Memories of Tomorrow: How Italian Graphic Novelists Are Rethinking Storytelling in the Digital Age

Congratulations to Neapolitan authors Giuseppe Sant’Elia and Alessandro Verre on their graphic novel debut, Timeless Tale – Ricordi di domani, and on the preview of Il Cappellaio.

Today’s cultural discourse often centers on the digital space and its effects on daily life, relationships, political behavior, and the business environment. Two young Neapolitan lawyers, well-versed in the intersection of law, economics, culture, and emerging trends in artificial intelligence, have taken on these themes with ambition and intelligence in Timeless Tale, brought vividly to life through Marco Monelli's illustrations.

Timeless Tale unfolds across two temporal poles: Christmas 2024 and a dystopian 2050, where climate catastrophe has reduced daily life to survival under a regimented, totalitarian order. Through a touch of magical realism, Marco, an older boy in 2024, and Paolo, a younger boy in 2050, transcend time via a magical snow globe, allowing them to see and speak to one another across eras. Each is incredulous at the other’s world. Their dialogue becomes a lens through which the narrative explores alienation, atomization, and the erosion of family life, conditions intensified by immersion in smartphones, social media, and virtual existence.

At its core, the story contrasts the present’s hurried impatience, where Christmas preparations are treated as an inconvenience rather than a source of meaning, with a future haunted by nostalgia, where a father, a son, and a few friends struggle to preserve tradition, continuity, and identity. The present appears as a land of needless alienation; the future as a desperate terrain of rediscovery, where the last remnants of human bonding are fought for among a handful of kindred souls. Reestablishing communication and shared humanity emerges as the only path toward reclaiming civilization itself.

Sant’Elia continues this reflection in Il Sorriso del Gatto, a hybrid comic strip centered on the character Il Cappellaio. Drawing on Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Sant’Elia reimagines the figure as a time-traveling observer who finds himself in contemporary Rome, conversing with the Cat about how, and whether, it is still possible to speak to the public. In the opening episode, set against a grim Roman sunset, the Hatter remarks that everyone is mad but does not know it, whereas he and the Cat are aware of their madness. Observing young people absorbed by their phones, unnoticed by one another or by him, the Cat abruptly transports the Hatter inside a smartphone, grinning, “Now they’ll see you.” The episode ends with a pointed and unsettling “End?”

Underlying both projects is Sant’Elia’s contention that we are attempting to understand the emerging present using conceptual categories inherited from the past. Newsstands are closing, bookstores are burdened with unsold stock, publishers struggle to maintain distribution, and artists feel threatened by artificial intelligence. The question is no longer simply how to tell stories, but how to create narratives within a radically altered ecosystem.

Sant’Elia argues that the decline in reading is not an individual failure but a systemic one. Attention spans continue to shrink, feeds replace articles, and reels last seconds. With so many competing demands on attention and diminishing tolerance for complexity, society drifts toward constant occupation rather than immersion. Long-form reading becomes the exception rather than the norm. In this context, traditional digital comics, often little more than scanned paper works sold as PDFs, struggle to find an audience.

New formats, such as webtoons designed for vertical scrolling and thumb-based navigation, attempt to meet readers where they are. As Sant’Elia notes, in these cases, the form is already the content. Short, self-contained strips circulate easily on social platforms, building narratives incrementally and virally, adapted to contemporary modes of consumption.

Confronting the attention economy poses a dilemma. Traditionalists fear that adapting to it means capitulating to its logic, yet a return to older models is no longer viable. As Sant’Elia puts it, the difference lies between those who are subjugated by the algorithm and those who learn to speak its language to say what they want anyway.

In response, Sant’Elia is now experimenting with AI-assisted, interactive comics and video-fumetti, combining Italian graphic traditions with new narrative strategies. Writing and lecturing on artificial intelligence, he emphasizes that the technology functions as an executive tool guided by the author’s vision, not as a substitute for artistic labor. Recent legal developments recognize the distinction between superficial prompt-generated imagery and works produced through sustained intellectual contribution. Artificial intelligence may generate quick, rough images, but without coherent vision or narrative development, it remains incomplete. Mastery lies in bending the tool to one’s will.

For these reasons, Sant’Elia is currently launching his video-fumetti and narrative reels. The new vision is to plant seeds through each brief bit of content, which will hopefully mature offline, when the reader or consumer has a moment of calmer reflection. The aim is not instant depth, but cultivation. It may be an imperfect strategy, but in a collapsing ecosystem, inaction guarantees failure. Quality will continue to attract an audience. What is changing is not the need for meaning, but the route by which meaning reaches its public.

~ By Antonio Isernia

Essential Bibliography:
• Sant’Elia and Verre, Times Tale, Gagio Edizioni, 2024
• See, Il Mattino’s review of Timeless Tale: https://www.ilmattino.it/en/timeless_tale_echoes_of_tomorrow-8590814.html
• See, bibliographical information at publisher Gagio Edizioni: https://www.gagioedizioni.it/prod/timeless-tales-ricordi-di-domani/