Liam Burke
Associate Professor Liam Burke is the Cinema and Screen Studies discipline leader at Swinburne University of Technology, where he is also an investigator at the Centre for Transformative Media Technologies. Liam has written and edited a number of books on comic books and cinema including Superhero Movies, Fan Phenomena Batman, and The Comic Book Film Adaptation: Exploring Modern Hollywood’s Leading Genre. Liam is a chief investigator on the Superheroes & Me research project with the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. Liam recently directed the documentary short film @HOME as part of the New Media, Ageing, and Migration research team, which he leads. The film was screened in competition at a number of international film festivals and received national broadcasts on Irish television. Liam regularly contributes to media in Ireland and Australia. Before entering academia, Liam worked for a number of arts organisations including Irish Film and Television Academy. He teaches Screen Studies, Screen Franchising and Innovation, and Graphic Narratives: Comics, Graphic Novels, and Manga.
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Videos by Liam Burke
Broadcast on TG4.
Screened at the St Kilda Film Festival, Boston Irish Film Festival, Melbourne Documentary Film Festival, Sydney Irish Film Festival, Fingal Film Festival, Waterford Film Festival, and more.
Synopsis: Modern Irish history has been marked by emigration, with the Global Financial Crisis prompting another mass departure. Yet, the Irish media was quick to suggest that modern expatriates will not be ‘lost’, when they can so easily be tagged, tweeted, and skyped. This documentary short film focuses on those Irish people who moved to Australia before the availability of new media. Stretching back to the 1940s @HOME provides a loving portrait of those brave emigrants who moved to the other side of the world when contact with Ireland was limited to occasional letters and a phone call once a year.
Papers by Liam Burke
This chapter argues that the comic book adaptation offers a window onto the creative and formal fluidity that marks today’s media industries. To bring this analysis into sharper focus, the key examples will be those texts that close the loop between comics and cinema: comic book adaptations of comic book movies. Drawing on new interviews with comic book adaptation writers and artists such as Dennis O’Neil (Batman), Max Allan Collins (Road to Perdition, Dick Tracy), and David Yardin (Injustice: Gods Among Us), this chapter positions comic book tie-ins as antecedents to today’s transmedia practices.
The chapter considers the various commercial and creative reasons for producing these seemingly redundant transmedia extensions. It provides a taxonomy of comic book adaptations as well as highlighting some of the key considerations in studying comic book adaptations, including: authorship, continuity, and medium specificity. Ultimately, this chapter will demonstrate how comic book adaptations provide a better understanding of why comics, their characters, and their creators form the connective tissue of many modern media conglomerates and their transmedia storyworlds.
Compelled by the box office triumph of Joss Whedon's crossover movie The Avengers (2012) a number of studios are now attempting to apply the transmedia storytelling template set by Marvel to their intellectual property. This chapter unpacks the process of transmedia storytelling, which is finally moving to the centre of mainstream screen production following years of false starts. By focusing on the industry leader, Marvel, the ideal characteristics of a transmedia-ready property will be identified, including: Flexible Continuity, Platform Neutral Storytelling, Collaborative Authorship, Fan/ Non-Fan Balance, Story World Depth, Brand Recognition, and a Conglomerate Structure. Ultimately, this chapter will demonstrate how Marvel Entertainment applied the practices of its publishing arm to its transmedia endeavours, setting the standard for a host of imitators and the future of transmedia storytelling.
Drawing on the transtextual relations Gérard Genette puts forward in Palimpsests, film scholar Robert Stam suggests that film adaptations are “hypertexts derived from preexisting hypotexts that have been transformed by operations of selection, amplification, concretization, and actualization.” He expands this point by suggesting, “diverse prior adaptations can form a larger, cumulative hypotext that is available to the filmmaker who comes relatively ‘late’ in the series.” For instance, when asked on the X-Men DVD commentary whether the 1992 animated series X-Men had influenced his live action adaptation, director Bryan Singer replied, “Tremendously. The animated series [… featured] the characters that had risen through the comic franchise and had become part of a more public lexicon, I wanted to take advantage of that.”
Focusing on industrial and formal relationships between comics, cinema, and animation, this chapter argues that animation is not so much the missing link, but rather the forgotten bridge between the comics that are respected as the source text and the excitement that greets each new transmedia franchise installment.
Books by Liam Burke
Nonetheless, superhero comics regularly feature Irish supporting characters, set adventures in Ireland, or expand their hero’s backstory to include Irish immigrant origins.
However, these comics often perpetuate prejudices that stem, in part, from Victorian era efforts to undermine Irish Home Rule. This chapter will trace the Irish stereotypes that still pervade superhero stories in the hope of unmasking their origins and understanding why they circulate so freely. It will also demonstrate how the recent growth in Ireland’s comic book community is serving as a corrective to wider representations of the Irish in superhero comics.
Broadcast on TG4.
Screened at the St Kilda Film Festival, Boston Irish Film Festival, Melbourne Documentary Film Festival, Sydney Irish Film Festival, Fingal Film Festival, Waterford Film Festival, and more.
Synopsis: Modern Irish history has been marked by emigration, with the Global Financial Crisis prompting another mass departure. Yet, the Irish media was quick to suggest that modern expatriates will not be ‘lost’, when they can so easily be tagged, tweeted, and skyped. This documentary short film focuses on those Irish people who moved to Australia before the availability of new media. Stretching back to the 1940s @HOME provides a loving portrait of those brave emigrants who moved to the other side of the world when contact with Ireland was limited to occasional letters and a phone call once a year.
This chapter argues that the comic book adaptation offers a window onto the creative and formal fluidity that marks today’s media industries. To bring this analysis into sharper focus, the key examples will be those texts that close the loop between comics and cinema: comic book adaptations of comic book movies. Drawing on new interviews with comic book adaptation writers and artists such as Dennis O’Neil (Batman), Max Allan Collins (Road to Perdition, Dick Tracy), and David Yardin (Injustice: Gods Among Us), this chapter positions comic book tie-ins as antecedents to today’s transmedia practices.
The chapter considers the various commercial and creative reasons for producing these seemingly redundant transmedia extensions. It provides a taxonomy of comic book adaptations as well as highlighting some of the key considerations in studying comic book adaptations, including: authorship, continuity, and medium specificity. Ultimately, this chapter will demonstrate how comic book adaptations provide a better understanding of why comics, their characters, and their creators form the connective tissue of many modern media conglomerates and their transmedia storyworlds.
Compelled by the box office triumph of Joss Whedon's crossover movie The Avengers (2012) a number of studios are now attempting to apply the transmedia storytelling template set by Marvel to their intellectual property. This chapter unpacks the process of transmedia storytelling, which is finally moving to the centre of mainstream screen production following years of false starts. By focusing on the industry leader, Marvel, the ideal characteristics of a transmedia-ready property will be identified, including: Flexible Continuity, Platform Neutral Storytelling, Collaborative Authorship, Fan/ Non-Fan Balance, Story World Depth, Brand Recognition, and a Conglomerate Structure. Ultimately, this chapter will demonstrate how Marvel Entertainment applied the practices of its publishing arm to its transmedia endeavours, setting the standard for a host of imitators and the future of transmedia storytelling.
Drawing on the transtextual relations Gérard Genette puts forward in Palimpsests, film scholar Robert Stam suggests that film adaptations are “hypertexts derived from preexisting hypotexts that have been transformed by operations of selection, amplification, concretization, and actualization.” He expands this point by suggesting, “diverse prior adaptations can form a larger, cumulative hypotext that is available to the filmmaker who comes relatively ‘late’ in the series.” For instance, when asked on the X-Men DVD commentary whether the 1992 animated series X-Men had influenced his live action adaptation, director Bryan Singer replied, “Tremendously. The animated series [… featured] the characters that had risen through the comic franchise and had become part of a more public lexicon, I wanted to take advantage of that.”
Focusing on industrial and formal relationships between comics, cinema, and animation, this chapter argues that animation is not so much the missing link, but rather the forgotten bridge between the comics that are respected as the source text and the excitement that greets each new transmedia franchise installment.
Nonetheless, superhero comics regularly feature Irish supporting characters, set adventures in Ireland, or expand their hero’s backstory to include Irish immigrant origins.
However, these comics often perpetuate prejudices that stem, in part, from Victorian era efforts to undermine Irish Home Rule. This chapter will trace the Irish stereotypes that still pervade superhero stories in the hope of unmasking their origins and understanding why they circulate so freely. It will also demonstrate how the recent growth in Ireland’s comic book community is serving as a corrective to wider representations of the Irish in superhero comics.
It is hard to imagine a time when superheroes have been more pervasive in our culture. Today, superheroes are intellectual property jealously guarded by media conglomerates, icons co-opted by grassroots groups as a four-color rebuttal to social inequities, masks people wear to more confidently walk convention floors and city streets, and bulletproof banners that embody regional and national identities. From activism to cosplay, this collection unmasks the symbolic function of superheroes.
It is hard to imagine a time when superheroes have been more pervasive in our culture. Today, superheroes are intellectual property jealously guarded by media conglomerates, icons co-opted by grassroots groups as a four-color rebuttal to social inequities, masks people wear to more confidently walk convention floors and city streets, and bulletproof banners that embody regional and national identities. From activism to cosplay, this collection unmasks the symbolic function of superheroes.
Bringing together superhero scholars from a range of disciplines, alongside key industry figures such as Harley Quinn co-creator Paul Dini, The Superhero Symbol provides fresh perspectives on how characters like Captain America, Iron Man, and Wonder Woman have engaged with media, culture, and politics, to become the “everlasting” symbols to which a young Bruce Wayne once aspired.
Commentators and critics frequently characterise films as having comic book qualities. Although such descriptions are often a barely veiled criticism, the use of this term does suggest that comic book nuances can be discerned in cinematic storytelling. As this chapter will attest, such nuances have blossomed in recent years into a fully-fledged style. Although variants on these conventions might also be identified in other traditions (e.g. theatre, painting, and prose), as described in the previous chapter, comics and cinema share a semiotic overlap. While this unique overlap might facilitate a comparatively easy back-and-forth between the forms it also makes it difficult (arguably impossible) to identify influences that are distinctly comic or cinematic. To negotiate the active relay between the forms, Lee and Buscema’s seminal guide will be used in this chapter to chart how filmmakers learned to adapt comics the Marvel Way.
Through in-depth analysis, industry interviews, and audience research, this book charts the cause-and-effect of this influential trend. It considers the cultural traumas, business demands, and digital possibilities that Hollywood faced at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The industry managed to meet these challenges by exploiting comics and their existing audiences. However, studios were caught off-guard when these comic book fans, empowered by digital media, began to in uence the success of these adaptations. Nonetheless, filmmakers soon developed strategies to take advantage of this intense fanbase, while codifying the trend into a more lucrative genre, the comic book movie, which appealed to an even wider audience. Central to this vibrant trend is a comic aesthetic in which filmmakers utilize digital filmmaking technologies to engage with the language and conventions of comics like never before.
The Comic Book Film Adaptation explores this unique moment in which cinema is stimulated, challenged, and enriched by the once-dismissed medium of comics.
Fan Phenomena: Batman explores the unlikely devotion to the Dark Knight, from his inauspicious beginnings on the comic book page to the cult television series of the 1960s and on to critically-acclaimed films and video games of today. Considering everything from convention cosplay to fan fiction that imagines the Joker as a romantic lead, the essays here acknowledge and celebrate fan responses that go far beyond the scope of the source material. And, the contributors contend, despite occasional dips in popularity, Batman’s sustained presence in popular culture for more than seventy years is thanks in no small part to his fans’ ardor.
Packed with revealing interviews from all corners of the fan spectrum—including Paul Levitz, who rose through the ranks of fan culture to become the president of DC Comics, and Michael Uslan, who has executive produced every Batman adaptation since Tim Burton’s blockbuster in 1989, as well as film reviewers, academics, movie buffs, comic store clerks, and costume-clad convention attendees—this book is sure to be a bestseller in Gotham City, as well as everywhere Bruce Wayne’s alter ego continues to intrigue and inspire.
technologies have intensified migrants’ connections to both old
and new homelands. Yet to be explored, however, is how this
interconnectedness intersects with shifting conceptions of “home”
over the life course. The research presented here helps fill this gap
by drawing on surveys and semi-structured qualitative interviews
conducted with Irish immigrants to Australia, now in their 60s, 70s,
and 80s, who left Ireland prior to the emergence of new media. The
article charts a trajectory across three phases of the migrant life
course: “leaving home,” characterized by feelings of dislocation from
Ireland and an involvement in the local Irish “ethnic village”; “at home,”
characterized by withdrawal from ethnic community involvements
under the pressure of family and work responsibilities; and “going
home,” characterized by a desire to reconnect with origins, both locally
and transnationally. Our findings suggest that age-related social
circumstances and existential concerns have played an important
role in shaping older migrants’ use of new media to stay “connected.”
This article will consider the reasons for the seeming incompatibility between Australia and the superhero. Drawing on a hundred interviews with superhero creators and fans at Melbourne comic book conventions the most frequently cited reasons for Australia’s superhero drought will be organised and analysed under three inter-related headings: National Identity, Cultural Cringe, and Market Differentiation. Although many of the perceived obstacles to Australian superheroes are no longer relevant (and perhaps never were), the respondent interviews demonstrate how they still have potent purchase in Australian cultural life.
This article will also consider how the recent emergence of local superhero writers and artists working for international publishers like Marvel and DC Comics can provide a corrective to outdated depictions of Australia. The analysis will conclude with an examination of how the Australian superhero TV show Cleverman surmounts many of the long-standing hurdles to Australian superheroes through a careful integration of superhero conventions and Indigenous mythology, suggesting a future direction for Australian superheroes.
Using the character of Namor as a case study, this paper charts how the superhero genre is uniquely placed to respond to societal anxieties. The analysis unmasks how the adaptation of Marvel’s perennial foreign invader Namor actively taps into uncertainties in contemporary racial politics in Mexico and Latin America. The paper explores how Namor’s identity as an Indigenous superhero provides an important, but also limited, avenue of representation for millions of Latin Americans and people in the global Latinx diaspora.
narrative conventions. Yet while these taxonomies have remained relatively static in
industrial and academic discourse over the past two decades, the digital age has given rise
to new modes of film distribution and consumption. This article presents preliminary
findings from an audience research project carried out in collaboration with Australian
media company Village Roadshow investigating genre and spectatorship. The findings
suggest that in an era characterised by video-on-demand, screen convergence, and
personalised recommendation systems, the existing categorisation strategies favored by the
film industry and screen studies scholars may no longer align with the practices and
priorities of contemporary audiences.
The article presents findings from a pilot study that examined the discursive
processes that constitute genre as a cultural practice in the digital age through identifying
how respondents classified and described certain films. The research also sought to explore
the extent to which these classification practices aligned with or diverged from existing
genre paradigms. The findings provide an audience-centered understanding of the shifting
landscape of film distribution and consumption, as streaming services such as Netflix
motivate significant transformations in the way films are accessed, understood, and
consumed. Considering the influence of both traditional genre categories and new forms of
categorisation and consumption driven by streaming services, the article demonstrates how
contemporary audiences link films as diverse as Moonlight (Jenkins 2016), Deadpool (Miller
2016), and Psycho (Hitchcock 1960) based on style, narrative structure, and affective
experience, thereby illuminating how audiences conceive of and relate to genre in this
period of industrial flux. This research offers analytical strategies grounded in audience
research aimed at re-evaluating genre in an era of personalised content curation, niche
content categorisation, and on-demand access to films.
Other credits in Dini’s career include Lost, the Star Wars spin offs Ewoks and Clone Wars, as well as Tiny Toon Adventures, Animaniacs, Freakazoid!, Ultimate Spider-Man, DC Comics The Batman Adventures: Mad Love and Superman: Peace on Earth.
His 2016 graphic novel Dark Night: A True Batman Story debuted on the New York Times bestseller list and is a harrowing autobiographical tale of Dini’s courageous struggle to recover from a vicious mugging, and how the figure of Batman helped him to deal with the trauma.
(Tom Brevoort, Joe Kelly, Michael E. Uslan, and Mark Waid) together to continue discussions from the book. Hosted by the academic forum the Comics Arts Conference, the panel, titled The Comic Book Film Adaptation, was held on Friday, July 10.