This passage by Doug Eyman didn’t really succeed at deepening my understanding of intertextuality. Eyman was focusing on the issues with intertextuality, focusing on the differences between print and digital texts. The section on intertextuality was rather short, but the rest of the article served as a nice refresh Digital texts have an advantage over print text because of the ability to look up certain references to other text.
Comic Book Intertextuality
The way I best understood the concept of intertextuality was through the comic book industry. It is the main feature of the comic book industry. Creative teams (writers, illustrators, etc.) will take an existing character along with major details of their backstory and create a new story arc. So for instance, Thor comics have been coming out since the 60s but things that happened in the 60s are still important to his character today. This degree of intertextuality is what makes comic books so unique. There is history behind the characters in these stories that go back decades. In comic books there is a sense of connectedness because there are characters that will cameo in some issues. When these small cameos do happen they still need to be true to the characters current title.
In 2020 there was a new Thor run written by Donny Cates, eventually interest began declining and he had to conclude his arc. As soon as that comic ended a new run was started, written by Al Ewing. Now Ewing is using the basic idea behind Cates run and build off of it in his own direction. Intertextuality in comics is also what makes it appealing to me because the characters are already created. As the writer you just have to come up with interesting stories for said characters. When I was young, I worked really hard trying to create an original comic book character. I was under the impression that is how you break into the comic book industry. Luckily, I quickly discovered that wasn’t the case at all.
Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash
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