Metafictional elements in Finnish comics in the 1920s and 1930s: Case Junnu

The article examines metafictional elements in a Finnish comic called Junnu, published in the 1920s and 1930s in the magazine Suomen Kuvalehti. Using historical poetics as a starting point, the article claims that the comic’s metafiction served as a strategy to engage readers in an era when magazines fiercely competed for readership. An integral part of the strategy was the interaction between the comic’s writer Veli Giovanni and the readers who were invited to participate in a metafictional play where the line between the reality and fiction was constantly blurred. The article utilizes comics scholar Roy T. Cook’s typology of metacomics and rhetorical narratology’s ideas about communication and interpretation. The most central techniques of metafiction in Junnu were the characters’ self-awareness of being characters in a comic, the depiction of the authors as characters, the play with the formal elements of the comic, and the foregrounding of the reader – a technique, which Cook does not recognize in his typology. Through the analysis of one of the most popular comic of its time, the article shows how comics narration and its phenomena, such as metafiction, are tied to their historical and cultural contexts.Peer reviewe