The Closed Circuit of Paranoia: Persecutory Vision in Alberto Breccia’s Informe sobre los Ciegos [Report on the Blind]

by Dr. Velebita Koričančić, Mexico City

Alberto Breccia’s Report on the Blind adapts the most unsettling section of Ernesto Sábato’s novel On Heroes and Tombs (Buenos Aires, 1961). The episode centered on Fernando Vidal Olmos, a man convinced that blind people form a secret order controlling the world. Breccia’s graphic adaptation turns this obsession into a way of seeing. The comic creates a closed circuit of paranoia: Fernando sees danger everywhere, and the reader is drawn into the same paranoid field.

First published by Ediciones B in the 1990s, Breccia’s comic later went out of print. It was reissued in Argentina by Ediciones Colihue in 2007, and in Spain by Astiberri in 2011. Since it remains officially untranslated into English, it is worth revisiting for Anglophone readers.

While critics have frequently framed Breccia’s comics language through its expressionist heritage and its use of abstraction and collage, I approach the work through Graphic Medicine to ask: what happens when seeing becomes persecutory? What happens when perception becomes so unstable that the world itself becomes difficult to trust?

What makes Report on the Blind valuable for Graphic Medicine is that Breccia confronts the readers with paranoia. His pages instruct us to scan for clues, to suspect, and perhaps even to misread, willingly or not. As faces become evidence and black spaces threatening, oppressive layouts seem to crumble. In this sense, the comic shifts Graphic Medicine away from diagnosis (there is nothing simple to detect here) and toward perception: mental distress as a way of being in a world already under surveillance and fraught with fear.

By “persecutory vision,” I refer to a mode of seeing in which every detail can become proof.  Distorted faces, dense black fields, fragmented bodies and repeated silhouettes are among Breccia’s trademarks. Eyes stare intensely; mouths twist; bodies stretch, shrink, or disappear into shadows. Other people’s faces become clues in the protagonist’s private investigation. The tunnel and descent sequences intensify this feeling of psychic pressure. As he moves deeper into hidden spaces, landscapes dissolve, stains and cracks abound, and the page is disorienting. Paranoia turns spatial: the world narrows down.

Recent clinical research on paranoia, such as “The International Consortium on Paranoia Research: An introduction” (2025), may offer an academic entry point for reading paranoia in Breccia, but its usefulness here lies in revealing the limits of medical explanation. Clinical vocabulary cannot fully account for what Breccia’s pages do visually. What the comic does instead is to recreate suspicions in comics’ terms: how fear clings to bodies and is entangled with urban space.

The comic also pushes Graphic Medicine to consider the cultural implications of mental distress. Vidal Olmos’s paranoia may be individually motivated, but Breccia’s visual world evokes the Argentine sociopolitical context of the 1960s, with its escalating authoritarianism and public fear. The world he draws is one in which suspicion feels justified because it is embedded in the very structure of social life. When political fear moves across the comic page, Breccia shows how a world sustained by surveillance teaches—and perhaps even requires—its citizens to see suspiciously.

References

Pinkham, Amy E., Daniel Freeman, Richard P. Bentall, and others. “The International Consortium on Paranoia Research: An Introduction.” World Psychiatry 24, no. 2 (2025): 274–75. https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.21323

Dr. Velebita Koričančić (ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2941-1471) is a Croatian professor-researcher, born in Zagreb and based in Mexico City. She holds a Master’s degree in Latin American Studies, cum laude, from the University of Salamanca, Spain, and a PhD in Comparative Literature, with honors, from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She is an Assistant Professor at Anahuac Mexico University’s School of Communication and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Latin American Studies at UNAM’s School of Philosophy and Letters. She is also a Candidate-level member of Mexico’s National System of Researchers and a literary translator.