‘The Fallow Narratives’ and The Pier: Writing for comics within transmedia storytelling

Storytelling across media presents a variety of concerns for the practitioner in terms of production and consumption, for transmedia storytelling expands a story across a variety of media within some consistent storyworld, often to enhance and integrate the experience of the audience/user/player. This expansion does not necessarily adapt the same story to generate interrelated narratives within a cohesive cosmos – narratives may be perceived and engaged with separately, and yet may also advance a larger consistent story. ‘The Fallow Narratives’ is a transmedia storytelling project currently being developed at the University of South Wales to explore narrative and the transformation of story across media, and examine what creative writing, particularly scriptwriting, may reveal of its production related media. The themes of identity, memory and perception are explored within each story across the project, told through: Fallow (animation), The Pier (comic), Desistance (video game), The Deep Machine (songs), Observance (journal), dell’ Arte (mixed media), Stain (music video) and The Quay (novel). The Pier tells the story of a boy, Casper Fallow, who loses his younger brother in a late night fire at a pier where they had gone to imagine and play out a Punch and Judy show. It is the story of his subsequent healing and harmful journeys after he is taken to a sanatorium, his release, and his years as a Punch and Judy puppet maker and storyteller. Through exploring the development of ‘The Fallow Narratives’ this article will discuss the process of writing for comics while considering a transmedia cosmology, and through examining the creation of The Pier what this may reveal of comics as image and language text.