“How much do you know about the European Union”: Disseminating EU Policies and Values through Comic Books

Nowadays it has become increasingly important for large institutions such as the European Union (EU) to bridge the knowledge gap between experts and citizens. The EU’s website, for instance, offers information materials in a form that can be easily understood by non-specialists. In this study we focused on the Learning Corner , a EU’s website which contains a wide range of teaching resources aimed at explaining the European Union and its policies in an understandable and attractive way to students of different age groups. The Learning Corner webpage includes different text types – booklets, comics, videos and websites; this analysis was conducted on a sub-corpus of four comic books: Troubled waters, Take two, Jump start and Hidden disaster whose target audience are young people from 15 years old onwards. By combining Narrative Analysis and a Multimodal approach, we investigated the linguistic and visual strategies for knowledge dissemination about the EU policies and procedures and we looked at how institutional discourse is recontexualized in these teaching resources in a student-friendly language. Finally, we looked at the values and ideologies that the EU seeks to communicate to young people through the aforementioned comic books.