Carnegie Mellon University

Research Illustrates Legacy of Latin American Comics

October 18, 2019

Research Illustrates Legacy of Latin American Comics

By Jaycie King

Stefanie Johndrow
  • Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences
  • 412-268-1788

Aliens, lethal snowflakes and a resistance movement, and a family separated by time travel could describe a sci-fi film. It's the setting of "El Eternauta," a serial comic published in Argentina during the late 1950s.

A fragment of the original comic as it was published in book form, is now available through Carnegie Mellon University's Latin American Comics Archive (LACA).

The archive is a curated, online exhibit of comic strips and comic books with the goal of enabling researchers to visualize and employ comic strips and comic books created in Latin America between the 1920s and the present for pedagogical purposes.

Felipe Gómez, teaching professor of Hispanic studies in Carnegie Mellon University's Department of Modern Languages, leads a multidisciplinary research team in the effort to provide students and researchers a new window into cultural studies.

Gómez recently was awarded "Best Formative Initiative Developed in 2018" by the Hispanic Digital Humanities organization for LACA. The archive also was nominated for a Dean's Educational Innovation Fellowship Award at CMU and for the 2018-2019 CMU Teaching Innovation Award, where it was selected as a finalist.

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