Time and narrative in editorial cartoons: condense to potentialize

The collapse of the dam built by Vale, a Brazilian mining company, which devastated the city of Brumadinho (MG) in January 2019, is the theme of six editorial cartoons that constitute the corpus of this article. Based on the Semiolinguistic Analysis of Discourse, editorial cartoons are discursive genres derived from a mediatic communicative contract, balanced, as such, between two main intentions: informing and capturing the reader's attention. Circumventing, however, the typical objectivity and credibility of the media, editorial cartoons narrate a personal and critical version of a situation, expressed in a verb-visuality "loaded"with opinion, humour and irony. Thus, we will analyse how these texts express temporality by using linguistic and symbolic mechanisms which are common in comic books, allowing them to break the apparent fixity of their structure.