![]() ![]() Using a simple episodic narrative structure, IA moves readers around the globe as Alice travels to various locations and homes in different national contexts. Inanimate Alice is a digital, online novel that employs strategies of transmedia and game-based storytelling in order to appeal to the “born-digital” generation. Play is represented as subversive of adult authoritarianism and narrative domination, thwarting the co-optation and commodification of play in the cultures of young people. The novels address readers as clever, sophisticated accomplices in the meaning-making process. The content and the formal properties of these texts posit ‘play’ dynamically in relationship to ‘flow’ as a subject of the texts’ critique, but also as an activity occurring in the liminal spaces in and between panels. ![]() The author is interested in the various ways the graphic novel can be read as a ‘leisure genre’ (to borrow a term coined by cultural anthropologist Victor Turner) that creates a dynamic, interactive ecology, encouraging protagonists and readers to participate in a ludic, pediarchic poetics of play. This article explores the ideological work of play as it is represented in three contemporary graphic narratives – Kean Soo’s Jellaby and Jellaby: monster in the city, and Mariko & Jillian Tamaki’s Skim, analyzing the relationship these texts create between urban spaces and the ‘innovative’ spaces of the panel and page. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |