Transcultural trajectories in 20th century comics

Abstract

The Italian comics scene of the last century offers several examples of works strongly connoted in a transcultural sense, such as the series Gli scorpioni del deserto (1969-1992) and L’uomo della Somalia (1979), in which Hugo Pratt addresses the theme of the relationship of Western man with the cultures that have suffered colonial domination, questioning the "representability" of the Other from his perspective of stateless person,  a perspective that will find sublimation in the figure of the romantic pirate Corto Maltese. Sergio Toppi, another key figure in twentieth-century Italian comics, also tackles the theme of colonialism in works such as Warramunga 1856 and M'Felewzi (1985), stories in which the representation of humanity in all its forms and through all its stories is proposed as the true point of arrival of the author's artistic research.

Starting from the analysis of the work of Pratt and Toppi, the present proposal intends to examine some of the ways in which comics language represents and conveys, at a figurative, compositional and textual level, specific images of the Other and otherness, in an attempt to identify an authentic transcultural trajectory in the twentieth-century history of Italian comics.