Mediascapes journal

Comics and the Invisible

2023-12-30T12:19:49+00:00

In contemporary visual culture, comics offer a curiously contradictory experience that is both ancient and hypermodern. It is a medium that predates film and television, and belongs to the declining circuits of print publishing, yet its market has been steadily expanding for more than two decades. It is anchored in a pre-modern and even archaic communicative practice such as drawing, yet it has been the main reservoir of ideas for major motion picture hits for more than a decade. Comics are experiencing a resurgence in consumption, institutional legitimacy, and industrial success in today's media landscape. Some even refer to it as a Renaissance or a new golden age of the Ninth Art. This is evident in the press and cultural institutions. But scholars face a dilemma: how can a medium with over a century and a half of history change so profoundly as to be “reborn” and find a new, more poignant attunement to the cultural context of an era?

Immersive marginality

2023-12-30T12:26:56+00:00

Among media cultures, invisibility has been more than a recurring narrative topic in comics: it has been one of the underlying forces that have shaped and driven its own cultural development. This paper propose to frame the topic of invisibility in comics both in sociological terms, as social marginality, and in textual terms, as part of comics’ visualization device. From the first point of view, comics has largely evolved during XX century as a subculture, shaped by its social invisibility within the public sphere as both a limit in social capital growth for their stakeholders, but also as a leveraging force to build up a community strongly based on participatory culture. From the second point of view, as a visual medium comics has dealt with the boundaries set by print culture’s visualization devices: the linguistic affordances of the gutter and layout design, but also the specificity of hand-drawn images. In the light of a media studies perspective, the paper will discuss the two-sided dimension of invisibility as a foundational force within comics history, leading to what we can call as the « immersive marginality » of comics culture.

The Color of Paper

2023-12-30T12:34:38+00:00

For uncolored works in the comics medium, ink is paradigmatically black and paper is paradigmatically white, creating conceptually complex relationships for images representing race. When characters are rendered as the negative spaces within lines that frame the interiors of bodies, the actual background color of the page represents skin color. If the actual page is literally white, then that whiteness represents the non-literally white skin of both racially white and nonwhite characters. Whatever its actual color, a page may also be understood as conceptually white: a uniformly blank default background denoting no color. Both page and racial whitenesses are composed of many of the same light-tone colors which are often grouped and conceptualized as a single monolithic metaphorical color treated as an unacknowledged background norm.

Playing with the Invisible

2023-12-30T12:41:51+00:00

The told/untold dialectic is not entirely coincident with the shown/unshown. What is told presupposes (and therefore implies) an enunciator voice (i.e. a narrator); what is shown, only and sometimes, a point of view. What is untold simply is not: it is just an absence. What is unshown, instead, can be blank/white: the presence of an absence. In comics, a blank/white space or field can represent the missing action between one panel and the following one; or it can represent the background that is missing within a panel. In any case, the unshown, exactly like the untold, consists of what is not necessary to show (or tell) either because it is irrelevant, or because it is very easily inferable from what is shown (or told). But the unshown, unlike the untold, can appear before us, making visible the invisibility of what is not shown. In verbal discourse, i.e. in the novel, nothing is actually visible. Everything is mediated by the story made by a narrator who takes all responsibility for truth and point of view. In visual discourse, and particularly in comics, what is seen, and therefore visible, is crucial, but the gaze that makes things visible cannot in turn be seen, only inferred. The word focuses by naming, image by representing. However, while the narrator of a novel, unless proven otherwise, is always one and the same throughout the whole course of the text, the observer of a story in comics, like that of a movie, can change at any shot. Her/his invisibility is not compensated by any convention of sameness. An indeterminate observer is therefore accompanied, in comics, by an absence made visible. Cinema can make absence present by mean of the voice, but it cannot make absence visible. In comics, everything, except the gaze, can be shown, even invisibility.

Tracing the Invisible

2024-01-11T12:33:32+00:00

Turning to Lynda Barry’s distinctive comics which interweave autobiography, fiction, and teaching manuals, this article expands on the different ways in which the invisible is present in Barry’s works, encompassing elements that challenge visual representation and those that constitute the backbone of comics expression. The article unpacks Barry’s incorporation of collage and its constituents of untutored drawing through considering key theories surrounding the trace and the archive. The valorisation of marginalized and ignored image-making practices (such as children’s drawings and untutored drawings) are examined through concepts surrounding animation, possibilities of connecting through drawing and alternative ways of conceptualizing both the making and reception of art.

Spirituality and Comics in Hugo Pratt, Alan Moore, and David B.

2023-12-30T12:52:20+00:00

This article describes the artistic production and intellectual and spiritual life of three of the most important artists in the field of comics and graphic novels: Hugo Pratt, Alan Moore, and David B. These artists share a common interest in esotericism: they have participated in esoteric and alternative spirituality groups, and in their artistic works they reproduce esoteric symbols, narratives, and doctrines. Scholars in religious studies have already described the connections between contemporary art and esotericism, arguing that artists are “spiritual seekers” who represent their spiritual quest. This article goes beyond such a perspective by describing how esotericism has changed in contemporary societies and, in particular, within the frame of comics and graphic novels. Esotericism is generally understood as a “rejected”, “absolute”, and “stigmatised” form of knowledge, characterised by elitism and secrecy. The esotericism of these artists (both in their life and in their artworks) is not “rejected”; on the contrary, it has become mainstream, with best-seller publications and museum exhibitions. Furthermore, it is not “absolute” or “hidden”; rather, it reveals doubt and deconstructs religion and spirituality, sometimes even challenging or mocking them. For these artists, esotericism is a form of “unsettled knowledge”, a never-ending quest for transcendence and a means of learning about the unconscious and humankind. It finds its legitimisation in religious texts, revelations, and religious movements, but mainly in the power of storytelling. This article argues that the blurring between reality and narration does not imply a process of disenchantment, nor a “hyper-religion”, instead representing another form of spirituality in contemporary societies. Finally, this “unsettled knowledge” is also unsettling for the reader, who is challenged by these artworks and finds in them wondrous, dazzling, and dreamlike experiences.

Making visible the invisible

2023-12-30T12:56:30+00:00

Ghosts, spirits and ancestors have a central place in the Japanese spiritual imagination and are central to its contemporary popular culture. In visual narratives such as manga, both their way of depiction and their agency are the result of creativity, continuously in the making, at the intersection of the artist’s imagination, the work of cultural and linguistic translation and the representation’s legibility to the audience. This article delves into the representations of religious content in chosen manga, with a focus on image, text, and panel/frame composition.

Giving Up the Artistic Aspect

2023-12-30T13:00:44+00:00

Leben? Oder Theater? by Charlotte Salomon, Krankzinnig Verpleging by K. F. Drenthe and Historia de Garabato y Florazul y de sus amigos by Eleuterio Fernández Huidobro have long been ignored within the comics fields but were also created in the loneliness of isolation. Their invisibility is therefore two-fold. The present essay study them from this double perspective and analyse the tension between these two invisibilities. To this end, they will be considered through the concept of ‘comicity’ that Colin Beineke has forged and through what Jean-Christophe Menu has described as the “hors-champ de la bande dessinée.” In doing so, the paper aims to question the reason of the fundamental choice made by the creators from outside the comics field to testify the isolation experience through a story in images. It will study their creation context and the possible influences within and without the comics field. The analyse will then show how their comicitous features are congruent with the urgent need of the authors to express oneself. It will also study the link between the conditions under which these works were made and their characteristics in terms of topics, graphic styles and narrative structures with the aim to establish what a poetics of comics made in extreme conditions of confinement could be.

How to Make the Invisible Visible?

2024-01-11T14:44:19+00:00

This study aims to analyze the conceptual and aesthetic strategies of three cutting-edge works employing comics to give form to the invisibility of trauma in 21st-century history and culture: In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) by North American cartoonist Art Spiegelman on the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States; Une éternité à Tanger (2004) by the African illustrator Faustin Titi and African journalist Eyoum Ngangué on the overlooked tragedy of immigration from Africa to Europe; and Astrodoubt and The Quarantine Chronicles (2020-ongoing) by the Italian artist Luca Buvoli on the Covid-19 pandemic which broke out in early 2020. These works share the impulse to visualize the invisible and narrate what resists narrative articulation, and raise awareness. They encapsulate what can be described as the “daring of imagination” in the face of trauma. The shadow silhouette of two towers no longer standing, New York’s Twin Towers, is the key image with which Spiegelman’s book opens: the presence of an absence. Blending the personal and the political as it addresses the trauma of the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York, the book comprises ten strips on memory and loss, and includes references to Spiegelman’s own Maus book on the Holocaust, as well as reprints of turn-of-the-20th-century comic strips. Published the same year as Spiegelman’s work, the comic book Une éternité à Tanger is about the trauma of displacement. It depicts the failed crossing of a young African boy, Gawa, from Tangiers to Europe seeking a brighter future. Leaving his native West African city, Gawa hopes to escape the turmoil of his home country but, following a journey fraught with dangers and betrayals, he is stranded in Tangiers, just in sight of his final goal. There he begins to tell his story, emblematic of thousands of immigrants. Narrating from an African perspective the story of the many invisibles like Gawa, Titi and Ngangué offer an intimate account of one of the great sociopolitical tragedies of our time. Since spring 2020, Buvoli has created a series of tragicomic visual narratives, presented on Instagram, where the mediums of comics, painting, and the digital blend. Their protagonist is the astronaut Astrodoubt, an individual of unspecified gender, race, and age, grounded by the pandemic. This study wishes to analyze how Buvoli’s work explores the expressive and formal possibilities of the ninth art and sequential narratives in the context of a multi-media and multi-disciplinary artistic inquiry on vulnerability, trauma, time and space, from the cosmos to life on Earth. In the analysis of these three projects, the notion of empathy will be addressed, investigating the works’ ability to mobilize conscience.Challenging the boundaries of visual and narrative dimensions in contemporary culture, these works of comics offer a rich material for reflecting on the ways in which the medium affords groundbreaking explorations of the invisible, time, memory and space with a great impact on urgent existential, social, and cultural issues of our time.

Lived and abandoned spaces

2023-12-30T13:11:10+00:00

The paper aims to propose a close reading of three non-serial comics, published in Italy after 2019, with a focus on the representation of spaces and the specific invisibilities they convey and communicate. The texts selected for the analysis are Malibu by Eliana Albertini, Padovaland by Miguel Vila, and 24/7 by Nova, as all three texts tell a story that takes place in a marginal environment such as the Italian province.

The paper will begin by defining the theoretical framework of reference, based on the geocritical perspective to literary texts (Tanca, Peterle) and the notion of hauntology proposed by Jacques Derrida and reworked by Mark Fisher. The analysis will begin by considering some general aspects of the representation of the province in the three comics, identifying the main features of that environment considered as a space-time.

The paper will then proceed to a comparison between commercial space and abandoned space: the ways in which these are represented will be analyzed, emphasizing the presences-absences that haunt the spaces, according to the hauntological perspective. These two typologies were chosen because they are exemplary, both within history and in the imaginary: non-place the former (Augé) and characterized by a system of rules, heterotopia the latter (Foucault), a place with a history and devoid of a regulating authority.

From the analysis it will be possible to define some of their peculiar characteristics: the commercial space will emerge as an environment that seeks to impose a precise temporality that is always the same; on the other hand, the abandoned place will be opposite but still in a dialectical relationship with the former, as it is unregulated and capable of hosting a temporality different from that of the rest of the provincial environment. These presences will be related to the question of visibility: the commercial space will emerge as overseer, endowed with a gaze, while the abandoned place is itself invisibilized and thus capable of hiding those who pass through it from the gaze of the province. This analysis finds its ideal field of study in the comics medium for several reasons: the invisible is an integral part of the grammar of comics (McCloud, Rey) and by its very nature it is forced to carefully select what it includes in its spaces (panels and pages) (Barbieri) leaving ample space for what it excludes, which remains invisible but nonetheless present; on the other hand, comics, as a visual medium, represent the story in a space, more or less mimetic with respect to what we call reality. This characteristic allows us to relate the representations, to map places both physical and belonging to the imaginary (Peterle) and to propose an analysis that is also a comparison of the different forms of invisibility related to the places of our imaginary, lived and visible, abandoned and invisible, and the possibilities that comics offer to tell them.

Dancing with the (un)seen

2023-12-30T13:14:17+00:00

Since the 1990s, international migration has become one of the most pressing socio-political issues in Italy. Subsequently, the topic of undocumented immigration has gained increased visibility in Italian society, making the infamous images of incoming masses of migrants ever more frequent in the mainstream media. At the same time, since the turn of the new millennium and thanks to the enhanced diffusion of the graphic novel format, significant changes also occurred in the Italian comics scene at the start of the 21^st century. The fumetto di realtà [non-fiction comics] saw a consistent rise in popularity, exemplified by the proliferation of autobiographical comics and graphic reportages focusing attention on both personal experiences and socio-political events. Comics and graphic novels have started addressing the topical events of the present, including the phenomenon of immigration towards Italy from the Mediterranean basin. This study aims at exploring the peculiarities of graphic narratives in portraying experiences of forced migration, by paying particular attention to the specific framing strategies of the medium and the political affordances therein. Through the close reading of the wordless graphic novel Mediterraneo (2018), the present contribution analyzes how the inherent problematization of notions of presence and absence in comics' spatial and visual grammar can constitute a call for the active participation of viewers in the narrative, potentially mobilizing the Rancièrian formulation of spectators’ emancipation that eschews the long-standing association of viewing with inertia.

On the externalities of news platformization

2023-12-30T13:17:36+00:00

The aim of the article is to assess the debate about news platformizations, by means of a wide-scale bibliographical review. Scientific literature has been organized along two axes: the marked or unmarked definition of news platformization; and the strong or weak understanding of its externalities. By weak definition, we mean all cases in which platform and platformization are used as being synonyms of other categories: namely, social media, websites, digital services; or digitization, remediation, and mediatization. By strong definition, we rather refer to the analyses premised on the specialist literature about platformization, and making space for more peculiar concepts such as, for instance, externalities or multi-sided markets. Externalities can be defined as weak or strong, then, based on whether or not the effects of the process seriously modify the economic, social, political or cultural assets of the information society. For the sake of simplicity, we will group the scientific clusters in the following order: weak definition and weak externalities effects; weak definition and strong externalities effects; strong definition and weak externalities effects; strong definition and strong externalities effects. The positive/negative effects dyad will be considered too: though it has not been used as a pivotal variable for the drawing of the quadrants, as most cases would fall in the middle of the continuum, and several authors take an uncertain position.

Animal care e nuovi media

2023-12-30T13:21:45+00:00

Gli animali domestici hanno avuto, e continuano ad avere, un ruolo sempre più importante nelle nostre vite, e la comunicazione intorno al settore della cura e del loro benessere è sempre più variegata, ricca, pervasiva. A partire da una piccola rassegna della letteratura volta a mostrare varie tendenze di ricerca, il presente contributo punta a esplorare diversi significati del fenomeno all’interno del contesto italiano, affrontandolo secondo una prospettiva mixed methods per illuminarne alcune principali dimensioni e prospettive. Sono stati realizzati dei focus group con petlovers ed è stato somministrato un questionario online agli utenti di una piattaforma di e-commerce dedicata agli animali domestici. È stata inoltre realizzata un’etnografia digitale per esplorare i contenuti sviluppati sulla rete, in particolare all’interno di community online e sui profili di influencer animali. Lo studio esplorativo mette in luce alcune principali polarizzazioni dei discorsi online e varie possibili frontiere di ricerca per il settore della cura degli animali e la sua comunicazione.

Onlife e “salti di specie” nelle nuove ecologie abitative della salute digitale

2023-12-30T13:25:24+00:00

The article explores the effects of digital media on care and health in a new living condition, the so-called onlife. Social networks, applications, digital platforms, body sensors, artificial intelligence, big data, and digital therapies are now generating new ecologies of care based on shared information co-produced by human and non-human agencies. These new ecologies of care are associated to a cultural spillover into networked, data-driven and trans-organic ways of experiencing illness and disease as well as conceiving health. The reshaping of the traditional care-path that was once featured exclusively within the doctor-patient monad relationship and within the dominion of the hospital/ambulatory setting, but now transformed in favor of a human and non-human ecosystem (social networks, big data, wearables, platforms), is an example of the effects. In social sciences, digital health has been presented as a paradigmatic turn from mechanical medicine into informational medicine and into a new social logic, which “all connect” and require further investigation.

The paper will examine social and medical digital health literature and will present three narratives on the subject: a) associated to a creative destruction of the traditional rituals of care; b) involved in a new data-driven way of considering illness and disease; c) associated to co-producing information and data, which it has been called info and trans-organic care. A comprehensive examination of info and trans-organic care has been carried out in the case of a social network, the Ros1ders. The case has been expounded as a new conformation of social action, no longer a prerogative of the human subject, and no longer presented as a transitive action, which is an externally oriented action. Rather, it is important because it takes place within a web of human and non-human networks (information, data, platforms), mostly as a trans-organic and connective process of care. Digital media is involved in the co-creation of value in the health field, allowing us to move past old dualisms, such as virtual/real, human/artificial, culture/nature, thereby turning toward a new, symbiotic idea of health and a “more than human” social condition.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of social media content, according to young people

2023-12-30T13:28:57+00:00

The cultural industries have been greatly affected by the emergence of online user-generated content, often produced by non-professionals. A large amount of literature has been produced in the last two decades on the positive or negative role of such Web 2.0 production. The aim of this paper is to shed light on a "user-generated critique" of online cultural production by providing a qualitative analysis based on 225 young people's evaluations of Web 2.0 content. According to such a sample, there are several good and bad aspects of UGC, therefore there is also a "grey zone" of digital productions, such as content that is liked "despite" being considered awful.The paper aims to explore such positive, negative and grey dimensions of UGC and to stimulate new questions about the cultural appropriation of Web 2.0 content by audiences.