Three characters search for the trail of the deceased Maravillas. In this comic, life and death chase each other and even confuse each other. Because this is – among other things – a comic about diffuse borders, whether they are the borders between the living and the dead, between high and low culture or between comics and graphic novels. El designio (Autsaider Cómics) is a comic where wonders and the extraordinary appear around the corner and where the amazing coexists with the most everyday reality and moves away from all lavishness.
El designio is the first comic written by a renowned comic reader who until now had expressed himself without drawings, Javier Pérez Andújar, author of The Brave Princes or Paseos con mi madre and Herralde Prize winner for his latest novel, The Year of the Buffalo. Precisely, this last title is the one that has the most connections with the comic that he now publishes, not least because of the diverse characters and the presence of the supernatural in the plot. The Design tells us the story of a man who claims to see evil in others and whose obsession with pursuing it results in a kind of mystical madness.
In the drawing, Laura Pérez Vernetti, Grand Prize winner at the Barcelona Comic Fair in 2018, exhibits the powerful line that characterizes her: a radical black and white, a solid line with hardly any modulation in its thickness. Dirty realism with a clear line, or if you prefer: a clear underground line, because also in artistic definitions the borders are blurred. The design is pop realism with an aesthetic that evokes the graphic and narrative transgression of magazines like Madriz or the first years of Cairo, or like the one she herself practiced in El Víbora from the beginning and for a decade.
Maravillas' death is shrouded in mystery. Those who will be in charge of elucidating it will be a good-looking young man (Largo), an exorcist (Father Elías) and a one-armed girl (Patricia). In a post-pandemic and swampy Barcelona, the three accidental heroes will move through the underworld of a Catalan capital that recalls the expressionist cinema of Murnau or the engravings of Frans Masereel. A saturated city where buildings crowd together and passersby seem to come out of a coven, a bustling and chaotic city, like a George Grosz painting.
These names come to mind when reading these pages, but they are not the only ones. Because this graphic novel – or this comic – is made of echoes as disparate as the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, the film The Exorcist, the Pink Floyd or REM albums, the tarot cards, or the comics of The Eternaluta, Little Nemo, Mortadelo or Sir Tim O'Theo. Father Elias himself, the exorcist, presents a face reminiscent of that of the pessimistic philosopher Emil Cioran, and the young man lying on the stretcher evokes Andrea Mantegna's Lamentation over the Dead Christ. Because in this comic the images contain within themselves other images that carry new meanings. The messages accumulate and make this reading a playful challenge for the reader.
Andújar has always made his tastes and interests as a reader or cultural consumer into first-class fiction material: tributes, recreations and winks crowd his stories. Also here. His literary voice is recognized for his ability to naturally weave together very diverse ideas without ever losing his footing. He knows that in comics the image counts and that is why his way of writing must change and appears, now, much more concentrated, encapsulated within dialogues that resonate with great force precisely because the text is scarce. That meandering, cultured and popular literary voice now also appears, although in a new way, in the drawn pages of El designio.
