Media, Culture, Technology

Category: Essay

Romanticism and Change in Chance the Rapper’s ‘Same Drugs’

When I first listened to Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book, I thought it was a pretty lackluster save for one song. My judgment may have been a little harsh, since I was comparing it to Chance’s previous mixtape Acid Rap (which I’ve  come to realize I’d romanticized and so had downplayed its flaws in my memory) and the two are very different albums born of different circumstances. I love Acid Rap’s consistent tone, I think that’s really what rewards listening to it all the way through and solidifies the album as one concrete thing to me. While the same can’t be said of Coloring Book, it was a major studio release while Acid Rap was just a mixtape, so it was obviously made over a much longer period of time and there was likely a much greater dispersal of artistic control. Chance also had access to new collaborators and so wanted to experiment with new sounds, which is admirable. It would have been disappointing if he tried to replicate Acid Rap, but I still can’t help but missing that unique, consistent mood. When I first listened to “Same Drugs,” I remember thinking that it was “hands down” his best song ever — an honor that, upon reflection, I’d still apply to it. I thought it not only extended the style that I’d come to associate with Chance, but expanded on it, which is strange considering how different it is from every other song he’s made. So why such high praise?

Before continuing, it’s worth considering that question as more than just a rhetorical transition. I do think it’s fairly curious that I like this song so much. It’s definitely somewhat of a departure from the carefree, fast-paced, acid-drenched style that made Acid Rap so memorable. I think my general notion of the idea of what an artist’s “best song” is is that it’s the best example of their trademark style, but this isn’t the case with “Same Drugs,” a slow-paced, sung piano ballad that, despite its title, is among the more sober songs on the album. All that being said, what’s truly incredible is that despite the fact that Chance eschews all of his traditional stylistic elements, the song is inexorably and immediately identifiable as a “Chance the Rapper” song. The fact that Chance took the effort to find the proper style to house this song and execute it well, a style which wound up being a departure from his norm, gives me the impression that the song’s attempt to evoke emotion must be sincere. Chance didn’t make a ballad for the sake of making a ballad, he made this song a ballad because that’s what he needed to do to make it function properly. Anything resulting from that sort of decision making is clearly trying to communicate something and so becomes recognizably genuine and communicates what it tries to more effectively for that genuineness. When art comes from a sincere place, it creates its own positive feedback loop — a phenomenon that I think is beautiful in itself. Essentially, I’m saying that the reason why I think it’s weird that I like the song so much (that it’s such a departure from Chance’s style) is the reason why I like it so much.

So how is this song so different from Chance’s others? Chance the Rapper is, as his name would suggest, a rapper and it is worth noting that “Same Drugs” is entirely sung (that being said, per Chano on “Smoke Again”: “she like when I rap raps, but better when I sing songs”). It’s not that singing is out of his wheelhouse, but rather that he generally sings in only (seemingly skill-confined) short bursts. When Chance is rapping, he has a melodic, potentially booming voice that can articulate clearly at high speeds while still maintaining his cadence and signature raspy style. His singing voice, however, is small, gentle, and sort of timid. His raspiness and playful delivery give his voice an air of fragility —  it feels as if he’s barely maintaining each note he sings and is trying his very hardest to keep from slipping off-key, but still attempts daring feats, reaching far into both extremes of his range, like a tightrope walker who can barely keeps his balance walking down the rope before attempting a front flip, his arms flailing wildly all the while. Beyond the stunt-pilot spectacle this fragility brings, his hesitant timbre also excellently evokes his character. While he may not be a fantastic singer by professional standards, his voice seems to be alive with his intimately-shorn, well-articulating personality, breathing naked life into whatever he sings.

In addition to his prolonged singing, the soft piano music is also uncharacteristic of Chance. The phrase “Chance the Rapper instrumental” has come to evoke horns, low-fi generic drums, and pitched and layered vocals, but the instrumental here creates a wildly different, pared-back mood that still jives well with the smokiness of the rest of the album. But if the resonant low-keys, decay-snipped twig claps, and off-kilter base melody on “All Night” elicit an alcoholic haze, the piano in “Same Drugs,” which is later accompanied by strings and a dreamy vocal distortion, communicates a haze of nostalgic simplicity and childhood innocence.

To return to my contradictory assessment of my enjoyment of “Same Drugs” and phrase it in a non-contradictory way: I think an artist’s best song is the best example of their style. Chance’s style is defined by his his personality. This song is outside his traditional style but has a heartfelt message and so it seems like an effort to communicate a sincere part of himself. Since it’s both so different and sincere, it defines Chance more completely than any of his other songs and so, in a counter-intuitive way, is the best example of Chance’s self-articulating style.

The cover of "Acid Rap"

You may be thinking that my musings about sincerity are all well and good, but why talk about why I like “Same Drugs” now? Coloring Book was released all the way back in the May of 2016, so this reflection isn’t exactly timely. The music video for “Same Drugs” was, however, released this February and got me thinking about the song again (granted, February was five months ago, so that retort doesn’t make the circumstance much less weird. The truth is that I wanted to write something back in February and decided to write it now on a whim). The video features a slightly different version of the song, which has expanded vocals from Eryn Allen Kane, Yebba, John Legend, Francis Starlite and Macie Stewart. Eryn Allen Kane’s vocals now stretch beyond their initial confinement of the choir and stand by themselves alongside Chance’s, transforming the song into a duet. When I first saw the video, which is directed by Jake Schreier, I was thrown by this change, along with the video itself (which I will get to), as they slightly morphed how I perceived the meaning of the song.

The original version of “Same Drugs” feels like a deeply personal solo ballad in which Chance is singing to a former childhood friend. The song utilizes an extended Peter Pan metaphor, likening the way that this childhood friend has grown up and apart from Chance to the way that Wendy grew old while Peter remained the same — the title referring to the fact that they no longer share the same interests, values, or outlooks. The song is sung by Chance from the imagined perspective of this friend, making the song a lamentation on the way he’s all but disappeared in her eyes — as if Wendy held onto Peter’s shadow to remember him by but wound up forgetting what the real him was like. Because this woman has Chance’s “shadow,” he knows she’s thinking of him and it pains him to imagine her memories of him remaining intact but decreasing in significance with each passing day. A part of him, his shadow, belongs to her and because she no longer holds dear what she used to, that part of him is all but worthless.

In the video, the weight of this knowledge is represented literally. As the video opens, Chance sits behind a piano with a giant, freakily glitter-glossed diva muppet — a stand in for Wendy — resting uncomfortably on his shoulder. He sings his way through the opening chorus and verse, glancing over at the muppet with a look of anxious frustration from time to time. Then, all of a sudden, when the second chorus kicks in, the muppet springs up and begins singing, sometimes in unison with Chance, other times trading lines with him, flipping the original lines from the third person to the first (e.g. “she don’t” becomes “I don’t”).

After the second verse, she flops back down on Chance’s shoulder, dormant again. He resumes looking annoyedly over at (and away from) her and, after a couple attempts to shrug her off, stands up, letting her flop down on the ground. That moment, where he let the stupid-looking muppet flop on the ground, is where my interpretation of the video really changed from that of the song.

Chance standing in stars.

I viewed the song as holding up meditation on nostalgia as the solution to the ails of change and responsibility. At first, the video only supported that conclusion, being shot with a very grainy filter and nostalgic palette in a polaroid-esque  aspect ratio, giving it an air of wistful romanticism. In this vein (skipping the world-changing  dropping of the muppet), as Chance walks away from the piano, he sings about not forgetting “the happy thoughts,” the things that allowed the children to fly in Peter Pan and, as later lines confirm, a reference to the memories of their childhood: “the past-tense, past bedtimes / way back then when everything we read was real and everything we said rhymed” (rhyming being both a reference to the cadence of children’s stories and the fact that their outlooks synced up). Chance then encourages her to “stay in the lines,” which, although at first glance seems counter to the carefree nature of childhood, is a concluding reminder to reflect on those happier days they shared (if growing up is taking on responsibility, then what better captures how unencumbered childhood is than the remembered feeling of importance that trying to correctly fill out a coloring book once had). Essentially, the two have become strangers but still hold pieces of each other which have all but died, but some life can be injected back into those pieces by reflecting on the memories of when they fit together (reference to puzzles, not sex joke).

However, “stay in the lines” is also a command to not change. He wants to hold on to the romantic conception of her that he once had and he can’t do that knowing that they no longer connect. The video gives Wendy a voice and makes clear that she also thinks fondly of those times, but is still fundamentally different from Chance (see: the fact that she’s a muppet), which is in line with the initial message of the song: they’ll always be apart, but they’ll still always have their memories of being together. The video changes this interpretation by having Chance leave Wendy behind. Once he drops her, snow starts falling from the ceiling and the lighting changes, creating an image reminiscent of passing stars and a galaxy. Then, Chance leaves the stage with the piano and the now-hidden muppet and the color palette changes, the image becomes sharper, the aspect ratio goes from fullscreen to widescreen, and, as Chance walks out of the studio and into the street outside, we can see that everyone else is a muppet.

Chance walking through the studio.

How fucking existential.

Initially the reveal that everyone else is a muppet struck me as really fucking dumb (oh Chance is saying that he’s the only “real” one in “the game” and everyone else is just a big phony. Look at the rap world Holden Caulfield everybody, I can’t believe that I told people I like you), but when you consider the contextualizing Peter Pan metaphor, it takes on a significance that is actually worthwhile. The passing stars and changing cinematography signify a clear change of state, and I think that it’s showing Chance leaving the Neverland of his art and returning to Earth. This is reinforced by the nostalgic visual reference to the muppet show, the famed behind-the-scenes set of which (the set which childish wonder is built upon) Chance walks through and out onto some dirty LA street.

In this reading, the notion that the song posits, that Wendy has some romantic significance and that the distance between them is tragic, becomes a comforting falsehood that he’s shedding. The fact that everyone else is a muppet doesn’t signify the fact that Chance is the only real person, but that Wendy doesn’t hold any real significance and that, just like everybody else, he’s as isolated from everybody he sees as much as he is from her.

Still, even with this comedown, the final chorus soars even higher than the original, with added vocals from John Legend and others. So, while the message is changed, Chance’s concluding reminder (“Don’t forget the happy thoughts / All you need is happy thoughts”) isn’t undercut. Those memories are still of significance. The difference here is that the Chance of the video has grown up and, unlike the version of him from his memories, realizes that — while it may be romantic to imagine that there’s still something significant about Wendy — he’s not beholden to uphold the romantic conception of her that he held in those memories and that the memories will still be valuable without maintaining that conception It’s no longer tragic to know that she doesn’t hold that conception of him. People change and grow apart and sometimes that means people that were once compatible no longer are. In realizing that connections don’t have to be eternal to be real — that people aren’t continuous entities, but continuously-changing and both self and other-defined — and that he can still cherish the Wendy of his memories without connecting to Wendy as she is now, Chance changes himself. Asking Wendy to “stay in the lines” is no longer an impossible task because he’s not asking Wendy as she exists now, but as she was all those years ago.

The refrain echoes among the crescendoing, dramatic vocalizations as Chance leaves behind the idea of Wendy as a tragic stranger (and with it Neverland), maybe for good. Chance, at the song’s end, is more encumbered by responsibility towards others for having grown up, and yet, freer than ever.

The present belongs to everyone, but our past is ours to keep.

Purple sky

 

‘It’s Always Sunny’ When Max Watches TV

What happens when you get five degenerate friends that own their own dive bar in Philadelphia? You get some raucous and off-putting situations with a tumultuous storm of dark and politically incorrect (but nonetheless hilarious) behavior. Such is the premise of the TV show It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Since the show’s inception in 2005, Sunny has become a major hit for its oxymoronically pitch-black and light tone.

Throughout the years, the show has acquired a pretty large fan base and FXX has recently renewed it for its 13th and 14th seasons. The show has spawned plenty of merchandise, a traveling rendition of one of the episodes, and a consistency to the show’s plot and nature. A big fan of the show, Max Rubinstein (former Dickinson graduate and my partner in crime) allowed me to interview him about his fandom.  For him, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is more than just a source of entertainment; it serves as both a connective tissue for his social relationships and way for him to make new connections.

The show’s consistency is the bedrock of Max’s fandom. Even with its different approach to the typical sitcom, Sunny has been extremely successful and generated a large fan base. Max started watching his sophomore year of high school and quickly zipped through it on Netflix. But he didn’t stop there. He watched the show at least once a day throughout college. He says that now, “I probably watch three episodes a week, but at peak time I was watching three episodes a day, every day.” It makes sense then that he claims he can quote word for word sixty percent of the show’s lines, with some episodes as high as ninety percent. Max loves the show for its “nuanced, fucked-up humor.”

Sunny has been known for drawing attention to taboo topics like abortion, gun control, Naziism, and pedophilia, but instead of coming off as rabble-rousing or mean-spirited, it’s somehow loveable for doing so.

At times it can go further than social awareness and even provide social commentary on these controversial topics. For example, in a recent episode, “The Gang Turns Black”, the gang gets electrocuted during a storm and wakes up in black bodies. The gang then goes about their day and experiences all the different ways that African-Americans are oppressed on a daily basis. In typical Always Sunny style, the episode turns when Charlie, who is being played by a young black actor, gets shot suddenly by the police at the end of the episode. This scene directly addresses police shootings of black children like Tamir Rice and Trayvon Martin, showing that the writers of Sunny pay attention to real world events. The content of the show and attention to real world events and problems, like racism, makes this show extremely intelligent, and the fundamental reason fans like Max love its “nuanced fucked-up” nature.

Even with such dark and political humor, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia maintains a massive following because of the show’s predictable and reliable structure. This consistency allows viewers like Max to feel more deeply connected with his peers while watching the show together. He says, “…it’s just a fun thing to do with friends. It’s a good fall back, because you know everybody’s going to have a good time watching it together.” Like most sitcoms, one can jump around to any episode and be able to fully understand it. The show relies heavily on character tropes, sticky situations, and dark humor, making it easy to watch an episode without much background context.

Not only are the episodes self-contained, but its easy to find new ways to enjoy them, allowing fans to watch the same episodes time and time again. Max and his friends have made a fun drinking game to watch alongside the show. He says, “it helps to be a long time Sunny watcher, because you drink whenever a character does one of their character motifs. Or when there’s a recurring joke in the show, or when another recurring character appears.”

This type of repetition creates memories, which helps create bonds. Max says that nearly all of the friends he makes are avid Sunny watchers, and he’s usually converts the ones that aren’t. As with any show, the content may not be the sole reason why someone is a fan. These connective opportunities with others can also serve as motivation to continue watching a show, as it builds common ground. Communal watchings acts as a sort of space to hang around with friends, create memories, bond over the reliable nature and shared love of Sunny.

There are even instances when Sunny interacts with Max’s life outside of the show, showing that his fandom extends beyond a TV screen. He said, “…yeah, me and my friends were able to quote the show so much, that we could make a Sunny reference to nearly anything in conversation. So we would realize that would be pretty off putting for everyone else. So we made a game that whenever we reference Sunny in front of other people that didn’t watch the show, we would have to drink.” Even in his life outside of TV watching, Sunny began to manifest in his ways of speaking and interacting with his friends and other people. For Max, the show can as a conversational safety net; he’s always able to refer back to the show if there’s ever an awkward moment among his peers.

Max has also put in labor towards his fandom, as he has spent outside time thinking about the show and has dressed up as some of the characters. Max told me that at one point he put hours of thought into compiling an extensive list of his top thirty episodes and then shared it with his friends. This intense meticulousness and care towards the show exemplifies how much the show means to him. He has even dressed up as different characters for Halloween along with his friends. Last year he dressed as the character he most identifies with, Charlie, who shares his “…sense of wonder and adventure, [and] feels love very strongly, which is something that I feel too. And Charlie just does ridiculous things, does weird things, eats weird things, and I like doing weird things.”

However, Max was not the only one; his good friend Nick also dressed as “Fat” Mac that year (in season 7 of the show, Rob McElhenney decided to put on 30 lbs because he thought it would be funny if the character of Mac was fat all of a sudden) and the two proceeded to act out the show throughout the night. In previous years, Max has also dressed as the McPoyle brothers with his good friend Graham. The costumes generated interest among non-Sunny watchers, inviting them to join in on the show’s social sphere by piquing their interest.

Max continues to spend much of his free time interacting and engaging with elements of the show. In small groups with other fans he has even made some of the meals from the show. He says, “I’ve cooked some of the meals that they’ve brought up in the show, like milk steak (when you boil milk and drop a steak in it until it cooks). It wasn’t terrible.” This happens to be Charlie’s favorite meal, an iconic part to his mostly cat-food and gasoline diet. Max and his friends bonded over the ridiculous labor of making this specific meal together. The physical act of making it made it worthwhile despite its gross nature.

Max has even presented his Sunny fandom in situations when other may have no idea about it. To do this, he made Charlie’s beer vest from “The Gang Goes to Hell Part One”. This required creating an elaborate duct tape vest with many different holes and pockets to put beer cans in. Max wore this to a party one time, inciting vehement questioning by those partygoers who were unaware of the show. Max boasted of his knowledge of the show and was proud to explain to anyone who asked (and some who didn’t) what the beer vest meant or did, hoping to gain more viewers and more connections to the show. He fed off of the energy of being a part of something that others might not know about and felt a deep-seated connection to those that did.

There have been times when Max has been rewarded for his devotion to the show. While in Australia, Max went to a Portugal. The Man[1] concert, and had heard through the grapevine that the band was also a fan of the show. He heard reports that the band sometimes played the song, “Dayman”, created by the characters in “The Nightman Cometh”, as a warm up. He said, “As we walked in they were playing it and I thought ‘I’m in a good place’.” Max felt safe and secure once he realized he was in a space where people also shared his same interests.

There was there was even a live version of “The Nightman Cometh” that went on tour with the actual actors. Unfortunately, Max did not get a chance to see the performance, as they are no longer touring. However, the performance can be found on YouTube and Max has watched it many times. He wishes, though, that the actors would go on tour again. These specific presentations of fandom prove to Max that there exists a sense of belonging among Sunny fans, and that others want to connect to something on a deeper level as.

Sunny also was Max’s first introduction to Netflix. The site, a place to continuously binge watch TV, provides all fans of all different shows to engage in fandom. With its limitless nature, a fan can watch hours upon hours of their favorite show, building up one’s fandom little by little. This introduction to Netflix provided Max with other shows like Bob’s Burgers or Breaking Bad, inviting him to engage in other fandoms. Netflix changes the game for fans and TV watching in general, as it can be both be a place to watch your favorite shows on repeat or put on in the background of a social setting. ‘Netflix and chill,’ if you will. The introduction to Netflix brought Max’s fan potential to the surface, allowing him to experience Sunny at all hours of the day, and also served as an outlet to maybe try something new.

The show itself acts an avenue for social belonging for its fans and proves that it can be more than just a source of entertainment. The show has changed the way Max thinks about TV, but also has influenced his mannerisms and speech, how he picks and interacts with his friends, and what he does in his free time. Max’s fandom proves that fandom itself is more than just liking a TV show, artist, or movie; it can be a source for belonging, activity, and social engagement that can bring people closer together to experience both new and old things.

 

[1] This is correct punctuation for the band’s name.

 

Between American Comics and Hollywood

During the summer months, Dickinson College’s campus is largely uninhabited, save for a small collection of staff members, faculty, and students. So when folks who saw me at the college then asked me to explain why I chose to spend my vacation from the academic halls and the library—where I exhausted countless hours studying, writing papers, and snacking on Kashi granola bars and Chobani yogurt cups (I admit that I am among the few who survives without caffeine)—back in those spaces, you might imagine, reader, that I felt motivated to offer some spectacular response. To satisfy most inquiries, saying very plainly “I’m doing research on comic books” was an exciting enough phrase.

In the presence of interrogators who possessed stronger senses of doubt, though, I needed to elaborate in order to show them that research on comics is a real thing; “Greg Steirer, a professor in the English department who taught of few of the classes I have taken, is writing a book with Alisa Perren, a professor at University of Texas at Austin, about the relationships between Hollywood studios and American comic book companies,” I would start.

“What got you interested in that topic?” one questioner asked at some point.

“I haven’t read many comic books and generally enjoy films, but what interests me most is my professor’s approach: he intends to move away from looking at the language, be it words or images, of comics and focus on how they function as products of industry: titles and symbols are trademarks, characters are copyrighted properties, and markets change as printing and film technology becomes more sophisticated,” I typically responded.

“Oh, so you won’t be comparing stories to their adaptations?” another interrogator asked.

“Only if the differences revealed through that kind of comparison affect the legal actions carried out by a company or studio, the money earned by comics artists and directors, producers, etc., adaptations for television, spin-offs, or the promotions and selling of ancillary products like toys, clothing, DVDs, and video games,” I have replied.

“You know, I have not thought about it much before now, but I have noticed a ton of comics-related things around within the last few years. I can see how you could learn a lot using that kind of approach,” the freshly convinced admitted.

Though I experienced several a-ha moments of my own as I was working on my project, many of them were similar to ones I witnessed others having: there existed this shared notion that comic books as well as films and merchandise inspired by comics have been a part of American popular culture for a while, yet the fact that this phenomenon would be examined in academia is generally surprising.

“Where Did You Begin?”

My first task was to familiarize myself with the terms in use within the works that discuss comic books. Effective research addresses the basis of knowledge about a topic or field that is maintained by a particular academic community before covering new ground, by using either traditional methodologies to add information to that basis or by suggesting that different tools be implemented to expand the breadth of the topic. To do this, I looked to two texts—Jean-Paul Gabilliet’s Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books (2013) and Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (2012)—that Professor Steirer assigned to me in order to gain a better sense of the history of comics as a medium and some of the prominent comic book artists who helped keep the art form alive (with some attention to its place within film, television, and other entertainment industries). Gabilliet’s book offers a comprehensive, yet not exhaustive, description of the birth and evolution of comics, highlighting different eras in which comic books were marked as pure entertainment, censored for being detrimental to the lives of American youth, hailed as art, and acknowledged as forums for ideological agendas.

Howe’s book focuses on the story of the founding and growth of Marvel Comics, one of the largest comic book companies to date, describing the artists, writers, corporate heads, organizations, and families involved in the creation of iconic characters, the most popular of whom are superheroes like Spiderman, Iron Man, Elektra, the Fantastic Four, Captain America, and the Incredible Hulk. Using personal interviews, recorded conversations, letters, and hearsay, Howe presents the company’s moments of decline and extreme commercial success during the Golden (late 1930s to the early 1950s), the Silver (late 1950s to around 1970), the Bronze (1970 to 1985), and portions of the Modern Ages (1985 to the present) of American comics. It is during this latter phase of time that comic book companies in the United States begin to integrate with Hollywood studios in order to build franchises around popular characters that inspire the development of ancillary products and allow both industries to thrive.

While I was reading through those books, Professor Steirer also shared with me his essay “The State of Comics Scholarship: Comics Studies and Disciplinarity,” in which argued that there is no established academic community for comics scholars and hence little opportunity for debate about what methodologies are to become standard and what theoretical direction ought to be taken within comics studies. He goes on to say that most of the research produced about comics either presents facts about the medium or puts forth critiques about the language within comics, their implicit ideological pretenses, authorship, the medium’s effect on readers (i.e. fan culture, social studies on children), and the comic book’s place as a commercial entity.

As a result of the prevalence of these kinds of isolated analyses, “comics studies” is often grouped together with traditional academic fields like literary studies, culture and media studies, and American studies rather than treated as its own discipline. Without any formal disciplinarity attributed to itself by comics scholars, research on comics does not have its own institutional locus. The solution to this lack of administrative organization and clarity of objective that Steirer offers redirects scholars’ attention to the fact that comic books were first printed to satisfy one goal: to earn money and continue selling products. Companies like Marvel, DC Comics, Image Comics, and Dark Horse have helped turn comics into a fully-fledged and continuously expanding industry. What is more, the Modern Age of American comics would likely have already ended and comics would largely be obscure by now if most comic book publishers did not combine forces with Hollywood studios such as Warner Bros., Sony, Disney, 20th Century Fox, and Universal Pictures, among others.

Both comic book companies and film studios in the United States now share the more sophisticated goal of mass-producing popular and accessible fare that is franchise-able. Thus, Professor Steirer identifies the industrial approach to the study of comics as the most productive mode of analysis on the subject of comic books because of their relationship to issues like production, marketing, consumption practices, and intellectual property law and because of the success of this approach in film and media studies. He does reference some examples of comics scholarship that explore texts through this lens, but he explains that these few pieces exist in the margins of an already marginalized scholarly space.

“What’s in the ‘doing’? What were you looking for?”

After I had finished reading through the basis of knowledge on comic books and comics studies, I was better equipped to search for information directly relevant to Professor Steirer and Professor Perren’s book. Since industry-oriented scholarship on comic books is not a common approach, the sources of information about deals between publishers and studios, legal battles over the copyrights on a particular character or name, and advertising techniques used to promote comics, movies, and ancillary products is buried, so to speak, in non-scholarly articles, reports, and databases. I was tasked with the job of searching through the digital archives of the trade magazine (a general resource for news targeted toward people working in a particular industry) known as Variety, which publishes articles about issues related to Hollywood. I sifted through roughly a thousand separate pieces using search terms like “Marvel Comics,” “Avengers movies,” “Batman,” and “comics and television” in order to find reports that could give Professors Steirer and Perren a greater sense of how issues within these industries are handled tonally in comparison to legal documents and other online forums that mention comic books, movies inspired by comics, or the individuals involved in the processes that maintain these industries’ activity and influence their success. I compiled these writings into a digital annotated bibliography that can be viewed at any point of the book project’s development. Currently, there are over 300 applicable entries listed and summarized.

“What have you gained from this experience and where do you go next?”

Professor Steirer and Professor Perren’s book is scheduled to be published a few years from now, so the work I completed for them was rather simple compared to the work that is going to need to be done at the later stages of the project. However, Professor Steirer and I have discussed the prospect of our picking up where I left off next year. Aside from the large amount of knowledge I have learned this past summer, I have discovered an interest in research and at the moment have not ruled it out among my post-graduation goals. Also, as a student who now has worked and studied using both techniques typically utilized in literary studies and those that are more unconventional, like looking at the commercial or industrial issues, I have become much more aware of and sensitive to what common words like “book,” “art,” “study,” and “American” can mean.

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