Journal articles on the topic 'Scott McCloud'

Resumen: En 1993, Scott McCloud publicó su primer ensayo teórico sobre cómic y en forma de cómic: Entender el cómic: el arte invisible, cuyo éxito inmediato lo convirtió en una de las principales referencias en los estudios sobre cómic. En su obra, McCloud definía el cómic como un arte estrictamente secuencial, y planteaba una clasificación de las transiciones entre viñetas que partía de su concepto de clausura. Tras identificar ciertas limitaciones de sus teorías, se plantea una crítica de estos puntos mediante el análisis de obras y la revisión de bibliografía especializada, y se proponen alternativas de análisis más apropiadas para el cómic contemporáneo. Abstract: In 1993, Scott McCloud published his first essay about comic in comic format: Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, whose early success turned it to one of the main references in comic studies. In his work, McCloud defined comic as a strictly sequential art, and raised a classification of panels transitions that came from his concept of closure. After identifying certain limitations of his theories, a critique to these points through the analysis of some comics and the use of specialized bibliography is presented, and some more suitable alternatives for contemporary comics are proposed.

In Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels (2006), Scott McCloud proposes that the use of specific drawing techniques will enable viewers to reliably deduce different degrees of intensity of the six basic emotions from facial expressions in comics. Furthermore, he suggests that an accomplished comics artist can combine the components of facial expressions conveying the basic emotions to produce complex expressions, many of which are supposedly distinct and recognizable enough to be named. This article presents an empirical investigation and assessment of the validity of these claims, based on the results obtained from three questionnaires. Each of the questionnaires deals with one of the aspects of McCloud’s proposal: face expression intensity, labelling and compositionality. The data show that the tasks at hand were much more difficult than would have been expected on the basis of McCloud’s proposal, with the intensity matching task being the most successful of the three.

Line Webtoon is one of the media used by South Korea in spreading Hallyu Wave. It has driven the views or opinions of the South Korean culture through manhwa (Korean Comic) called "Noblesse" in the application Line Webtoon using Comic Theory from Scott McCloud. The analysis of case studies on the Noblesse manhwa showed that opinions were presented and exhanged related to the characters, the messages being conveyed, and reader's expectations about in the manhwa. The readers' enthusiasm for this manhwa has made Noblesse one of the most favored manhwas. The implications of this research led to the intercultural communication associated with the comic elements in this manhwa.

Penelitian ini mengetengahkan pengidentifikasian unsur-unsur komik yang terdapat pada relief tersebut menggunakan teori komik. Berbagai unsur dalam komik dapat dipelajari dari teori yang ditulis oleh Scott McCloud. Memang tidak semua unsur komik terdapat pada relief itu, khususnya disebabkan oleh medianya. Beberapa unsur yang terpenting di antaranya adalah panel, pertokohan dan transisi antarpanel. Unsur komik lainnya juga dapat digunakan untuk membedah relief Kresnayana, kecuali yang termasuk kata-kata. Sebagai hasilnya, relief Kresnayana dan komik menunjukkan adanya beberapa kesamaan maupun ketidaksamaan dalam unsur-unsurnya. Semua panelnya ternyata merupakan gabungan pecahan-pecahan batu. Kemudian, parit (gutter) dalam relief ini juga unik, yaitu berupa dua pilar yang mengapit panel. Transisi antarpanel dalam relief Kresnayana berpatokan pada cara pradaksina.

Abstract. Comic is one of the popular literary works that combining pictures and languages. It can be a work if it consist of story that using language as the medium. The aims of this study is to explain the formula of the comic by using theories of comic, escapism, and the narration’s structure of an adventure comics, The Life and Times Of Scrooge McDuck created by Don Rosa. To get relevant data, this study is employ one method, namely; library study. In this paper, the writer used theories of comic by Scott McCloud, escapism by Cawelty, and the narration’s structure of Vladimir Propp. The result indicates that in this comic, there is the reality of the idea that the existence of the main character is manifested by the presence of the villains. Comic is a complete books that can teaching the reader which is not only understand the stories, but also the world view inside, it is the good ideology of the existence from the bad side.Keywords: comic, escapism, narration, existence, and the villains.Abstrak. Komik adalah salah satu karya sastra populer yang menggabungkan gambar dan bahasa. Hal ini dapat bekerja jika itu terdiri dari cerita yang menggunakan bahasa sebagai media. Tujuan dari penelitian ini adalah untuk menjelaskan formula komik dengan menggunakan teori komik, melepaskan diri, dan narasi struktur komik petualangan, hidup dan Gober Bebek dibuat oleh Don Rosa. Untuk mendapatkan data yang relevan, studi ini menggunakan satu teknik, yaitu;\ studi perpustakaan. Dalam tulisan ini, penulis menggunakan teori Komik oleh Scott McCloud, eskapisme oleh Cawelty, dan struktur narasi Vladimir Propp. Hasilnya menunjukkan bahwa di komik ini, ada realitas gagasan bahwa keberadaan karakter utama diwujudkan oleh kehadiran penjahat. Komik sebuah bacaan yang berisi, mendidik, dan berbobot, karena melalui komik pembaca tidak hanya memahami ceritanya saja, tetapi realitas ide di baliknya, yakni ideologi baik dari keberadaan si pelaku kejahatan.Kata kunci: komik, eskapisme, narasi, keberadaan, dan para penjahat.

Abstract How does one translate silence onto a silent medium? Printed comic books and graphic novels are generally a non-auditory art form. This has caused them to be traditionally perceived as ‘silent’. This also means that comics artists have come up with some of the most innovative ways of translating sound to a primarily visual medium ‐ bold letters, onomatopoeic words, fading images, etc. Nonetheless, these innovations have often in fact failed to address silence. As an art form where both the blank space and the printed word acquire their own unique visual signification, is comics rather a stubbornly un-silent medium? If so, then how does one depict silence in an un-silent medium? My article addresses these questions by first examining the works of Scott McCloud, Thierry Groensteen and Barbara Postema and their study of sound in comics. I then build on these theoretical frameworks to problematize the conventional correlation of visual signifiers with sound and silence, primarily examining the use of blank space or the lack of words as a default signifier of silence. Ultimately, I will argue that comic books provide a unique transmedial approach to re-analyse our conventional ideas for visual representations of sound.

Since the expansion of Japanese comic books throughout western countries, the so-called “manga style” has get attention from audiences and theorists. But how can we identify such Japaneseness? Trying to fulfill readers` interests, books have been published under the how-to-draw-manga label, usually highlighting the visual composition of characters, from clothes to facial expressions to hairstyle. From the academic perspective, particularities of page layout have been also considered since Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle`s idea of tabularity. Such structuralist perspective is also echoed by contemporary scholars such as Benoît Peeters and Thierry Groensteen. Investigations on what is called the “grammar of mangas” were also proposed by Neil Cohn or Scott McCloud (or at least based on his contributions). But what are they referring to by “manga”? Artists from all around the world translate mangas into transnational experiences. This study proposes a wider understanding of the manga narrative style and its particular aesthetic influence on readers. The study focuses on the Asian philosophies of Tao and Buddhism, identifying how their ideals are articulated to promote reader’s immersion in the narrative. The article investigates the visual representations of the Taoist idea of vacuum and the Zen idea of trivia, which characterize the visual and narrative fluidity of manga – especially those whose stories are based on everyday life.

Barman, Scott A., Laryssa L. McCloud, John D. Catravas, and Ina C. Ehrhart. Measurement of pulmonary blood flow by fractal analysis of flow heterogeneity in isolated canine lungs. J. Appl. Physiol. 81(5): 2039–2045, 1996.—Regional heterogeneity of lung blood flow can be measured by analyzing the relative dispersion (RD) of mass (weight)-flow data. Numerous studies have shown that pulmonary blood flow is fractal in nature, a phenomenon that can be characterized by the fractal dimension and the RD for the smallest realizable volume element (piece size). Although information exists for the applicability of fractal analysis to pulmonary blood flow in whole animal models, little is known in isolated organs. Therefore, the present study was done to determine the effect of blood flow rate on the distribution of pulmonary blood flow in the isolated blood-perfused canine lung lobe by using fractal analysis. Four different radiolabeled microspheres (141Ce,95Nb,85Sr, and51Cr), each 15 μm in diameter, were injected into the pulmonary lobar artery of isolated canine lung lobes ( n = 5) perfused at four different flow rates ( flow 1 = 0.42 ± 0.02 l/min; flow 2 = 1.12 ± 0.07 l/min; flow 3 = 2.25 ± 0.17 l/min; flow 4 = 2.59 ± 0.17 l/min), and the pulmonary blood flow distribution was measured. The results of the present study indicate that under isogravimetric blood flow conditions, all regions of horizontally perfused isolated lung lobes received blood flow that was preferentially distributed to the most distal caudal regions of the lobe. Regional pulmonary blood flow in the isolated perfused canine lobe was heterogeneous and fractal in nature, as measured by the RD. As flow rates increased, fractal dimension values (averaging 1.22 ± 0.08) remained constant, whereas RD decreased, reflecting more homogeneous blood flow distribution. At any given blood flow rate, high-flow areas of the lobe received a proportionally larger amount of regional flow, suggesting that the degree of pulmonary vascular recruitment may also be spatially related.

The short film Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, released in 1906 and directed by J Stuart Blackton (1875–1941), is considered to be one of the earliest examples of cinematic animation. This article aims at examining the film’s influence from another perspective, beyond its pioneering use of film camera: the author argues that Blackton’s film has also laid the foundation for common design principles in subsequent animated productions, particularly in the design of animated characters. The analysis of Blackton’s film aimed at supporting this argument is based on Scott McCloud’s seminal book Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1993) and this article offers a modified method of McCloud’s ‘Vocabulary of Comics’ to demonstrate how Blackton has introduced the basic building-blocks of animated characters’ design that are common to this day: designs that rely on an emotional, universal core upon which culture-specific items are overlaid. Moreover, through appearance and performance of his animated characters, Blackton broke the design process of animated characters into such building blocks, emphasizing their importance.

Given the importance to the role of reading about the development of science then there should be efforts to improve students’ reading ability by using the presence of English comics as a medium is expected to make a positive contribution for students through its nature that makes readers are happy. The child’s interest in the story tells a significant emphasis about the need through the use of comic media for learning. This classroom action research aims to improve students’ reading comprehension at VIII C in MTs Subulussalam Kayuagung through English comic media. This research is a Classroom Action Research which is carried out by following John Elliot's model research procedure which includes planning, action, observation, reflection or evaluation. The research was conducted at MTs Subulussalam Kayuagung from the 2017-2018 which was odd semester of 26 students. The research shows that before being given instruction using english comic media the average score of reading student’s understanding is 62,70 (57,70%) with medium category. After reading comprehension learning using english comic media first cycle the average score of students’ comprehension ability increased to 70 (69.23%) still in medium category and done learning on second cycle of reading comprehension ability of student experience increase of average value and percentage equal to 81,54 (88,46%) with very high category. References Arikunto, S. (2009). Penelitian tindakan kelas. Jakarta: Bumi Aksara. Iskandar. (2012). Penelitian tindakan kelas. Jakarta: Referensi (GP Press Group). Prasetyono, A.E., Amsia, A., & Ekwandari, Y.S. (2015). Pengaruh penggunaan media komik terhadap peningkatan hasil belajar sejarah. PESAGI (Jurnal Pendidikan dan Penelitian Sejarah), 3(6). Puspitorini, R., Prodjosantoso, A.K., Subali, B. & Jumadi. (2014). Penggunaan media komik dalam pembelajaran IPA untuk meningkatkan motivasi dan hasil belajar kognitif dan afektif. Cakrawala Pendidikan, XXXIII(3), 413-420. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.21831/cp.v3i3.2385 Rubin, D. (2011). A practical approach to teach reading. Boston: Allyn dan Bacon. McCloud, S. (2001). Understanding comics. Jakarta: Kepustakaan Populer Gramedia. McCloud, Scout. (2008). Reinventing comics. Jakarta: Kepustakaan Populer Gramedia. Somadayo, Samsu. (2011). Strategi dan teknik pembelajaran membaca. Yogyakarta: Graha Ilmu. Suci, Lestari. (2009). Media komik. Jakarta: Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia. Yunus, Abidin. (2012). Pembelajaran membaca berbasis pendidikan karakter. Bandung: PT. Refika Aditama.

Contemporary computer-animated films by the major American animation studios Pixar, Disney and DreamWorks are often described as evoking (extremely) emotional responses from their ever-growing audiences. Following Murray Smith’s assertion that characters are central to comprehending audiences’ engagement with narratives in Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (1995), this article points to a specific style of characterization as a possible reason for the overwhelming emotional response to and great success of these films, exemplified in contemporary examples including Inside Out (Pete Docter and Ronnie del Carmen, 2015), Big Hero 6 (Don Hall and Chris Williams, 2014) and How to Train Your Dragon (Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, 2010). Drawing on a variety of scholarly work including Stephen Prince’s ‘perceptual realism’, Scott McCloud’s model of ‘amplification through simplification’ and Masahiro Mori’s Uncanny Valley theory, this article will argue how a shared style of character design – defined as a paradoxical combination of lifelikeness and abstraction – plays a significant role in the empathetic potential of these films. This will result in the proposition of a new and reverse phenomenon to Mori’s Uncanny Valley, dubbed the Pixar Peak, where, as opposed to a steep drop, audiences reach a climactic height in empathy levels when presented with this specific type of characterization.

This research aims to finding ascpets of theory in Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud, using the analitical of semiotic research of Roland Barthes, by focusing on issues: 1) Visual narrative in Understanding Comics, 2) Visual language in Understanding Comics, and 3) Visual implications of theory in Understanding Comics for examples; comics book, comics research and journal of comics in 2010s above. The Narrative methodology is used for qualitative-interpretative, with sign analysis and text analysis as an object of research.

Desde que los primeros analistas enfocaron sus microscopios semióticos hacia los cuadritos de historieta, la naturaleza del lenguaje (o sistema) secuencial logró escabullirse de sus mejores esfuerzos para asirlo. Muchos de los que mejor se acercaron al núcleo de la cuestión, no por casualidad, fueron los autores devenidos analistas de su propio medio de expresión. Durante décadas dos libros indispensables permanecían casi como únicos referentes: El Arte Secuencial de Will Eisner y Entendiendo el Cómic de Scott McCloud. Este último, sobre todo, pasó a ser el manual de uso cotidiano para la mayoría de los profesores de dibujo e historieta. Si para la anatomía o el dibujo natural en general estaba Loomis, para la secuenciación estaba Scott McCloud y su relectura ampliada de la teoría iniciada por Will Eisner. Una teoría que encontraba su base en un simple y extendido fenómeno secuencial: en la historieta, el tiempo se traduce en espacio. Los minutos, los segundos, los siglos, las tardes lentas, los viajes grises, todo es convertible en su codificación habitual de cuadritos, centímetros cuadrados, páginas.

Consciente da relação do tempo narrativo com os sujeitos da enunciação, este trabalho visa a examinar os mecanismos do tempo ficcional numa análise comparativa da obra machadiana O Alienista com a sua adaptação em quadrinhos, de Fábio Moon e Gabriel Bá. Esta abordagem do texto ficcional parte de um viés dos estudos da linguagem na tentativa de construir um raciocínio sobre os múltiplos sujeitos na narrativa, além de se embasar nas teorias de Scott McCloud (1995) sobre os aspectos de tempo na leitura de quadrinhos. Este artigo integra a pesquisa Encontro de Gerações: O Tempo Narrativo n'O Alienista (PIBIC/CNPq, 2009-2010).

Tatang Suhenra adalah salah seorang komikus legendaris Indonesia yangterkenal dengan karya komiknya berupa komik silat, komik cerita Punakawan,dan komik religius. Komik-komik karya Tatang Suhenra menjadi benda koleksiyang bernilai tinggi karena dapat terus dikonsumsi saat komik Indonesia sulitbersaing pada periode 1980-an menjadi daya tarik utama yang menarik untukdikaji lebih dalam. Aspek visual story telling komik Tatang Suhenra dikajimenggunakan teori Scott McCloud. Adapun hasil penelitian ini mengerucut pada pemanfaatan konten dan konteks lokal secara kreatif dari target pembacanya sebagai salah satu ciri kekhasan karya Tatang Suhenra selain pemilihan tokoh serta penokohan yang teliti dan konsisten. Hasil penelitian ini dapat digunakan sebagai acuan pembuat komik untuk mengatasi persaingan komik Indonesia dengan komik mancanegara

A proposta deste texto é explorar o cruzamento de experiências visuais surdas e ouvintes a partir de produções de HQs e analisar os recursos utilizados por estes dois trabalhos a fim de produzir sentido. O trabalho terá como referencial de análise a obra de Will Eisner e Scott McCloud e tudo isso será permeado também a partir de uma sustentação acerca de uma cultura surda que é retratada nas histórias de quadrinistas surdos, buscando entender que tipo de discussão tais artistas propõem e qual a importância de se discutir isso hoje em dia. O trabalho permeia tanto a linguagem visual da produção do quadrinho, quanto uma linguagem antropológica/social, buscando apresentar de forma sucinta o que é o sujeito surdo, cultura surda e procurar desmistificar alguns mitos criados a respeito desses sujeitos, trazendo olhares de artistas que são surdos.

Grafične pripovedi se nahajajo na stičišču prikazovanja in pripovedovanja zgodbe, v vsakem primeru pa zgodbo pripovedujejo, torej predstavljajo narativen žanr. Grafično pripovedovanje omogoča zastavljanje temeljnih vprašanj, ki zadevajo na primer temporalni aspekt narativnosti (razumljene kot skupek formalnih in kontekstualnih lastnosti, ki določajo pripoved) in področje fokalizacije. Grafične pripovedi s pripovednim časom upravljajo nekoliko drugače od (zgolj) literarnih besedil, saj občutek časa ustvarjajo z razmerjem med vizualnim in verbalnim. Nadalje poleg (po navadi uokvirjenih) ilustracij vsebujejo tudi tako imenovani »gutter«, »jarek« ali »luknjo«, torej vmesne prazne prostore. Teoretik in stripar Scott McCloud pravi, da je prav ta prostor v grafičnem romanu najkreativnejši; je praznina, ki najbolj buri bralčevo domišljijo, obenem pa tudi prostor, kjer se zgodi iluzija premika prostora in časa. Na primerih nekaj stripov (izpostavljeni avtorji so Art Spiegelman, Joe Sacco in Marjane Satrapi) članek prikaže specifike grafičnega pripovedovanja, ki s sekvenčnostjo podob, montažo kadrov, kompozicijo posameznih strani in drugimi strukturnimi karakteristikami omogočajo grajenje in vzdrževanje zgodbe. Ko govorimo o grafičnih pripovedih, je torej ustrezno govoriti o čezžanrski in čezmedijski naratologiji, zato razprava izpostavi tudi vlogo postklasične naratologije pri interpretaciji in razumevanju tovrstnih zgodb.

Reliefs and comic have a connection in context of research just because of the presence of panel. The Kresnayana Relief of Visnu Temple in Prambanan Yogyakarta is considerably an interesting object of reserach. The relief itself is a story of The God Visnu who reincarnates to be a human named Kresna. Because such relief has a story, the research is set forth about the identification of comic elements that contained in the reliefs using comic theories.Various comic elements could be learned as theories wrote by Scott McCloud. It is not likely all the elements could be found in it though, mainly caused by two different medium. Only couple can become essential such as panels, characters and panel transition. The other elements of comic are also useful for examining the object, except any part of words.As the results, Kresnayana reliefs and comic are indicates some similarities as well as dissimilarities in their elements. A panel is completely joint up from square stone pieces. Also, the gutter is unique, it is shown with two columns that enclose both of the panel sides. The panel transition on the Kresnayana relief is following the standard as the way of pradaksina.

A proposta deste artigo é dupla: em sentido mais amplo, analisar a representação da nova geração, tendo como embasamento teórico os conceitos da trivialidade da essência (Jameson) e do presenteísmo (Maffesoli); como objetivo mais específico, analisar o papel do mouse, do game e da animação no longa de Jorge Furtado Meu tio matou um cara (2004). Serão enfatizados o uso do virtual na construção da “cena do crime”, o desempenho do mouse implícito do protagonista e a estrutura de videogame que perpassa o texto, criando imagens híbridas. Tanto na reconstrução do crime como na seqüência de fotos que provariam a traição da namorada de seu tio, o protagonista, em seu enfoque de adolescente, imagina estar jogando um videogame no computador. Seu mouse parece querer clicar em ícones e abrir janelas a qualquer momento. A representação da interação dos três elementos —mouse, game e animação— retira do contexto o peso conteudístico do tema, que fica reduzido a um exercício de pseudo-detetive, e expõe, em primeiro plano, o universo juvenil, com sua familiaridade em interagir com games. O computador, além de suporte, é elemento essencial na vida da geração “clic-link” e ocupa lugar de destaque como coadjuvante do protagonista. Como referencial teórico, serão usados os conceitos de Vicente Gosciola relacionados aos roteiros nas novas mídias, comentários de Steven Johnson sobre benefícios dos videogames, e as idéias de Scott McCloud quanto à estética do desenho animado e sua relação com os conceitos de verossimilhança, representação e referencialidade, além dos já citados conceitos de Jameson e Maffesoli.

Halfway through the 2006 memoir comic Fun Home, the reader encounters a photograph that the book’s author, Alison Bechdel, found in a box of family snapshots shortly after her father’s death. The picture—“literally the core of the book, the centrefold” (Bechdel qtd. in Chute “Interview” 1006)—of Alison’s teenaged babysitter, Roy, erotically reclining on a bed in only his underwear, is the most tangible and direct evidence of her father’s sexual affairs with teenage boys, more confronting than his own earlier confession. Through this image, and a rich archive of familial texts, Bechdel chronicles her father’s thwarted desires and ambitions, probable suicide, and her own sexual and artistic coming of age.Bruce Bechdel, a married school teacher and part-time funeral director, was also an avid amateur historical restorer and connoisseur of modernist literature. Shortly after Alison came out to her parents at nineteen, Bruce was hit by a truck in what his daughter believes was an act of suicide. In Fun Home, Bechdel reads her family history suspiciously, plumbing family snapshots, letters, and favoured novels, interpreting against the grain, to trace her queer genealogy. Ultimately, she inverts this suspicious and interrogative reading, using the evidence she has gathered in order to read her father’s sexuality positively and embrace her queer and artistic inheritance from him. In The New York Times Magazine, in 2004, Charles McGrath made the suggestion that comics were “the new literary form” (24). Although comics have not yet reached widespread mainstream acceptance as a medium of merit, the burgeoning field of comics scholarship over the last fifteen years, the 2007 adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis into a feature film, and the addition of comics to the Best American series all testify to the widening popularity and status of the form. Memoir comics have established themselves, as Hillary Chute notes, as “the dominant mode of contemporary work” (Graphic 17). Many of these autobiographical works, including Fun Home, recount traumatic histories, employing the medium’s unique capacity to evoke the fractured and repetitive experience of the traumatised through panel structure and use of images. Comics articulate “what wasn’t permitted to be said or imagined, defying the ordinary processes of thought” (Said qtd. in Whitlock 967). The hand-drawn nature of comics emphasises the subjectivity of perception and memory, making it a particularly powerful medium for personal histories. The clear mediation of a history by the artist’s hand complicates truth claims. Comics open up avenues for both suspicious and restorative readings because their form suggests that history is always constructed and therefore not able to be confirmed as “ultimately truthful,” but also that there is no ultimate truth to be unveiled. No narrative is unmediated; a timeline is not more “pure” than a fleshed out narrative text. All narratives exclude information in order to craft a comprehensible series of events. Bechdel’s role as a suspicious reader of her father and of her own history resonates through her role as a historian and her interrogation of the ethical concerns of referential writing.Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity critiques the hermeneutics of suspicion from a queer theory perspective, instead advocating reparative reading as a critical strategy. The hermeneutics of suspicion describes “the well-oiled machine of ideology critique” that has become the primary mode of critical reading over the last thirty or so years, suspiciously interpreting texts to uncover their hidden ideological biases (Felski, Uses 1). Reparative reading, on the other hand, moves away from this paranoid mode, instead valuing pleasure and “positive affects like joy and excitement” (Vincent). Sedgwick does not wholly reject suspicious reading, suggesting that it “represent[s] a way, among other ways, of seeking, finding, and organizing knowledge. Paranoia knows some things well and others poorly” (Touching 129). Felski, paraphrasing Ricoeur, notes that the hermeneutics of suspicion “adopts an adversarial sensibility to probe for concealed, repressed, or disavowed meanings” (“Suspicious” 216). In this fashion, Bechdel employs suspicious strategies to reveal her father’s hidden desires and transgressions that were obscured in the standard version of her family narrative, but ultimately moves away from such techniques to joyfully embrace her inheritance from him. Sedgwick notes that paranoid readings may only reveal that which is already known:While there is plenty of hidden violence that requires exposure there is also, and increasingly, an ethos where forms of violence that are hypervisible from the start may be offered as an exemplary spectacle rather than remain to be unveiled as a scandalous secret. (Touching 139)This is contrary to suspicious reading’s assumption that violence is culturally shunned, hidden, and in need of “unveiling” in contemporary Western culture. It would be too obvious for Bechdel to condemn her father: gay men have been unfairly misrepresented in the American popular imagination for decades, if not longer. Through her reparative reading of him, she rejects this single-minded reduction of people to one negative type. She accepts both her father’s weaknesses and her debts to him. A reading which only sought to publicise Bruce’s homosexual affairs would lack the great depth that Bechdel finds in the slippage between her father’s identity and her own.Bechdel’s embrace of Bruce’s failings as a father, a husband, and an artist, her revisioning of his death as a positive, creative act full of agency, and her characterisation of him as a supportive forerunner, “there to catch [Alison] as [she] leapt,” (Bechdel 232) moves his story away from archetypal narratives of homosexual tragedy. Bechdel’s memoir ends with (and enacts through its virtuoso execution) her own success, and the support of those who came before her. This move mirrors Joseph Litvak’s suggestion that “the importance of ‘mistakes’ in queer reading and writing […] has a lot to do with loosening the traumatic, inevitable-seeming connection between mistakes and humiliation […] Doesn’t reading queer mean learning, among other things, that mistakes can be good rather than bad surprises?” (Sedgwick Touching 146–7).Fun Home is saturated with intertextual references and archival materials that attempt to piece together the memoir’s fractured and hidden histories. The construction of this personal history works by including familial and historical records to register the trauma of the Bechdels’ personal tragedy. The archival texts are meticulously hand-drawn, their time-worn and ragged physicality maintained to emphasise the referentiality of these documents. Bechdel’s use of realistically drawn family photographs, complete with photo corners, suggests a family photograph album, although rather than establishing a censored and idealistic narrative, as most family albums do, the photographs are read and reproduced for their suppressed and destabilising content. Bechdel describes them as “particularly mythic” (Chute “Interview” 1009), and she plunders this symbolic richness to rewrite her family history. The archival documents function as primary texts, which stand in opposition to the deadly secrecy of her childhood home: they are concrete and evidentiary. Bechdel reads her father’s letters and photographs (and their gothic revival house) for sexual and artistic evidence, “read[ing] the text against the grain in order to draw out what it refuses to own up to” (Felski “Suspicious” 23). She interprets his letters’ baroque lyrical flourishes as indications both of his semi-repressed homosexuality and of the artistic sensibility that she would inherit and refine.Suspicion of the entire historical project marks the memoir. Philippe Lejeune describes the “Autobiographical Pact” as “a contract of identity that is sealed by the proper name” of the author (19). Bechdel does not challenge this pact fundamentally—the authoritative narrative voice of her book structures it to be read as historically truthful—but she does challenge and complicate the apparent simplicity of this referential model. Bechdel’s discussion of the referential failings of her childhood diary making—“the troubled gap between word and meaning”—casts a suspicious eye over the rest of the memoir’s historical project (Bechdel 143). She asks how language can adequately articulate experience or refer to the external world in an environment defined by secrets and silence. At the time of her childhood, it cannot—the claim to full disclosure that the memoir ultimately makes is predicated on distance and time. Bechdel simultaneously makes a claim for the historical veracity of her narrative and destabilises our assumptions around the idea of factual and retrospective truth:When I was ten, I was obsessed with making sure my diary entries bore no false witness. But as I aged, hard facts gave way to vagaries of emotion and opinion. False humility, overwrought penmanship, and self-disgust began to cloud my testimony […] until […] the truth is barely perceptible behind a hedge of qualifiers, encryption, and stray punctuation. (Bechdel 169)That which is “unrepresentable” is simultaneously represented and denied. The comics medium itself, with its simultaneous graphic and textual representation, suggests the unreliability of any one means of representation. Of Bechdel’s diaries, Jared Gardner notes, “what develops over the course of her diary […] is an increasing sense that text and image are each alone inadequate to the task, and that some merger of the two is required to tell the story of the truth, and the truth of the story” (“Archives” 3).As the boyishly dressed Alison urges her father, applying scare-quoted “bronzer,” to hurry up, Bechdel narrates, “my father began to seem morally suspect to me long before I knew that he actually had a dark secret” (16). Alison is presented as her father’s binary opposite, “butch to his nelly. Utilitarian to his aesthete,” (15) and, as a teenager, frames his love of art and extravagance as debauched. This clear distinction soon becomes blurred, as Alison and Bruce’s similarities begin to overwhelm their differences. The huge drawn hand shown holding the photograph of Roy, in the memoir’s “centrefold,” more than twice life-size, reproduces the reader’s hand holding the book. We are placed in Bechdel’s, and by extension her father’s, role, as the illicit and transgressive voyeurs of the erotic spectacle of Roy’s body, and as the possessors and consumers of hidden, troubling texts. At this point, Bechdel begins to take her queer reading of this family archive and use it to establish a strong connection between her initially unsympathetic father and herself. Despite his neglect of his children, and his self-involvement, Bechdel claims him as her spiritual and creative father, as well as her biological one. This reparative embrace moves Bruce from the role of criticised outsider in Alison’s world to one of queer predecessor. Bechdel figures herself and her father as doubled aesthetic and erotic observers and appreciators. Ann Cvetkovich suggests that “mimicking her father as witness to the image, Alison is brought closer to him only at the risk of replicating his illicit sexual desires” (118). For Alison, consuming her father’s texts connects her with him in a positive yet troubling way: “My father’s end was my beginning. Or more precisely, […] the end of his lie coincided with the beginning of my truth” (Bechdel 116–17). The final panel of the same chapter depicts Alison’s hands holding drawn photos of herself at twenty-one and Bruce at twenty-two. The snapshots overlap, and Bechdel lists the similarities between the photographs, concluding, “it’s about as close as a translation can get” (120). Through the “vast network of transversals” (102) that is their life together, Alison and Bruce are, paradoxically, twinned “inversions of one another” (98). Sedgwick suggests that “inversion models […] locate gay people—whether biologically or culturally—at the threshold between genders” (Epistemology 88). Bechdel’s focus on Proust’s “antiquated clinical term” both neatly fits her thematic expression of Alison and Bruce’s relationship as doubles (“Not only were we inverts. We were inversions of one another”) and situates them in a space of possibility and liminality (97-98).Bechdel rejects a wholly suspicious approach by maintaining and embracing the aporia in her and her father’s story, an essential element of memory. According to Chute, Fun Home shows “that the form of comics crucially retains the insolvable gaps of family history” (Graphic 175). Rejecting suspicion involves embracing ambiguity and unresolvability. It concedes that there is no one authentic truth to be neatly revealed and resolved. Fun Home’s “spatial and semantic gaps […] express a critical unknowability or undecidability” (Chute Graphic 182). Bechdel allows the gaps in her narrative to remain, refusing to “pretend to know” Bruce’s “erotic truth” (230), an act to which suspicious reading is diametrically opposed. Suspicious reading wishes to close all gaps, to articulate silences and literalise mysteries, and Bechdel’s narrative progressively moves away from this mode. The medium of comics uses words and images together, simultaneously separate and united. Similarly, Alison and Bruce are presented as opposites: butch/sissy, artist/dilettante. Yet the memoir’s conclusion presents Alison and Bruce in a loving, reciprocal relationship. The final page of the book has two frames: one of Bruce’s perspective in the moment before his death, and one showing him contentedly playing with a young Alison in a swimming pool—death contrasted with life. The gaps in the narrative are not closed but embraced. Bechdel’s “tricky reverse narration” (232) suggests a complex mode of reading that allows both Bechdel and the reader to perceive Bruce as a positive forebear. Comics as a medium pay particular visual attention to absence and silence. The gutter, the space between panels, functions in a way that is not quite paralleled by silence in speech and music, and spaces and line breaks in text—after all, there are still blank spaces between words and elements of the image within the comics panel. The gutter is the space where closure occurs, allowing readers to infer causality and often the passing of time (McCloud 5). The gutters in this book echo the many gaps in knowledge and presence that mark the narrative. Fun Home is impelled by absence on a practical level: the absence of the dead parent, the absence of a past that was unspoken of and yet informed every element of Alison’s childhood.Bechdel’s hyper-literate narration steers the reader through the memoir and acknowledges its own aporia. Fun Home “does not seek to preserve the past as it was, as its archival obsession might suggest, but rather to circulate ideas about the past with gaps fully intact” (Chute Graphic 180). Bechdel, while making her own interpretation of her father’s death clear, does not insist on her reading. While Bruce attempted to restore his home into a perfect, hermetically sealed simulacrum of nineteenth-century domestic glamour, Bechdel creates a postmodern text that slips easily between a multiplicity of time periods, opening up the absences, failures, and humiliations of her story. Chute argues:Bruce Bechdel wants the past to be whole; Alison Bechdel makes it free-floating […] She animates the past in a book that is […] a counterarchitecture to the stifling, shame-filled house in which she grew up: she animates and releases its histories, circulating them and giving them life even when they devolve on death. (Graphic 216)Bechdel employs a literary process of detection in the revelation of both of their sexualities. Her archive is constructed like an evidence file; through layered tableaux of letters, novels and photographs, we see how Bruce’s obsessive love of avant-garde literature functions as an emblem of his hidden desire; Alison discovers her sexuality through the memoirs of Colette and the seminal gay pride manifestos of the late 1970s. Watson suggests that the “panels, gutters, and page, as bounded and delimited visual space, allow texturing of the two-dimensional image through collage, counterpoint, the superimposition of multiple media, and self-referential gestures […] Bechdel's rich exploitation of visual possibilities places Fun Home at an autobiographical interface where disparate modes of self-inscription intersect and comment upon one another” (32).Alison’s role as a literary and literal detective of concealed sexualities and of texts is particularly evident in the scene when she realises that she is gay. Wearing a plaid trench coat with the collar turned up like a private eye, she stands in the campus bookshop reading a copy of Word is Out, with a shadowy figure in the background (one whose silhouette resembles her father’s teenaged lover, Roy), and a speech bubble with a single exclamation mark articulating her realisation. While “the classic detective novel […] depends on […] a double plot, telling the story of a crime via the story of its investigation” (Felski “Suspicious” 225), Fun Home tells the story of Alison’s coming out and genesis as an artist through the story of her father’s brief life and thwarted desires. On the memoir’s final page, revisioning the artifactual photograph that begins her final chapter, Bechdel reclaims her father from what a cool reading of the historical record (adultery with adolescents, verbally abusive, emotionally distant) might encourage readers to superficially assume. Cvetkovich articulates the way Fun Home uses:Ordinary experience as an opening onto revisionist histories that avoid the emotional simplifications that can sometimes accompany representations of even the most unassimilable historical traumas […] Bechdel refuses easy distinctions between heroes and perpetrators, but doing so via a figure who represents a highly stigmatised sexuality is a bold move. (125)Rejecting paranoid strategies, Bechdel is less interested in classification and condemnation of her father than she is in her own tangled relation to him. She adopts a reparative strategy by focusing on the strands of joy and identification in her history with her father, rather than simply making a paranoid attack on his character.She occludes the negative possibilities and connotations of her father’s story to end on a largely positive note: “But in the tricky reverse narration that impels our entwined stories, he was there to catch me when I leapt” (232). In the final moment of her text Bechdel moves away from the memoir’s earlier destabilising actions, which forced the reader to regard Bruce with suspicion, as the keeper of destructive secrets and as a menacing presence in the Bechdels’ family life. The final image is of complete trust and support. His death is rendered not as chaotic and violent as it historically was, but calm, controlled, beneficent. Bechdel has commented, “I think it’s part of my father’s brilliance, the fact that his death was so ambiguous […] The idea that he could pull that off. That it was his last great wheeze. I want to believe that he went out triumphantly” (qtd. in Burkeman). The revisioning of Bruce’s death as a suicide and the reverse narration which establishes the accomplished artist and writer Bechdel’s creative and literary debt to him function as a redemption.Bechdel queers her suspicious reading of her family history in order to reparatively reclaim her father’s historical and personal connection with herself. The narrative testifies to Bruce’s failings as a father and husband, and confesses to Alison’s own complicity in her father’s transgressive desires and artistic interest, and to her inability to represent the past authoritatively and with complete accuracy. Bechdel both engages in and ultimately rejects a suspicious interpretation of her family and personal history. As Gardner notes, “only by allowing the past to bleed into history, fact to bleed into fiction, image into text, might we begin to allow our own pain to bleed into the other, and more urgently, the pain of the other to bleed into ourselves” (“Autobiography’s” 23). Suspicion itself is queered in the reparative revisioning of Bruce’s life and death, and in the “tricky reverse narration” (232) of the künstlerroman’s joyful conclusion.ReferencesBechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. New York: Mariner Books, 2007. Burkeman, Oliver. “A life stripped bare.” The Guardian 16 Oct. 2006: G2 16.Cvetkovich, Ann. “Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 36.1/2 (2008): 111–29. Chute, Hillary L. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia UP, 2010. ---. “Interview with Alison Bechdel.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006): 1004–13. Felski, Rita. Uses of Literature. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2008.---. “Suspicious Minds.” Poetics Today 32:3 (2011): 215–34. Gardner, Jared. “Archives, Collectors, and the New Media Work of Comics.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006): 787–806. ---. “Autobiography’s Biography 1972-2007.” Biography 31.1 (2008): 1–26. Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994. McGrath, Charles. “Not Funnies.” New York Times Magazine 11 Jul. 2004: 24–56. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. ---. Touching Feeling. Durham : Duke University Press, 2003. Vincent, J. Keith. “Affect and Reparative Reading.” Honoring Eve. Ed. J. Keith Vincent. Affect and Reparative Reading. Boston University College of Arts and Sciences. October 31 2009. 25 May 2011. ‹http://www.bu.edu/honoringeve/panels/affect-and-reparative-reading/?›.Watson, Julia. “Autographic disclosures and genealogies of desire in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” Biography 31.1 (2008): 27–59. Whitlock, Gillian. “Autographics: The Seeing “I” of the Comics.” Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006): 965–79.

In November 2015 the progressive rock band, Coheed and Cambria, released their latest album and art-book, both titled The Color before the Sun (Color) (2015). This album deviates from their previous six releases by explicitly using a biographical frame for the art-book, the album, and their paratexts. This is a divergence from the band’s concept album approach, a transmedia storyworld, The Amory Wars (TAW) (2002-17), which fictionalised the life experiences of Claudio Sanchez, the band’s lead singer. When scholars discuss transmedia they often refer to fantastic and speculative fictions, such as the Star Wars (1977-2018), Star Trek (1966-2018), Doctor Who (1963-2018) and Marvel Universe (1961-2018) franchises, and TAW fits this framework. However, there is increasing consideration of the impact transmedia reading and writing practices have on storytelling that straddles representations of the “real” world. By making collaborative life-writing explicit, Color encourages readers to resist colonising ontologies. Framing the life-writing within the band’s earlier auto-fiction(s) (TAW), Color destabilises genre divides between fiction and life-writing, and positions readers to critique Sanchez’s narration of his subjectivity. This enables readers to abstract their critique to ontological narratives that have a material impact on their own subjectivities: law, medicine, religion, and economics.The terms subject and identity are often used interchangeably in the study of life-writing. By “subjectivity” I mean the individual’s understanding of their status and role in relation to their community, culture, socio-political context, and the operations of power dynamics therein. In contrast “identity” speaks to the sense of self. While TAW and Color share differing literary conceits—one is a space opera, the other is more explicitly biographical—they both explore Sanchez’s subjectivity and can be imagined as a web of connections between recordings (both audio and video), social media, books (comics, art books, novels and scripts), and performances that contribute to a form of transmedia life-writing. Life-writing is generic term that covers “protean forms of contemporary personal narrative” (Eakin 1). These narratives can be articulated across expressive practices, including interviews, profiles, diaries, social media, prose, poetry and so on. Zachary Leader notes in his introduction to On Life-Writing that “theoreticians and historians of life-writing commonly fuse or meld sub-genres [… and this] blurring of distinctions may help to account for life-writing’s growing acceptance as a field of academic study” (1-2). The growing relationship between life-writing and transmedia is therefore unsurprising.This article ties my research considering the construction of subjectivity through transmedia life-writing, with Emma Hill and Máiréad Nic Craith’s consideration of transmedia storytelling’s political potential (87-109). My intention is to determine how readers might construct their own subjectivity to resist oppressive interpellations. Hill and Nic Craith argue that the “lack of closure” in transmedia storyworlds creates “a greater breadth and depth of interpretation … than a single telling could achieve” (104). They conclude that “this expansive quality has allowed the campaigners to continue their activism in a number of different arenas” (104). I contest their assertion that transmedia lacks closure, and instead contend that closure, or the recognition of meaning, inheres with the reader (McCloud 33) rather than in a universalised meaning attributed to the text: transmedia storytelling therefore arouses political potential in reading communities. It is precisely this feature that enables the “expansive quality” valued in political activism. I therefore focus my discussion on the readers of transmedia life-writing, rather than on its writer(s). I argue that in reading a life or lives across multiple media the reader is exposed to the texts’ self-referential citations, its extra-diegetic reiterations, and its contradictions. The reader is invited to make meaning from these citations, reiterations and contradictions; they are positioned to confront the ways in which space and time shape life-writing and subjectivity. Transmedia life-writing can therefore empower readers to invoke critical reading practices.The reader’s agency offers the potential for resistance and revolution. This agency is invited in Color where readers are asked to straddle the fictional world of TAW and the “real” world. The Unravelling Palette of Dawn (2015) is the literary narrative that parallels this album. The book is written by Chondra Echert, Sanchez’s collaborator and wife, and is an amalgam of personal essay and photo-book. It opens by invoking the space opera that informs The Amory Wars: “Sector.12, Paris, Earth. A man and a woman sit in a café debating their fate” (n.p.). This situates the reader in the fictional world of TAW, but also brings the reader into the mundanity and familiarity of a discussion between two people. The reader is witness to a discussion between intimates that focusses on the question of “where to from here.” The idea of “fate” is either misunderstood or misapplied: fate is predetermined, and undebatable. The reader is therefore positioned to remember the band’s previous “concept,” and juxtapose it against a new “realistic” trajectory: fictional characters might have a fate that is determined by their writer, but does that fate extend to the writer themselves? To what extent is Sanchez and Echert’s auto/biography crafted by writers other than themselves?The opening passage provides a skin for the protagonists of the essay, enabling a fantastical space within which Echert and Sanchez might cloak themselves, as they have done throughout TAW. However, this conceit is peeled away on the second page:This might have been the story you find yourself holding. A Sci-fi tale, shrouded in fiction. The real life details modified. All names changed. Threads neatly tied up at the end and altered for the sake of ego and feelings.But the truth is rarely so well planned. The story isn’t filled with epic action scenes or glossed-over romance. Reality is gritty and mucky and thrown together in the last seconds. It’s painful. It is not beautiful … and so it is. The events that inspired this record are acutely personal. (n.p.)In this passage Echert makes reference to the method of storytelling employed throughout the texts that make up TAW. She lays bare the shroud of fiction that covers the lived realities of her and her husband’s lives. She goes on to note that their lives have been interpreted “to fit the bounds of the concept” (n.p.), that is TAW as a space opera, and that the current album was an opportunity to “pull back the curtain” (n.p.) on this conceit. This narrative is echoed by Sanchez in the documentary component of the project, The Physics of Color (2015). Like Echert, Sanchez locates the narrative’s genesis in Paris, but in the Paris of our own world, where he and Echert finalised the literary component of the band’s previous project, The Afterman (2012). Color, like the previous works, is written as a collaboration, not just between Sanchez and Echert, but also by the other members of the band who contributed to the composition of each track. This collaborative writing is an example of relationality that facilitates a critical space for readers and invites them to consider the ways in which their own subjectivity is constructed.Ivor Goodson and Scherto Gill provide a means of critically engaging with relational reading practices. They position narrative as a tool that can be used to engage in critical self, and social, reflection. Their theory of critical narrative as a form of pedagogy enables readers to shift away from reading Color as auto-fiction and towards reading it as an act of collaborative auto/biography. This transition reflects a shifting imperative from the personal, particularly questions of identity, to the political, to engaging with the web of human relations, in order to explore subjectivity. Given transmedia is generally employed by writers of fantasy and speculative literatures, it can be difficult for readers to negotiate their expectations: transmedia is not just a tool for franchises, but can also be a tool for political resistance.Henry Jenkins initiated the conversation about transmedia reading practices and reality television in his chapters about early seasons of Survivor and American Idol in his book Convergence Culture. He identifies the relationship between viewers and these shows as one that shifts from “real-time interaction toward asynchronous participation” (59): viewers continue their engagement with the shows even when they are not watching a broadcast. Hill and Nic Craith provide a departure from literary and media studies approaches to transmedia by utilising an anthropological approach to understanding storyworlds. They maintain that both media studies and anthropological methodologies “recognize that storytelling is a continually contested act between different communities (whether media communities or social communities), and that the final result is indicative of the collective rather than the individual” (88–89). They argue that this collectivity results from “negotiated meaning” between the text and members of the reading community. This is a recognition of the significance held by readers of life-writing regarding the “biographical contract” (Lejeune 22) resulting from the “rationally motivated inter subjective recognition of norms” (Habermas n.p.). Collectivity is analogous to relationality: the way in which the readers’ subjectivity is impacted upon by their engagement with the storyworld, helixed with the writer(s) of transmedia life-writing having their subjectivity impacted upon by their engagement with reader responses to their developing texts. However, the term “relationality” is used to slightly different effect in both transmedia and life-writing studies. Colin Harvey’s definition of transmedia storytelling as relational emphasises the relationships between different media “with the wider storyworld in question, and by extension the wider culture” (2). This can be juxtaposed with Paul John Eakin’s assertion that life-writing as a genre that requires interaction between the author and their audience: “autobiography of the self but the biography and autobiography of the other” (58). It seems to me that the differing articulations of “relationality” arising from both life-writing and transmedia scholarship rely on, but elide, the relationship between the reader and the storyworld. In both instances it is left to the reader to make meaning from the text, both in terms of understanding the subject(s) represented in relation to their own, and also as the nexus between the transmedia text, the storyworld, and the broader culture. The readers’ own experiences, their memories, are central to this relationality.The song “Colors” (2015), which Echert notes in her essay was the first song to be written for the album, chronicles the anxieties that arose after Sanchez and Echert discovered that their home (which they had been leasing out) had been significantly damaged by their tenants. In the documentary The Physics of Color, both Echert and Sanchez speak about this song as a means for Sanchez to reassert his identity as a musician after an extended period where he struggled with the song-writing process. The song is pared back, the staccato guitar in the introduction echoing a similar theme in the introduction to the song “The Afterman” (2012) which was released on the band’s previous album. This tonal similarity, the plucked electric guitar and the shared rhythm, provides a sense of thoroughness between the songs, inviting the listener to remember the ways in which the music on Color is in conversation with the previous albums. This conversation is significant: it relies on the reader’s experience of their own memory. In his book Fantastic Transmedia, Colin Harvey argues that memories are “the mechanisms by which the ‘storyworld’ was effectively sewn together, helping create a common diegetic space for me—and countless others—to explore” (viii). Both readers’ and creators’ experiences of personal and political time and space in relation to the storyworld challenge traditional understandings of readers’ agency in relation to the storyworld, and this challenge can be abstracted to frame the reader’s agency in relation to other economic, political, and social manifestations of power.In “The Audience” Sanchez sings:This is my audience, forever oneTogether burning starsCut from the same diseaseEver longing what and who we areIn the documentary, Sanchez states that this song is an acknowledgement that he, the band and their audience are “one and the same in [their] oddity, and it’s like … family.” Echert echoes this, referring to the intimate relationships built with fans over the years at conventions, shows and through social media: “they’ve superseded fandom and become a part of this extended family.” Readers come to this song with the memory of TAW: the memory of “burning Star IV,” a line that is included in the titles of two of Coheed’s albums (Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV Vols. 1 (2005) and 2 (2007), and to the Monstar disease that is referenced throughout Second Stage Turbine Blade, both the album (2002) and the comic books (2010). As a depiction of his destabilised identity however, the lyrics can also be read as a poetic commentary on Sanchez’s experiences with renegotiating his subjectivity: his status as an identity that gains its truth through consensus with others, an audience who is “ever longing what and who we are.” In the documentary Sanchez states “I could do the concept thing again with this album, you know, take it and manipulate it and make it this other sort of dimension … but this one … it means so much more to be … I really wanted this to be exposed, I really want this to be my story.” Sanchez imagines that his story, its truth, its sacredness, is contingent on its exposure on being shared with an audience. For Sanchez his subjectivity arises from on his relationality with his audience. This puts the reader at the centre of the storyworld. The assertion of subjectivity arises as a result of community.However, there is an uncertainty that floats in the lacunae between the texts contributing to the Color storyworld. As noted, in the documentary, both Echert and Sanchez speak lovingly of their relationships with Coheed audiences, but Sanchez goes on to acknowledge that “there’s a little bit of darkness in there too, that I don’t know if I want to bring up… I’ll keep that a mystery,” and some of the “The Audience” lyrics hint at a more sinister relationship between the audience and the band:Thieves of our timeWatch as they rape your integrityMarch as the beat suggests.One reader, Hecatonchair, discusses these lyrics in a Reddit post responding to “The Audience”. They write:The lyrics are pretty aggressive, and could easily be read as an attack against either the music industry or the fans. Considering the title and chorus, I think the latter is who it was intended to reach, but both interpretations are valid.This acknowledgement by the poster that there the lyrics are polyvalent speaks to the decisions that readers are positioned to make in responding to the storyworld.This phrase makes explicit the inconsistency between what Sanchez says about the band’s fans, and what he feels. It is left to the reader to account for this inconsistency between the song lyrics and the writers’ assertions. Hecatonchair and the five readers who respond to their post all write that they enjoy the song, regardless of what they read as its aggressive position on the band’s relationship with them as audience members. In identifying as both audience members and readers with different interpretations, the Reddit commentators recognise their identities in intersecting communities, and demonstrate their agency as subjects. Goodson and Gill invoke Charles Taylor’s assertion that one of the defining elements of “identity” is a “defining community,” that is “identity is lived in social and historical particulars, such as the literature, philosophy, religious teaching and great conversations taking place along one’s life’s journeys” (Goodson and Gill 27).Harvey identified readers as central to transmedia practices. In reading a life across multiple media readers assert agency within the storyworld: they choose which texts to engage with, and how and when to engage with them. They must remember, or more specifically re-member, the life or lives with which they are engaging. This re-membering is an evocative metaphor: it could be described as Frankensteinian, the bringing together of texts and media through a reading that is stretched across the narrative, like the creature’s yellow skin. It also invokes older stories of death (the author’s) and resurrection (of the author, by the reader): the murder and dismemberment of Osiris by his brother Set, and Isis, Osiris's wife, who rejoins the fragmented pieces of Osiris, and briefly brings him back.Coheed and Cambria regularly cite musical themes or motifs across their albums, while song lyrics are quoted in the text of comic books and the novel. The readers recognise and weave together these citations with the more explicitly autobiographical writing in Color. Readers are positioned to critique the function of a canonical truth underpinning the storyworld: whose life is being told? Sanchez invokes memory throughout the album by incorporating soundscapes, such as the sounds of a train-line on the song “Island.” Sanchez notes he and his wife would hear these sounds as they took the train from their home in Brooklyn to the island of Manhattan. Sanchez brings his day-to-day experiences to his readers as overlapping but not identical accounts of perspectives. They enable a plurality of truths and destabilise the Western focus on a singular or universal truth of lived experience.When life-writing is constructed transmedially the author must—of necessity—relinquish control over their story’s temporality. This includes both the story’s internal and external temporalities. By internal temporality I am referring to the manner in which time plays out within the story: given that the reader can enter into and engage with the story through a number of media, the responsibility for constructing the story’s timeline lies with the reader; they may therefore choose, or only be able, to engage with the story’s timeline in a haphazard, rather than a chronological, manner. For example, in Sanchez’ previous work, TAW, comic book components of the storyworld were often released years after the albums with which they were paired. Readers can only engage with the timelines as they are published, as they loop back through and between the storyworld’s temporality.The different media—CD, comic, novel, or art-book—often represent different perspectives or experiences within the same or at least within overlapping internal temporalities: significant incidences are narrated between the media. This results in an unstable external temporality, over which the author, again, has no control. The reader may listen to the music before reading the book, or the other way around, but reading the book and listening to the music simultaneously may not be feasible, and may detract from the experience of engaging with each aspect of the storyworld. This brings us back to the importance of memory to readers of transmedia narratives: they must remember in order to, as Harvey says, stitch together a common “diegetic space.” Although the author often relinquishes control to the external temporality of the text, placing the reader in control of the internal temporality of their life-writing destabilises the authority that is often attributed to an auto/biographer. It also makes explicit that transmedia life-writing is an ongoing project. This allows the author(s) to account for “a reflexive process where individuals take the opportunity to evaluate their actions in connection with their intentions and thus ‘write a further part’ of their histories” (Goodson and Gill 33).Goodson and Gill note that “life’s events are never linear and any intention for life to be coherent and progressive in accordance with a ‘plan’ will constantly be interrupted” (30). This is why transmedia offers writers and readers a more authentic means of engaging with life-writing. Its weblike structure enables readers to view subjectivity through a number of lenses: transmedia life-writing narrates a relational subjectivity that resists attempts at delineation. There is still a “continuity” that arises when Sanchez invokes the storyworld’s self-referential citations, reiterations, and contradictions in order to “[define] narratives within a temporal, social and cultural framework” (Goodson and Gill 29), however transmedia life-writing refuses to limit itself, or its readers, to the narratives of space and time that regulate mono-medial life-writing. Instead it positions readers to “unmask the world and then change it” (43).ReferencesArendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1958.Coheed and Cambria. Second Stage Turbine Blade. New York: Equal Vision Records, 2002.———. In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3. 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