European Comic Art

The introductory article to this special issue on intermediality and comics focuses on exploring the richness of graphic narrative beyond the conventional understanding of comics as a multimodal medium that often combines text and images. Primarily using diverse examples of Spanish comics as its focus, this essay investigates intermedial relations between comics and music, adaptation and animation, as well as the extension of comics beyond physical and digital spaces. Drawing on existing research on intermediality more broadly and specific scholarly literature that examines comics as an intermedial cultural production or in relation to other media, the article argues that intermediality has been a consistent theme throughout the history of Iberian comics and key to new aesthetic and conceptual explorations in the medium.

This article deals with the relationship between comics and intermediality (the interaction or relation between two media) as well as transmediality (the migration from one medium to another). It defends the idea that inter- and transmediality are inextricably linked and that the interaction between them can shed new light on either dimension, in order to broaden the idea of intermediality (which cannot be reduced to a matter of taxonomy but entails important historical aspects) and that of transmediality (which should include discussions on power relationships between media). The article uses the examples of Jijé and Watchmen. It also aims at emphasising the wide variety of parameters that play a role in inter- and transmediality.

In 2011, the poet Lois Pereiro (1958–1996) was honoured at the annual Día das Letras Galegas (Galician Literature Day). The Galician publishing industry released a plethora of texts about Pereiro, including Jacobo Fernández Serrano's comics biography Lois Pereiro: Breve encontro. This article examines the comic as an intermedial text that captures the influence of literature, films, music and comics in Pereiro's own writing. Furthermore, it is analysed as part of a transmedial network, together with other biographies published around the Día das Letras. These texts address the role played by death in the poet's life and work (as he died at an early age of rapeseed oil poisoning and AIDS), and they can therefore be understood as ‘thanatographies’ as much as life writing.

This study analyses how the comic book La vida es sueño (Life Is a Dream) by Ricardo Vílbor, Alberto Sanz and Mario Ceballos transposes the form and content of Calderón de la Barca's dramatic text La vida es sueño (1635–1636) into the multimodal discourse of the comic. Drawing on Irina Rajewsky's theory of ‘intermediality’ and the concept of mise en scène, introduced as an analytical tool for comics studies by Geraine D'Arcy, the findings present evidence that the design strategies of the adaptation are based on a convergence of the modalities of theatre and comic, and on the imitation of the poetic visuality and musicality of the original via the comic's media-specific means. The resulting comic offers a sophisticated but nonetheless highly accessible reading of the philosophical, political, religious and ethical discourse of the Spanish literary classic.

This article looks at the intersection of web-based comics and print graphic memoirs authored by transgender Brazilian comics artists. Brazilian comics have in recent years opened up to internet platforms, a change that has proved particularly fruitful for LGBTQ+ artists, traditionally marginalised by the Brazilian comics industry. The article examines two case studies – those of Luiza Lemos and Alice Pereira, both authors of comics originally posted on social media and later published in print. By means of a mixed methodology that brings together semi-structured interviews with the authors and close readings, this contribution investigates the dynamics regulating the creative and publishing processes of these works, as well as the relationship that they entertain with the practice of transsexual self-narration and self-portraiture.

Ewa Stánczyk, Comics and Nation: Power, Pop Culture, and Political Transformation in Poland (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press 2022). 200 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8142-5838-5 ($34.95)

Heike Bauer, Andrea Greenbaum and Sarah Lightman, eds, Jewish Women in Comics: Bodies and Borders (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2023), 296 pp., ISBN: 978-0-8156-3781-3 ($39.95)