This contribution will explore Sutu’s These Memories Won’t Last (2015), an autobiographical webcomic dealing with the evolving dementia of the ninety-three-year-old grandfather of the narrator. Sutu (Stuart Campbell) makes a novel use of the scroll structure that McCloud dubbed “infinite canvas” to unfold avertical narrative punctuated by a synchronized soundtrack that changes as we progress into the story, and, more importantly, by an animation effect that renders the panels increasingly foggy once the reader proceeds through the story; as a result, the ones that had been already read fade away to irretrievability. In doing so, Campbell’swork not only relies on medium-specific features in an original way, butembodies and stages the continuing erasure of the memories experienced by the elder man,building a site of narrative and mnemonic uncertainty.

If vulnerable is what can be “wounded”, within which some kind of breach can be made, vulnerability is undoubtedly a dominant in post-media society. Not only for the media themselves, but also for those who populate the media, that is, individual subjects. The objective of this paper is to reflect on the vulnerability of the face in the post-media and post-cinematographic context: faces that have been manipulated either abusively (deepfakes, deep nostalgia, digital resurrections, memetic resemantizations…) or voluntarily (filters, face apps, social overexposure…) are in fact the common denominator in a sclerotic context, polarized between the obsession with controlling one's own appearance and the proprioception of an increasingly fragile, inadequate, vulnerable self.

This paper is part of FACETS - Face Aesthetics in Contemporary E-Technological Societies, a project funded by ERC (European Research Council) under the Horizon 2020 program (grant agreement: 819649).