The road to Hell is paved with interpictorial intentions. Parody and subversions in the silent Infierno by Faraci and Ziche

Abstract

Although the history of silent comics and picturebooks is long, it is only in the last decades that they have been systematically studied in terms of their structure, the techniques used by their creators and the value of their use in the context of multilingualism and the transmission of meaning to readers of all ages, exclusively through pictures. Particularly in comics, where the image plays a dominant role in the development of the story, the absence of words poses several problems and constraints, but also imposes a number of innovative solutions and tricks to replace words and make the narrative effective. Some of these gimmicks such as the interpictorial association of recontextualized images, often parodies, of the contemporary work with corresponding images of earlier works in a way that recalls to the readers' memory the meanings of the originals and the subversion of the scripted through transpositions and transformations that cause a confusion in the reader by subjecting him/her to an active revision of his/her conclusions, are ingeniously exploited in Tito Faraci and Silvia Ziche's Infierno, a silent comic in two parts that constitutes the case study of this research. By identifying such examples from this work, we will attempt to draw conclusions about the function of silent comics to further exploit them for teaching purposes in a variety of educational contexts.