Article:

Origami Unicorn Revisited. ›Transmediales Erzählen‹ und ›transmediales Worldbuilding‹ im THE WALKING DEAD-Franchise

The production, distribution and reception of storyworlds across media developed as an emergent trend among media scholars for quite some time. A promising approach to cope with these phenomena on a theoretical basis seems to be the distinction between transmedia storytelling in a narrow sense as described in Henry Jenkins’ Convergence Culture and the concentration on the implications of constructing a coherent mental image of a storyworld across media, so called transmedia world building. To differentiate between those two transmedial approaches, the text outlines a dialogue between Jenkins and his former teacher, David Bordwell. The insights gained from that discussion will then be transferred to a recent case study—the transmedia franchise of THE WALKING DEAD.