"History has always been told from the male perspective. It is time for that to change," says Cristina Durán forcefully. The Valencian cartoonist has just published the comic María la javelina (Astiberri) with Miguel Ángel Giner Bou, in which rescues the story of María Pérez Lacruz, the last woman murdered by Francoism in the Valencian Community.
The authors are these days in the Comic Barcelona room remembering the story of this young woman who enlisted as a militiawoman in the Iron Column and who was shot after the war, at just 25 years old. A story, they say, that "very little is known outside of Sagunt and the anarchist sphere."
When the project reached the ears of Laureano Domínguez, editor of Astiberri, he knew that it had to be part of his catalogue: "It is a very important work of historical memory." It's not the only one. There are several novelties that have just come out that have a historical woman as their protagonist, “and not necessarily from the 19th and 20th centuries. There is a previous life”, as Catalina Mejía from Salamandra Graphic points out.
The label has just released in Spanish the latest work by Barbara Stok, The Philosopher, the Dog and the Wedding, which reveals Hiparquía, a practically unknown thinker who lived in Greece in the 4th century BC. She “she I have been interested in philosophy for more than twenty years. I took classes in college and got into stoicism and yet I had never heard of it. That's when I knew that she could bring something new to the reader ”, confesses her author to La Vanguardia, who can also be seen these days for the comic book appointment.
In addition to Hiparchy, Salamandra also reveals the professional and personal career of Alice Guy, one of the world's leading filmmakers with more than 1,000 films to her credit, many of them attributed to her husband, Herbert Blaché.
Garbuix Books is another of the publishers that has been betting on this type of non-fiction comics for some time. The publisher has just published Jiujitsufragists, the Amazons of London, which is reminiscent of both the first feminist self-defense groups in history as well as Edith Garrud, a pioneer in this area.
“Self defense is an unfortunately current issue among women. But what many of us did not know is that it has been practiced for centuries to combat machismo and other injustices, points out the editor Montserrat Terrones, who assures that “comics are an excellent narrative for biographies. The combination of drawing and text allows complex concepts to be told quickly and easily, as well as reaching a wider audience.” Despite the fact that most of these stories are intended for an adult audience, Terrones points out that "this type of book is a very interesting way to bring the story closer to the youngest, precisely because of how visual they are."
That there are so many new comics about women who until now have remained in the shadows "is the result of a lawsuit that has been vindicated for years," reflects the bookseller José Antonio Manzano, from La Casa del Libro. A trend that, he hopes, "does not stop here."
It does not seem. Throughout this year, the autobiography of the underground cartoonist Aline Kominsky-Crumb (Reservoir Books) and Hinterhof (Garbuix Books) will also see the light of day, which will recall the life of the German designer Dasa Hinkis, who chose to earn a living as a sex worker .
