Cohesion in Comics and Graphic Novels: An Empirical Comparative Approach to Transmedia Adaptation in City of Glass

Abstract

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 article, 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 article 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.