Chiao-I Tseng

The effective study of transmedia adaptation requires descriptions that allow us to track how changes in media may correlate with both similarities and differences across medial realisations of a work. To the extent that such description can be made systematic and reliable, it becomes possible to apply a variety of empirical methods for revealing reoccurring patterns of medial influence. In this paper, we set out how a transmedially extended notion of cohesion offers a level of description of precisely this kind. Taking Paul Auster's novel City of Glass (1985) and its adaptation in graphic novel form by Karasik and Mazzuchelli (2004) as an example, the paper offers a cross-media cohesion analysis that demonstrates how the mutually intertwining thematic shifts in the novel and its graphic novel adaptation differ. We argue that this is largely due to the affordances of their respective medium and apply this result to suggest how empirical findings on narrative involvement may be related more firmly to properties of the artifacts analysed. This opens up a path for the design of more focused empirical investigations of how adaptation may impact on readers' processes of narrative perception.

This article argues that non-fictional graphic war narratives are a powerful tool for influencing people’s interest in and attitudes towards the issue of war because they offer an effective combination of affective engagement and cognitive mechanisms that speak to how people interpret fact and fiction.
The article first reviews the recent theoretical and empirical research on factors of visual narratives for narrative impact and for changing people’s attitude, including message authenticity and affective immersion. Through analyzing a selection of Argentine comics about the 1982 Falklands War, produced across three decades, the article explicates how the prominent stylistic and narrative features achieve message trustworthiness and affective engagement drawing on different persuasive strategies. These strategies include the use of widely circulated news photographs to authenticate the narrative, the inclusion of a broadly known fictional war correspondent (with mixed results), as well as the first-person point of view to emotionally engage readers in the war stories.
In synthesis, this article unravels how these narrative mechanisms are combined in graphic war narratives with different persuasive intents in a particularly effective way, namely through the subtle blending of a perceived reality linked to the authentic war materials and typical fictional storytelling devices. At the same time, the article sheds light on the limits of these devices, highlighting as an area for further inquiry a situation where the identified narrative devices effectively undermine the graphic war narrative’s documentary ambition.