Proposal paper Comics and Their Audiences Eva Van de Wiele
(Not) corresponding with child readers in early-twentieth-century comics magazines Corriere dei Piccoli and TBO
Correspondence sections and miscellaneous pages in children’s comics
magazines are specific locations of reader-author interactions, intent on loyalizing the child while providing it with a voice. Corriere dei Piccoli’s correspondence led by pedagogue and children’s author Paola Carrara Lombroso, on the one hand, built a thinking and reading community where (book) charity and literacy stood central, while its miscellaneous pages paid children for their graphic work and jokes, inculcating capitalist ideas. Community building and inculcating were moreover strengthened by the fact one could yearly subscribe to the bourgeois supplement. TBO’s correspondence section, on the other hand, contained brutally short and direct replies by the editor (first Suárez then Buigas) to material sent in by children, while the miscellaneous pages solely mentioned their name and location. Apparently, for a more commercial humorous weekly, direct interaction with the Spanish child reader was not deemed necessary. Although extremely different, both correspondence sections disappeared after only a few years. My paper will discuss the correspondence sections and their ‘untimely’ ending, as they are useful instruments to reflect on the magazines’ editorial format, ideology and imagined reader.
Bibliography
ALARY, Viviane. ‘The Spanish Tebeo’. European Comic Art, vol. 2, no. 2, June 2009, pp. 253–76.
BARRERO, Manuel, editor. Yo quiero un tebeo: homenaje a una publicación centenaria: 1917-2017. ACT Ediciones Diminuta, 2017.
CANTATORE, Lorenzo. ‘Con il diavolo zoppo tra verità e fantasia. La corrispondenza di Zia Mariù’. Il Corriere dei piccoli in un secolo di riviste per ragazzi: atti del convegno, Università cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano, 28 marzo 2008, edited by Renata Lollo, V & P, 2009, pp. 73–85.
CARLI, Alberto. ‘Paola Marzòla Lombroso fra psicologia, pubblicistica e letteratura per l’infanzia’. Il Corriere dei piccoli in un secolo di riviste per ragazzi: atti del convegno, Università cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano, 28 marzo 2008, edited by Renata Lollo, V & P, 2009, pp. 19–43.
FAVA, Sabrina. ‘Il progetto culturale del «Corriere dei Piccoli» avviato da Silvio Spaventa Filippi’. Il Corriere dei piccoli in un secolo di riviste per ragazzi: atti
Proposal paper Comics and Their Audiences Eva Van de Wiele
del convegno, Università cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano, 28 marzo 2008, edited by Renata Lollo, V & P, 2009, pp. 45–71.
GINEX, Giovanna, editor. Corriere dei piccoli: storie, fumetto e illustrazione per ragazzi. Skira, 2009.
GUBERN, Román. Comunicación y Cultura de Masas. 1. ed, Ediciones Península, 1977.
Bio
Eva Van de Wiele has published in Cuco, Tebeosfera and reviews comics for 9ekunst.nl. She used to teach Spanish and Italian at the language center of Ghent University. Currently, she is working as a PhD student on the ERC project Children in Comics. She is also a member of several research groups such as 20cc and ACME. Her doctoral thesis focuses on seriality/serialisation and the spread of (inter)national comics in early Italian Corriere dei Piccoli and Spanish TBO. She has presented papers at the international comics conference of Zaragoza (May 2019) and TORCH Comics (July 2019) and hosted a comics workshop on
Holocaust Comics at the Antwerp Summer School on Children’s Literature (July 2019). She is organizing a virtual Conference (22-23 April 2021) on Girlhood in Comics with her PhD colleague Dona Pursall. She is also part of the outreach activities of the Department of Literary Studies at Ghent University, and as such co-organizes a lecture series on adaptations and intermediality (Spring 2021).
