European Comic Art

Spanish comics represent an exciting and diverse field, but with few exceptions they are unknown to most comics scholars outside of Spain. This is one important reason behind choosing the subject for not only one but two special issues of European Comic Art. Another reason is the opportunity to draw attention to the extensive comics research in Spanish, and a third is that a national comics focus such as this one contributes to two perspectives within comics research that are very much in vogue, namely transnational studies and memory studies. The six articles included in this issue contribute in different ways to one or all three of these concerns and, despite their necessarily limited number, represent a surprisingly broad spectrum of historical periods, genres and themes.

This article traces the formation of comics art scholarship in Spain from 1965 to 1975. This decade witnessed the beginning of the study of comics as a serious object of cultural analysis. Reading formations surrounding the medium – in particular, historical and critical reading protocols – and a set of key critical debates were concurrent with the establishment and the development of mass communication studies as an incipient field of research in Spain in the mid-1960s. The aim of this article is to provide a close examination of the first generation of critics participating in and writing about the scene in relation to hitherto overlooked local and transnational contexts that shaped the constitution of the Spanish field of comics.

The installation of the Franco dictatorship sparked an inadvertent boom in the production of comics. While many cartoonists hailing from Barcelona’s rich satirical tradition went into exile or clandestine publication, still more turned to the children’s comics market that had become firmly rooted in the Catalan capital since the 1920s. Until the 1950s, comics remained relatively free from censorial intervention, and the development of characters such as La Familia Ulises, Carpanta and Doña Urraca offered cartoonists an outlet for covert critique. However, in 1952, the Junta Asesora de la Prensa Infantil was established to police children’s publications for ‘inappropriate’ content, marking a turning point in the history of Spain’s comics genre. This article discusses the implications of specific legislation for editors, artists and their comic strip characters, focusing on the publications Pulgarcito, TBO and DDT.

This article considers two graphic novels that depict and deal with two separate periods during the Spanish Reconquista [Reconquest] that was fought during the Middle Ages by the Christian kingdoms to roll back the Muslim domination of the Iberian peninsula. Though written more than thirty years apart, El Cid (1971–1984), by Antonio Hernández Palacios, and 1212: Las Navas de Tolosa (2016), by Jesús Cano de la Iglesia, present interesting and at times quite similar views of the medieval Spanish past, even though the periods they depict were arguably very different from each other. This article analyses the ways in which both authors depict the themes of Spain, the crusading movement, and ‘otherness’ in their texts, and it considers the potential influences behind their depictions of such themes.

The multifaceted Galician artist, writer and politician Alfonso Daniel Rodríguez Castelao (1886–1950) has been considered a pioneer of Galician comics, or banda deseñada. This is because of his key role in the development of the medium from his early comic strips in the magazine Vida gallega [Galician life] (1909), to the cartoons that he published in the press in the 1920s and 1930s. Furthermore, Castelao has become a comics character in several graphic biographies since the end of the 1970s. This article not only addresses the reasons for the recurrent presence of Castelao in Galician comics, but it also looks at how the latter have contributed to the mythologisation of this important figure of Galician culture. In aesthetic terms, it will reveal the overlaps between adaptation, biography and comics by analysing all three of them as networks.

This article explores Paco Roca’s graphic novel La Casa (2015) with attention to the structuring role of architecture at two interrelated levels of analysis. At the level of theme and represented content, the comic employs architecture as a mediator of emotional connections and familial grief. At the level of comics form and visual narrative structure, artistic choices underscore the architectural properties of La Casa’s own construction. Repurposing the notion of ‘iconostasis’ from Andrei Molotiu provides a way of bringing together the reader’s self-directed perusal of the comic’s page and the characters’ self-directed navigation of their grief. The characters’ collaborative construction of a pergola as an architectural addition to their father’s house holds two meanings. It provides a degree of emotional closure, further contributing to the architectural theme of the comic, and it pulls the architectural structure of the work towards a cathartic narrative resolution.

Numerous authors of comics and graphic novels have used the economic crisis in the Iberian Peninsula as a narrative frame for social criticism. Prominent amongst them is the Catalan cartoonist Aleix Saló, who burst onto the comics scene with his animated YouTube video Españistán, a book trailer for his graphic novel Españistán: Este país se va a la mierda [Españistán: This country is going to hell] (2011). This article shows how Saló offers a humorous and didactic portrait of the devastating effects of the economic crisis: he does this through multimodality (using specific shapes, colours, fonts and components of orality) and through creating ‘multimodal extensions’, intertextual relations between published books and book trailers. This analysis presents a case study of the multimodal techniques that authors use to shape and develop their work in the context of the powerful relationship between text and image in the digital age.