Cartoon Borders

Passports, Visas and Walls in Graphic Reportage

Abstract

This article examines the representation of borders in comics reportage, a narrative form that combines documentary practice and subjective testimony and that offers privileged access to places where photography encounters limitations: military zones, checkpoints, detention areas, and geopolitical frontiers. The border will be understood both as «comics-built space» (Aldama) and as a chronotope (Bakhtin), that is, as a point of access to the site of investigation and as a space of encounter between different worlds—the world of the reporter and that of the visited place.
The analysis will focus on two Italian comics, Migrantes. Verso il sogno americano by Flaviano Bianchini and Giovanni Ballati (2019) and Tracciato Palestina. Racconto di viaggio in Cisgiordania by Elena Mistrello (2023). The representation of the border in these works will be examined from both a historical perspective—through comparison with reportages such as New York New York by Sergio Staino (1984)—and an international one, including How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less by Sarah Glidden (2011). By focusing on the thematization of passports and visas and on the representation of the border as a physical place, this article aims to show how, in comics journalism, the crossing of borders emerges as a crucial moment of political revelation.