When he was in the third year of BUP, Oriol Malet spent a good part of the year in the corridor, expelled from class to amuse himself by drawing and making caricatures of the teachers. But at the time, he didn't realize that dropping out of school was looming over his life. It is now, when he has received the commission from the Bofill Foundation and Comanegra publishing house to make a comic that explores this problem, that he has realized it.
The result is Ombres de colores, which is his third comic, but his first solo. "The main purpose is to talk about this premature school leaving to a part of society that doesn't talk about it, but that suffers from it", explains the author, referring to adolescence. "The Bofill Foundation conducts studies on this problem, based on such percentages, but they have gone further and I discovered that they provided witnesses. I read them and they moved me. They are witnesses of boys and girls who leave their studies prematurely and they tell us why".
But "it's not a theoretical comic", warns Jordi Puig, publisher of Comanegra. "L'Oriol has been profusely documented and has been nourished by the experience of these dwarfs to make a fiction out of it. It's about putting the focus on an important problem in our society, with a mission: to destigmatize school dropout, but bearing in mind that it's a problem that needs to be addressed and solutions found."
Colored shadows tells the story of Cris. "He or Cris, we don't know if it's a boy or a girl: this was an idea of the dwarfs", declares the author, who shared his work with the students of a few high schools in Catalonia. "First he was a boy and now he is Cris, with a passion for drawing. And this is autobiographical - he confesses -. Halfway through the comic, I shared it with witnesses from the Bofill Foundation. And still, when it was at 75-80%, we went around different centers in Catalonia to get to know this reality first hand".
Malet justifies some aspect of self-fiction: "For me to be able to do a job 100 percent Malet, the assignment must challenge me. And this one challenged me a lot. Here I had the opportunity to do a triple somersault: look for the teenage audience to whom it is addressed to read, and look for the comic book to have a second life and enter the centers to deepen this debate among students”. "We have a big problem when it comes to listening to young people, we don't know how to listen to them", he adds.
The comic includes a foreword by Triquell, the singer of the program Eufòria, in which he reflects on being different and not belonging to the herd, and defends the work of many educators. And it ends with a text by Malet, which invites us to go further in this work.
"I also think that young people are not very aware of the importance of art in their lives - continues the author-. When I was a teenager I didn't understand the concept of daydreaming, when I had been daydreaming all my life. Anything I fictionalized, imagined... They say that the creators always tell the same story, and I feel identified with it. I think that every author needs this connection so that the work has its truth". Malet also acknowledges that there are some very clichéd passages: "But they are real. They were in my time and they continue to be now."
The director of the Bofill Foundation, Ismael Palacín, recalls: "There is still the idea that education is a privilege, but in the 21st century we cannot afford the current educational inequalities as a society. Every year 97,000 students leave their studies early".
This 16.9% occurs in Catalonia. In Spain it drops four points and in Europe the figures are in half. "The problem of abandonment is persistent and serious and, on the other hand, is not a social concern. We would like to denaturalize it, so that there would be a profound change in mentality", concludes Palacín.
