1st Edition
Transmedia Storytelling in East Asia The Age of Digital Media
This book offers a thorough investigation of the recent surge of webtoons and manga/animation as the sources of transmedia storytelling for popular culture, not only in East Asia but in the wider global context.
An international team of experts employ a unique theoretical framework of media convergence supported by transmedia storytelling, alongside historical and textual analyses, to examine the ways in which webtoons and anime become some of the major sources for transmedia storytelling. The book historicizes the evolution of regional popular culture according to the surrounding digital media ecology, driving the change and continuity of the manhwa industry over the past 15 years, and discusses whether cultural products utilizing transmedia storytelling take a major role as the primary local cultural product in the cultural market.
Offering new perspectives on current debates surrounding transmedia storytelling in the cultural industries, this book will be of great interest to scholars and students of media studies, East Asian studies and cultural studies.
1. East Asian Transmedia Storytelling in the Age of Digital Media - Introduction
Dal Yong Jin
Part I. Asian Culture and Transmedia
2. Dynamic texts as hotbeds for transmedia storytelling: a case study on the story universe of The Journey to the West
Barbara Wall
3. The storyteller who crosses boundaries in Korean reality television: transmedia storytelling in New Journey to the West
Ju Oak Kim
4. Snack Culture’s Dream of Big Screen: Korean Webtoon’s Transmedia Storytelling
Dal Yong Jin
5. Sword art everywhere: narrative, characters, and setting in the transmedia extension of the Sword Art Online franchise
Andrew Hillan
Part II. Digital Media and Storytelling
6. Dynamics between agents in the new webtoon ecosystem in Korea: responses to waves of transmedia and Transnationalism
Jane Yeahin Pyo, Minji Jang, and Tae-jin Yoon
7. Do Webtoon-Based TV Dramas Represent Transmedia Storytelling?: Industrial Factors Leading to Webtoon-Based TV Dramas
Ji Hoon Park, Jeehyun Lee, and Yongsuk Lee
8. The Multimedia Life of a Korean Graphic Novel: a case study of Yoon Taeho’s Ikki
Bruce Fulton
9. Media's representation of female soldiers and their femininity: a case study of Korean webtoon Beautiful Gunbari
Taeyoung Kim
Part III. Platform Politics and Media Convergence
10. Managing the media mix: industrial reflexivity in the anime system
Marc Steinberg
11. Yokai monsters at large: Mizuki Shigeru’s manga, transmedia practices, and (lack of) cultural politics
Shige (CJ) Suzuki
12. Transmedia as Environment: Sekai-kei and the Social in Japan’s Neoliberal Convergence
Brett Hack
13. From Media Mix to Platformization: The Transmedia Strategy of IP in One Hundred Thousand Bad Jokes
Jinying Li
Biography
Dal Yong Jin is Distinguished SFU Professor. Jin’s major research interests are on digital platforms and digital games, globalization and media, transnational cultural studies, and the political economy of media and culture. Jin’s books include Korea’s Online Gaming Empire (MIT Press, 2010), New Korean Wave: transnational cultural power in the age of social media (University of Illinois Press, 2016), Smartland Korea: mobile communication, culture and society (University of Michigan Press, 2017), and Globalization and Media in the Digital Platform Age (Routledge, 2019).