Comics have been incorporating new voices and proposals for some time that support the variety of this medium capable of telling all types of stories through cartoons. This article recommends some novelties published after the summer, but it is inevitable to emphasize first that this has been a year of great creativity for comics. During the first months of 2023, and limiting ourselves to national production, titles destined to last appeared, such as Ronson by César Sebastián, Contrition by Keko and Portela, Here there is a breakdown by Lorenzo Montatore, Because of a flower by María Medem or María la Javelin by Cristina Durán and Miguel Á. Giner Bou. To them are added, in the final stretch of the year, other equally outstanding works that confirm this good moment.
We start with a novelty that falls directly into the category of contemporary classic. The Sky in the Head is a work (Norma Editorial) by Antonio Altarriba, Sergio García and Lola Moral that tells the life of Nivek, who works in Congo in a coltan mine and is forced to become a child soldier at only twelve years old. Nivek will embark on a trip to Europe and on his odyssey he will come across mafias that traffic in migrants, slave merchants and boats that sow death in the Mediterranean. A hard book because it challenges us in a stark way about a tremendously current reality. A comic where adventure and political story go hand in hand in a well-documented script and pages of great compositional originality, where the background sneaks into the vignettes and the vignettes mix with the landscape. Years will pass and we will continue to remember this reading.
We do not leave the national market because this month a best-selling graphic novel, Paco Roca, returns to bookstores, presenting El abismo del olvido (Astiberri) together with Rodrigo Terrasa, who has supported him in documentation and contribution of ideas. The new album by the author of Arrugas and La casa arrives with the same horizontal format as the latter and recovers the story of José Celda, shot by the Franco regime along with eleven other men in the Paterna cemetery months after the end of the Civil War .
The new installment of the cat detective Blacksad, the second part of the diptych Everything Falls (Norma Editorial), by the Spaniards Juan Díaz Canales and Juanjo Guarnido, is aiming to be a best-seller – it already is in France. Corruption, crimes, heartbreak and a superlative portrait of the city of skyscrapers during the fifties.
The veteran Kim immerses himself in the turbulent years of the French Revolution and the times of Napoleon with a work of goldsmithing, Fouché (Norma Editorial), a graphic tour de force that adapts Stefan Zweig's biography of Joseph Fouché, a politician without scruples that monopolized immense power thanks to force and obtaining confidential information. Kim is respectful of the original work and that is why the comic pages have a lot of voice-over text, which does not prevent them from being read without ever losing interest.
Four authors born in the eighties have important news. Ana Oncina, who conquered thousands of readers with her series Croqueta y Empanadilla, proposes an interesting change of register with a small graphic novel titled Planeta (Planeta Cómic), where the story of Valentina, who lives in a small and cozy cabin in the middle of the forest, is mixed with a dream where we see her in another world with her partner. The two plots are mixed to the point of not knowing what is real and what is dreamed.
The Argentine Sole Otero presents Walicho (Salamandra Graphic) after the good reception of Poncho fue (2017) and Naftalina (2020); Her new story spans from the 17th century to the present and tells the story of three sisters who arrive in Buenos Aires on a colonial ship and will be accused of witchcraft. Each chapter offers a different narrative and visual approach, although always supported by Otero's powerful and expressive use of color.
Bea Lema from A Coruña demonstrates that a graphic novel can be drawn or embroidered, in the literal sense of the word, and thus, with lines and thread stitches, she explains a disturbing story about a mother's mental illness from the point of view of his daughter in The Body of Christ (Astiberri). For her part, Genie Espinosa from Badalona publishes White Shark (Sapristi / Finestres), where she tells the story of a young woman who travels to a small island after receiving the news of the death of her father. Espinosa evokes the feelings produced by grief and loss through an experimental and hypnotic setting.
Hypnotic is also the proposal by Lucas Burtin and Sun Bai, The most beautiful beach in the North Sea (Fulgencio Pimentel), a silent and subtle comic, a languid and poetic dystopia about the goodbye of two former lovers on a dying planet Earth. Another groundbreaking proposal, although with a very different, brutish and ugly graphics, is Beca mouse (Apa Apa), the new work by Anna Haifisch, a crazy story of two human-like rodents locked in a remote artists' residence. Delicious punk humor drawn like a stark sketch.
One of the big news of the season is the publication, for the first time in our country, of a 1983 comic by filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, master of anime and director of My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away. El viatge de Shuna / El viatge de Shuna (Salamandra Graphic) is a manga made in a delicious color and where we can see, once again, the overflowing imagination characteristic of his films as well as his love for nature and dream landscapes, the lonely heroes and the legends.
After seven years of work, comes the new graphic novel from the author of Ghost World, the story of a feisty woman who hides a tribute to genre comics. Coming from the independent underground scene, Daniel Clowes is one of the most interesting artists in contemporary comics. With Monica (Fulgencio Pimentel / Finestres) he builds a unitary story through a mixture of stories, styles and themes that range from science fiction to romance through war stories. A comic with several reading levels.
From North America also comes Jordan Crane's new graphic novel, Don't Go (La Cúpula), in which he has invested almost two decades, a psychological thriller that captivates the reader from a minimal everyday situation, a drama that unfolds in the protagonist's head and generates an anxiety that the author knows how to convey very well. Two comics with engaging plots, although very different from each other, are Limpieza en dry (Planeta Comic), an impeccable example of a well-constructed black series, with sublime drawing and color by Joost Martens, and The Many Deaths of Laila Starr ( Planeta Comic) by Ram V and Filipe Andrade, a science fiction adventure in which Death – with a capital letter – is forced to stop performing its functions.
We return to the close stories with cousins Jillian and Mariko Tamaki, who describe in Roaming (La Cúpula / Finestres) the visit of three Canadian university friends to New York and capture both the beauty of the city and the evolution of friendship throughout of this journey that will transform your relationship. More than four hundred pages that can be read in one sitting thanks to the authenticity of the scenes and the freshness of the dialogues.
The biography that the British Lizzy Stewart has imagined in Alison (Errata Naturae) and which tells of a woman's struggle to emancipate herself and break the limits of patriarchy through art also reads as if it were real. A delicious, subtle and deep read at the same time. A sensitive and intelligent book that, due to its format, can serve as a gateway to the graphic novel for readers unfamiliar with this medium.
One of the great historical frescoes of comics comes to an end. Passengers of the Wind, François Bourgeon's magnum opus, closes with the second part of the diptych The Blood of Cherries (Astiberri). The story began in the 18th century with the slave trade as a backdrop and now reaches the revolutionary social movement that culminated with the government of the Paris Commune in 1871. The end of a saga that transformed adult comics in Europe.
Renovating, but for Japanese comics, it was what was published in Garo magazine. There appeared, between 1970 and 1971, the pages now compiled in Elegy in Red (Gallo Nero), an intimate manga by Seiichi Hayashi that captures the quiet life of a young couple struggling to make ends meet. With influences from the French New Wave, it is a good representative of author and alternative manga.
A highly recommended read for all audiences is The Friends of Spirou (New Nine), by Benoit Bekaert, David Evrard and Jean-David Morvan. The history of Europe is inserted in this fictional adventure that is based on a very real case, when in Belgium in 1943 the Nazi occupier banned the publication of the Spirou magazine. Young people and adults will discover an emotional story about the resistance during World War II. The collective non-fiction book Mujer Vida Libertad / Dona Vida Llibertat (Reservoir Books) directed by Marjane Satrapi and with the collaboration of authors such as Sfar, Coco, Trondheim or Catel.
