We can call it a comic, cartoon, comic, manga or graphic novel. The art of cartoons is experiencing a moment of editorial expansion, more titles than ever are being published and this allows us to enjoy proposals for all kinds of readers. There are intimate, philosophical stories, journalistic reports, biographies and autobiography; there are proposals close to poetry, experimentation and humor. The editorial vitality of the sector means that more and more publishers are incorporating comics into their catalog and that the novelties are complemented by an important work to recover classics and works to better understand this medium and its creators.
We start with an intense, emotional and moving comic. La espera (Reservoir Books), by the Korean Keum Suk Gendry-Kim, which comes after the critical and public success of her previous work, the heartbreaking Hierba. In this case, it focuses on the drama of families separated after the division of Korea at the end of World War II and with the war that began in 1950. The wait proposes a profoundly human look at this matter based on the history of a Korean woman who lives in Japan and is still waiting to receive news about the whereabouts of her daughter, whom she lost while fleeing the bombings. Keum Suk Gendry-Kim is able to create complex characters that exude a closeness and allow him to explore universal themes such as uncertainty, loss or hope. The rigorous drawing in black and white provides a decisive note of emotion.
Another true story, although closer in time, is the one proposed by the Italian Zerocalcare in No sleep till Shengal (Reservoir Books) where he narrates his torturous experience on a trip to northern Syria to meet the Ezidi community, a people who survived to the ISIS genocide in 2014, and now fighting against the Islamic State. With a direct language and very close to the reader, his chronicle explains how he entered the war zone, the extreme situations and the moments of solidarity that he experienced there. With edgy drawing, sharp dialogue and searing humor, No sleep till Shengal proves that photojournalism can use very different styles, just as adjective-free journalism can.
Two other great examples of cartoon journalism are Ukrainian Notebooks. Diary of an invasion (Salamandra Graphic), where Igort explains the start of the war in Ukraine through the testimony of friends and acquaintances in the area who recount their passage from perplexity to horror; and the monumental A Far Mountain (Amok) by Chongrui Nie, an autobiographical story illustrated with a powerful drawing about the cartoonist's youth who, after Mao Zedong came to power and in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, had to abandon his artistic studies when he was transferred to a remote rural area where he served in a weapons factory.
More autobiographical works deserve to be highlighted. The first is the voluminous Ducks: two years in the oil sands (Editorial Norma), written and drawn by Canadian Kate Beaton, where she narrates her experience in the country's oil industry and the sexual harassment experienced in that cold, dehumanized and mostly male. The second is the first volume of the Maiden diptych, by Florence Dupré la Tour (Astiberri), which with acid humor describes the passage from childhood to puberty, the discovery of sex and the hidden taboos in a conservative and patriarchal family; a fresh and very intelligent comic, narrated with an admirable ease.
The new album by Daniel Torres could be described as an artistic autobiography, since in Some teachers and the whole truth (Norma Editorial) he recalls the cartoonists who were essential to his training, from George Herriman to Hugo Pratt, while evoking the birth of some of his works, such as Opium or The Eighth Day. The book allows Torres' color pages to be contrasted with the preparatory work and is both a drawing lesson and a declaration of love for comics.
And although they are not properly autobiographical, we close this block with three albums that are based on the personal experience of their authors. The Surrogate (Garbuix Books), written by Sophie Adriansen and drawn by the illustrator Mathou, is a graphic novel with a non-idealized vision of motherhood. Its authors say that childbirth is not necessarily a wonderful moment and that the maternal instinct does not have to arise spontaneously. For his part, the Balearic Bartolomé Seguí offers a costumbrist story full of humor and realism about the lives of those who, like himself, have already turned sixty in Boomers (Salamandra Graphic); in these pages he recovers the characters Lola and Ernesto whose youth stories could be read in the magazine El Víbora in the eighties.
In turn, Raquel GU looks at the generation that is in its forties with humor through the hilarious comic strips of La edad stupendous (Sapristi), originally published in the magazine El Jueves. Through a gallery of very well characterized characters that give a lot of play, she shows that humor can make the most truthful of portraits when used with ingenuity.
Another national author with an outstanding novelty for Sant Jordi is Pep Brocal, who dares neither more nor less than an adaptation of Ramon Llull in The Book of Beasts / El llibre de les besties (Bang Ediciones). After going through the children's album, illustration or screen printing, Brocal has managed to endow his latest comics with superlative narrative efficiency, as he demonstrated in his previous work, the award-winning Underworld. You have to be a very good storyteller to appropriate Llull and come out of the challenge so gracefully. The Book of Beasts is an allegorical and symbolic fable about power and the legitimacy of exercising it. The version in comic format skilfully combines references to medieval aesthetics with the iconography typical of contemporary comics, and among the characters the cunning and ambitious figure of Renarda stands out.
With a good critical load comes the new comic by the Catalan Max, one of the most respected authors of our comic. In Qué/ Què (Salamandra Graphic / Finestres) he shows us a filiform and minimalist character who advances through some double pages with a theatrical appearance with which Max ridicules the journeys of initiation and charges against political correctness and influencers. For his part, Lorenzo Montatore from Madrid presents Aquí hay avería (ECC), a colourful, psychedelic work told with mastery and an unquestionable personality. After approaching the figure of Francisco Umbral in The lie ahead, he opts for fiction to tell the story of a painter named Viti, addicted to a drug that is consumed by eye. The drawing and the unstoppable acceleration that Montatore gives to his work make it a fascinating read in which the form and substance of the work go hand in hand to crystallize in a hallucinating story full of references to cartoons and comics. comics.
Violent colors and dreamlike landscapes are the protagonists of Por culpa de una flor (Blackie Books / Apa Apa), by María Medem, an experimental proposal that demonstrates the extent to which comics can handle a radically new and contemporary plastic and narrative discourse to situate these three hundred atmospheric pages in a place closer to poetry than to conventional comics.
For their part, Cristina Durán and Miguel Ángel Giner Bou sign a valuable exercise of justice and recovery of historical memory with María la javelina (Astiberri). The tandem, which won the National Comic Award with El día 3, returns vindicating the fight of the one who was the last woman executed by Francoism in the Valencian Community, at the age of twenty-five. A portrait of the role of women in the defense of the Republic and the climate of terror and denunciations after the war. An honest and moving story.
Continuing with the national authors, we highlight the new work by the tandem formed by the cultural critic Jorge Carrión and the cartoonist Sagar, El museo / El museu (Norma Editorial) is a visual essay that is inspired by Romanesque frescoes, Gothic altarpieces or in modern painting from the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya to argue that the comic is a language as ancient as it is powerful. An ambitious and hypnotic tour that strings together names such as Jacint Verdaguer, Goya or Picasso, portrayed with a spirited line sublimated with some textures and forceful color that turn these pages into a visual feast. The album is a project in which the MNAC itself has participated, a type of collaboration that is not uncommon in the world of comics.
Another recent album has the support of another museum, in this case the Louvre in Paris; This is The Lovers of Shamhat (Ponent Mon), written and drawn by Charles Berberian –co-author of the delicious Monsieur Jean series–, which tells the famous epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest literary works of humanity, based on the figure of Shamhat, his companion. Berberian mixes the mythical story with some works exhibited in the French museum and the personal history of the author himself, who was born in Iraq and lived his childhood in Lebanon before moving to France. The cartoonist's sweet and graceful brush stroke is here complemented by a selective and clever use of spot colour.
The new work by Javi Rey also has a literary basis, in his case he adapts the famous work by Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People (Comic Planet) where he tells the story of Dr. Thomas Stockmann, who discovers that the hot springs in his city, an important economic resource, are contaminated. With a crystalline drawing reinforced by an expressionist color, Rey evokes this famous story of the fight for integrity and truth. It is also an adaptation of the intimate and epidermal manga A Woman and the War (Gallo Nero) by the Japanese Kondo Yoko, where she brings together in one story the two stories of Ango Sakaguchi in which she offered two views of life under the bombs, one masculine and another female. In the comic, her figure stands out, an ex-prostitute who is only capable of feeling pleasure surrounded by destruction.
Four international titles to finish the block of novelties. Asterix fans have a must with the album Por Tutatis! (Astiberri), where Lewis Trondheim parodies the adventures of the little Gaul and the result becomes, paradoxically, one of the funniest episodes of the character of Uderzo and Goscinny since the death of the latter. Full of wit and winks that readers of the series will quickly understand, it is a fun comic that renews the series because he is not forced to imitate it. A regular contributor to Trondheim, Joann Sfar teams up this time with cartoonist Benjamin Chaud to sign the first volume of a comic designed for readers aged ten and up, Heliotrope. The magic thieves (New Nine), a crazy adventure in a contemporary key starring a schoolgirl that serves to deal with issues such as political commitment, education or gender identity.
The first work by Léa Murawiec, El gran vacío / El gran buit (Salamandra Graphic / Finestres), an original and fast-paced dystopia that presents a society in which the names of people they have to be remembered for them to survive. A parable about the cult of personality and the dependence on social networks in a work drawn with a naive and expressive style, halfway between manga and the most primitive Tintin mixed with pop resonances. From the other side of the Atlantic comes The Virgin's Blood (Fulgencio Pimentel), by Sammy Harkham, a story about a young man who wants to make his way in the low-budget horror film industry in 1970s Los Angeles. Harkham, one of the most influential American independent comic book publishers and authors, spent fourteen years on this album. The result is an ambitious, atypical and magnificently dialogued graphic novel, capable of renewing the comic while looking back at the classics.
And one of the classics that continues to amaze with its imaginative page compositions is Frank King, author of an indisputable masterpiece called Gasoline Alley and which is now compiled with great care and in a giant format –28 by 38 centimeters– in an album of one hundred and twenty pages entitled Sundays with Walt and Skeezix (Diábolo Ediciones) and which compiles Sunday plates published between 1921 and 1934 plus a very complete introduction. To understand the importance of this series that is still capable of giving modern lessons about comics, it is enough to say that his followers include Art Spiegelman or Chris Ware.
Equally revolutionary, but for the French comic, was the appearance of the album Barbarella (Dolmen Publishing), written and drawn by Jean-Claude Forest, which for the first time showed a woman fully enjoying her sexuality. It marked the birth of the adult bande dessinée and was a decisive work for artists like Tardi or Druillet. The Spanish edition maintains the mythical French cover of 1964.
Finally, two works that recover two figures of the comic strip in our country: the critic Antoni Guiral analyzes and puts in context the most famous creation of Josep Escobar in Zipi y Zape. The most famous comic book twins (Bruguera) while René Parra reconstructs the career of one of the main cartoonists of Republican Spain, sentenced to death for allegedly subversive comics, in 'Bluff'. The death of a cartoonist (El Nadir), an exciting and revealing read. And also, an act of justice.
