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Comics in Russia: Transmedia Narrative and Publishing Strategies

Mass culture creates genre-and-style phenomena that possess both the illusion of a simplified understanding and a complex aesthetic nature. Comics is a phenomenon reflecting trends in the development of mass culture at the turn of the 21st century. In comics, the plot and genre are secondary (graphic novel, various adaptations and retellings), the aesthetics is ambivalent (playful and serious; secular, amateurish and professional), the text has a complex artistic nature (creolisation, polycodedness, centaurism, transmedia features) and, at the same time, an essential goal for reaching commercial success and facilitated consumption/perception. The article aims to describe and analyse the genre-and-style features of the comic strip as a transmedia phenomenon of mass culture. These features give grounds for assessing the principles and tendencies of the presence of the comics in the domestic book market, in particular, the ways of forming the publishing repertoire. The general trend of the modern study of comics (in addition to analysing specific samples of the genre) is the reflection of visual aesthetics in the artistic structure of its text. It is the basis for the inclusion of this genre into mass literature. The peculiarity of the poetics of the comic book lies in the transmedia and sequenciality means that organise the dramatic narrative and visual plot as equal artistic spaces. In combination with the experience of visual media, the genre, style, and discourse of mass culture acquire attributes of transmedia, marginality, and transfer, i.e. tendencies to the mobility of the borders of the traditional genre-and-style system and going beyond them with the help of several different media (visualisation). They have an impact on the genre-and-style features of the comics, and the features of the multimedia information space built on repetition and convergence—sequels, remakes—are becoming more and more familiar. The intention to replicate recognisable stories readers demand encourages major publishers to rely on comic book remakes, comic book adaptations, comic book sequels. There is an extensive development “in depth and in breadth” of the already familiar successful plot, character, aesthetic discourse. Publishing houses are not interested in expanding the thematic repertoire of the comic book, but they seek to update and deepen the reading experience through the emergence of national genre patterns, the discovery of new authors’ names. This leads to a non-linear dynamics in both book publishing and book selling practices in the comics industry and in the genre. The change in the range of comic books is mainly due to various types of remakes, including plot (plot and style, when the aesthetics of the narrative changes) variants of a well-known story. Thus, publishers are faced with common problems in their marketing strategies: objective, related to the lack of understanding of the genre nature and existence of comics, and specifically publishing—the emergence of special technological operations in the production of comics as a publication.