What have we already named? What do we not yet have a ‘proper name’ for? In English, we tend to rely on ‘thing’ as a placeholder until we’ve come to consensus on a better term–or, at least, until various parties have submitted their respective names for the subject and one or a few have shaken out in regular discourse.
Here, then, maybe the start of that process. What do/should we call those media products that are made to appear within a narrative? Products that, at some level, are still made for us–the real-world audience–yet which don’t directly acknowledge any intended audience but that of the narrative in which they appear? Should we be calling them full-fledged ‘media products’ in the first place, or does their contingency on the larger narrative somehow negate the fact that they were yet produced and can be independently viewed, at least sometimes? For example, see the comic book that appears in the trailer for Logan, a page of which was released via Tumblr, as well as the newscast that serves as the trailer for Stranger Things‘ second season.
Are these ‘inward facing’? ‘Narrative-bound’? ‘Viewer-blind’? None seems entirely accurate for the unusual position of this type, though I’m not yet sure that the two examples cited above are even the same animal themselves. Specifically, the end of the Stranger Things newscast, in which we see only an empty chair, might be the point at which that product specifically stops being for its own narrative realm and starts being only for us.
Suggestions for tagging this phenomenon would be welcome.
So, probably as a result of all the academic work I’m doing in comics and narrative and media, I’ve developed a first episode for what might just be a series of scripts, but might also become anything from a radio play to a YouTube series (a boy can always dream)! The source material isn’t strictly out of copyright, so all due recognition to DC Comics and Columbia Pictures.
o, I randomly wrote a script for an issue of the Batman comic. This is in no way authorized nor endorsed by DC and I have no plans to make any money from it (unless someone at DC reads it and wants to hire me–in which case, screw academia: gimmie that money!).
Dispatches from the Adventure 