Adventure and emotion for a modern story but with a pleasant classic aroma. The Tin Heart (New Nine) is a comic of impeccable workmanship, aesthetically and narratively, ideal to recommend to young readers and whose reading adults will also enjoy because it achieves that so difficult –and often so undervalued– of being a cartoon truly for all audiences.
Its pages contain a hymn to friendship, love and freedom, a look at the relationship between a mother and her teenage daughter and a vital learning lesson where the popular story of Cyrano de Bergerac works as a reference and as a mirror. This is a comic where tenderness is not at odds with action and with some shocking plot twists.
The story takes place in a strange retrofuturistic world that mixes highly advanced technological elements with sets typical of the United States of the late nineteenth century. That places it within that current of science fiction known as steampunk, where the future is combined with a pre-industrial iconography presented with a certain nostalgia.
In The Tin Heart, humans live surrounded by servants who work on their plantations. The image evokes that of black slaves working on plantations in the American South; however, the slaves have been replaced by human-like robots. Docile and obedient robots. But also sensitive. They have a heart even though it's made of tin.
Among the human characters, the young Iséa stands out, who likes to take refuge in Cyrano de Bergerac, a film recommended to her by her only friend, whom she only knows virtually through the screen. But the day her mother fires Ruyna, her beloved robot nanny, Iséa rebels and will do everything possible to find that android she loves so much.
The comic's script is written by José Luis Munuera with the help of Beka, the pseudonym of the scriptwriting couple Bertrand Escaich and Caroline Roque. Munuera himself is in charge of the drawing, who certifies the extraordinary vividness of his stroke, which had already been evident in series such as Los Campbell, Sortilegios or Zorglub. Perhaps the novelty is that with The Tin Heart his style reaches the ideal point of balance between its more caricatured side and the more realistic facet of works like Bartleby, the scribe or like that Christmas Carol that is now also published in Spanish.
Munuera draws with a style of clear Disney references that is accompanied by a clever layout of the page and a skilful composition of the vignettes. The result is an album that can be read quickly, although the author knows how to insert moments of pause to enjoy a captivating atmosphere, enhanced by the splendid coloring of Sedyas from Biscay. The album was originally published in French by the Belgian publisher Dupuis, which presented it as the first volume in a series of "family and modern tales", although this volume can be read as a self-contained story.
In The Tin Heart, the robots manage to convey more kindness and more capacity for love and sacrifice than many of the humans that appear in these pages. The disturbing figure of the Sheriff, a powerful robot turned into a fearsome opponent, is another of the successes of the book.
