 63, 149–50, 168 Örnebring, Henrik 6, 16, 22, 27, 32, 40, 193, 196, 205 Oz Film Manufacturing Company, The 95, 97–9, 136 Ozmapolitan, The 1, 4, 92–3 Paramount Pictures 132, 148, 151, 167–74, 182 Parikka, Jussi 9, 16–17 Pearson, Roberta x, 5, 15, 17, 23–4, 29, 35–6, 41, 62, 65, 98, 105, 107 performance 38, 90, 115, 181 Pirates of the Caribbean 23, 25 posters 37, 78, 91, 94, 117, 169 printed map 29, 81–2, 100–101, 194 propaganda 146, 149–52, 154, 159–63, 165–7, 169–70, 172–3, 179, 181, 183, 191, 193 pulp magazines 6, 11, 18, 42, 46, 109–14, 116–19, 123, 126–30, 133, 142–4, 156–9, 161, 166, 172–3, 178, 183, 187, 194, 204–5 Radio Mirror 52, 114, 165–6, 171 radio serials 124, 126–8, 160, 163–4, 166, 169, 171, 173–5, 179 reviews 38, 70, 86, 93, 95–7, 100–101, 150, 171, 194

Robin Hood 6 Romeo and Juliet 21 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 59, 149–50, 166 Saler, Michael 48–9, 75, 79, 81–3, 101 Santo, Avi 5–6, 17, 54–5, 65, 113, 115–6, 121, 123, 136, 143, 187 Scolari, Carlos x, 2, 11, 15, 17–18, 28, 38, 42, 183, 187, 203, 205 seriality 25, 28, 88, 91–2, 164, 181, 190, 193 Shadow, The 6, 16, 40, 173–4, 183, 205 Shuster, Joe 155, 157–8 Siegel, Jerry 155–8 social class 46, 70, 72, 82–5, 96–8, 197 spectacle 29, 49, 69, 70–5, 77–8, 81–2, 84–6, 93, 100, 194 sponsorship 109, 115–16, 123–6, 128–9, 137–8, 194 spreadability 29, 47, 160 Starlight Runner Entertainment 1, 2, 16, 22–3, 40, 196 Star Wars 34–5, 40, 203 Stein, Louisa Ellen 3, 17, 32–3, 42 Stella Dallas 60, 148, 167 subjectivity 26–8, 92, 94, 128, 181, 190 Superman; Action Comics 155–8, 164, 166, 168–9, 174–5; Adventures of Superman (1952–1958) 145, 154, 178–80; Atom Man vs. Superman 175–6; Man of Steel 196, 200–1; Smallville 196; Superman (1948) 172–6; Superman: The Movie 154–5; The Adventures of Superman (1940–1951) 160–1, 163–6, 169–72, 175 Superman, Inc. 157, 163, 174, 178 Tarzan; The Legend of Tarzan 196; Tarzan (1999) 196; Tarzan and the City of Gold 129–31; Tarzan and His Mate 132–3; Tarzan of the Apes (1912) 110–12, 117–19, 123; Tarzan of the Apes (1918) 117–18; Tarzan the Ape Man 132–3; The Return of Tarzan 112, 117, 119, 123 telefilm 61, 153–4, 177–80 textual author-function 37–8, 112, 117, 126, 128–31, 134–5 Thompson, Kristin 114 Tolkien, J. R. R. 5, 29 transmedia consultancies 1, 196 Treasure Island 81, 83

210 Index Wachowskis 33–4 war film 146, 149–50, 154, 166–70, 181 Warner Bros. 1, 30–1, 35, 132, 148, 151, 182–3, 196 west coast transmedia 3, 151 Wide Sargasso Sea 25–6 window dressing 72–5, 77, 82, 84, 101 Wolf, Mark J. P. 6, 7, 18, 21, 28–9, 42–3, 66, 124

Woollacott, Janet 31, 36–7, 40, 102, 124, 137, 139, 161, 180, 184, 194, 204 World War II 14, 59, 121, 136, 138, 146, 148–9, 151, 154, 159–61, 163, 170, 172–3, 179–82, 189, 191, 193–4 Yellow Kid, The 54, 76 Zorro 6