Iron Man and a Comic Template

I recently watched the new Iron Man movie, efficiently titled 'Iron Man 2', and thought it was pretty enjoyable action romp. What intrigued me was that some of the criticism I had read before seeing it said it wasn't very good, as the plot was too complicated, the film was too 'wordy', etc. Most of these criticisms seemed disingenuous - the critics seemed to like Robert Downey Junior's performance, but deemed the story too 'complex' for an action movie audience. Not surprisingly, it has done very well at the box office, and the story really isn't that complex, it's just that it has a lot of characters, some of whom are minor and are clearly being set up as cross-overs with other productions within the Marvel universe. This is primarily where the criticism of complexity came from; in old world thinking, crossovers equal tacky franchising and are therefore 'bad'.

This of course got me thinking about transmedia. I enjoyed the introduction of these minor characters in Iron Man that may have screen time in their own films or others coming up, and when I got home afterwards I immediately looked up the characters and their back stories. I came across the very useful site SuperHeroDB,  where you can find a biographical history of comic book characters, including which books they have been in and which other characters they have a history with. It's all interlinked, so I had fun clicking through different characters back stories as they related to each other. Comics have a long history of not locking characters into a single narrative. There is a well understood ethos of character and narrative overlap in the comic community, and it happily crosses into other mediums, like tv and film.

When Alex Leavitt asked 'Where Is Our Transmedia Mozart?', he questioned from what discipline the first great transmedia creator would emerge, and bucked against the automatic assumption is would be from film. While a diverse technical understanding is needed in film, and thus it would seem they are suited to create work across a variety of mediums, film is still very much about linear narrative. I think comic authors, with their flexible narratives that cross and overlap but can also be enjoyed individually, and their combination of both textual and visual narrative skill, are more poised to be our transmedia mozarts. The 'classic' transmedia example, The Matrix, was produced by a couple of comic book geeks, and of course comics were an essential part of the canon. Marvel is currently trying to develop it's universe of characters in much the same way as Disney, with an intelligent eye towards franchising and product overlap, and I can only hope that in the process they might produce some of the first truly great transmedia stories.