Representations of media and technology in Eloar Guazzelli’s comic books

Abstract

The current Brazilian production of comics presents a rich diversity of themes, formats, and experimentations with language. This article takes two of the works of Eloar Guazelli as an example of this production: Velhos Hotéis Passam Cinema Mudo (2012) and Apocalipse Nau (2015). Based on theoretical concepts of cultural studies and on the understanding of technology as a social construct, we intend to reflect on the visualities and representations of media and technology in everyday life present in these works. These comics propose technological narratives that constitute and are constituted by cultural and symbolic values. The methodology consists of a detailed description of the work, followed by a brief analysis, considering the plastic and expressive materialities, the thematic and the style of the comic book artist and the dialogues with the contexts of contemporary society. Velhos Hotéis Passam Cinema Mudo is a predominantly visual story that creates nondeterministic looks on technical artifacts, discussing the processes of production, circulation, collection, preservation, and discarding of images as strategies of re-signification and valuation of memories, of subjectivities. Apocalypse Nau is a set of discursive fragments, short stories, which interweaves reports and comments on the author’s life events with journalistic news, such as the terrorist attack on the office of the French humor magazine Charlie Hebdo on January 7, 2015. Images and texts simulate the encounter between fiction and reality, choosing the everyday as a space/ time of criticism and struggle.

Keywords: comics, technology, media, Eloar Guazzelli.