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Despite many philosophical and scientific appeals, physical inactivity, especially in children and young people, remains one of the most serious problems of contemporary civilisation. In our sub‐study of wider research, we focus on the use of Czech fiction and comics by Jaroslav Foglar as a motivational factor to increase readers' physical activity. The respondents (n = 1174) were mostly adults who had spent their childhood or adolescence reading the works of Jaroslav Foglar. These people valued exercise (70%) in this reading, with a high correlation (0.73) to a healthy lifestyle (abstinence from alcohol and smoking). For 57% of the respondents, these values from reading also become an inspiration for application in life (there is a causal link between the degree of awareness of being influenced by the work and the actual application of the physical activity), with even higher values recorded for camping and being in a natural environment, as well as moral behaviour, ethical principles, and helping others. Thus, we can confirm that the inspiration of the fictional world of literature can become a motivational impulse to increase physical activity in the real world, moreover in the context of a very strong awareness of ethical values and moral behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking an arguably minor character from Tezuka Osamu's oeuvre, Natsume Fusanosuke argues how the Pig Gourd's cameos even in the artist's most serious works demonstrate a bifurcated sense of play and high-brow artistry in his manga. Natsume employs an early version of his 'manga-expression theory' (manga hyōgen-ron) manga-analysis approach, which he began to develop in this, his first manga-studies monograph and seminal study of the 'god of manga' Tezuka Osamu. This translation of a chapter essay from Where Is Tezuka Osamu? (1992) demonstrates Natsume's versatility in isolating thematic patterns or formal experimentations in an artist's style, including character design and page layouts. Natsume's 'manga-expression theory' approach, which focuses on three basic elements of manga (words, pictures, and frames), can be seen in this essay on Tezuka's trademark Pig Gourd character, who will pop up or even decimate panel borders to show not only Tezuka's embarrassment at being unable to resist a sight gag but also his bold desire to play with panel possibilities. The larger picture that Natsume describes here is how this ubiquitous cameo character became a litmus test of readers' tastes as the manga master's target demographic became older and wise to his stylistic idiosyncrasies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability of graphic narratives to ensure reader-participation creates a visual dialogue between the narrative and the readers and makes them hospitable to the story at hand. The readers become active participants, which brings in the question of ethics, as the passive gaze is converted into empathy and identification. Such a reading encourages a reassessment of the perceived differences between the 'I' and the 'other' and aims to reduce such a gap. This paper, therefore, discusses the idea of empathy and ethics vis-à-vis the strategies and techniques employed in the graphic narratives to encourage reader-participation and make them sensitive to the sufferings of the 'others'. The texts under analysis include Clément Baloup's Vietnamese Memories: Leaving Saigon and Vietnamese Memories: Little Saigon, representing the migrant stories. Such experiences require a hospitable audience and the graphic practices of the texts play a crucial role in making the readers empathic to the life narratives of the 'others'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the authorial projections of the comics artist in Kiko da Silva's El infierno del dibujante (2015) and argues that da Silva creates a work with conflicted authorship in which he actively engages with metafiction, not only including numerous paratexts in the form of fictional facsimile (images, documents, etc.) that highlight the materiality of comics but also expanding the work through online and public happenings. Da Silva's graphic novel appropriates various graphic styles and genres to pay tribute to and/or parody real cartoonists that influence the protagonist, a failed author whose life paradoxically becomes the comic he always wanted to write. In portraying a character who is supposedly plagiarised, El infierno del dibujante also provides a reflection on the notion of originality and copy in art, drawing attention to the comics industry and the production, reception and social recognition of comics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the apparatus of authorial instructions in Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. It does so by first investigating the role coincidence plays in the literalization of Ware's comic, and then by examining what might be hidden or more deeply at stake in Ware's incorporation of the urn of his father's ashes into the "corrigenda" (or afterword) of his book. My reading takes issue with Ware's assertion of the gap that yawns between his artistic deployment of coincidence in his comic and the blind unfolding of coincidence in life itself; or, as Ware himself puts it, between the "artless, dumbfoundedly meaningless coincidence of 'real' life and my weak fiction." My analysis does not wholly contest Ware's claim, but it does complicate Ware's lamenting the failure of his "weak fiction" by arguing that if his house rules or instructions fail, they paradoxically also prevail. In order to justify this claim, I try to take account of what strangely happens to Ware's "weak fiction" when read in the context of Walter Benjamin's weak messianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The task of extracting and analyzing character networks from works of fiction, such as novels and movies, has been the object of a number of recent publications. However, only a very few of them focus on graphic novels, and even fewer on European graphic novels. In this paper, we focus on Thorgal, a bande dessinée, i.e. a comic of the French-Belgian tradition. We manually annotate all the volumes of this series, in order to constitute a corpus allowing us to extract its character network. We perform a descriptive analysis of the network structure and compare it to real-world and fictional social networks. We also study the effect of character filtering over the network structure. Finally, we leverage complex network analysis tools to answer two research questions from the literature, related to the similarity between Thorgal and the Saga of Icelanders; and to the position of women in the series. Our data and source code are both publicly available online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on growing interest in the development of the ninth art in Spain, this article returns to a foundational work by creator Pere Joan that encapsulates Barcelona's role in forging the post-dictatorial Iberian comic. Beyond carrying out a close reading of the eponymous comic contained in Passatger en trànsit, it is important also to elucidate the cultural forces shaping post-dictatorial comics in Spain: from the languages of publication, to the legacies of visual style, the relationship between comics and prose literature, and the reemergence of Barcelona as a putative center of the comics industry. Published by Norma Editorial in 1984, the hardback volume arguably reflected the growing expansion of the Catalan-language cultural market specifically and the progressive linguistic diversification of the Iberian comics market in general. The theme, story and comics form of the visual tale – "Passatger en trànsit", which was adapted from English science fiction writer Barrington J. Bayley's earlier short story "Man in Transit" – establish a number of the hallmark traits of Pere Joan's subsequent work: such as contemplative mood; themes of isolation, alienation, interiority and travel; and his characteristic use of landscape panels in page design. The comic's spatial aesthetics also connects with notions of space, place and nonplace that were receiving renewed attention in 1980s Barcelona. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although France abolished slavery for the second time in 1848, the economic and social realities in the French Caribbean reflect persistent power dynamics between béké owners and black workers who are not only dispossessed of their land, but also of their bodies, perpetuating the commodification of labor-power and cycles of economic exploitation. The adaptation in bande dessinée (BD) of Zobel's novel by Michel Bagoé and Stéphanie Destin published in 2018 by Présence Africaine marks a return to spatial subjectivity. The visualization of interactions between the human and non-human worlds, made possible through the BD format, provides us with an intimate cartography of the Martinican land that is divorced from representations of a charted landscape brought under the control of the colonizer, or white plantation owner. This article investigates forms of dispossession of land and bodies exemplified by Zobel's depictions of the plantation society, and places them in contrast with visions of abundance and sustainability in an uncharted, re-enchanted, non-human world in the BD adaptation by Bagoé and Destin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to establish, in the light of Semiotic-Cultural Constructivism in Psychology, a contribution to the research of creative processes through a reflection on the emergence of the new in the relationship between self-other-world. It is intended to advance in the classic approaches to creativity, by focusing on the unusual and ambiguous, affective-singularizing and, simultaneously, everyday-cultural face of the perspective of the possible and the new in the course of human action. In this way, the article focuses on fiction as a psychic reality that participates in the intersubjective field inherent to creative dynamics, as well as addresses affectivity in the Boeschian grammar from the place of the ambivalence and the dynamics between myths and fantasms in the forms of meaning construction in the face of disturbing experiences and uncertainty about the future. As an interpretive exercise, this text discusses a comic strip by a pair of elementary school students about a character who studies in a school where nothing was prohibited. The discussion of the data seeks to broaden the reading about the ways of fictionalizing the lived experience, pervasive to the everyday plot of the self, and its relationship with creativity in the future of human action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to reflect on the historical narratives and the constructions of Brazilian identity present in the book / catalog O que é o Brasil (What is Brazil), from a homonymous exhibition, held at Senac São Paulo, from July 12th to August 13th, 2005. It is a collection of 52 one-page comics, composing a complex mosaic around subjects imbued with “Brazilianness”. In this text, the themes most directly linked to the representation of everyday relations and the country's history were selected, highlighting some of the symbols considered emblematic of our culture. The analysis reveal an ironic and parodic perspective that juxtaposes and updates the present and the past. Brazil is presented in its plurality, polysemic, with nuances of surrealism and nonsense. These comics simulate the encounter of fiction with reality, fantastic worlds to be deciphered, in which the understanding of cultural identities is seen as becoming. Even though the work is marked by folkloric views and stereotypes, the stories bring problematizations that can be thought of in an interdisciplinary way, displacing concepts that move between art and history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the implementation of multimodalities in education is much lauded by education research, the educational value of such formats is uncertain for education stakeholders. This study relied on the use of focus group interviews and field notes to better understand how a group of middle school students felt about their graphic novel reading experience and the legitimacy of this format in an educational context. The researcher's findings suggest that the students enjoyed their graphic novel reading experience greatly; however, the participants did not consider graphic novel reading to be a valuable educational practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reads The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) as a critique of metatestimonial fiction and of the tendency to overstate literature's power to heal cultural traumas. Metatestimonio bears figurative witness to historical atrocities and interrogates who is or is not allowed to speak of such events. Although Junot Díaz's narrator Yunior gathers testimony from multiple survivors of the Trujillo regime, he mediates their experiences through his own authorial voice. The novel suggests that in refusing to allow testimony to speak for itself, Yunior (and by extension metatestimonio as a genre) replicates the discursive practices of the regime it denounces. Furthermore, by referencing specific comic book series, the artwork accompanying the 2007 Riverhead edition of the novel generates a counter-narrative critiquing Yunior's project. This graphic counter-narrative illustrates that ending the Trujillato's hold on Dominicans is impossible-- that certain traumas cannot be healed once and for all. Oscar Wao thus suggests that in claiming literature's power to heal the past, we (like Yunior) privilege our own desire for resolution over the lived realities of survivors, for whom the working through of trauma is an ongoing and incomplete process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes and analyzes the transmedia experience of the research project "Simulator IC, a transmedial test scenario for the simulation of collective intelligence", in which the ability of four fictional artifacts was explored, --literary text, comic, videogame and role-playing game-- generated from the transmediation of a literary source to develop sensitivity in resolving problems with characteristics linked to collective intelligence. The research method was mixed, with a main qualitative component and a quantitative one --observational methodology--. When a measurement of the collective intelligence gradient of the participants was performed upon contact and interaction with various problem simulation strategies --artifact combination according to a specific experimental design--, it was found that the complete transmedia experience, ie. Interaction with the four artifacts, enhances the effects and benefits the simulation with individual artifacts. It is also concluded that the participants who interacted with various artifacts combinations offered alternatives of collaborative solutions to everyday problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]