‘When introducing a new comic book, why not get fans of your most popular characters to give the issue a look?’ – Kendall Whitehouse

I have always really enjoyed Marvel films, I love the Marvel Universe, and how there are ‘multi-issue story arcs, crossovers, team-ups, reboots, and multiple title tie-ins’ as Whitehouse describes in Media marketing and the evolution of narrative structure.

In Cinematic destiny: Marvel Studios and the trade stories of industrial convergence, Johnson describes how ‘Marvel launched a unique model for cinema production in the age of convergence: an independent company with expertise in a different media industry drove block buster film content’. I think that Marvel lead the way in adaptations, spin-offs, and multi-platform production. Whitehouse states:

‘These maneuvers may seem like typical Hollywood marketing ploys: Team-up the characters from several successful films into one big event movie, build marketing teases into the earlier films, and throw in a crossover character or two. But Hollywood has nothing on the comic book industry, which is a font of marketing techniques based on clever storytelling techniques. Comic books have explored — and exploited — narrative structure like no other medium.’

For example, Agent Carter was simply a character in Captain America, and Marvel managed to create her own franchise, a one-shot short film as well as her own TV series.

I really enjoyed this week’s screening. I have never seen the first Captain America or any of the Agent Carter ABC action adventure series. I think that helped me to view them with an unbiased perspective and take a step back and analyse how well they adapted the character of Agent Carter over these three platforms.

I think that the character does have some disparities across the platforms, and you wouldn’t be able to seamlessly res-insert her into each screen. However I think that is bound to happen in a TV series in order to develop the character effectively.   She is bound to have some discrepancies  between each screen if she is to grow and develop from the start of the series.