Iconographic repertories in graphic novels. The reconstruction of identity in Emil Ferris' and Una's graphic novels

This paper aims at analyzing the different discursive strategies used to find a language to express traumatic feelings in comics. Attention is focused on Emile Ferris' My Favourite Thing Is Monsters and Una's Becoming Unbecoming. The analysis aims at analyzing the construction of iconographic repertories that visually shape the story conceived as a device to organise text and confer meaning to discourse. While Emil Ferris uses what we can call a sort of graphic Koine rooted in conventions taken from terror films and comics, Una creates a new graphic code to draw symbolic images valid only for that concrete context: she creates a graphic idiolect.