Elia Barceló’s Dangerous Futures: Violence of Tomorrow in a Transmedia Key

Abstract

The book of stories Dangerous Futures (2008) by the Spanish writer Elia Barceló and its version of the same year in comic, in which Jordi Farga collaborates as a writer and Luis Miguez Ybarz as illustrator, formulate a proposal for textual copresence, shared contents, and, after all, a certain significant autonomy; this we understand as transmediality. Both texts, that of Barceló—written—and that of Farga-Ybarz—sequential art that expands the hypothext—recreate themes of the immediate tomorrow, in hyperbolic terms, from one of the lines that have highlighted certain recent analyses of science fiction: the question of today’s extratextual fictionalized reality, whose problematization points to the very character of the fictions. The aim of this article is to recognize the role of both texts, with different codes, in writing about the everyday violence that takes place in the extratextual universe. In addition, I will seek to explain the complex process of dialogical relationship between literary writing and sequential art. From the concepts of transmediality and violence, nodes of meaning are identified in two stories included in this book, which are considered as source texts (hypothexts) and their derivations. This article seeks to reflect on the way in which the original story is expanded and enrichened.