Shyness has never been an obstacle for Ana C. Sánchez (Murcia, 1990) to become one of the most recognized Spanish mangakas in Europe. She has been drawing since she was a child, but the growth she has made in the last five years is remarkable. Some of her books can be read in France, Italy, the United States and even Brazil. “I am the first one surprised that my cartoons have reached there,” she confesses smiling to La Vanguardia.
The culmination came last Thursday, when the Manga Barcelona salon, which closed its doors yesterday with a new record of 165,000 attendees, recognized his latest work, Limbo (Planeta Cómic), as the best Spanish manga published this year. An award that is decided by the public and is another example of how faithful readers are to their stories.
The protagonist of this last story is Aurora Edelweiss, a young woman who can see and interact with the spirits of deceased people. A gift she used to make money until she is tasked with collecting soul essences. A complicated mission, since she doesn't know where to find them or if they really exist.
“I had a plot like this in mind for a long time, because it gives a lot of play to implement in the real world, but I didn't feel ready to develop it, at least as I had in mind. It was easier to start with short, romantic, one-volume stories. But, in the end, I found myself able to add more action and start a longer project,” she confesses.
Next February the second volume of a series that is expected to have a minimum of five books will be published. “Actually, I don't have an exact number. I could have many more. It will depend on the public's interest. When they decide I should stop I will, but in the meantime, I keep going,” she admits.
He does it with great enthusiasm. He never thought that he would be able to fulfill his dream. “It was enough for me to be able to draw for myself, show my cartoons online and sell some of my works in salons and fairs.” He still remembers when he came to the Manga Barcelona salon for the first time at the age of 20, because “he was quite clear that it was a place where everyone who liked manga and this world had to be.”
She joined a group of friends who, like her, were immersed in the otaku world, and they set up a small stall where they sold bags, key chains, and also fanzines that she drew herself. The experience was so “spectacular” that she repeated it the following years and became a regular at this and other manga and anime festivals. She understood that she would have to spend hours on the train up and down with her creations. She “printed out about fifty fanzines and carried them with me. It was very loaded, so I had better sell all or a large part of them so as not to bring them back.”
Knowing that an event of this type was close was a motivation to come up with new comics, which he first published on the Internet, “because it is a good laboratory to get to know your audience better,” and then he printed and sold them.
In 2018, in a fit of confidence, thanks to the good comments that the chapters of his new story received on the networks, which he titled Alter ego, he took one hundred issues to the press and, to his surprise, sold them all. That caught the attention of the Planeta Manga team, who told him that they were about to launch a magazine and that they were looking for new talent. “The salon is a good place to meet cartoonists. What I couldn't believe was that it was me they called. I admit that I am a somewhat negative person. They asked me if I would like to continue making chapters for publication and, of course, I accepted. I had to back out of some pre-sales I had made at the salon. And then people started wondering what was happening, until we finally made it public.”
There began his professional adventure, which soon took off, despite the fact that there was a pandemic in the middle that, far from turning it back, helped him inspire the “distorted world” of Limbo, “which was not so far from the real thing because it seemed that we would all have gone crazy.”
Regarding her civil servant position that she enjoyed until then, she says: “I had to leave it. I know it was something stable, but it didn't fulfill me. I always looked for a job that would allow me to continue drawing. That was my only and main objective. And I fulfilled it. Who knows if I'll have to go back to it. I hope to always be able to live off my drawings, but, as I said before, readers rule,” he concludes.
