From the state of comics to comics by the State: a view on the relationship culture-art-State by the first Antologia de Historieta y Pin-up of San Luis

Abstract

This dossier starts from the idea of ​​a sociology of the production of comics that takes into account the existence of a set of positions and relationships that are organized around the comics, that is, the dispositions of the social agents that occupy these positions (editors, writers, designers, distributors, managers), as well as their practices that define the configuration of the field. An exercise of this type would inevitably involve studying the relationships between the field of graphic narratives and other areas of social reality (the economic field, the public sector and the field of mass communication). In this paper, we propose to analyze the experience of publishing the first Anthology of Comics and Pin-Up (2015) of San Luis, a small Mediterranean province located in the center of the Argentine Republic that has experienced significant economic and demographic growth since the democratic recovery in the country, a process that, however, was driven predominantly by the provincial government. A State that, on the other hand, has been occupied for 37 years by the same political party and, almost uninterruptedly, by the same family.