Comics and Graphic Novels

Resumen: Este texto revisa las construcciones en torno al ideal del amor romántico en tanto que fórmula narrativa consumida en los productos culturales centrándose en un medio escasamente atendido en los Estudios Visuales como es el cómic. Para ello, atendemos a la doble naturaleza del relato en tanto que unión del contenido (historia) y la forma (discurso) tradicional en el ámbito disciplinar de la narrativa audiovisual. En este sentido, utilizaremos la revisión de textos críticos para definir tanto el ideal romántico en el que opera-mos así como el uso de imágenes visuales empleadas planteando, aun tentativamente, un canon narrativo. A través del análisis crítico de la obra de El príncipe y la modista (The Prince and the Dressmaker) (2018) de Jen Wang exploraremos la aplicación o subversión de este canon romántico para, en último término, concretar estos aspectos y que puedan servir como modelo pedagógico de nuevos roles y construcciones en torno al amor romántico y los roles de género asignados en este tipo de relato. De este modo, la obra de Wang innova en la representación habitual de los protagonistas y sus roles a pesar de mantener algunos esquemas amoro-sos clásicos.

Abstract: This paper deals with constructions of the romantic love ideal as narrative formulae inscribed in cultural products, focusing on «comic» as a médium hardly attended in Visual Studies. We look this narrative's doublé nature as a union of the content (story) and the traditional form (discourse) in the discipline of audiovisual narrative. In this direction, we will review some of the critical texts dealing with both the romantic ideal of which consumers participate as well as the use of visual images employed in this stories, as a way of tentatively posing a narrative canon. Through the critical analysis of The Prince and The Dressmaker (2018) by Jen Wang, we will explore the subversive strategies of the romantic canon in order to, ultimately, concretize these aspects in a podagogical model concerned with new roles and construction mechanisms of romantic love and gender roles in this type of story. This analysis will show, beside his loyalty to classic amorous schemes, Wang's innovations in the representation of characters and their narrative roles.

Carl Jung's Red Book could be viewed as a pre-modern graphic novel in that there is a clear correlation between the visual fantasies portrayed in the Red Book and the use of graphic images to convey a story in modern comics and graphic novels. The paper presents the Red Book as a pre-modern graphic novel and highlights a number of parallels and similarities with the said genre. Jung's characterization of the central protagonist, a youthful aid, invokes a anti-hero mythology, not unlike what we find in the Batman.

Comics are complex documents whose reception engages cognitive processes such as scene perception, language processing, and narrative understanding. Possibly because of their complexity , they have rarely been studied in cognitive science. Modeling the stimulus ideally requires a formal description, which can be provided by feature descriptors from computer vision and computational linguistics. With a focus on document analysis, here we review work on the computational modeling of comics. We argue that the development of modern feature descriptors based on deep learning techniques has made sufficient progress to allow the investigation of complex material such as comics for reception studies, including experimentation and computational modeling of cognitive processes.

Having the chance to explore the architecture of the Rocinha favela and in the same time, to further my research with a new experiment, that can prove that the characteristics of the comic strip structure can be an alternative manner to explore and discuss, this time, the architecture of one of the most chaotic and controversial spaces, another fellow architect and I, developed a two week experiment with the students of a local NGO, in Rio de Janiero. In order to be able to start an analysis in which we can explore the architectural composition of one the largest favela in Rio de Janiero, this city in a city, we must take into account all the overlapping layers: the everyday violence, the poverty, the poor state of the education system, the health issues, but also the vibrant and colourful environment of the narrow streets that go through this urban composition, without any regulations. In our opinion, in order to start an honest exploration, you must spend time, living, talking and working with the residents, gaining their trust, day by day. Drawing and discussing about the architecture they experience every day, with the students of Tio Lino NGO, we had the chance to investigate the built space, adding more information with each interview we conducted and every experience we had working alongside them, while, also, talking with them about what it means to be an architect, how we can draw our surroundings, after carefully examining it and how we can illustrate the solutions we can provide to the problems we observe..

The canonical representation of death as the Grim Reaper is a well-known trope in art. The main aim of this paper is to analyze this trope as it appears in selected instalments of the Italian comics series Dylan Dog. Fauconnier and Turner have extensively discussed its complexity by describing it in terms of the Blending Theory/Conceptual Theory model. As a complex integration of several mental spaces, including a space with an individual human being dying, and a harvest space, the Grim Reaper blend involves metaphoric and metonymic interactions of non-counterpart elements (Fauconnier & Turner 1998). This model will be used as a starting point in the analysis of the corpus consisting of four separate Dylan Dog stories. In the selected issues, the Grim Reaper appears in both the traditional version: a skeleton-like creature dressed in a monk’s robe and holding a scythe, as well as variants in which its appearance gains new and unusual characteristics. It will be demonstrated how the artists' use of the comics medium, with its combination of written text and static visuals, enables certain creative varieties on the classic trope.

The article is an attempt to critically read the Polish comic book „Episodes from Auschwitz: The Carriers of a Mystery” by Michał Gałek and Michał Pyteraf. The author draws attention to the risks associated with the choice of the comic as a medium talking about the trauma of the Holocaust. Placing a comic book within publications that fit the current of historical politics, the author of the article pointed to the elements that testify to his polonocentrism. The image of the body was analyzed, with particular emphasis on differences in the presentation of prisoners of the camp, men selected to work in the Sonderkommando branches and its members. Attention was paid to the fetishization and eroticization of the Jewish body, which is dangerously close to the Nazi body.

O corpo do super-herói por princípio é antinatural. Ou melhor, sua natureza é cindida, é uma natureza do-brada. O corpo do super-herói, por tradição, herda dos gregos a kháris. Pela graça concedida pelos deuses, aos heróis e aos atletas, a beleza escultural é a manifestação do próprio poder reluzente. Daí a herança do esculpido atleta nu na religiosa competição esportiva resultar no atlético super-herói semidivino que Usa uma roupa que, na maioria das vezes, mais se as-semelha a uma tintura sobre o corpo. Da mesma forma, a beleza escultural do super-herói é o superpoder manifesto. Superman é atlético, mesmo dificilmente existindo algum modo de ele colocar rotineiramente sua musculatura a teste; Homem-Aranha, que se tornou atlético após a picada da aranha radioativa, sob o traço de Steve Ditko, parece apenas ganhar musculatura quando veste o uniforme, sendo o Peter Parker ainda bastante franzino, a despeito de qualquer disfarce. Cabe notar essa semelhança entre os dois super-heróis mais historicamente populares da DC e da Marvel.

Reinhard Kleist' s graphic novel The Boxer tells the story of Holocaust survivor Harry Haft and his participation in forced boxing matches in Nazi concentration camps. Throughout the work, Kleist works against clear delineations of right and wrong by offering what I term 'nuancing gestures'. Haft is a morally complex protagonist who works against the image of the heroic and sanctimonious survivor, and Kleist identifies other characters that challenge comforting notions of good and bad. The work uses visual correspondences between panels to highlight cycles of interpersonal violence, showing how issues of complicity are carried forward later in life. Furthermore, the graphic novel depicts in vivid detail how traumatic intrusions disrupt Haft' s daily life. This article explores how The Boxer' s particular stylistic rendering of moral ambiguity, complicity, and the longer lasting effects of trauma raises new insights about how the medium of comics can navigate a sensitive and complex Holocaust narrative.