AUTEUR COMICS MAGAZINES IN ITALY: THE CASE OF ORIENT EXPRESS (1982-1985)

Thesis (Ph.D.) - Indiana University, Department of French and Italian, 2020This dissertation centers on the understudied and yet very representative auteur comics magazine Orient Express; it aims at casting light on its role as a training ground for a new generation of Italian comics authors and as a foreteller of a new comics season in Italy. Not only is Orient Express worthy of scholarly attention in itself; it also represents a case study that illuminates the art of making a (comics) magazine and provides the means for understanding the complex dynamics that rule the relationship among publishers, editors, staff, authors, and the market. Auteur comics magazines appeared in late 1960s and thrived in the following two decades, mainly re-publishing works from Anglo-Saxon, Franco-Belgian, and Hispanic authors. Among the competitors, Orient Express distinguished itself for its carefully planned editorial line, its emphasis on quality storytelling, and its commitment to showcase Italian authors, many of whom were not acknowledged auteurs yet. Moreover, the way in which Orient Express blended auteur-comics and popular-comics formats into the so-called popolare d’autore anticipated a tendency that became gradually more frequent and successful in the late 1980s and 1990s, as this format proved more able to adapt to the change in the cultural and medial context. This dissertation is composed of two parts. Part I provides a historical and cultural contextualization of the Italian comics environment in the period preceding and following Orient Express’ publication, focusing on the phenomenon of auteur comics from a theoretical standpoint, as well as identifying and detailing major auteur comics magazines that were active between 1965 and the mid-1980s. Part II presents the outcomes of my archival research on Orient Express; it contributes an all-encompassing understanding of the magazine’s aesthetics, content, and positioning in the market through the in-depth analysis of non-comics elements (paratext and editorial content) and comics elements as well as the predominant modes and genres of the period, and its most representative authors. The last chapter expands the scope of this research into the field of comics readership; combining both traditional and digital methods (including close readings, text analysis, concordancing, and data visualization), I examine the letters to the editor to gain an insight into the kind of readers the magazine had. In Part II I propose a method to study comics magazines that can be applied effectively to other forms of periodical products