Making 'Eye Contact': Visualising the Magnus Archives in Fan Art

Romancing the Gothic is an independent online education project run by Dr Sam Hirst which offers a range of classes, courses and groups

Romancing the Gothic

Making 'Eye Contact': Visualising the Magnus Archives in Fan Art with Maria Juko

If you are able to, please support the speaker with a donation.The Magnus Archives, a horror fiction podcast, that ran from 2018 to spring 2021 became a sleeper hit among podcast listeners. In The Magnus Archives, newly employed Jonathan Sims records himself reading out transcripts from the archives – strange stories full of hauntings and inexplicable events. At first these don’t seem intertwined, but the listener and John slowly realise that they have become part of a more intricate and elaborate narrative. His co-workers and John himself have to gauge whom to trust and how the recordings work together. The eerie feeling is not just engendered via the uncanny stories that John reads out and the happenings around him but through the analogue medium of the recording device, featuring atmospheric sounds of the tape running in the background. Most importantly, the podcast’s reliance on a single sense, auditory perception, heightens the sensation of haunted-ness. Fan art has taken single episodes and overarching storylines and given a face to the characters and creatures of the podcast. These adaptations often eschew the actual audio recording and pair the visual artistry with alternative musical numbers. Most importantly, the artists create and transfer their own vision of the protagonists, owing to the lack of visuals, and cast people of colour, characters in culturally appropriate attire (hijab), as well as exploring the characters’ sexual identities beyond the established lore. All these revisions work towards an argument that stresses the transmedial nature of podcasts that allows for a transfer to other media, such as videos on YouTube. An emerging genre, considering podcasts through the lens of adaptation studies engenders discourse on the (erasure) of genre boundaries and the possibilities for diversity and inclusion in adaptation processes. Biography: Maria Juko completed her B.A. and M.Ed. in English and Biology for Secondary Education with a focus on Victorian Literature at the University of Hamburg. She currently holds a scholarship by the university where she is in her final stage of writing her PhD on female self-reliance in late 18th to mid-19th-century novels. She is interested in pursuing research in the field of adaptations studies and graphic novels afterwards.

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Making 'Eye Contact': Visualising the Magnus Archives in Fan Art

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Making 'Eye Contact': Visualising the Magnus Archives in Fan Art

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