Semiotic aspects of the fantastic in the comic short story “The Stone Age”

Abstract

This paper will analyze, from the perspective of the fantastic and the Semiotics of Culture, the short story “The Stone Age,” part of the graphic novel entitled “Until Here Everything Was Well” from the series “Ordinary Tales” by Turkish cartoonist Ersin Karabulut, published in Brazil in 2022 by Comix Zone. The nine short stories that comprise this book describe the ills and absurdities present in our society, which appear in the story, generally, through a destabilizing, or fantastic, phenomenon. By combining the literary notion of the term “fantastic” with the Semiotics of Culture, the aim is to analyze how, in the short story in question, the fantastic is the result of the encounter of semiospheres with opposing characteristics, based on the reader’s active perception of where the natural, or real, ends and the fantastic begins. The choice of the corpus – a short story in comic book form – is due to the fact that the National Common Curricular Base (BNCC) requires that one of the skills of the Portuguese language class be knowing how to read the meanings of the comic book, relating non-verbal signs and, when present, verbal ones, which act in different semiotic perspectives, in order to provoke effects of meaning in the reader.