Introduction: transnational Italian comics: memory, migration, transformation

Abstract

This special issue introduces for the first time to the predominantly Anglophone arena of Comics Studies a strand of the globalising comics culture of the 21 century, namely the transnational Italian comics scene. Our aim has been to highlight the mobility and the multilingualism of Italian comics culture as well as the avenues of research evident in this emerging field. Two elements have been key in such an endeavour: a transnational perspective that embraces the mobility of Italian (comics) culture across geographical and linguistic borders (Burdett, Havely and Polezzi 2020; Spadaro 2022) and the engagement of contributors from different academic backgrounds related to Comics and Italian Studies. In this framework, memory and migration have emerged as powerful narrative themes in comics production and simultaneously as avenues of research in Comics Studies. This introduction outlines the rationale of the project and points towards further directions within the emerging field of Transnational Italian Comics Studies. Our starting point is that the phenomenology of the Italian fumetto cannot be contained within Italy and Italian language because it is intertwined with the long and ongoing history of mobility of Italian authors and readers and also because it springs from acts of translation – whether between languages, creative and industrial practices, or media. Comics and graphic novels help us think differently about the definition, the canons and the production of Italian culture, and this special issue calls for more robust theoretical investment from scholars in the field. Such expert engagement with the specificity of Italian transnational mobility – in terms of trajectories, practices, languages – highlights tensions within the globalising development of both comics culture and Comics Studies. This special issue aims to intensify the scholarly engagement with Italian comics and with the rapidly establishing canons, categories, and research questions of the broadly defined field of Transnational Comics Studies. The latter has burgeoned across various journals and book series, questioning definitions of French or Francophone (Forsdick et al. 2005), US (Denson, Meyer, and Stein 2013), European (Grove, Miller, and Magnussen 2019), Asian (Brienza 2016; Ogi et al. 2019Spanish (Magnussen 2018), German (Kraenzle and Ludewig 2020), and postcolonial (Mickwitz 2015) comics and canons, focusing on comics genres, authors and productions exemplary of transnational and transcultural exchange. In this spirit, our project engages ‘with narratives, histories and imaginaries that transcend national boundaries as well as with practices of comics production indebted to multiple comics traditions” (Kraenzle and Ludewig 2020, 2), advancing current debates that seek to globalise Comics Studies. Over the last twenty years, this JOURNAL OF GRAPHIC NOVELS AND COMICS 2023, VOL. 14, NO. 4, 489–501 https://doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2023.2239334