Visual Novels and Comic-Strip Poetry: Dino Buzzati’s Poema a fumetti, Martin Vaughn-James’s The Projector, and Avant-Garde Experimentation with Comics in the 1960s and 1970s

This thesis focuses on two novel-length graphic narratives: Poema a fumetti (1969) by the Italian novelist Dino Buzzati and The Projector (1971), created in Toronto by the British-born visual artist Martin Vaughn-James. Through an in-depth analysis of these two works and by comparing them to other “avant-garde” comics from the 1960s and early 1970s, I seek to identify the factors that might explain the appeal of visual narrative to writers and artists from that era who were working outside of the world of comics as it would have then been defined. The first chapter, dedicated to Poema a fumetti, begins with a discussion of Buzzati’s use of the “poetic” aspects of comics, which I relate to various experimentations with comics among certain avant-garde poets. I then examine the influence of 1960s Italian erotic and crime comics on Buzzati, and how the disreputable aura surrounding these and other comics rendered them a particularly effective means for artists to express certain repressed impulses and desires. The second chapter analyzes The Projector in terms of its subversion of: a) an alienating consumer-capitalist social order, b) a “normal” visual perception of reality, and c) conventional modes of ordering narrative. These three lines of analysis I relate to three contemporaneous cultural tendencies that I argue also influenced other avant-garde comics. These are, respectively: the détournement strategies employed by the Situationists, the “psychedelic” movement in the visual arts, and literary and media theories advocating for a radical break with the existing conventions of literary narrative