Who Watches the Watchmen? Law Diving into “Speaking Clouds”

Abstract

Abstract Comics are an extremely popular, though sometimes underestimated, medium. Yet they are able to convey the image of reality in a potentially infinite variety of genres and styles. Their explicitly fictional approach sends simple and direct messages to the reader, allowing him or her to move into a dimension where original rules, free of superstructures and compromises, apply. In fact, the cultural, political and social interaction between object and subject, which comics inevitably represent, eventually involves the theme of the rule and its relationship with society. The encounter between the comic and the legal often takes place in an almost inevitable and unplanned way and determines a synergy capable of producing original results not only from a narrative point of view. The inherently visual embodiment of the rule ends up enhancing the plot, and the rule’s many expressive potentialities. For this reason, the unusual association between comics and law has also earned the growing and curious attention of the world of the legal profession and may acquire, in the not-too-distant future, a further and absolutely unpredictable possibility of use as an atypical learning tool.