Graphotopies. Space Configurations in Travel and Migration Comics

Abstract

As a structurally spatialized narrative form, comics – like other media that operate through framing, from painting to cinema – are, on the one hand, structured in space and, on the other hand, represent space. In this essay our aim is to describe the processes of spatial transformation that produce alternately the environment, the landscape or, as Higgins defines it (1987), the discourse space, and finally the dreamlike space. Against the background of these issues lies the central importance of the relationship between spatial and social forms, which still shows the influence of Simmel’s (1908) inquiry. We will analyse here stories that have travellers and, broadly speaking, migrants as their protagonists, characters who move more or less far away out of necessity, adventure spirit, thirst for knowledge, and who convey peculiar views of the world (from Tex to Corto Maltese, from Superman to Hulk, from Diabolik to Zanardi).