Media Representation and Transmediation: Indexicality in Journalism Comics and Biography Comics

Abstract

This article analyzes the ways in which journalism comics and biography comics create indexicality through intermedial relations. These strategies include media representations of different qualified media types (journalistic report, biography, and autobiography) and of specific media products (such as familiar images of people and places). The article starts with a short history of comics. It then offers a theoretical discussion of intermediality, media representation, and transmediation, with specific focus on the tactics that journalism and biography comics use to represent reality indexically through media representation and transmediation. Furthermore, the authors analyze intermedial relations in the comic albums The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders by Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefèvre, and Frederic Lemercier; Il mondo di Aisha-Storie di donne dello Yemen by Ugo Bertotti; Maus by Art Spiegelman; To the Heart of the Storm by Will Eisner; Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes by Mary M. Talbot and Bryan Talbot; and Footnotes in Gaza by Joe Sacco.