Alberto Breccia: Memoirs of Resistance and the Ethos of Reading

This article intends to nuance the view that there is a clear break in the work of graphic novelist Alberto Breccia between work made during the Argentine military junta (1976-83) and his post-dictatorship work. I argue that there is both a break and continuity: there is a break in terms of a certain aggressiveness that comes to the surface and which is barely contained by the architecture of the comics page. On the other hand, there is also a continuous working through of a poetics of radicalness, but radicalness by other means: it is a paradoxical radicalness that hinges on indirection. I will show how the latter was already evident in Breccia’s work published during the junta, but which, paradoxically, continued even after its collapse. I will show how he used literary adaptation as a critical tool against censorship and how it would live on in his later work, even after the restitution of democracy in Argentina. More specifically, I will demonstrate how his adaptation of Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' can be read as the continuation of this counter-censorial tactic.