European Comic Art

The introduction offers an overview of English-language and Spanish-language scholarship about Spanish comics since 2000. This research is typically concerned with one of four main chronological periods, i.e. early comics history 1875-1939; the Francoist dictatorship 1939-1975; the Political Transition 1970-1985; and Democratic Spain from the early 1980s, and some of its recurrent themes are memory, gender, regional identities and history, and/or a focus on social or educational comics. The articles in the two special issues on Spanish comics (11.1 and 11.2) almost all relate to these periods and themes in different ways, and together they show that comics scholarship about Spanish comics is a fascinating field, and one that offers plenty of opportunities for further study.

This article traces ways in which comic fanzines of the late 1970s and early 1980s transgressed against and conformed to accepted Spanish constructions of gender and sexuality of the day. Research is drawn from close readings of comics found in zines of the period, such as 96 Lágrimas, Ediciones moulinsart and Kaka de Luxe. Young Madrileños literally drew on images and tropes from a variety of sources, from punk musicians to Tintin in the Congo, making them their own. Through fanzines, often sold in Madrid’s Rastro, a Roma marketplace, young people became cultural producers, creating a culture that was postmodern and anti-fascist.

In mid-1970s Spain, many new satirical magazines featured a strong political stance opposing Francisco Franco’s regime and in favour of democracy. Magazines with a significant amount of comics-based content constituted a space for political and social critics, as humour allowed them to go further than other media. However, legal authorities tried to censor and punish them. This article analyses the relationship between the Spanish satirical press and censorship and focuses on the difficulties their publishers and authors encountered in expressing their criticism of the country’s social changes. Various cartoonists have been interviewed, and archival research carried out. In-depth analysis of the magazines’ contents is used to gain an overview of a political and social period in recent Spanish history, in which the satirical press uniquely tackled several issues.

The graphic representation of traumatic memory of war disasters constitutes a broad tradition that can be traced back to Francisco Goya. Comics, with the resources provided by their textual-visual narrative, have been part of that tradition especially since the 1950s. However, representing traumatic memory of war disasters is troublesome, in regard to the artists’ strategies and public reception – as shown by the conflicts between memory, history and myth posed in these works. This article develops a comparative study of traumatic memories in Spanish comics and presents an analysis of the modes of representation in works such as Carlos Giménez’s Paracuellos, Francisco Gallardo Sarmiento and Miguel Gallardo’s Un largo silencio, Antonio Altarriba and Kim’s El arte de volar and Paco Roca’s Los surcos del azar.

In using metaphors including trees, food, land and house to invoke the power of intergenerational memory, Paco Roca’s La casa (2015) shifts a national obsession with memory to an intimate scale. The book’s intimacy invites reconsideration of notions of ‘giving voice’ and ‘sites of memory’ that several other recent and groundbreaking Spanish comics have explored. This article situates the visual and verbal metaphors in La casa within the larger context of comics and memory, and the consistent attention to memory in Roca’s oeuvre. The characters’ discussions about tending to the land they have inherited, especially via Roca’s impeccably sophisticated use of the medium, demand that we tend to a new generation taking up its ancestors’ struggles, including the silent struggles of a repressed (or buried) generation.

María y yo by Miguel and María Gallardo, Arrugas by Paco Roca and Una posibilidad entre mil by Cristina Durán and Miguel Ángel Giner Bou are contemporary Spanish graphic novels that can be considered pathographies. This article shows how they use the metaphor of the journey to deconstruct social representations and challenge preconceived ideas about autism, Alzheimer’s disease and cerebral palsy. By making readers travel to the unknown territory of differences and diseases, these works help them to discover and understand alterity. I also study how the authors use techniques specific to travel guides to explain these disorders, and interrogate the extent to which creating and reading those pathographies can have a curative dimension. This will lead to questioning the concept of the therapeutic journey.

Paco Roca (b. 1969, Valencia) creates stories that tackle the universal through the local. He examines historic and social conflicts through the everyday experiences of his characters, whom he treats with affection, detail and respect. His works explore personal concerns and relationships without falling into melodrama, always looking for a balanced and sober style. Arguably, the most successful aspect of his work is the harmonious, beautiful drawing, which makes it accessible and appealing to a wide audience. As is common in today’s graphic novel, his stories feature losers: characters whose struggle is finally defeated by greater forces but whose trajectory tells us about dignity, friendship and courage. In this interview, we talk about his major graphic novels, and we are given access to his methods of work.

Vicent Sanchis, Franco contra Flash Gordon: La censura franquista aplicada a les publicacions infantils i juvenils (1936–1977) (Valencia: Tres i Quatre, 2009). 231 pp. ISBN: 9788475028507 (€22)

Pedro Pérez del Solar, Imágenes del desencanto: Nueva historieta Española 1980–1986 (Madrid and Frankfurt: Iberoamericana and Vervuert, 2013). 329 pp. ISBN: 9788484896678 (€29.80)

Simon Grennan, A Theory of Narrative Drawing (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 277 pp. ISBN: 9781137521651 (£89.99)