Creative, Cultural Crossover Content - The 99 - Fastest Selling Comic in the Muslim World
'Creative cultural-crossover content' is media and entertainment content that not only captures international markets of indigenous and emigrant Southeast Asian, Chinese, Indian, or Middle Eastern audiences, made accessible at home and abroad by the proliferation of world-wide cable and other global media distributors; but also, international media and entertainment content that incorporates and exploits the creative narratives and styles of developing regions and repackages them to an emergent mainstream Western audience that is made up primarily of members of the game generation – i.e., age thirty-five and under.
Unlike their predecessors, these younger electronic media consumers are more likely to digest cross-cultural creative content - for example, Japanese anime – as automatically and un-selfconsciously as they would their own. In fact, for this demographic, international content, is viewed as more 'original' than 'foreign'; because, as authors John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade have pointed out in their study of the effects of the game generation ethos on the culture of business, this birth cohort takes both globalization and the consumption of electronic media and socialization in all its forms automatically. In other words, they look at globalization from the viewpoint of the valley rather than the hill top, and they also view electronic media as an extension of themselves and their own culture - even if that interplay is couched in a verisimilitudinous role-play with their foreign counter-parts.
Here is an example of such a crossover vehicle.
Link to Frontline Program on 'The 99':
http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/rough/2008/01/indonesia_wham.html
Unlike their predecessors, these younger electronic media consumers are more likely to digest cross-cultural creative content - for example, Japanese anime – as automatically and un-selfconsciously as they would their own. In fact, for this demographic, international content, is viewed as more 'original' than 'foreign'; because, as authors John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade have pointed out in their study of the effects of the game generation ethos on the culture of business, this birth cohort takes both globalization and the consumption of electronic media and socialization in all its forms automatically. In other words, they look at globalization from the viewpoint of the valley rather than the hill top, and they also view electronic media as an extension of themselves and their own culture - even if that interplay is couched in a verisimilitudinous role-play with their foreign counter-parts.
Here is an example of such a crossover vehicle.
"Last season, FRONTLINE/World ran a story from the Middle East that introduced viewers to the fastest selling comic book in the Arab world, The 99. The comic features characters with super powers based on the concept of Allah's 99 attributes, including wisdom and generosity, as taught in the Koran. Its creator, Naif al-Mutawa, is a 36-year-old from Kuwait who was educated in the United States and who, as a boy, devoured Marvel comics and the Hardy Boys mysteries."
Link to Frontline Program on 'The 99':
http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/rough/2008/01/indonesia_wham.html
