Reading Contracts in Argentine Comics of the 1970s

Abstract

In the 1970s, the magazines D'artagnan and Skorpio occupied center stage in the field of adventure comics in Argentina. The first one emerged in 1957 under the publisher Editorial Columba, while the second one was established in 1974 under the label Record. They brought innovation to the publishing market in terms of genres and narrative forms. Additionally, they contributed to the creation of respective imagined communities of readers while also defining a canon expressed through a tradition of authors and works within the national comic field. For this reason, both publications played a leading role in a specific contemporaneity, during a period when this medium operated within the professional publishing industry.

In this paper, we compare the fundamental lines of the reading contract proposed by D'artagnan and Skorpio, focusing on an aspect of the enunciation instance or regime of speech (Lucas Berone, 2014), namely, the discursive identity of the cover and other paratextual components of a graphic communication medium that "act on the diverse and interconnected planes of the visual and the verbal" (Berone, 2022, p. 26). Our corpus of analysis consists of three issues from each magazine, published in mid-1978, an important moment in their respective editorial trajectories.