A Theory of the Fantastic From Italy – With Comics

Though this solid monograph does not primarily deal with the sequential art, its last chapter includes a remarkable reading of two classics of Italian fantastic comics, that is, Dino Battaglia's and Alberto Breccia's graphic adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe respectively, but also briefly discusses more recent works, or better series, Tiziano Sclavi's Dylan Dog and Mike Mignola's Hellboy. The sections focusing on graphic narratives are part of a chapter whose title is “Transmedialità del genere fantastico” [The transmediality of the fantastic genre], hence the analysis deliberately moves across media. No wonder then that the sections on comics are preceded by a discussion of Ridley Scott's Alien and Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds – and one must also highlight the resolutely transnational nature of Carnevale's monograph, straddling across several nations and three languages (English, Italian, Spanish).

A particularly interesting feature of these interpretations of comics is that they exemplify Carnevale's own theory of the fantastic genre, which strives to differentiate the works written, drawn, or shot in the 20^th century from those of the 19^th – it is an ambitious attempt to go beyond Tzvetan Todorov's theoretical assessment of the fantastic (which the author deems acceptable for 19^th century texts, but ill suited to those of the following periods), and present us with a viable theory of 20^th and 21^st century fantastic literature, cinema, and comics, based on the key concept of invasion. Suffice it to say that the new fantastic is best represented, according to Carnevale, by the enigmatic short stories written by Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar, totally free from the traditional fantastic devices of such 19^th century authors as Bram Stoker or Poe.

The section devoted to comics is aimed at presenting readers with specimens of post-modernist fantastic (graphic) fiction, to be understood as what comes after the modernist fantastic of Cortázar or Buzzati: Sclavi and Mignola are representatives of a period in which borderlines between genres are highly porous, and hybridization propels narratives. One might have liked to see Dylan Dog and Hellboy compared to extreme products of such a trend as Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Gaiman's Sandman, o Grant Morrison's bewildering Nameless – but Carnevale has understandably defined rigorous temporal limits to his research, and those works fall outside them.

The section on Breccia and Battaglia is more strictly focused on issues of transmediality, that is, how the two comics artists managed to visualize the purely verbal texts by Poe and Lovecraft (a particular difficult challenge when we think that the latter theorized his poetics as based on the impossibility of representation), and offers interesting insights on the solutions devised by the two authors, with remarkable comments even on the minutest details of their technique.

All in all, one hopes that Carnevale will write a book specifically focused on fantastic comics. It might well be a precious contribution to comics studies.