What in the world is Fumetti?

I was IMing a friend about comics today, and he told me that one of his favorite kinds were fotonovelas. He recently moved here to the US from Spain so he still sorta speaks more Spanglish than English. I didn’t really get a chance to ask him what fotonovelas were so I googled it and found the English term for it, fumetti. I still had no idea what this meant. Any ideas?

Duh, fotonovelas, like photo novels? These are just comics where photographs are used for the illustrations. They’re pretty popular in Spain, Latin America, and Italy. I’m not really sure what fumetti are though either. Probably the same thing?

Yah, fumetti are basically photo novels or photographic comics. It’s the Italian word for all comics since it means a little puff of smoke referring to the speech bubbles. However, in English, fumetti are comics where photographs serve as the illustrations. Fumetti was never really that popular in the US though, so I don’t know how many of them your Spanish friend is gonna be able to find here.

Thanks for all the info, guys. I did a bit more research about fumetti and found out that there aren’t many photographic comics printed today because it’s way more expensive to print high quality photographs than simple line illustrations. However, what I did find was that there has been a revival of fumetti online in the form of webcomics. Here are a few panels from the latest called Night Zero that I found.

lolololol , that shit’s pretty awesome. i think imma read up some more fumetti, its nice to get a break from all the digital artwork that plagues webcomics these days

Wow, you guys just found out about Night Zero?!?! It’s definitely one of my favorite webcomics and one of the only ones I still keep up with weekly. You guys should really check it out because it has a really intense storyline. It’s essentially about the city of Seattle being infected by a disease that made the people turn into zombies. After the outbreak, chaos broke out in the city and this allowed the Russian Nazarov mob group to take over for the failing government. They sectioned off a part of the city with a wall, and the people who followed them were able to create a new community with the hopes of repairing their lives. Hope I didn’t give away too much...

I tried reading a few pages of this, but I couldn’t get past the juxtaposition of the speech bubbles on the photographs. As you said, guy 5, Night Zero focuses on the plot and storyline. Thus, it’s wired to have something so geared towards meaning, the speech bubbles explaining the plot, layered on such realistic pictures, the photographs. On McCloud’s pyramid of abstract, meaning, and reality from his Understanding Comics, fumetti would be combining the bottom left and right corners. McCloud does comment that currently “many American mainstream comics... have the desire for more realistic art and more elaborate scripts.” Night Zero definitely takes this to the max.

Nazarov4ever wrote: It’s definitely one of my favorite webcomics and one of the only ones I still keep up with weekly. You guys should really check it out

Yeah, I agree with you that Night Zero is a cool fumetti webcomic. I just did some quick research and found out that the production of Night Zero is actually quite complicated and takes a lot of work. It’s produced like an actual movie with a full cast and crew. They even have sets props and costumes! The effort behind Night Zero is pretty amazing and consists of many writers, actors, photographers, digital artists, and film crews. It’s no wonder the quality of Night Zero is so great!

Oh, that’s cool. I never knew there was such a large group of people that worked to make Night Zero. The one thing that always amazed me was the quality of the pictures that make up Night Zero’s comics. I know that they’re photographs, but the lighting just seems so different from normal pictures...would you happen to know how they achieve that effect TeheXperT?

ILikeGarfield wrote:I couldn’t get past the juxtaposition of the speech bubbles on the photographs

Yeah I guess the format of fumetti can seem a bit stiff since it has to bring together speech bubbles which are a form of emanata with the complete oppposite in photographs. However, the great plot and beautifully-produced images is all I care about when reading Night Zero.

It turns out Night Zero’s pictures are the result of various imaging techniques that collectively are called high dynamic range imaging, or HDR. It works by taking pictures at varying exposures and then those images are combined through something called tonemapping to create one picture. The tonemapping brings the large range of contrasts to a smaller one, so that they can monitors can display all the colors. The resulting image is one that has relatively even luminance across the image. This is what makes Night Zero’s images look like a mix of photography and illustration. ILikeGarfield, this sorta helps out with your problem with Night Zero because the HDR technique gives final images that aren’t completely realistic.
Here's an example of HDR imaging: