More Obscene than De Sade
by Luc Sante
May 16, 2019
4 minutes
In his biweekly column, Pinakothek, Luc Sante excavates and examines miscellaneous visual strata of the past.
, , —the terms betray the fact that the form never got much traction in the Anglo-Saxon realm. There is no word for it in English, exactly. You could say “photo-comics,” but you’d risk being misunderstood. These narratives, often but not always romantic, are conveyed by means of photographs arrayed in panels on a page, with running text, soon followed by its French sibling, ; both magazines still exist. Fotonovelas flourished in the fifties and early sixties (into the eighties in Latin America), then began a slow decline that still refuses to yield to extinction.
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