Signs of the Times · Signs of the Times. Intermedial Imaginaries, Countercultures, and Gendered Representations in French and Italian Comics Magazines, 1968-1989

This project investigates French and Italian comics magazines for adult audiences published between 1968 and 1989, a pivotal period of cultural upheaval, political ferment, and new media ecologies. Still understudied, magazines offer gateways to re-examine the cultural history of their times, working as cultural ecosystems blending comics with editorials, advertising, and borrowings from music, cinema, and literature. In particular, these magazines nurtured the sub- and countercultures that informed the artistic, media, and political imaginaries of the time.The project has two objectives. First, to return comics magazines as heritage, reconstructing their centrality as (counter)cultural mediators. Second, to analyse their imaginaries, stressing the politics of gendered representation.The project combines comparative literature, media sociology, and cultural history with DH and AI methods. I will apply Named Entity Recognition (NER) to textual sections to map cultural references across media and borders. I will use multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to detect recurring visual tropes in selected comics, complementing this with close reading. The results will be combined in a linked data structure, allowing text and image findings to be studied together.The project approaches a complex, contradictory landscape whose impact is still tangible today, reconstructing both the cultural centrality and the legacy of these magazines and the critical shortcomings of their imaginaries. By integrating traditional and digital methods, it aims to cast new light on how magazines mediated the aspirations of 1968, how their countercultural energy was absorbed into the 1980s mainstream, and how gendered visual regimes simultaneously embodied emancipation and reproduced exclusion. By focusing on comics magazines, it offers a fresh critical genealogy of European cultural history while advancing methodological bridges between media studies, gender studies, and DH/AI methods.