By Massimo Manca [Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, Italy]

1. Comics as a medium and comics as a literary genre. A foreword

Let us begin by an unrequested apology.(1) The survival of the epic tradition in comics is undoubtedly an interesting topic, but also a potential trap. This is the kind of research that fatally attracts criticism. It appears to be an ‘easy’ field of research, one you may view as a mere divertissement, but with few or no connections with the ‘real’ history of literature or classics. Ironically, the task is in fact more difficult than it might appear. “Topolino” (the Italian version of “Mickey Mouse”) and “Alan Ford” are not usually indexed byGnomon and the Année Philologique, and there are no such tools to investigate the huge amount of international comics that has been produced up to today. Thus, the recensio must absolutely be carried out by means of non-standard methods, and many formal rules must be carefully weighed or questioned, which sometimes leads to slightly parodist effects, such as the Batrachomyomachy compared to Homer (“Topolino” is a ‘magazine’; Io, Topolino, a monograph, etc. (2) sounds a little odd).

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