Subjectivity and Comics Journalism in the French Magazine <i>XXI</i>. Discrepancy between Paratexts and Texts

Abstract

Comics journalism is a form of narrative journalism, but also plays a part in a much wider movement – the hybridization of cultural products – and the increasing blurring of the boundaries between fact and fiction. It presents itself as a way to inject new life into a profession currently in crisis by resurrecting reporter subjectivity. Based on a corpus from the magazine XXI, this article analyses how the alleged subjectivity is expressed in the comics journalism paratext and how it is translated into the cartoon itself – in both its graphic and its textual dimensions. One of the most interesting results is the contrast between the two parts of the analysis: while the paratext almost systematically emphasizes the authors’ personal involvement, the authors make their presence fully known in slightly fewer than half of the cartoons analysed.