La vanguardia del cómic digital: Transmedialidad y recursos narrativos en Joselito de Marta Altieri = Digital Comics Avant-garde: Transmediality and narrative resources in Marta Altieri's Joselito

Abstract

One of the latest and more complex examples of the potentialities of digital comics is Joselito (2018-) by Spanish author Marta Altieri. Published on her own webpage, Joselito is a serial melodrama, in which the author uses all her knowledge as a webpage designer in order to introduce various intermedial elements, such as real-time diegetic music, photographs, chat conversations, gif animations, memes or vertical scroll as a reading mechanism, imitating our way of reading someone else's stories today. In this paper, we propose a study of Joselito's narrative and analyze the strategies that it uses when it comes to represent psychological and subjective realities, as well as the way it provokes emotional and sensorial responses in the readers. We also analyze the implications of the absence of the conventional panoptic qualities of conventional comics, which are replaced by a multimodal way of organizing information. We also investigate the many ways whereby Joselito defies the most traditional comic definitions, not to mention the great changes that animations introduce in the representation of movement. Additionally, we analyze how the return of serial narrative and the possibility of extending each chapter without restrictions have an influence in webcomics like Joselito, making way to a different kind of narrative, based on the anecdotal and on routine, where the psychological evolution of the characters is not as important as it is in the classical graphic novel.