Search

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fandom activities and practices are a complex machine driven by fan participation and capacity of intercepting the relationships between media production and consumption, thus influencing the productive logics of cultural industry. In order to better understand some of the evolutions that fandom has recently undergone, this contribution intends to investigate the phenomenon in relation to the Dylan Dog franchise. Cult hailed by critics, Dylan Dog has been a momentous comic series, able to uniquely resonate and answer to the desires and identity needs of its audience (Frezza 1995, 2017). One key reason for its prolonged success and commercial fortune lies in its capacity to build a thick network of cinematic and literary references (to quote Eco, an encyclopedia: 1979) that the readers have to actualize, thus becoming themselves active devices of the texts (Abruzzese 2016). This in turn has encouraged, and been mirrored by, a series of fan practices taking part throughout the years. The intense relationship Dylan Dog entertains with his fans has transformed over time in line with the evolutions of the media system and their aging. Its fandom changed from niche communities with a strong internal homology (mainly composed of young horror fans) to expanded ones, whose fan practices, especially online, were markedly heterogeneous. Recchioni's arrival at the helm of the magazine was the fuse that exploded - through dynamics typical of the social web such as echo chambers, filter bubbles and polarized debates (Bentivegna, Boccia Artieri 2019) - (insoluble?) tensions between older and newer generations, earlier and more recent fans. This contribution wants to draw a comparison between the first fan experiences (Horror post and Dylan Dog Horror Fest) and contemporary ones taking place on the internet (forums, fanpages, and fanfilms), foregrounding the networks of cultural practices that are shaping fandom following or crossing generational divides. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital comics that try to maximize the affordances of their medium seem to be condemned to in-betweenness: their strength (leveraging on unusual narrative potentials) often becomes their limit, and authors are hardly able to free themselves from the role of niche experimenters and open up to audience participation. A significant exception, however, is Homestuck, a gigantic webcomic by Andrew Hussie. Strongly connected to videogame culture and the very nature of the internet, Homestuck features animations, sounds, embedded flash games, and so on. The webcomic resulted in various transmedial branches (a videogame spin-off and several friendsims, a multi-volume soundtrack, a book epilogue) and an ongoing intermedial adaptation in book format. It has equally managed, over the years, to consolidate an extremely lively community active both in its interactions with the author (with a constant exchange of ideas and an endless readiness to subsidize his projects), in its interpretation of the canon production, and in providing an amazing extent of fan production. This contribution aims to analyze Homestuck as a possible mediation between the two inclinations (experimental and participated) of digital comics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]