The Genova G8 in graphic novels

A case study about conflict storytelling between words and images

Abstract

Although war has always been considered the narrative matter par excellence, it isn't just the object of literary stories, but it's also closely related to a visual dimension that, from the beginning of the 20th Century, finds in mass media (television and cinema, first of all) a privileged channel. Looking back on the tragic events of Genova G8, it isn't hard to notice how so many artists have preferred to narrate the conflict using hybrid forms as graphic novels, in which the text and the images work together in order to explain better and give meaning to the absurdity of violence. Authors as Zerocalcare, in particular, have fixed on paper the snapshots of «the worst suspension of democratic rights in an occidental country after the Second World War», as the Amnesty International said.