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While the Joker’s current transmedia persona is overwhelmingly a dark and violent one, David Ray Carter suggests that we move beyond contemporary interpretations and consider the deeper history of the character, particularly his manifestations in television and animated formats. Carter argues that the Joker’s motivations and methods change according to the demands of era and medium, and that if we limit our investigation of the character to the more violent Joker enabled by sequential art and films aimed predominantly at mature audiences, we set aside much of the character’s richness.

This chapter explores the international transmedial phenomenon, The Witcher, which began life as a 1986 Polish short story, ‘Wiedźmin’ (The Witcher) by Andrzej Sapowski, but has become a paradigm of the intercultural communication facilitated by the digital age, including not only translated fiction, but also fan fiction and fan translations, a videogame trilogy and a film. The chapter highlights the new opportunities that digital cultures offer translated literatures, regardless of national origin, and the challenges they present to existing translation studies theory, dominated by the circulation of high literature in book form. It also notes, however, how even internationally co-owned genre franchises, old considerations of national cultural diplomacy, narrative and identity remain.

This chapter focuses on Krokodil's transmediality. Krokodil was always more than just a magazine. As this chapter shows, the magazine was surrounded by various "extensions", ranging from parallel publications to an aircraft, and the examples discussed in this chapter demonstrate that Krokodil editors had significant authority to conceive and explore transmedia extensions, and they were given material resources and assistance where necessary. This insight reveals the roles that publications like Krokodil adopted in the USSR. Rather than simply functioning as mouthpieces for official points of view, they had genuine authorial agency and were allowed a degree of freedom that is not always acknowledged. We may also challenge certain assumptions about the passivity of Soviet readers, and re-imagine Krokodil's readership as active consumers in a participatory culture.

The introduction chapter provides an overview of the key elements of media franchises in the context of ongoing digital technology developments. In particular, the chapter explains the history of media franchising and how technologies like video games and streaming video have encouraged a shift from multimedia to transmedia franchise management. A summary of significant shifts in contemporary media franchising follows, including a lack of mid-budget projects in favor of blockbusters, the replacement of stars with characters, experiments with cinematic universes instead of just one-off “tentpoles,” the role of television within franchise management, the pursuit of global audiences, and the entrance of Silicon Valley technology companies into Hollywood. The chapter concludes with a summary of the main ideas of each essay within the edited collection.

This essay works toward a definition of the media franchise and uses the Alien franchise (1979-Present) to consider how digital technologies have influenced a shift in franchise management from multimedia to transmedia. The Alien franchise illustrates how the transition from multimedia to transmedia has brought new demands, such as stricter continuity among texts, stronger collaboration between licensors and licensees, and regular engagement with fans. The authors argue that Hollywood’s turn from multimedia replication to transmedia expansion has led to conflicts of textual continuity, creative ownership, and public relations within the Alien franchise. The chapter dissects these conflicts through the video game Aliens: Colonial Marines (Sega, 2013) as a case study of media franchise mismanagement.

Bryan Hikari Hartzheim examines how a growing number of top-grossing and popular mobile game titles are extensions of larger media franchises that also stem from other media properties. He posits the licensed mobile game as a flexible, promotional paratext within Japanese video game and anime transmedia franchises such as Dragon Ball and Final Fantasy. As such, his chapter considers the increasingly important role of ancillary, low-budget texts and how they can quickly adapt to changing market conditions to effectively monetize audience interests.

Mel Evans explores the media network surrounding House of Leaves, focusing in particular on the intersection between Danielewski’s novel and his sister Poe’s musical album Haunted, also released in 2000. Evans proposes that the album is another potential entry-point into the multilayered narrative of House of Leaves. Her fresh and original perspective illuminates both novel and album through a reading of their intertextual relationships. She concludes that the ‘effect of the intertext to foreground previously marginalised or unnoticed themes, events, or objects within the novel cannot be underestimated.’

The ongoing interest in Jane Eyre and its various adaptations, appropriations, mash-ups and sequels are indicative of the fact that the story and the main character have loosened themselves from literary forms and have become transmedia phenomena. Taking into consideration the independent web series The Autobiography of Jane Eyre, and the media discussion it generated among online communities, this chapter argues that in contrast to popular screen adaptations of the novel, the web series disentangles the heroine from the romantic plot and re-positions her within a network of relationships that encourage her growth. In this way, the series bypasses gender critiques levelled at Charlotte Brontë’s text and the majority of its mainstream adaptations. The web series’ media format and exploration of authorship enables its viewers to treat it both as an adaptation and a fictional vlog, highlighting the complex ways in which this classic of Victorian literature continues to matter today.

The mid-2010s saw a wave of nonfiction young adult literature published by authors who initially gained fame through YouTube. In addition to the authors’ shared background experiences, these memoirs have another feature in common. Each example of life writing puts forward a consistent narrative regarding the rationale for their existence: increased intimacy. This chapter offers an analysis of YA YouTube memoirs, first identifying the unique features of this subgenre of youth literature and, then, exploring the question of intimacy across print and digital formats. Despite these author’s claims, intimacy in print or digital narratives might be an impossibility; however, analysis of these memoirs, which function as examples of transmedia storytelling, offers a fruitful space to explore the question of what counts as young adult literature and how scholars of YA literature might study this genre as it expands beyond print texts.