The concept of narrative in Turkish comic book cinema and Tarkan movie series

With the invention of the cinematograph by the Lumiere brothers, cinema emerged as a dynamic reflection of life. However, with George Melies' discovery of the power of storytelling, cinema became an art that aims to tell stories to the audience rather than merely imitating life. The impulse to tell stories led cinema to interact with other arts and cinema was recognized as the seventh art. This impulse also led to the emergence of the concept of adaptation. Considering the cross-cultural diffusion of cinema over time, adaptations have fed on different storytelling sources of different countries and retold them. Comic books have also been of interest to cinema because they bring together visual and literary narrative tools. In this direction, in the theoretical part of the study, the main elements of the cinematic narrative, the formal elements that have an impact on the formation and interpretation of the narrative were investigated, and the emergence of genres was examined. In the study, it was aimed to analyze the narrative structure of the Tarkan series, which can be considered as one of the interesting and popular examples of Turkish comic book cinema according to its period, and the comic books they were adapted from, based on Propp's thirty-one functions and the monomyth phases put forward by Campbell and Vogler covering these functions. In the analysis, a mixed narrative analysis method was applied in terms of the functions and the use of function symbols that characterize them within the scope of monomyth phases. The study is limited to five Tarkan films adapted from comic books and the comic books that form the narratives of these films. An attempt was made to evaluate the narratives of these adaptations, which can be a reference to similar examples in Turkish cinema at the present time. In the study, the inferences that constitute the narrative structure of the comic book adaptations are combined with the findings obtained through a systematic analysis of the narrative structure, and a general conclusion is tried to be drawn from all the inferences in the 293-page study.