Drew Morton

I received a copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for a fair and honest review. Thank you! 🙂

This was an interesting book to read and I found it very informative, but it read like a technical manual. The author knows his stuff but it comes across as over intellectual and repetitive. The book is incredibly monotonous and I believe it just isolates it’s target audience. It’s a fascinating subject to write a book on but don’t present it like a student thesis, be more accessible!… (lisätietoja)

I’ve been very interested in the move of comic book style lettering, where the words interact with the scenery, to movie credits (and Fringe), and this book considers the phenomenon of moving techniques of one medium to another more generally. Morton argues that films have increasingly relied on formal characteristics of comic books—e.g., panels, speed lines/bullet time, flat compositions—while comics have drawn from formal characteristics of film, such as film noir-type high-contrast lighting (Powers, anyone?) and “Photoshop assisted motion blurring,” which I myself don’t recall seeing. However, a split-screen movie functions differently than a split-screen comic because of their differing relationship to time—the movie gives you “multiple spatial perspecitves on the same moment in time,” while individual comic panels are frozen instants. Morton calls this a compromise, “a formal translation rather than a transposition.” More generally, he calls the phenomenon of formal technique slippage “stylistic remediation,” a process he identifies as continuing and dialogic. (For example, websites interact with TV news, using formal techniques from newspapers and contributing them as well. The headline/chyron is only part of it, while CNN’s 6 talking heads at once is a more visible part.) Remediation is different from adaptation because it’s not tied to a particular text, and because it can flow both ways.

It’s notable that the techniques he discusses aren’t tied in any particular way to box office success—the movie Scott Pilgrim was hugely influenced by comic book style, and was a flop; 300 was too, and was a hit. Even though Morton recognizes that comic book readers are a small group, he retains the fan’s conviction that this is an audience that matters—he calls comic book fans “the main demographic for films based on comics,” even though even for Batman they’re tiny compared to the movie audience. But his emphasis on style is a good reminder that “collective intelligence and pleasure in a transmedia property need not be bound to narrative.”… (lisätietoja)