Spanish Graphic Narratives: Recent Developments in Sequential Art [1st ed.] 9783030568191, 9783030568207

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Spanish Graphic Narratives: Recent Developments in Sequential Art [1st ed.]
 9783030568191, 9783030568207

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xviii
Front Matter ....Pages 1-1
Graphic Spain: From Aleluyas to the “Second Boom” (Collin McKinney, David F. Richter)....Pages 3-25
Front Matter ....Pages 27-27
Espacios en blanco: Historical Memory, Defeat, and the Comics Imaginary (Lena Tahmassian)....Pages 29-46
Memory, Amnesia, and Forgetting: Graphic Representations of a Chronic Disease in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Spain (Fernando Simón Abad)....Pages 47-65
Recovering the Irrecoverable: “The Memory of What Matters” in Three Works by Paco Roca (Diego Batista)....Pages 67-84
The Persistent Memories of Federico García Lorca: History, Poetry, and Spanish Graphic Narratives (David F. Richter)....Pages 85-116
Front Matter ....Pages 117-117
Polemic Collision: Race, Immigration, and Gender Violence in Olimpita (Jeffrey K. Coleman)....Pages 119-137
“I Hate Being Chinese”: Migration, Cultural Identity, and Autobiography in Quan Zhou Wu’s Gazpacho agridulce (Adrián Collado)....Pages 139-158
Black and Basque Power: Visualizing Race and Resistance in Black is Beltza (N. Michelle Murray)....Pages 159-182
Gender, Genre, and Retribution in Rayco Pulido’s Lamia: A Historical Novel for the Present Day (Collin McKinney)....Pages 183-209
Maternal Life Writing in Contemporary Spanish Graphic Narratives: From Blog to Book (Marina Bettaglio)....Pages 211-232
Front Matter ....Pages 233-233
“In This Country, the Past Never Dies”: Superheroes, Democracy, and the Culture of the Spanish Transition in ¡García! (Alberto López Martín)....Pages 235-256
The Right to Barcelona: Spectrality, Unbuiltness, and El fantasma de Gaudí (Maria DiFrancesco)....Pages 257-284
The Post-15M Condition: Liminality and Multitude in Spanish Graphic Narratives (Xavier Dapena)....Pages 285-301
Back Matter ....Pages 303-315

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN COMICS AND GRAPHIC NOVELS

SPANISH GRAPHIC NARRATIVES Recent Developments in Sequential Art

Edited by Collin McKinney · David F. Richter

Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels Series Editor Roger Sabin University of the Arts London London, UK

This series concerns Comics Studies—with a capital “c” and a capital “s.” It feels good to write it that way. From emerging as a fringe interest within Literature and Media/Cultural Studies departments, to becoming a minor field, to maturing into the fastest growing field in the Humanities, to becoming a nascent discipline, the journey has been a hard but spectacular one. Those capital letters have been earned. Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels covers all aspects of the comic strip, comic book, and graphic novel, explored through clear and informative texts offering expansive coverage and theoretical sophistication. It is international in scope and provides a space in which scholars from all backgrounds can present new thinking about politics, history, aesthetics, production, distribution, and reception as well as the digital realm. Books appear in one of two forms: traditional monographs of 60,000 to 90,000 words and shorter works (Palgrave Pivots) of 20,000 to 50,000 words. All are rigorously peer-reviewed. Palgrave Pivots include new takes on theory, concise histories, and—not least—considered provocations. After all, Comics Studies may have come a long way, but it can’t progress without a little prodding. Series Editor Roger Sabin is Professor of Popular Culture at the University of the Arts London, UK. His books include Adult Comics: An Introduction and Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels, and he is part of the team that put together the Marie Duval Archive. He serves on the boards of key academic journals in the field, reviews graphic novels for international media, and consults on comics-related projects for the BBC, Channel 4, Tate Gallery, The British Museum and The British Library. The ‘Sabin Award’ is given annually at the International Graphic Novels and Comics Conference. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14643

Collin McKinney  •  David F. Richter Editors

Spanish Graphic Narratives Recent Developments in Sequential Art

Editors Collin McKinney Bucknell University Lewisburg, PA, USA

David F. Richter Utah State University Logan, UT, USA

ISSN 2634-6370     ISSN 2634-6389 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels ISBN 978-3-030-56819-1    ISBN 978-3-030-56820-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56820-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © 2020, Carles Esquembre. All rights reserved. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

Spanish Graphic Narratives represents a collaborative effort. We would like to thank everyone who helped make this project a reality, including our contributors, the team at Palgrave Macmillan, our colleagues at Bucknell University and Utah State University, and students from both universities who took part in courses devoted to contemporary Spanish graphic narratives. We are also grateful for the support and encouragement from our families, especially from Tara and Mindy. We likewise thank Carles Esquembre for his generosity in providing the original illustration for the cover of Spanish Graphic Narratives. We thank the following presses and authors for permission to reproduce images and text from their work: • La araña del olvido: Text and illustrations © 2015, Enrique Bonet. All rights reserved. Published by agreement with the author and Astiberri Ediciones. • Arrugas: Text and illustrations © 2007, Paco Roca. All rights reserved. Published by agreement with Astiberri Ediciones. • Black is Beltza: Text and illustrations © 2015, Fermín Muguruza, Herkaitz Cano, and Jorge Alderete. All rights reserved. Published by agreement with Ediciones Bang. • La casa: Text and illustrations © 2017, Paco Roca. All rights reserved. Published by agreement with Astiberri Ediciones. • Cuaderno de Sol: Text and illustrations © 2011, Enrique Flores. All rights reserved. Published by agreement with the author. v

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

• Espacios en blanco: Text and illustrations © 2017, Miguel Francisco. All rights reserved. Published by agreement with Astiberri Ediciones. • El fantasma de Gaudí: Text and illustrations © 2015, Jesús Alonso Iglesias and El Torres. All rights reserved. Published by agreement with Dibbuks. • ¡García! vols. 1 and 2: Text and illustrations © 2015–16, Santiago García and Luis Bustos. All rights reserved. Published by agreement with Astiberri Ediciones. • Gazpacho agridulce: Text and illustrations © 2015, Quan Zhou Wu. All rights reserved. Published by agreement with Astiberri Ediciones. • La huella de Lorca: Text and illustrations © 2013, Carlos Hernández and El Torres. All rights reserved. Published by agreement with the authors. • Lamia: Text and illustrations © 2016, Rayco Pulido. All rights reserved. Published by agreement with the author and Astiberri Ediciones. • Lorca: Un poeta en Nueva York: Text and illustrations © 2016, Carles Esquembre. All rights reserved. Published by agreement with the author and Panini España. • Nela: Text and illustrations © 2013, Rayco Pulido. All rights reserved. Published by agreement with the author and Astiberri Ediciones. • Los surcos del azar: Text and illustrations © 2016, Paco Roca. All rights reserved. Published by agreement with Astiberri Ediciones. • “Vida del valiente general D. Juan Prim, marqués de los Castillejos” (1861), held by the Fundación Joaquín Díaz, Ureña (Valladolid). All other images and quotations are used under fair use guidelines.

Contents

Introduction   1 1 Graphic Spain: From Aleluyas to the “Second Boom”  3 Collin McKinney and David F. Richter Part I Memories, Historical and Personal  27 2  Espacios en blanco: Historical Memory, Defeat, and the Comics Imaginary 29 Lena Tahmassian 3 Memory, Amnesia, and Forgetting: Graphic Representations of a Chronic Disease in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Spain 47 Fernando Simón Abad 4 Recovering the Irrecoverable: “The Memory of What Matters” in Three Works by Paco Roca 67 Diego Batista

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CONTENTS

5 The Persistent Memories of Federico García Lorca: History, Poetry, and Spanish Graphic Narratives 85 David F. Richter Part II Transforming Identities: Race, Gender, Immigration 117 6 Polemic Collision: Race, Immigration, and Gender Violence in Olimpita119 Jeffrey K. Coleman 7 “I Hate Being Chinese”: Migration, Cultural Identity, and Autobiography in Quan Zhou Wu’s Gazpacho agridulce139 Adrián Collado 8 Black and Basque Power: Visualizing Race and Resistance in Black is Beltza159 N. Michelle Murray 9 Gender, Genre, and Retribution in Rayco Pulido’s Lamia: A Historical Novel for the Present Day183 Collin McKinney 10 Maternal Life Writing in Contemporary Spanish Graphic Narratives: From Blog to Book211 Marina Bettaglio Part III Contemporary Issues 233 11 “In This Country, the Past Never Dies”: Superheroes, Democracy, and the Culture of the Spanish Transition in ¡García!235 Alberto López Martín

 CONTENTS 

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12 The Right to Barcelona: Spectrality, Unbuiltness, and El fantasma de Gaudí257 Maria DiFrancesco 13 The Post-15M Condition: Liminality and Multitude in Spanish Graphic Narratives285 Xavier Dapena Index

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Notes on Contributors

Fernando Simón Abad  is currently finishing a joint PhD program at the University of Salamanca and SUNY University at Buffalo, in addition to working as a secondary school teacher of Geography and History in Spain. His academic interests are focused on graphic novels and comic books related to the history of Spain in the twentieth century, and the importance of these cultural artifacts in analyzing the crisis of Spanish identity. Diego Batista  is Associate Professor of Spanish at Weber State University. His research interests include literature and cultural studies from and about the Canary Islands, as well as the literary and historical relationships between Spain and Latin America, especially pertaining to marginal territories and transatlantic literature. His articles have appeared in journals including Confluencia, Letras Hispanas, and Studies in Visual Arts and Communication. Marina Bettaglio  is Associate Professor of Hispanic and Italian Studies at the University of Victoria. Her research interests include twentieth- and twenty-first-century Spanish and Italian literature, women’s studies, gender studies, critical theory, and translation theory. Her most recent publications explore how images of motherhood constitute powerful ideological tools that have shaped women’s identities  throughout history. Her research has appeared in Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, Letras Femeninas, Confluencia, Italian Quarterly, and several other edited volumes. In 2019, and with Elizabeth Montes Garcés and María Elsy Cardona, she co-edited a special issue of Revista Canadiense de Estudios xi

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Hispánicos that focused on women and comics. Previously, she co-edited Rappresentare la violenza di genere: Sguardi femministi tra critica, attivismo e scrittura with Nicoletta Mandolini and Silvia Ross (Mimesis, 2018). Jeffrey  K.  Coleman is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Marquette University. He has published articles on immigration, race, and national identity in Spanish theater and popular culture in Catalan Review, Symposium, Estreno, and others. His first book, The Necropolitical Theater: Race and Immigration on the Contemporary Spanish Stage (Northwestern UP, 2020), explores the intersections of race and immigration in Spanish theater from 1991 to the present. His next book project, tentatively titled España Negra: The Consumption & Rejection of Blackness in Contemporary Spain, focuses on the ways in which Spanish media, popular culture, and literature have portrayed Blackness from the early twentieth century to the present. Adrián Collado  has taught Spanish courses at UCLA, where he earned his PhD, and California State University-Northridge, among other universities in the Los Angeles area. He is currently teaching at Colegio Madrid in Spain. His research interests focus on contemporary Spanish literature, film, and popular culture, with particular emphasis on debates about migration. In 2012, he founded the UCLA Latin American and Iberian Film Festival. Xavier Dapena  is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Iowa State University. While earning his PhD in Hispanic and Portuguese Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, he was also a Graduate Fellow at the Wolf Humanities Center. Dapena’s publications on Spanish graphic novels have appeared in scholarly journals such as Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos and 452°F: Journal of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature, and edited volumes including Consequential Art. He is a member of the Plataforma Académica sobre el Cómic en Español (PACE) and the Asociación de Críticos y Divulgadores de Cómic (ACDCómic), and he also collaborates with several comic publishing journals and websites. Maria  DiFrancesco is Professor of Spanish and Director of the Exploratory Program at Ithaca College. She is the author of Feminine Agency and Transgression in Post-Franco Spain: Generational Becoming in the Narratives of Carme Riera, Cristina Fernández Cubas, and Mercedes Abad (Juan de la Cuesta, 2008); and co-editor, with Debra Ochoa, of

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

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Gender in Spanish Urban Spaces: Literary and Visual Narratives of the New Millennium (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). She has published articles in journals such as Letras Femeninas, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, and Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures; and she has contributed chapters to volumes treating the intersection of immigration and gender in Spanish contemporary literature and culture. Most recently, she has begun research on representations of gender and sexuality in the urban space of Spanish graphic novels. Carles Esquembre  is an author and illustrator from Valencia, Spain. He studied visual arts and comics creation at the Escola Joso in Barcelona, and has worked as a freelance illustrator and storyboard producer for Dasca Producciones, Timelapse Creative Agency, and Rumores Factory. His first comic was the 2013 volume The Body, which was followed by the graphic novel Lorca: Un poeta en Nueva York, published in 2016 by Panini. He illustrated La Brigada Lincoln in 2018 (script by Pablo Durá and color by Ester Salguero), and his work has also been included in anthologies like Visiones del Fin (Atleta, 2015) and the collaborative volume Diferente: 140 artistas. Una única historia (Planeta Cómic, 2019). Most recently, he worked as colorist for Cavan Scott and José María Beroy’s official adaptation to comic format of The Phantom of the Opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber (Titan Books, 2021). Alberto  López  Martín  is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Valparaiso University. He specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Iberian cultural production, with a focus on contemporary poetry, comics, and cultural politics through the lens of affect and emotion studies. He has published articles on Chilean comics during the Pinochet regime, the work of comic-book author Miguel Brieva, and poets such as Antonio Orihuela, María Salgado, and the Sahrawi Friendship Generation. Among other venues, his research has appeared in Revista de lenguas y literaturas catalana, gallega y vasca, Perífrasis, and the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies. He is currently working on a book about post-2008 Spanish poetic production. Collin McKinney  is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish at Bucknell University. In addition to his interest in Spanish graphic narratives, his research covers the literature and culture of nineteenth-century Spain, with a special focus on masculinity studies. His publications include Mapping the Social Body: Urbanisation, the Gaze, and the Novels of

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Galdós (U of North Carolina P, 2010), as well as articles in Anales Galdosianos, Letras Hispanas, Decimonónica, and Prisma Social. N.  Michelle  Murray is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Vanderbilt University. Her research and teaching focus on contemporary Spanish literature, film, and culture. Her first book, Home Away from Home: Immigrant Narratives, Domesticity, and Coloniality in Contemporary Spanish Culture (U of North Carolina P, 2018), studies representations of immigrant women as domestic workers in contemporary Spain. She has published essays in Symposium, Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas, Research in African Literature, and Letras Femeninas (now REGS). With Akiko Tsuchiya, she co-edited the volume Unsettling Colonialism: Gender and Race in the Nineteenth-Century Global Hispanic World (SUNY Press, 2019). David  F.  Richter  is Associate Professor of Spanish and Distinguished Associate Professor of Honors Education (2017–2020) at Utah State University. He specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Spanish literature, including the poetry of the Generation of 1927 writers, surrealism, contemporary Spanish narrative, and contemporary Spanish women writers. He is the author of García Lorca at the Edge of Surrealism: The Aesthetics of Anguish (Bucknell UP, 2014), and his articles have appeared in journals including Letras Hispanas, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Letras Peninsulares, Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature, Confluencia, Letras Femeninas, Poéticas, Acta Literaria, Neophilologus, Theatralia, and ConNotas. Lena Tahmassian  is Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of South Carolina. Her scholarly work focuses on the cultures of contemporary Spain, particularly through the lens of cinema, visual media, and social and countercultural movements. Her research is driven by an interest in how this cultural production helps shape or intervene in power relations, especially those pertaining to nationalisms, historical memory, and gender. Her published works on Spanish democracy and Iberian cinema have appeared in venues such as the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies and Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, as well as in a forthcoming volume on Queer Iberian Cinema.

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2 Fig. 1.3 Fig. 1.4 Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4 Fig. 3.5 Fig. 3.6 Fig. 4.1

“Vida del valiente general D. Juan Prim, marqués de los Castillejos” (1861), held by the Fundación Joaquín Díaz, Urueña (Valladolid) 6 Two-page spread from De Qvommic. El Rrollo Aristocrata (1974) 10 Cover of Nela by Rayco Pulido 16 Cover of Arrugas by Paco Roca 18 Food imagery (8) in Espacios en blanco by Miguel Francisco 32 Political turbulence (19) in Espacios en blanco by Miguel Francisco39 Angry Birds mobile game app (80) in Espacios en blanco by Miguel Francisco 41 Bird’s eye view of Sebastián (114) in Espacios en blanco by Miguel Francisco 44 Allegory of the victory of Francoism and the “blindness” of the population (141) in El arte de volar by Antonio Altarriba and Kim 57 Petra and Antonio’s wedding (145) in El arte de volar by Antonio Altarriba and Kim 58 “Die to stay alive” (139) in El arte de volar by Antonio Altarriba and Kim 58 Forgotten heroes (41) in Los surcos del azar by Paco Roca 60 Remembering (320) in Los surcos del azar by Paco Roca 61 Collage of political figures (1: 134, 139 and 2: 25) in ¡García! by Santiago García and Luis Bustos 62 Usage of color (13, 226) in Los surcos del azar by Paco Roca 72

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Fig. 4.2

Miguel’s face becomes a mere sketch (96) in Arrugas by Paco Roca 76 Fig. 4.3 Memories attached to objects (20) in La casa by Paco Roca 80 Fig. 4.4 Examples of visual silence (6) in La casa by Paco Roca 82 Fig. 5.1 Visual flashbacks (43) in La huella de Lorca by Carlos Hernández and El Torres 92 Fig. 5.2 Zooms in and out (55) in La huella de Lorca by Carlos Hernández and El Torres 94 Fig. 5.3 Visual surrealist metaphors (74) in La huella de Lorca by Carlos Hernández and El Torres 95 Fig. 5.4 Usage of onomatopoeia (32) in La huella de Lorca by Carlos Hernández and El Torres 96 Fig. 5.5 Lorca as dots on a page (14) in La araña del olvido by Enrique Bonet99 Fig. 5.6 Splash panel sombra (12) in La araña del olvido by Enrique Bonet101 Fig. 5.7 Miniature visual metonymies (167) in La araña del olvido by Enrique Bonet 103 Fig. 5.8 Fragmented raccords (168) in La araña del olvido by Enrique Bonet105 Fig. 5.9 The “construction” of Lorca in Lorca: Un poeta en Nueva York by Carles Esquembre 107 Fig. 5.10 Surreal visual text (38) in Lorca: Un poeta en Nueva York by Carles Esquembre 109 Fig. 5.11 Visual ascending climax (63) in Lorca: Un poeta en Nueva York by Carles Esquembre 111 Fig. 5.12 Wall Street mayhem (133) in Lorca: Un poeta en Nueva York by Carles Esquembre 113 Fig. 6.1 Colors and genders (3–4) in Olimpita by Hernán Migoya and Joan Marín 123 Fig. 6.2 Drops of Olimpita’s blood (74) in Olimpita by Hernán Migoya and Joan Marín 125 Fig. 6.3 Encounter on the African savannah (58) in Olimpita by Hernán Migoya and Joan Marín 129 Fig. 6.4 24 expressions (84–85) in Olimpita by Hernán Migoya and Joan Marín 130 Fig. 6.5 Upside-down panels (140) in Olimpita by Hernán Migoya and Joan Marín 132 Fig. 6.6 Phallic objects (141) in Olimpita by Hernán Migoya and Joan Marín134 Fig. 7.1 Rejection of Chinese culture (54) in Gazpacho agridulce by Quan Zhou Wu 147

  List of Figures 

Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3 Fig. 7.4 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2 Fig. 8.3 Fig. 8.4 Fig. 8.5 Fig. 9.1 Fig. 9.2 Fig. 9.3 Fig. 9.4 Fig. 9.5 Fig. 10.1 Fig. 10.2 Fig. 10.3 Fig. 10.4 Fig. 10.5 Fig. 11.1 Fig. 11.2 Fig. 11.3 Fig. 11.4 Fig. 11.5

Hyperbolic vignettes of disfiguration (72) in Gazpacho agridulce by Quan Zhou Wu Identity and national traditions (47) in Gazpacho agridulce by Quan Zhou Wu Engagement of Zhou Wu’s parents (122) in Gazpacho agridulce by Quan Zhou Wu “They look dead” (n.p.) in Black is Beltza by Fermín Muguruza, Herkaitz Cano, and Jorge Alderete “What if they came to life?” (n.p.) in Black is Beltza by Fermín Muguruza, Herkaitz Cano, and Jorge Alderete The Cuban battlefield (n.p.) in Black is Beltza by Fermín Muguruza, Herkaitz Cano, and Jorge Alderete Manex the photographer (n.p.) in Black is Beltza by Fermín Muguruza, Herkaitz Cano, and Jorge Alderete “Beltza power!” (n.p.) in Black is Beltza by Fermín Muguruza, Herkaitz Cano, and Jorge Alderete Laia gets in the bathtub (8) in Lamia by Rayco Pulido Caricaturesque appearances (58) in Lamia by Rayco Pulido Laia waiting to attack (38) in Lamia by Rayco Pulido Strange tenderness after the kill (39) in Lamia by Rayco Pulido Laia leaves bloody messages (51) in Lamia by Rayco Pulido The emotions of conception (2–3) in 40 semanas. Crónica de un embarazo by Glòria Vives Xiol The mishaps of mothering (n.p.) in  Mamá by Glòria Vives Xiol Lovemaking scene (n.p.) in La Volátil. Mamma mía! by Agustina Guerrero Magazines vs. reality (n.p.) in La Volátil. Mamma mía! by Agustina Guerrero Insecurity and unrest (n.p.) in La Volátil. Mamma mía! by Agustina Guerrero García finds out Franco is dead (1: 92) in ¡García! by Santiago García and Luis Bustos Collage of ¡García!’s distinctive drawing styles, past and present, in ¡García! by Santiago García and Luis Bustos The president seeks Don Jaime’s help against “the commie” (2: 24, 1: 151) in ¡García! by Santiago García and Luis Bustos Protest at Puerta del Sol demanding the release of the Capitana (1: 133) in ¡García! by Santiago García and Luis Bustos Antonia in her workplace (1: 150) in ¡García! by Santiago García and Luis Bustos

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150 152 154 167 168 171 172 175 185 194 199 200 202 221 222 224 225 227 236 238 242 245 248

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List of Figures

Fig. 11.6 García’s struggles in modern day Spain (1: 107) in ¡García! by Santiago García and Luis Bustos 252 Fig. 12.1 Cover of El fantasma de Gaudí by Jesús Alonso Iglesias and El Torres262 Fig. 12.2 Rooftop scene at Casa Batlló (65) in El fantasma de Gaudí by Jesús Alonso Iglesias and El Torres 264 Fig. 12.3 “Beep” at the grocery store (11) in El fantasma de Gaudí by Jesús Alonso Iglesias and El Torres 267 Fig. 12.4 Death at Casa Vicens (16) in El fantasma de Gaudí by Jesús Alonso Iglesias and El Torres 269 Fig. 12.5 Close-ups of Bonet’s final moments (28) in El fantasma de Gaudí by Jesús Alonso Iglesias and El Torres 272 Fig. 12.6 Toñi’s commercial popularity (68) in El fantasma de Gaudí by Jesús Alonso Iglesias and El Torres 275 Fig. 12.7 Toñi’s apartment (69) in El fantasma de Gaudí by Jesús Alonso Iglesias and El Torres 277 Fig. 12.8 Tourists at the Sagrada Familia (23) in El fantasma de Gaudí by Jesús Alonso Iglesias and El Torres 279 Fig. 13.1 “Los jóvenes salieron a la calle y súbitamente todos los partidos envejecieron…” by Andrés Rábago García (El Roto). El País. 18 May 2011 289 Fig. 13.2 “No estoy solo…” from the Archivo 15-M file 290 Fig. 13.3 Police officers vs. protesters (114–15) in Cuaderno de Sol by Enrique Flores 292 Fig. 13.4 The body on display (n.p.) in Acampada BCN 15-M by Sagar Fornies295 Fig. 13.5 15M mobilizations at the Parc de la Ciutadella (n.p.) in Acampada BCN 15-M by Sagar Fornies 295 Fig. 13.6 “Bar-ce-lo-na soli-dari-dad!” (70–71) in Cuaderno de Sol by Enrique Flores 297

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1

Graphic Spain: From Aleluyas to the “Second Boom” Collin McKinney and David F. Richter

This anthology of essays might not have been possible in the 1990s when we were discovering Spanish literature as undergraduate students in the American university system. Don Quijote was what you studied in the classroom, comics were something you read in your personal time. (And let’s be honest, what wannabe literary scholar would have admitted to reading comics?) But the academic landscape has changed in the past few decades, as has the literary scene itself. Once considered a mere pastime of school boys and socially-awkward men, comics and graphic novels have now wedged themselves firmly into both the mainstream literary landscape as well as serious literary scholarship. In Spain, the so-called “second boom” of graphic literature (roughly since the turn of the century) has given rise to successful publication houses like Astiberri and Dibbuks, which boast extensive catalogues that include subjects ranging from Civil

C. McKinney (*) Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] D. F. Richter Utah State University, Logan, UT, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 C. McKinney, D. F. Richter (eds.), Spanish Graphic Narratives, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56820-7_1

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C. MCKINNEY AND D. F. RICHTER

War memoirs to crime novels, books that can be found on the shelves of popular bookstores like FNAC or Casa del Libro in addition to specialized bookstores in every major Spanish city. Indeed, graphic literature has definitively shed its reputation as a niche literary form and has earned the right to be taken seriously. As further evidence that graphic literature has moved beyond its status as a springboard to get semi-literate children interested in reading, graphic narratives are now the subject of college courses and conference panels, in addition to scholarly articles and books. Recent academic volumes that discuss the growing interest in Spanish comics and graphic novels include La novela gráfica (2010) by Santiago García, El discurso del cómic by Luis Gasca and Román Gubern (2011), La historieta española, 1857–2010: Historia, sociología y estética de la narrativa gráfica en España (2011), coordinated by Antonio Altarriba, La cárcel de papel (2017) by Álvaro Pons, Historieta o Cómic: Biografía de la narración gráfica en España (2017), edited by Alessandro Scarsella, Katiuscia Darici and Alice Favaro, Diez ensayos para pensar el cómic (2017) by Ana Merino, Con el lápiz en la mano: Mujeres y cómics a ambos lados del Atlántico (2019), edited by Elizabeth Montes Garcés, Marina Bettaglio, and María Elsy Cardona, The Art of Pere Joan: Space, Landscape, and Comics Form (2019) by Benjamin Fraser, and Consequential Art: Comics Culture in Contemporary Spain (2019), edited by Samuel Amago and Matthew J. Marr. The present volume of essays is yet another step down this new path of inquiry into graphic narrative in the Spanish context. Spanish Graphic Narratives examines the most recent thematic developments in Spanish sequential art, with most chapters focusing on comics published since 2007. This volume brings together scholars based in the USA, Canada, and Spain and seeks to address the graphic works that are increasingly being studied in academic settings in an international context. Considering Spain’s rich literary history, contentious Civil War (1936–1939), oppressive Francisco Franco regime (1939–1975), and progressive contemporary politics, both the recent graphic novel production in Spain and the thematic focal points of the essays here are greatly varied. Topics of particular interest include studies on the subject of historical and personal memory; representations of gender, race, and identity; and texts dealing with Spanish customs, traditions, and current issues in Spain. Even though all of the essays examine graphic narratives in the Spanish context, they all do so in different ways, using a variety of

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analytical tools and distinct critical methodologies. Just as a poem or novel can be read, discussed, and written about using a multitude of critical approaches (from the formalist close reading and literary-historical perspectives to the more ideological positions of gender and cultural studies), this volume celebrates the diversity of critical traditions and methods of inquiry. As such, the essays in this volume each deal with sequential art, but from a variety of perspectives both thematic and critical. The pages that follow make no attempt to provide a comprehensive history of graphic literature in Spain.1 Instead, a brief, modest synopsis of both the literature and scholarship will provide readers with some context for the essays that follow.

The Comics Tradition in Spain Although comics studies in a Spanish context is a relatively new phenomenon, the comics tradition itself is not. Comics, in one form or another, have been around in Spain for more than a century. The new medium introduced in the 1830s and 40s by Swiss teacher Rodolphe Töpffer, considered the father of comics, spread throughout nineteenth-century Europe and would eventually reach Spain, although somewhat later than other European countries (Barrero, “Orígenes” 21). But even before comics proper came to the Peninsula there was already a tradition of graphic storytelling in the form of aleluyas, known as aucas in Cataluña. These proto-comics consisted of a single-page of images, usually having 48 panels, each of which included a rhyming couplet or triplet. A unifying theme or narrative tied the panels together, as in the story of General Prim from 1861 (see Fig. 1.1). Antonio Martín, one of the pioneers of Spanish comics studies, makes the following observation about aleluyas in the nineteenth century: “Es imposible comprender y valorar la importancia de las aleluyas y su impacto sobre los lectores … [incluso] a los lectores menos 1  See Santiago García’s La novela gráfica (2010), translated by Bruce Campbell in 2015 as On the Graphic Novel, for a general history of the graphic novel, which refers to the Spanish context on pages 263–64, 180–81, and elsewhere. For more specific information on the origin of comics in Spain see Antonio Martín’s Historia del cómic español: 1874–1939 (1978), Ana Merino’s El cómic hispano (2003), the 2011 special volume of Arbor, “La historieta española, 1857–2010: Historia, sociología y estética de la narrativa gráfica en España,” and more recently, Antonio Lázaro-Reboll’s “Historicizing the Emergence of Comics Art Scholarship in Spain, 1965–1975” (2018). In The Art of Pere Joan (2019), Benjamin Fraser also gives a succinct overview of comics production and scholarship in Spain (35–58).

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Fig. 1.1  “Vida del valiente general D. Juan Prim, marqués de los Castillejos” (1861), held by the Fundación Joaquín Díaz, Urueña (Valladolid)

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cultos y generalmente iletrados” (“Las Aleluyas” n.p.) [it is impossible to fully comprehend and appreciate the importance of the aleluyas and their impact on readers … including those that were less educated or illiterate]. Although aleluyas can and should be viewed as sequential art, arguably the most important defining quality of comics as described by Will Eisner (Comics) and Scott McCloud (7, 199), they lacked some of the characteristics of later comics, such as certain structural elements (e.g. speech bubbles) and serialized narratives. Antonio Martín has further argued that they do not possess the same degree of narrative continuity between panels that one finds in traditional comics (“Las Aleluyas” n.p.). While these proto-comics were written primarily for juvenile readers, or illiterate consumers of all ages, it was not long before short humorous and satirical comic strips showed up in adult venues, such as those found in papers like La Flaca, El Mundo Cómico, or Madrid Cómico. As Martín outlines in his essay “Notes on the Birth of Comics in Spain, 1873–1900,” political shifts and social pressures at the end of the nineteenth century led to significant changes in the press, which in turn allowed comics to flourish: “In this new press, for the society of the Restoration, Spanish comics grew, attaining their true raison d’être” (134). Many of these early strips took aim at contemporary Spanish society, playing with well-known figures or popular types, in the costumbrista tradition. Some of these early comics creators include José Luis Pellicer, Francisco Cubas, Eduardo Sáenz Hermúa (known artistically as Mecáchis), and Ramón Cilla. The first years of the twentieth century would follow a similar pattern— illustrated magazines for children, and humorous strips for adults. But by the end of the second decade, changes to the mechanics of printing (specifically, the ability to mass produce color newspaper-quality magazines), as well as continued urbanization and the capitalist development that came with it, and shifting attitudes (such as a move away from didactic morality in favor of pure entertainment), initiated a commercial shift that led to the decline of adult comic strips and the ascension of magazines for young middle-class readers (Martín, Apuntes 7). Beginning in 1915, Dominguín, the first weekly comic in the modern sense of the word, was published in Barcelona under the direction of José Espoy. As Martín explains, the magazine was ground-breaking and would set the tone for future Spanish comics: “Dominguín representa el arquetipo de los tebeos, anticipo de lo que estos habrían de ser con los años: predominio total de la imagen, textos escasos y sintéticos, todo color, dibujo ágil y dinámico” (Apuntes 8)

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[Dominguín constituted the archetype of comics, a precursor of what comics would become in subsequent years: a complete superiority of the image, scarce and concise usage of text, full color, dynamic and flexible drawings]. Other comics would soon follow, including Charlotín, Pinocho, Pulgarcito, and of course the iconic TBO, from which the term tebeo is derived.2 Despite the proliferation of comic books, Martín laments this new period, which he describes as a “progressive infantilisation” of the comics form: In Spain, at the turn of the century and mainly from 1917, a poor understanding of the expressive possibilities of the comic by the publishing industry, along with an evaluation full of prejudices that indicates a certain contempt of the medium, plus a hypocritical educational and moral stance, deprived Spanish comics of the adult character with which they had originated, consigning the medium mainly to children. (“Notes” 155)

Over the next half century this infantilization of comics would continue, leading to the virtual disappearance of adult comics in favor of bellicose narratives for boys, such as the swashbuckling tales found in the series El Cachorro, or the action-packed adventures of the eponymous hero of El Capitán Trueno.3 It is not until the 1970s that we find the beginnings of a notable corpus of comics for adults, which would appear in the form of underground comix. Consisting initially of translated works, primarily from France and the United States, and later of original works from Spanish creators like Max, Javier Mariscal, Miguel Gallardo, the Farriol brothers, and others, the irreverent style of underground comix found in magazines like El Rrollo Enmascarado, El Víbora, Star, or Cimoc breathed new life into the comics tradition, if only for a moment.4 These comics reflected what Pablo 2  Tebeo is one of several Spanish terms that are roughly synonymous with comic. Others include historieta, cómic, viñeta, and novela gráfica. For a discussion of the subtle differences between these terms see Antonio Gil González’s article “Comics and the Graphic Novel in Spain and Iberian Galicia,” Nuria Ponce Márquez’s study “El mundo del cómic: Planteamiento terminológico, literario y traductológico,” and Manuel Barrero’s Diccionario terminológico de la historieta (2015). 3  See Pedro Porcel’s article “La historieta española de 1951 a 1970” for more information on these popular adventure series. 4  See Pablo Dopico’s El cómic underground español, 1970–1980 for a comprehensive look at Spain’s underground comix tradition, as well as Francesca Lladó Pol’s Los cómics de la Transición (El boom del cómic adulto 1875–1984).

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Dopico described as a spirit of “hippismo tardío” (“Esputos” 174) [a delayed hippy movement], and they did not hesitate to depict sex, drug use, political protest, and other taboo subjects (see Fig. 1.2). Featuring the work of Antonio Pamies, Javier Mariscal, and others, the pages of De Qvommic. El Rrollo Aristocrata demonstrated a clear underground aesthetic, with references to “frics” [freaks], countercultural movements, allusions to sex, and the frequent appearance of the irreverent character Nedbul (too controversial by today’s standards). Although the underground comix scene remained marginalized, both socially and commercially, it provided a creative platform for future graphic novelists, such as those studied in this book. Despite the proliferation of comics throughout the twentieth century, such was the moral climate and economic precariousness of graphic literature within Spanish culture that there were moments when it seemed the comics industry had run its course and might fade into the past. In his article on stigma, comics, and popular culture, Paul Lopes describes the stigmatization of comic books since the 1930s and how that low reputation negatively affected the evolution of the comics genre (389). In particular, post-World War II comics saw an increase in more mature or “adult” themes, including romance, crime, and horror (Lopes 400), much to the displeasure of crusading moralists. Renowned cartoonist and critic Will Eisner reminds us that between the 1940s and 1960s “the reading of comic books was regarded as a sign of low intelligence” (149), or what others have called low status or part of a dangerous “subcultural.” Some, however, saw potential benefits of reading comics, calling them “an entryway to ‘true reading’” (García, Graphic 14). The popular phrase in the industry was, “where today there is a comic book, tomorrow there will be a book” (qtd. in García, Graphic 14). Today, the mixed reputation of comics has largely been resolved both in Spain and abroad, and graphic narrative “has moved beyond the negative impression stamped on the field by the Senate hearings of the 1950s” (Weiner 61), which sought to address what some in the USA saw as a public health problem inherent to the genre. Beginning in the 1960s, commercial problems compounded the cultural challenges faced by Spain’s comics industry. With the rise of television use came the decline of street kiosks and the simultaneous dwindling of publishing houses. The consumption of comics gradually became a niche endeavor; so much so that by the end of the century Spanish comics seemed to be all but gone. Benoît Mitaine calls the 1990s a “década de crisis para el cómic español” (150) [a decade of crisis for Spanish comics].

Fig. 1.2  Two-page spread from De Qvommic. El Rrollo Aristocrata (1974)

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Or as Santiago García bluntly put it: “Dicho de otra forma: el cómic murió. En algún momento entre 1985 y 2000, lo que entendíamos como tebeos dejó de existir” (Panorama 5) [Put another way: comics died. In some moment between 1985 and 2000, what we understand as comics ceased to exist]. While García’s diagnosis may be true of the traditional comics format, the medium itself found a way to recover. The salvation of Spanish comics would eventually arrive with the advent of the “graphic novel” (García, Spanish x–xi; Constenla). The term “graphic novel” originates from a short essay penned by Richard Kyle in 1964 titled “The Future of ‘Comics’” wherein he discusses “serious” and “adult” comic book strips and notes an increased level of depth in these “graphic stor[ies]” or “graphic novel[s]” (3, 4). In Faster Than a Speeding Bullet: The Rise of the Graphic Novel (2003), Stephen Weiner elaborates on these comics that “take themselves seriously” by suggesting that when comics from the 1970s to 1990s started to be used “as a vehicle for personal and political statements” (in Eisner’s A Contract with God, or Art Spiegelman’s Maus, for example), the “new course for comics” ensured the need for a new name as well (17–20).5 Yet some scholars and practitioners dislike the term “graphic novel,” arguing that it is simply a way to side-step the historical stigma surrounding comics, or a marketing gimmick meant to re-­ package and sell comics to adult readers. Kristin Kiely, for instance, argues that the term is exclusionary, narrowing the definition of the genre as well as the canon itself (278). Daniel Clowes, author of Eightball and Ghost World, dislikes the term, which he calls “imprecise” and “pretentious” (10). And Manuel Barrero, who runs the website tebeosfera.com in Spain, argues that the nomenclature is harmful to the medium in that it creates needless confusion: “el concepto encierra una perversión etimológica, una defectuosa comprensión de su evolución histórica, una equívoca interpretación de sus cualidades narratológicas” (“La novela” 1) [the concept entails an etymological perversion, a misled understanding of historical evolution, an erroneous interpretation of narratological qualities]. Even Spiegelman, a pioneer of the format, once quipped that a graphic novel is simply a “comic book that needs a bookmark” (qtd. in McGrath 26). But these critiques ignore the fact that this rechristening was merely a superficial effect of a more profound shift that occurred within the industry. On 5  In his foundational 1985 study, Comics and Sequential Art, Will Eisner elaborates on the term “graphic novel” and notes that in the 1980s it was the “fastest-growing literary medium in America” (148).

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the one hand is the materiality of graphic novels. Commenting on the situation in the United States, Will Eisner notes that the change in nomenclature runs parallel with changes in production. Evolving technology transformed the industry by making publication easier and of a higher quality; as a result “the form’s potential has become more apparent” as the medium has left behind low-grade newsprint, which often lacked proper coloring and clarity of line, in favor of high-quality materials and finishing, which, in turn, has attracted “a more sophisticated audience” (1). Along with this improved quality came creative changes as well. In their study of the graphic novel form, Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey note several differences between the recent graphic novel movement and its serial comics forebears: a predominance of single authors; a proliferation of one-shot works as opposed to serialized stories; stronger narrative voices; and greater experimentation with length, format, and layout (8–23). Scottish author and cartoonist Eddie Campbell suggests that the rise of the graphic novel represents much more than a simple rebranding or tweak to the format when he states that “it’s undeniable that there is a new concept of what a comic is and what a comic can be” (qtd. in García, Graphic 9). In his “Graphic Novel Manifesto,” Campbell promotes the term “graphic novel” as a necessary step to denote a paradigm shift within the field of comics: “It is a disagreeable term,” he explains, but one that is necessary because it “signifies a movement rather than a form” (n.p.). Part of this movement, he continues, is to cast off the low-brow connotations associated with the comic book, “which has become an embarrassment,” and which too many readers identify with “a sub-genre of science fiction or heroic fantasy” (n.p.). The shift from comics to graphic novels, he concludes, is not merely about becoming more marketable, it is a chance to find a new identity, an opportunity to take the medium beyond “the cliches of ‘genre fiction’” (n.p.). Similarly, in On the Graphic Novel, Santiago García qualifies graphic novels in terms of being “more adult,” (20), having “a new spirit” (22), engendering a “tendency toward density” (154), and focusing increasingly on autobiography (162).

The “Segundo Boom” and Recent Scholarship Scholars working within the Spanish context have made similar observations, noting that the revision in nomenclature mirrors a shift in themes and tone. Samuel Amago and Matthew J. Marr, for example, suggest in their 2019 volume Consequential Art: Comics Culture in Contemporary

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Spain that the historical development of the comics form has given rise to a variety of neologisms and “multitudinous lexical variations” that seek to define the genre (5). In short, the change of terminology reflects a change in material quality as well as a change in focus—a move away from humor, satire, and adventure, in favor of topics that seek to challenge the status quo or cast light on what was once taboo. Anne Magnussen describes this shift toward reactionary, adult comics in her introduction of European Comic Art, where she suggests that topics like the Spanish Civil War and Franco dictatorship are “central to the understanding of Spanish comics history, as it saw the emergence of comics produced for adult audiences that were more closely connected to the social, cultural, and political protests of the time” (3). There is no denying that this new format is dominating the graphic narrative industry. According to Tebeosfera’s annual analysis of the comics industry by year, the vast majority—nearly 77%—of comics published in Spain in 2018 were in book format (“Informe” 13).6 Perhaps the strongest evidence of the paradigm shift described above can be found in the changing attitudes among scholars and critics. As we suggested in the opening lines of this chapter, serious literary scholarship on Spanish graphic narratives is a relatively new phenomenon. Despite a long record of comics production in Spain, it is only in the past few decades that comics have moved out of the cultural and literary “gutter,” to borrow an expression from Joyce Goggin and Dan Hassler-Forest (1), and achieved a semblance of respectability and success. Figures like Antonio Martín and Luis Gasca paved the way with important documentary works, joined by the likes of Álvaro Pons, Román Gubern, Manuel Barrero, Enrique Bordes, and Juan Antonio Ramírez. With a few exceptions, the valuable contributions of these early trailblazers were squarely in the field of literary history rather than literary analysis.

6  While this naming debate continues, regardless of the terminology that one chooses, the works that we call sequential art, comics, underground comix, graphic novels, and graphic narratives share a defining characteristic; they lie at the intersection of verbal and visual storytelling, and the affordance of this word-image combination is greater than what either one could do on their own. Although we have followed Hilary Chute’s lead in using the more inclusive term “graphic narrative” in the title of this book, in this anthology we have allowed authors to use whichever term they like or even to use them interchangeably. For further reading on this ontological debate—which Thierry Groensteen calls “the impossible definition” (12)—see Baetens and Frey (1–23), the aforementioned García (Graphic 20–24), and Hilary Chute (3).

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This began to change at the turn of the twenty-first century in Spain, corresponding more or less with the second graphic novel “boom.” Since then, there has been a steady trickle of scholarship, mostly articles in literary studies journals, in addition to a few big splashes. Some of the more extensive works of scholarship to emerge in the last two decades include Jesús Cuadrado’s Atlas español de la cultura popular: De la historieta y su uso 1873–2000, Pablo Dopico’s previously mentioned El cómic underground español, 1970–1980, Santiago García’s La novela gráfica (later translated into English as On the Graphic Novel), and a special volume of Arbor titled “La historieta española, 1857–2010,” which features articles by the most important Spanish comics scholars, many of whom are cited above. Despite this growing body of scholarship within Spain, Anne Magnussen points out that “Spanish comics are only to a limited degree visible beyond Spanish borders and in English-language comics research” (2). The special volume of European Comic Art, edited by Magnussen and dedicated to Spanish comics, marks an important contribution from outside the Peninsula, as do Benjamin Fraser’s recently-published volume The Art of Pere Joan, the Fall 2018 issue of Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos (dedicated to comics by Hispanic women), and the aforementioned 2019 collection of essays, Consequential Art, compiled by Amago and Marr. These publications suggest that, on the one hand, Spanish comics are unique and have their own identity, and on the other hand, Spanish sequential art is relevant enough to warrant entire volumes dedicated to its study. Despite this, and despite our own focus on Spanish graphic narratives, we recognize the limits of considering any national comics tradition in isolation. Spanish artists have long had a close relationship with foreign publishers, and international developments in comics production has had an indelible impact on Spanish artists. What is more, many Spanish illustrators flourished in foreign markets prior to their success in Spain. According to Emilio C.  García Fernández and Guzmán Urrero Peña, “[f]or more than 25  years, the most diverse French publications have enriched themselves with contributions by Spanish artists, either permanent residents in Paris or hired via these publishing houses. Germany, the Scandinavian countries and Italy employed so many Spanish artists that, in some cases, this led foreign editors to sponsor offices or publishing houses in Spain” (n.p.). One notable example of this transnational comics production is the noir-style comic album Blacksad, by Spaniards Juan Díaz Canales and Juanjo Guarnido, first published in France in 2000 and

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subsequently in over 20 other languages. Other prominent Spanish graphic novels published initially in French include Paco Roca’s Arrugas (in 2007 as Rides), Felipe Hernández Cava and Bartolomé Seguí’s Las serpientes ciegas (in 2008 as Les serpents aveugles), Jaime Martín’s Jamás tendré 20 años (in 2016 as Jamais je n’aurai 20 ans), and Miguel Francisco’s Espacios en blanco (in 2017 as Des espaces vides). In On the Graphic Novel, Santiago García underscores the importance of the internationalization of the graphic novel in the Spanish context. He suggests that writers and illustrators like Paco Roca are fully aware that they are “working for a global market” and therefore often “make some formal accommodations in order to bring the work closer to the liking of his publishers” (180). Due to the success of having sold 20,000 copies in just over a year since initial publication, Spanish publisher Astiberri purchased the rights to Arrugas from the French publisher Delcourt and “translated the work as if it were just another French comic” (García, Graphic 180). And prominent Spanish author and illustrator of Paracuellos, Carlos Giménez, also accomplished much success within the French market, with his contributions to graphic narrative production recognized in 2010 as he was awarded the Heritage Prize at the International Comics Festival of Angoulême. Nevertheless, as Anne Magnussen rightly notes, while a transnational focus may call into question the “naturalness” of political, geographical, and epistemological boundaries, “it does not render the national frame obsolete” (2). The graphic novels studied in this volume observe the international context of the comics tradition while, at the same time, celebrating the Spanish underpinnings inherent to their creation. While the aforementioned scholarship has certainly contributed to the newfound popularity of graphic novels in Spain, it is, above all, the work of imaginative artists and authors who are tackling weighty topics with skill, subtlety, and daring that has made the 2000s what both Jorge Carrión and Tereixa Constenla have called a “Golden Age” of graphic literature in Spain. Yes, the escapist superhero narratives are still being produced, but so too are historical biographies, coming-of-age stories, experimental novels, and everything in between. At a global level we can single out foundational works like Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize winning account of the Holocaust in Maus (which ushered in the first graphic novel boom), the depiction of life in Iran following the Islamic Revolution in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Chris Ware’s interactive/meta/deconstructed novel-­ in-­a-box Building Stories, and Alison Bechdel’s Bildungsroman memoir

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Fun Home, which explores the author’s own sexuality in parallel with her father’s repressed homosexuality. As for works by Spaniards, we can point to nonfiction accounts of disability (Miguel Gallardo’s María y yo), Civil War memoirs (Sento’s Dr Uriel), literary adaptations (Rayco Pulido’s Nela, see Fig. 1.3), as well as stories of gender inequality (Ana Penyas’s Estamos todas bien)—to name just a few—as being representative of this new era of graphic novel production. Such works are made possible in Spain by a combination of factors. First is the recent establishment of specialized editorial houses, like Sinsentido (1999), Astiberri (2001), Dibbuks (2004), or Apa-Apa (2008),

Fig. 1.3  Cover of Nela by Rayco Pulido

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which gives creators a wider platform for distributing their works, although this has not necessarily translated into the authors reaping the financial success that they deserve (Díaz de Guereñu 219). Similarly, the proliferation of online resources, such as the digital magazines Tebeosfera (founded in 2001) and CuCo: Cuadernos de Cómic (founded in 2013), provides free and easy access to all-things-comics for fans. But it is in 2007 that graphic literature would truly find new life in Spain. For one, this is when the Ministerio de Cultura established the Premio Nacional del Cómic. This prize would institutionalize the shift from low-brow to high-brow described above, giving cultural and literary legitimacy to a medium that had languished for so long at the margins of society. 2007 also witnessed the publication of the most commercially successful Spanish graphic novel to date, Paco Roca’s Arrugas, which has sold approximately 70,000 copies and has been translated into over a half dozen languages (see Fig. 1.4). Furthermore, 2007 is also the year that the Ley de Memoria Histórica was established in Spain, which sought to reconcile Spanish society to the trauma of the Civil War and the subsequent dictatorship of Francisco Franco. As Anne Magnussen explains: “An international interest in comics and memory spread from 2000, and in Spain it acquired a particular focus on memories of the Civil War and dictatorship. The new memory comics and the accompanying research was part of a broader movement in Spain concerned with historical memory” (5–6). Understandably, the Civil War and its aftermath have provided artistic fodder for creators of graphic literature, attracting perhaps more attention in Spanish sequential art than any other single topic, with titles like 36–39: Malos tiempos (2007–2009), Las serpientes ciegas (2008), El arte de volar (2009), Los surcos del azar (2013), the aforementioned Dr. Uriel (2013–2017), La balada del norte (2015), Jamás tendré 20 años (2016), Frank: La increíble historia de una dictadura olvidada (2017), and La Brigada Lincoln (2018), among others. For Spanish writer and critic Santiago García, “[t]he historical graphic novel has established a kind of relationship between the comic and reality that had never been seen before, and which is a cousin of a still incipient but very interesting phenomenon: journalistic comics” (Graphic 166). In addition to the attention given to issues of historical memory and the Spanish Civil War, recent Spanish graphic narratives cover a wide array of themes and topics. One example is literary adaptation, with volumes that both respect the original works but also remake them in new and innovative ways. Some recent examples include Lanza en astillero: el

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Fig. 1.4  Cover of Arrugas by Paco Roca

caballero don Quijote y otras sus tristes figuras (2005), the previously cited Nela (2013), Miguel EN Cervantes: El retablo de las maravillas (2015), La vida es sueño (2018), and Soldados de Salamina (2019); literary and artistic interpretations, such as El juego lúgubre (2001), Las meninas (2014), and Lorca: Un poeta en Nueva York (2016); and homages to Spanish cultural icons, like La huella de Lorca (2013), El fantasma de Gaudí (2015), Goya: Lo sublime terrible (2018), El sueño de Dalí (2018), Antonio Machado: Los días azules (2019), and Buñuel en el laberinto de las tortugas (2019). Another trend in Spanish graphic novels of the twenty-first century is the treatment of cultural customs and current entertainment, such

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as bullfighting in Manolo López Poy and Miguel Fernández’s A las cinco de la tarde (2013), soccer in Santiago García and Pablo Ríos’s Fútbol: La novela gráfica (2014), and even the titular Spanish fantasy television series treated graphically in El Torres et al.’s El Ministerio del Tiempo (2017), an adaptation of the popular 2015–2016 Radio y Televisión Española (RTVE) and Netflix series that continues in 2020 with its fourth season. Issues of gender and identity have also become an increasingly important theme in graphic literature, as we see in such volumes as Clara-Tanit Arqué’s ¿Quién ama a las fresas? (2010), Rayco Pulido’s Lamia (2016), Ana Penyas’s Estamos todas bien (2017), and I. L. Escudero et al.’s Diferente: 140 artistas. Una unica historia (2019). In the spirit of the writings on eroticism of French intellectual Georges Bataille, Spanish graphic novels of the “second boom” have also discussed sexuality and human desire, as in Amores locos (2005) and El brillo del gato negro (2008) by Laura Pérez Vernetti and Antonio Altarriba, for example. The last several years have also seen an increase in the number of female scriptwriters and illustrators in Spain and elsewhere, and such efforts have been recognized favorably by critics and scholars alike. Among the works of special note, we should mention the previously alluded to works by Clara-Tanit Arqué and Ana Penyas, as well as Laura Pérez Vernetti’s Poémic (with Ferran Fernández, 2015), María Medem’s Cénit (2018), Ana Galvañ’s Pulse enter para continuar, Cecília Hill’s Antonio Machado: Los días azules (with Josep Salvia, 2019), and Laura Suárez’s Los cuentos de la niebla (2019). And the Valencian illustrator Cristina Durán, along with her collaborators, won the Premio Nacional del Cómic in 2019 for El día 3 (2018), which recounts a metro accident that claimed the lives of 43 people. In his article “Cómic: Femenino, singular y en español,” Jorge Carrión highlights the surge in comic-book production by female authors in some of the most important centers of the Spanish-speaking world, including Spain, Colombia, and Argentina. Furthermore, the Colombian editor Catalina Mejía suggests that in recent years “el cómic se ha desmasculinizado” [comics have become un-masculinized] and that “la incursión de la mujer, inicialmente como lectora, no solo ha hecho que el medio adquiera una mayor relevancia y dimensión social y cultural, sino que ha animado a lectoras-autoras que estaban a la sombra a atreverse a crear y dibujar historias” (qtd. in Carrión, “Cómic” n.p.) [the entrance of women into the genre, initially as readers, has not only meant that the medium has acquired greater relevance and socio-cultural weight, but it has also energized many female readers and authors who were previously at the

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margins to dare to create and draw stories]. Carrión also underscores the recent graphic narrative awards received by women, such as the Autor/ Autora revelación español/a and Gran Premio, given to Ana Penyas and Laura Pérez Vernetti, respectively, at the 2018 Barcelona International Comic Fair, as well as the Premio Valencia de Novela Gráfica awarded to Núria Tamarit in 2018 and the FNAC-Salamandra Graphic award given in recent years to Penyas, Bea Enríquez, and Anapurna (alter-ego and pen name of Ana Sainz Quesada). Additionally, Carrión notes the increasing role that female authors and illustrators are assuming as editors of fanzines and other publication platforms. In her study “Autoras contemporáneas en la historieta española: Revisión de la etiqueta ‘cómic femenino’,” Adela Cortijo examines the growing list of publications of comics by women in Spain since the 1980s and the “trayectoria de algunas autoras representativas de distintos periodos: Laura, Ana Juan, Ana Miralles, Sonia Pulido y Clara-­Tanit” (223) [trajectory of some representative female authors of different periods: Laura, Ana Juan, Ana Miralles, Sonia Pulido, and ClaraTanit]. Cortijo highlights the proliferation of presses during the 2000s that have enabled this significant increase in female-authored and illustrated volumes, from publishers including La Cúpula, Edicions de Ponent, Astiberri, and Sinsentido.

The Essays The chapters in Spanish Graphic Narratives are divided into three general sections—memory, identity issues, and contemporary culture—, which reflect recent trends in the industry and offer an accurate representation of what much of sequential art in Spain is currently discussing. These overarching topics share many points of contact one with another, and this interrelationship (as well as the many points of divergence) is illustrative of the uniqueness, diversity, and paradoxes of literary and cultural production in modern-day Spain, thus illuminating our understanding of Spanish national consciousness in the present day. Part one of this volume includes essays dedicated to memory (both historical and personal), arguably one of the most prominent topics treated in recent Spanish literature, graphic narrative included. In conjunction with (and in response to) the 2007 Ley de Memoria Histórica, Spaniards have sought to address the tensions and tragedies of their recent past, most notably the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and the Francisco Franco regime (1939–1975). The first chapter of this book, Lena Tahmassian’s “Espacios en blanco: Historical

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Memory, Defeat, and the Comics Imaginary,” establishes much of the groundwork for the consideration of Spanish graphic narratives focused on memory and Spain’s contentious past. Tahmassian contends that (auto) biographical texts such as Espacios en blanco (2017) by Miguel Francisco, which engages history, trauma, and self-fashioning, attempts to render the transmission of memory legible through the visual mode of expression. Fernando Simón Abad’s essay, “Memory, Amnesia, and Forgetting: The Graphic Representation of a Chronic Disease in Twentieth- and TwentyFirst-Century Spain,” addresses memory as it relates to the recuperation of history. By examining works by Paco Roca and Antonio Altarriba, Abad discusses how Spanish graphic novels seek to “annul social amnesia” and “use fiction as a tool to facilitate remembrance.” Also focusing on the works of Paco Roca and issues of contemporary Spanish history and memory, Diego Batista’s essay, “Recovering the Irrecoverable: ‘The Memory of What Matters’ in Three Works by Paco Roca,” takes a more intimate and personal look at issues of aging, remembering, and familial connections. David Richter’s chapter, “The Persistent Memories of Federico García Lorca: History, Poetry, and Spanish Graphic Narratives,” discusses the intersections of historical memory, visual metaphors, and poetic language in Carlos Hernández’s La huella de Lorca (2011), Enrique Bonet’s La araña del olvido (2015), and Carles Esquembre’s Lorca: Un poeta en Nueva York (2016). In their own way, each of these graphic novels seeks to pay homage to Lorca’s life and works, while at the same time offering visual interpretations of his literary contributions. The essays in part two respond to growing tensions in Spain related to contemporary Spanish identities in flux, especially regarding issues focused on race relations, the expression of gender, and debates over immigration and violence. Jeffrey Coleman’s chapter, “Polemic Collision: Race, Immigration, and Gender Violence in Olimpita,” considers African immigration and gender violence in Spain, two issues that have dominated Spanish media since the 1990s. In his discussion of Hernán Migoya and Joan Marín’s 2009 graphic novel Olimpita, Coleman suggests that both issues are ingrained in contemporary Spanish society and that the novel urges readers to examine how gender and race are constructed in Spain. In “‘I Hate Being Chinese’: Migration, Cultural Identity, and Autobiography in Quan Zhou Wu’s Gazpacho agridulce,” Adrián Collado addresses similar tensions related to racism and immigrant culture in Spain, this time through the 2015 graphic novel Gazpacho agridulce and issues of transcultural encounter, the reproduction of stereotypes, crises of identity, and

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cultural integration. Michelle Murray’s chapter, “Black and Basque Power: Visualizing Race and Resistance in Black is Beltza,” examines marginalized regional identities in Spain (the Basque experience in this case) in their relation to blackness. Murray underscores how the novel re-imagines colonial and racial strife and mobilizes blackness in a way that moves beyond racial connotation in an attempt to create solidarity with other marginalized identities. In Collin McKinney’s “Gender, Genre, and Retribution in Rayco Pulido’s Lamia: A Historical Novel for the Present Day,” the focus centers on abused and marginalized women in Franco’s Spain. McKinney’s reading of Lamia argues that the historical setting is merely a dissimulated mirror meant to reflect current issues plaguing Spanish society, specifically a frustrating lack of gender equality and the mistreatment of women. When read against the backdrop of the recent social movements like #YoTambien [#MeToo] and #YoTeCreo [#IBelieveYou] or the 2016–2019 “La Manada” trial, Lamia feels alarmingly contemporary despite its historical setting. Marina Bettaglio’s essay, “Maternal Life Writing in Contemporary Spanish Graphic Narratives: From Blog to Book,” highlights the increasing number of women-authored graphic narratives in Spain and, in particular, the presence of maternal figures in those works. This newly-flourishing genre, what Bettaglio calls “maternal chronicles,” includes texts such as Agustina Guerrero’s La Volátil. Mamma mía (2015), Cristina Quiles’s La madre que nos parió (2015), Esther Gili’s 39 semanas y mis experiencias como madre novata (2016), and Cristina Torrón’s Mammasutra: 1001 posturas para madres en apuros (2016). Bettaglio argues that novels such as these seek to articulate the conflict, ambivalence, and guilt associated with the lived experiences of mothering, but also chronicle women’s transition to motherhood while resisting the mystification and glamorization of the maternal role. The final chapters in Spanish Graphic Narratives recognize the vital impulse in graphic narrative to address some of the most recent developments in modern-day Spanish society through the consideration of contemporary issues and cultural manifestations. In the chapter, “‘In This Country, the Past Never Dies’: Superheroes, Democracy, and the Culture of the Spanish Transition in ¡García!,” Alberto López Martín discusses the two-part graphic narrative ¡García! and the manner in which history, fiction, and Spain’s dark past come together in the detective novel focused on the transition period in Spain, from the final years of the Franco regime to the present day. Maria DiFrancesco’s “The Right to Barcelona: Spectrality, Unbuiltness, and El fantasma de Gaudí” portrays the plight of

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Barcelona residents who have been pushed out of the city in recent years by unbridled tourism. DiFrancesco’s reading of El fantasma de Gaudí is informed by Henri Lefebvre’s notion of “the right to the city” as well as theories of Jacques Derrida and Gordon Matta-Clark. This chapter suggests that only a radical challenge to the current status quo is capable of “unbuilding” an unjust system that has forced residents to the margins of the city. In his essay, “The Post-15M Condition: Liminality and Multitude in Spanish Graphic Narratives,” Xavier Dapena discusses public spaces in Spain that, especially since 2007, have served as the staging grounds for protests, “occupations,” and social mobilization. Taking into account the important role that such activism holds in Spanish society, Dapena argues that recent graphic expressions have emerged as a foundational cultural mode through which political exchange occurs during times of economic crisis and political instability. Much of the content of this volume is indebted to the increasing number of international academic conferences wherein many of the essays here were initially presented, such as the Barcelona International Comic Fair (which has run since 1981), the Unicómic conference in Alicante (which has existed since 1999), and more recent endeavors such as panels dedicated to Spanish graphic narratives at regional, national, and international gatherings of the Modern Language Association over the last several years. With the growing number of conferences, university courses, and studies treating the subject of Spanish sequential art each year, artists, authors, and academics alike have shown that comics can be both popular and serious.

Works Cited Amago, Samuel, and Matthew J.  Marr. “Comics in Contemporary Spain.” Consequential Art: Comics Culture in Contemporary Spain. Ed. Amago and Marr. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2019. 3–28. Baetens, Jan, and Hugo Frey. The Graphic Novel: An Introduction. New  York: Cambridge UP, 2014. Barrero, Manuel. Diccionario terminológico de la historieta. Sevilla: Asociación Cultural Tebeosfera (ACyT) Ediciones, 2015. ———. “La novela gráfica. Perversión genérica de una etiqueta editorial.” 1–24. 2005. https://www.academia.edu/3600773/La_novela_gr%C3%A1fica._ Perversi%C3%B3n_gen%C3%A9rica_de_una_etiqueta_editorial.

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———. “Orígenes de la historieta española, 1857–1906.” Arbor: Ciencia, Pensamiento y Cultura 187.Extra 2 (2011): 15–42. Campbell, Eddie. “Graphic Novel Manifesto.” http://donmacdonald. com/2010/11/eddie-campbells-graphic-novel-manifesto/. Carrión, Jorge. “Cómic: femenino, singular y en español.” The New York Times. 19 Aug. 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/es/2018/08/19/espanol/cultura/comics-mujeres-espanol.html/. ———. “La edad de oro del cómic en español.” The New York Times. 1 Feb. 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/es/2017/02/01/la-edad-de-oro-del-comicen-espanol/. Chute, Hillary. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia UP, 2010. Clowes, Daniel. The Daniel Clowes Reader. Ed. Ken Parille. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2013. Constenla, Tereixa. “El siglo del oro del cómic español.” El País. 31 July 2017. https://elpais.com/cultura/2017/07/28/babelia/1501264717_520065. html?rel=mas. Cortijo, Adela. “Autoras contemporáneas en la historieta española: Revisión de la etiqueta ‘cómic femenino’.” Arbor: Ciencia, Pensamiento y Cultura 187.Extra 2 (2011): 221–38. Díaz de Guereñu, Juan Manuel. “El cómic español desde 1995.” Arbor: Ciencia, Pensamiento y Cultura 187.Extra 2 (2011): 208–20. Dopico, Pablo. El cómic underground español, 1970–1980. Madrid: Cátedra, 2005. ———. “Esputos de papel: La historieta ‘underground’ española.” Arbor. Coord. Antonio Altarriba. 187 (2011): 169–81. Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and Practices from the Legendary Cartoonist. New York: Norton, 2008. Fraser, Benjamin. The Art of Pere Joan: Space, Landscape, and Comics Form. Austin: U of Texas P, 2019. García, Santiago. La novela gráfica. Bilbao: Astiberri, 2014. ———. On the Graphic Novel. Trans. Bruce Campbell. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2015. ———. Panorama. La novela gráfica española hoy. Bilbao: Astiberri, 2013. ———. Spanish Fever: Stories by the New Spanish Cartoonists. Trans. Erica Mena. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books. 2016. García-Fernández, Emilio C., and Guzmán Urrero Peña. “History of Comics in Spain.” Europe Comics. 20 Mar. 2017. http://www.europecomics.com/ history-comics-spain-part-2/. Goggin, Joyce, and Dan Hassler-Forest. The Rise and Reason of Comics. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010. Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2007.

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Hansen, Kathryn Strong. “In Defense of Graphic Novels.” The English Journal 102.2 (Nov. 2012): 57–63. “Informe Tebeosfera 2018.” Asociación Cultural Tebeosfera (ACyT) Ediciones. https://www.tebeosfera.com/anexos/informe_tebeosfera_2018.pdf. Kiely, Kristin. “Spanish Comics as Genre.” Hispania 101.2 (2018): 278–85. Kyle, Richard. “The Future of ‘Comics’.” Wonderworld 2 (1964): 3–4. Lázaro-Reboll, Antonio. “Historicizing the Emergence of Comics Art Scholarship in Spain, 1965–1975.” European Comic Art 11.1 (2018): 8–29. Lladó Pol, Francesca. Los cómics de la Transición (El boom del cómic adulto 1875–1984). Barcelona: Ediciones Glénat, 2001. Lopes, Paul. “Culture and Stigma: Popular Culture and the Case of Comic Books.” Sociological Forum 21.3 (2006): 387–414. Magnussen, Anne. “Introduction.” European Comic Art 11.1 (2018): 1–7. Márquez, Nuria Ponce. “El mundo del cómic: Planteamiento terminológico, literario y traductológico.” Philologia Hispalensis 24 (2010): 123–41. Martín, Antonio. “Las Aleluyas, primera lectura y primeras imágenes para niños en los siglos XVIII–XIX. Un antecedente de la literatura y la prensa infantil en España.” Espéculo: Revista de estudios literarios 47 (2011): n.p. ———. Apuntes para la historia de los tebeos. Barcelona: Ediciones Glénat, 2000. ———. “Notes on the Birth of the Comics in Spain, 1873–1900.” Forging a New Medium: The Comic Strip in the Nineteenth Century. Ed. Charles Dierick and Pascal Lefèvre. Brussels: VUB UP, 1998. 129–56. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New  York: Harper Perennial, 1994. McGrath, Charles. “Not Funnies.” The New York Times Magazine. 11 July 2004: Section 6, page 24. Merino, Ana. Diez ensayos para pensar el cómic. León, Spain: Eolas Ediciones, 2017. ———. El cómic hispano. Madrid: Cátedra, 2003. Mitaine, Benoît. “Memorias dibujadas: La representación de la Guerra Civil y del franquismo en el cómic español. El caso de Un largo silencio.” Memoria y testimonio. Representaciones memorísticas en la España contemporánea. Ed. Georges Tyras and Juan Vila. Madrid: Editorial Verbum, 2012. 148–70. Pamies, Antonio, et al. De Qvommic. El Rrollo Aristocrata. Barcelona, 1974. “Vida del valiente general D. Juan Prim, marqués de los Castillejos,” Número 1 (1861). Barcelona: Fundación Centro Etnográfico Joaquín Díaz. Weiner, Stephen. Faster Than a Speeding Bullet: The Rise of the Graphic Novel. Intro. Will Eisner. New York: Nantier, Beall, Minoustchine, 2003.

PART I

Memories, Historical and Personal

CHAPTER 2

Espacios en blanco: Historical Memory, Defeat, and the Comics Imaginary Lena Tahmassian

At the intersection of the international rise of the graphic novel in the last decades and Spain’s memory cultures,1 the graphic medium has asserted itself as a formidable ground for the recuperation of historical memory in Spain. A subset of recent Spanish graphic novels’ authors seems particularly motivated by the anxiety to document and transmit stories that make up the collective historical memory of the Civil War and aftermath, before the first and even second-hand testimonies slip irretrievably into oblivion. Celebrated works such as Un largo silencio (Miguel Gallardo), El arte de volar and its sequel El ala rota (Antonio Altarriba and Kim), and Los surcos del azar (Paco Roca) are examples of recent graphic novels that aim to recuperate this history through the (auto)biographical personal narrative. 1  I am referring to the proliferation of cultural production in the form of cinema, literature, art, and other material objects, but also legislation, court cases, and literal exhumations that have dealt with recuperating the memory of the losing side of the Spanish Civil War and subsequent dictatorship under Francisco Franco.

L. Tahmassian (*) University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 C. McKinney, D. F. Richter (eds.), Spanish Graphic Narratives, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56820-7_2

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Miguel Francisco’s recent work Espacios en blanco [Blank Spaces] forms part of this body of graphic texts and through its self-reflexivity—a quality inherent to the comics form—addresses both the subject of memory culture and the how comics intervene in it. Espacios en blanco functions as an autobiography refracted through fragments of memories and biographies of Francisco’s father and grandfather. It conveys the objective of the transmission of memory, particularly in the context of contemporary emigration and a growing diaspora memory. The narrator, who is a literary version of the author Miguel Francisco2 and a Spanish emigrant living and working in Helsinki as an illustrator, is prompted by the death of his father back in Barcelona to document the family’s stories for his son before he too is no longer around to tell them. His father’s and grandfather’s pasts are subsequently conjured up through both conversations and memories of past storytelling, navigating various fragmented layers of memory before arriving back at the narrative present at the conclusion of the graphic novel. Memory is anchored in historically resonant moments corresponding to the life stories of the three generations as a trajectory of defeat in which the subjects are always on the losing side of history. In this chapter, I argue that Espacios en blanco contemplates the weight of defeated memory / the memory of defeat from both a personal and distant or external position. There is tension between the importance of memory for contemporary subject formation, while an obsession with the past also signals melancholy and lack of future horizons. I will discuss how the comics medium facilitates this complex subject position in Espacios en blanco, which attempts to handle memory productively through challenging dominant narratives.

Embodiments of the Past in (Auto)biographical Memory Comics At the beginning of the narrative, the protracted flashback that contains the majority of the story is set into motion as Miguel is cooking dinner for his son while maintaining an inner dialogue about how he will pass the family’s stories on to him. The reader shares Miguel’s view of the sofrito cooking over the stove as he reflects on the anxiety of oblivion: 2  I will refer to Miguel as the narrator and Francisco as the author, though the autobiographical pact as well as the meta-textual dimension of the graphic novel allows for necessary slippage between the two.

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[T]an sólo son trocitos de vidas vividas en un mundo en el que cada día desaparecen millones de historias. Un mundo que él mismo ya no existe. Millones de historias llenas de espacios en blanco, de silencios que cuentan más que las palabras. Así que te voy a contar todas las historias que me contaba mi padre, pero te las voy a contar a fuego lento, para que las leas cuando quieras. (Francisco 8) [They are just little bits of lives lived in a world where millions of stories disappear every day. A world that no longer exists in itself. Millions of stories full of blanks, of silences that speak more than words. So, I’m going to tell you all the stories my father told me, but I’m going to let them simmer, so you can read them when you feel like it]. (see Fig. 2.1)

The food imagery is metonymic, as the dinner table was often the site of memory transmission from Miguel’s father. The sofrito also functions as a metaphorical referent to the comics form itself, which serves as the narrative medium by which memory transmission will occur. Miguel will let the stories “simmer” for whenever his son is ready to read them, which can be read as a reference to the graphic medium’s autonomous temporality—a format allowing for the slow-paced perusal of images and texts, in contrast to the film medium that imposes its own rhythm on the viewer. Creating the graphic novel is therapeutic for Miguel: “Hacer sofritos siempre me relaja, debo ser un tío raro” (8) [Making sofritos always relaxes me, I must be a weird guy]. Espacios en blanco artfully exploits the graphic medium’s interplay of images and text, employing various self-reflexive visual metaphors that refer both to memory as narrative and to the graphic medium in particular. The reader is therefore primed to the communicative function of the images, relying on the reader’s capacity to fill in the blanks in order to understand Espacios en blanco as a reflection on the graphic novel itself, which is never explicitly stated. Throughout the novel visual cues point to this meta-textual dimension in which Miguel is working on a graphic novel in his free time that will provide the emplotment of the family memories he retrieves and constructs. The concept of “espacios en blanco” (“blanks” or “white spaces”) also conveys a variety of meanings. Explicitly it signifies the silences that leave lacunae in the inherited family stories due to forgetting and traumatic blockage. Miguel attempts to fill in these gaps through a combination of prodding his father for more information, imagination, and through a consultation of the historical archive in order to make sense of the stories he heard in his childhood and that he did not fully understand. Espacios en

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Fig. 2.1  Food imagery (8) in Espacios en blanco by Miguel Francisco

blanco shows how the family memory is mediated through photographs and testimony, and when the events fail to add up, Miguel consults Spanish history volumes by Paul Preston in order to fill in the gaps. The appearance of history books and drawings of iconic photographs and images peppered throughout the panels also function to invoke the Spanish historical memory for the reader. Thierry Groensteen observes in his study of the comics system of signification that “[a]n important aspect of modern comics is the mixture of imaginary drawings and documented drawings […] fusing these two categories almost to the point where they become

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identical” and that comics are “at once a production of the imagination and a recycling of icons from every provenance” (42). The nature of comics therefore mirrors that of memory narratives, relying on the cultural archive to create meaning. The grammar of comics is also defined literally by the white spaces between its panels—known as the gutter—where the reader must project causality and/or missing images and information in order for the narrative to coalesce, what Scott McCloud describes as “closure” (69). Invoking Thierry Groensteen, Jason Helms notes that “Whether called the gutter or arthrology, the same principle that connects one panel to another or text with image can make connections across books and people” (n.p.). In other words, reader participation in comics happens simultaneously through intertextuality and creating connections between images, text, and panels. Thus, the “espacios en blanco” suggest that, like reading comics, the exercise of recuperating memory is defined by its conspicuous gaps, echoing the various textual relationships through which comics (and to an extent, all narratives) create meaning. Drawing a parallel between the filling in of gaps in memory through cultural texts within the graphic novel and the reader’s participation in suturing the gaps comprising the gutter helps characterize the collaborative text where both author and reader are in search of and generate meaning. Hillary Chute has written at length on how the formal aspects of comics lend themselves to life narrative. For Chute, auto(biographical) comics “make literal the presence of the past by disrupting spatial and temporal conventions to overlay or palimpsest past and present” (“Comics” 109). The linearity of the story of Miguel’s life in Helsinki is consistently interrupted by past memories that weigh on the present, illustrated through jumping back and forth between time in panels appearing side-by-side on the page. Francisco draws himself as a child, and also imagines his grandfather in the war, and his father as a starving post-war child. In order to draw their lives, Francisco must occupy their respective subject positions. Chute refers to this procedure in comics as the “embodiment” through which the cartoonist can resurrect other bodies: “Materializing history through the work of marks on the page creates it as space and substance, gives it a corporeality, a physical shape—like a suit, perhaps, for an absent body […] to make, in other words, the twisting lines of history legible through form” (Disaster 27). This is a highly personal procedure, which involves close identification with the subjects being drawn. There is no doubt a therapeutic function in giving physical shape and presence to

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silenced family history and granting subjectivity to those on the losing side of history. Embodying others’ lives through drawing comics is also a means of engaging with what Marianne Hirsch has termed “postmemory.” Postmemory is generated as Miguel adopts his father’s memories as his own through the act of drawing. According to Hirsch, postmemorial work strives to reactivate and re-embody more distant political and cultural memorial structures by reinvesting them with resonant individual and familiar forms of mediation and aesthetic expression. In these ways, less directly affected participants can become engaged in the generation of postmemory that can persist even after all participants and even their familiar descendants are gone. (33)

Postmemory can be understood as the necessary process through which personal testimony becomes cultural and historical memory, in order for societies to remember. Miguel’s affective inquiry into the past gives his life meaning, helping to overcome the melancholic rootlessness of the émigré experience; but unsettling the past also proves messy. As Miguel travels from Barcelona to Helsinki at the beginning of the story, he invents a new verb tense to describe his predicament. “El pasado presente continuo” (Francisco 17) [the continuous past-present] refers to being stuck in a state of observing and reviewing the past, but unable to intervene in it—an unproductive interplay of presence and absence. His postmemorial embodiment helps to make the past legible as the graphic novel’s self-reflexivity points to the medium itself and its intervention into memory as a way out of the impasse. In this sense, Espacios en blanco is an example of what Charles Hatfield refers to as metacomics (comics about making comics), a trope that runs through the larger body of autobiography (130). It is also important to note that Hirsch elaborated her theory on post-memory in part through her analysis of the groundbreaking graphic novel Maus, analyzing Art Spiegelman’s autobiographical inquiry into his father’s survival of the holocaust as an attempt to get deeper into postmemory, or the son’s experience of the father’s trauma, in order to eventually find a way out (13). Francisco’s (and Miguel’s) embodiment of his father’s life through the comics form in Espacios en blanco represents a salient aspect of the graphic narrative’s function as a therapeutic art form in its handling of memory by giving shape to silenced histories.

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Historical Subjectivity and Self-Estrangement An additional dimension to this self-reflexivity is that the personal embodiment is coupled with a host of distancing mechanisms that make comics function as a fruitful inquiry into the past. Espacios en blanco can be read as a story within the story in which Miguel is recounting episodes of his life, and Francisco is telling the story of his former self who creates the graphic novel we are reading. Functioning in conjunction with the intimate affective entanglement of embodying the past, there is a distancing between the author and the drawn self-as-narrator, as well as between the narrator and narrated subjects. Not only is the narrator looking back on himself with a degree of irony, but the tension between image and text produces a simultaneity between different perspectives—while the autobiographical narrator speaks in first person, we see images from a variety of perspectives. In his study on autobiographical comics, Hatfield observes that unlike its prose counterpart, autobiographical cartooning works “from the outside in” thus “offering a unique way for the artist to recognize and externalize his or her subjectivity” (115). We are afforded a perspective of imagined objectivity of Francisco (and Miguel) looking in on his situation, which facilitates self-reflection from a critical distance. The autobiographical comic is well suited to produce spaces and situations of estrangement in which the subject can view himself from afar, stepping outside himself in order to gain a critical understanding. The narrator’s displacement conveyed through airplane travel from Barcelona to Helsinki to start his new life prompts a disruption of the linear time of the narrative. The feeling of uprootedness caused by emigration triggers old memories from home anchored in Spanish history, while living abroad simultaneously facilitates the adoption of an external gaze—that of someone looking in on Spanish memory culture. One night while at a local bar, he meets a jevi (metal-head) who delivers some hard truths. He tells Miguel, “Españoles … os tengo cariño a pesar de que seáis tan dramáticos y lastimeros con vuestras viejas historias del pasado que lleváis marcadas a fuego, que no podéis olvidar ni de las que os podéis curar. Visto desde fuera es un poco patético, la verdad” (Francisco 39) [Spaniards … I like you guys even though you’re so dramatic and pitiful with your old stories from the past that you carry branded onto you, that you can’t forget nor cure. Seen from the outside, it’s a little pathetic, you know]. The strange yet familiar presence of the jevi makes explicit what was previously confined to Miguel’s internal dialogue reflecting on his state of being stuck in

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the “continuous past-present,” relating it to an incurable wound. This trauma is incurable not just because of the politics of memory in Spain, but also because the emotional investment corresponds to an inherited and therefore indirect trauma, echoing Hirsch’s interrogation on postmemory: “How is trauma transmitted across generations, how is it remembered by those who did not live it or know it in their own bodies?” (11). The acerbic jevi, who ultimately shapeshifts into Baphomet,3 appears throughout the story in bars, night clubs, and eventually Miguel’s home where the reader can tacitly confirm that this intruder is in fact Miguel’s alter-ego. The interlocutor who appears when Miguel is intoxicated or in an otherwise impaired cognitive state, reads like a twenty-first-century version of Carmen Martín Gaite’s “hombre vestido de negro” [man in black] in the canonical El cuarto de atrás (1977). In the Todorov-inspired memory novel, a mysterious guest appears one night to apparently interview the first-person narrator—who, like Miguel, is also cognitively altered by her pharmacological regime—inadvertently helping her access the sealed-­ off and repressed memories of growing up under the Franco dictatorship. The man in black constitutes an uncanny “self as other,” which allows the subject to access latent content in the recesses of the subconscious. While Martín Gaite’s man in black depends on the reader’s interpretive imagination in El cuarto de atrás, Francisco’s caustic riff of the fantastical interlocutor appears as a visual metaphor for Miguel’s working through postmemory and his melancholic state, driving him towards critical self-­ reflection about the weight of the past on the present and to reclaim a sense of agency. In Espacios en blanco, these panels break with the literal verisimilitude of the narrative, invoking Spanish memory culture from an ironic distance. For Hatfield, a sense of otherness pervades autobiographical comics in which the self is split between the present subject looking back on a less-informed earlier version of itself and through which ironic pictorial metaphors grant an emotional rather than literal authenticity to the story (128). The jevi in Francisco’s graphic novel can thus be seen as the tool that facilitates self-reflection from a critical distance, made possible by a combination of emigration and self-development, which in turn helps bring the former self in line with the current one. 3  An occult deity embodying various binaries such as male/female, human/animal, and good/evil, which also bears the dualistic inscription of “solve”/“coagula.” The symbol has been associated with Satanism, resistance to all forms of social oppression, and is prevalent in gaming and popular culture.

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This gesture corresponds to Enzo Traverso’s notion of self-­estrangement and can facilitate a critical understanding for those who see themselves from a perspective of historical defeat: “Just for a moment, [the melancholic vanquished] can neutralize his emotional commitment to an exhausted experience and scrutinize it as the viewer of a photograph” (25). He can temporarily escape his status as generational loser of history and negotiate a different affective investment in the past. Francisco’s autobiography also functions as a multigenerational biography in which the past returns fragmentarily and out of order, but nevertheless corresponds to a trajectory of historical left-wing defeats of the last century. The graphic novel is punctuated by historically resonant moments such as the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, the fall of the Spanish Republic and the subsequent civil war, the lengthy Franco regime, the transition to democracy, and also, it could be implied, the twenty-first-century economic crisis. Francisco’s answer to positivistic consensus historiography is not to present a mythified account of his father and grandfather’s exploits—who are instead presented as complex individuals vanquished by history—but rather to investigate and bring to the surface the silenced and neutralized political dimensions of their lives. For example, Miguel discovers that in addition to being his namesake, he also inherited his grandfather’s political affiliation as a member of the CNT (National Confederation of Workers, an anarchist labor union). Although he lost everything after the war, the elder Miguel retained his membership card in his wallet despite the threat of retribution and intimidation. Perhaps the effort to re-politicize his family members through investigating the past is an attempt to imbue them with historical subjectivity, escaping pure victimhood status. Traverso argues that the shadow cast on memory by “the end of history” further underscores that “the remembrance of the victims seems unable to coexist with the recollection of their hopes, of their struggles, of their conquests and their defeats” (10). Affirming their political pasts serves as a reminder that prior to being remembered as a victim of Francoist repression, and despite their silence, the grandfather, Miguel, and the father, Sebastián, were both anarchists that believed in shaping history.

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Comic Icons as Historical Triggers and Visual Quotations Comic drawings that resemble snapshot images also function as metonyms for historical events, imbuing them with subjectivity. Looking back, Miguel remembers the televised announcement of Franco’s death in 1975, which set into motion Spain’s transition to democracy. Francisco’s panels are drawn from his childhood perspective wherein the last day he was required to pray in school was followed shortly by the first time he saw a woman walking down the street in a revealing miniskirt. These frames are preceded by a larger panel showing political turbulence he describes as “dibujos y palabras que no entendía” (Francisco 19) [drawings and words that I couldn’t understand], corresponding with a protest sign of “Amnistía” [Amnesty] and political graffiti that reads: “Puig Antich Asesinado” [Puig Antich Assassinated] (see Fig. 2.2).4 The panels depicting childhood memories of newfound personal freedoms are signifiers of Spain’s supposedly harmonious and de-politicized transition. This contrasts with a more critical reading of the historical period that has become more mainstream in Spain in recent years, represented by the inclusion of political signifiers that the narrator did not understand at the time, but now does. The allusion to amnesty is especially relevant to the current debates surrounding historical memory in Spain. Amnesty for the political prisoners of the dictatorship was eventually granted as part of the Amnesty Law of 1977, but this landmark legislation also granted legal immunity to the perpetrators of crimes committed by the Franco regime. For Miguel’s grandfather and father in Espacios en blanco, surviving repression necessitated a relegation of memory to the private conscience, and yet the arrival of democracy in Spain never fully rectified this state of internal exile. It is against this backdrop that one can understand Sebastián’s reluctance to remember times of misery and humiliation and to fill in the silences about the past so that Miguel may complete his story. It is a recognition of the futility of remembering when memory serves primarily as a reminder of historical defeat—a melancholic gaze fixated on the past.

4  Salvador Puig Antich was a Catalan anarchist and political prisoner charged summarily for the alleged murder of a state security officer. His internationally publicized and highly unpopular execution in 1974 was one of the last two carried out by the Franco regime.

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Fig. 2.2  Political turbulence (19) in Espacios en blanco by Miguel Francisco

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Indeed, one of the great disappointments of the Spanish transition to democracy was the institutionalization of oblivion—the so-called “pacto del olvido” [Pact of Forgetting]—characterized by the denial of the relevance of memory dealing with political antagonisms and social conflicts. Memory, like the return of the political, was seen as a threat to social cohesion and stability needed for Spain’s long-awaited European integration, as Joan Ramon Resina succinctly states: “[A] higher standard of living, bringing Spanish identity in line with the European, was purchased at the price of blurring elements of the recent past” (5). The popular myth of a peaceful and successful transition as the bedrock of contemporary Spanish democracy has been ruptured especially in the last decade, corresponding to the present temporality of Espacios en blanco. The widespread grassroots protests against the government’s handling of the financial crisis from 2011 onward saw an increasing proportion of the Spanish public connecting the dots between a protracted economic crisis and a democratic deficit in Spain that was enshrined in the founding documents and legislation crafted during the transition. In other words, the present economic lack seems to undermine the premise of the trade-off in which memory was suppressed in order for Spain to advance economically. While European integration did bring unprecedented gains to Spain’s economy in the 1980s and 90s, the more recent EU-imposed austerity measures highlight Spain’s economically subordinate position to the more hegemonic European powers. Written and narrated from Helsinki, Espacios en blanco and Miguel represent the thousands of Spanish émigrés leaving for more prosperous European countries in the last decade in search of better opportunities. In order to carve out a viable future, many young people must resort to migration strategies reminiscent of that of previous generations, now recast as a virtue in the name of freedom of movement between European Union member states. Espacios en blanco suggests a cycle of exile, from the grandfather’s sojourn in Argentina during Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship, to the father’s internal exile, and to Miguel’s economic exile. Parallels between past and present are cast into relief through the (meta)comics format. As a story dedicated not just to documenting, but also to materializing memory in the present, the fragmented narrative is embedded with additional secondary flashbacks, characterized by sometimes jarring temporal jumps between the panels, often occurring on the same page. Available for perusal at the reader’s own pace, the panels are taken in sequentially by the reader and also as a unified composition where

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the presence of silence speaks in the form of co-presence of images in sequence. Thierry Groensteen considers “iconic solidarity” as the common denominator and central element in comics, which he defines as interdependent images participating in a series that possess the double characteristic of being both separated and co-present (18). In addition to the sequential co-presence of past and present on the same page, Groensteen identifies a modality of iconic solidarity called “braiding”— the relationship between images woven throughout the various pages of the graphic narrative (147). Similar to how recycled, intertextual icons constitute a visual quotation, braiding is a sort of self-quotation that adds to the complexity that this medium can achieve. This associative feature bridges concepts between panels located throughout the story, creating a depth of meaning by building up a thematic network of motifs. In the midst of his inquiry into the past, and while contemplating an iconic image from the Spanish Civil War at work, Miguel is assigned a new project that consists of designing the characters for what would become the popular Angry Birds mobile game app (see Fig. 2.3). The iconic photo

Fig. 2.3  Angry Birds mobile game app (80) in Espacios en blanco by Miguel Francisco

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of the young republican militiawoman Marina Ginestà taken by the war photojournalist Juan Guzmán, forms part of a network of other emblematic civil war images populating the pages of Espacios en blanco. They evoke a sense of tragic heroism about the lost potential of the defeated republican cause, giving meaning to the personal family stories. This photo of Marina Ginestà is incorporated in the story later, although now she is being drawn by Miguel, also sketching out the young boy whose image is braided into subsequent pages representing Miguel’s father as a starving postwar child. These images are now juxtaposed with the Angry Birds imagery, representing the alienated labor at odds with his more fulfilling project. The reader observes how drawing comics has a curative function, both as a way of dealing with transgenerational melancholy and as a way of combating alienation and disenchantment.

Combatting Transgenerational Defeat and the Waning of the Political Imagination When, toward the end of the story, Miguel returns briefly to Barcelona upon the death of his father, silent frames depicting his funeral and cremation are imbricated with panels recounting memories from his life. In one of these flashbacks (which is focalized through Miguel’s flashback of hearing his father tell the story), Sebastián’s narration accompanies a memory of his childhood during the harsh postwar period. He feels guilt and shame remembering the hunger and desperation his family suffered. In order to meagerly make ends meet he and Miguel’s grandfather would exhume the bones of the republican dead and transfer them to mass graves. An additional flashback recalls an episode in adulthood when Sebastián’s friend at work pleads with him to help him burn the CNT tattoo off his arm with a welding iron in order to avoid persecution and repression. These episodes allude to the punishment suffered for belonging to the losing side and for adherence to a defeated ideology, first under Francoism and later under the “end of history” paradigm anticipated by the Spanish transition to democracy. Jo Labanyi describes the Francoist cultural repression as that which “relegated those suspected of opposition to the ghostly status of ‘the disappeared’—consigned to physical or cultural death” (7). As the incinerator closes on Sebastián’s coffin, the story cuts to a single-page panel depicting Miguel’s final memory of his father who reflects back on his life, telling his son he is tired of remembering in order to satisfy

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Miguel’s curiosity, bringing only pain and sadness. He regrets working so hard with little to show for it—another reference to the alienation of labor and also a challenge to the economic promise of the transition pact. He tells Miguel that he should dedicate himself to living as he wishes he had done himself. This splash page depicting a bird’s eye view of Sebastián sitting on a couch in an empty white room on page 114 generates a braided relationship with a previous splash page of Miguel earlier in the story, on page 102, just prior to getting the phone call delivering the news of his father’s death (see Fig. 2.4). In this image, Miguel is seen sitting in a similar position on the couch in his living room, also shown in isolation surrounded only by blank space. Here, Miguel has just been visited by the jevi-turnedBaphomet one last time, and he helps Miguel connect the dots about his father’s silence and the transgenerational melancholy. He interrogates Miguel: “¿Qué vas a hacer con ella? ¿Con la tristeza de tu padre, con la de tu abuelo, con la tuya? ¿Cómo te vas a curar de una herida que no te han infligido?” (Francisco 101) [What are you going to do with your father’s sadness? With your grandfather’s? With yours? How are you going to cure yourself from a wound that wasn’t inflicted on you?]. This is followed on the same page by, “¿Vas a dejar que continúe infectando más generaciones? ¿O vas a seguir dibujando pajaritos y dejando que el tiempo pase?” [Are you going to let it continue infecting more generations? Or are you going to keep drawing little birds and let the time pass?]. But instead of continuing as a speech bubble attributed to his interlocutor, these last questions are presented as a caption giving voice to Miguel (the narrator) and thus tacitly confirming that both characters are in fact the same person. The interplay of visual cues and text loads the comics medium with subtle complexities. The reference to the “little bird” as a metonym for Miguel’s alienated labor and obstacle to completing his memory comic project draws a connection between the sources of transgenerational melancholy as both the transmission of unsettled trauma and the alienation of doing unfulfilling and inconsequential work as a means of survival, a theme that pervades each generation in the story. Both sources of melancholy are thus somehow linked to the multigenerational history of defeat of workers’ struggles. The autobiographical metacomic is therefore cast as a therapeutic remedy to cure an elusive yet persistent wound—a cathartic tool to work through an unresolved past underpinning Spain’s memory culture. It is a way to re-imagine, recuperating the lost potential of histories silenced by

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Fig. 2.4  Bird’s eye view of Sebastián (114) in Espacios en blanco by Miguel Francisco

dominant historiographic narratives. Producing subjectivity from an objective position, autobiographical comics literalize the rhetorical performance of prose autobiography through drawn self-caricature (Hatfield 114). The narrator-cartoonist’s desires or desired attributes are projected onto the page, which could explain why Espacios en blanco is often

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articulated from a male gaze in its depiction of idealized and improbable female bodies and of the narrator’s sexual conquests. This factor also shapes the conclusion, arguably dampening the overall political dimension of the graphic novel. The story returns to the present time when Miguel is putting his son to bed after dinner and finds his girlfriend waiting for him in the bedroom. Asking her if she thinks he’s dead, her response is “a ver” (Francisco 118) [let’s see], and they then turn off the light, concluding the story. The concept of “living” posited by Miguel’s father on page 114 is then directed away from questions of memory, history, and labor, and diverted into one of sexual prowess. If anything, this also supports the notion that drawing comics is a way to reimagine, whether in terms of the potential to combat the waning of the political imagination characterized by a mythification and de-politicization of the past, or to explore other issues. Thus, Spanish memory comics represent a new medium of exploration that benefits from having a footing both in alternative autobiographical comics and Spanish memory culture, taking both in new directions.

Works Cited Altarriba, Antonio, and Kim. El arte de volar. Alicante: Edicions de Ponent, 2010. ———. El ala rota. Barcelona: Norma Editorial, 2016. Chute, Hillary. “Comics Form and Narrating Lives.” Profession (2011): 107–17. ———. Disaster Drawn. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2016. Francisco, Miguel. Espacios en blanco. Bilbao: Astiberri, 2017. Gallardo, Miguel. Un largo silencio. Bilbao: Astiberri, 2012. Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 2007. Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 2005. Helms, Jason. “The System.” Rhizcomics: Rhetoric, Technology, and New Media Composition, Michigan Publishing. www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative.org/rhizcomics/the-system.html. Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory. New York: Columbia UP, 2012. Labanyi, Jo. “Introduction: Engaging with Ghosts; or, Theorizing Culture in Modern Spain.” Constructing Identity in Contemporary Spain: Theoretical Debates and Cultural Practices. Ed. Labanyi. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2002. 1–14. Martín Gaite, Carmen. El cuarto de atrás. Madrid: Cátedra, 2018. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New  York: Harper Perennial, 1994.

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Resina, Joan Ramon. The Ghost in the Constitution: Historical Memory and Denial in Spanish Society. Liverpool: U of Liverpool P, 2017. Roca, Paco. Los surcos del azar. Bilbao: Astiberri, 2014. Spiegelman, Art. Maus. New York: Voyager, 1994. Traverso, Enzo. Left-Wing Melancholy. New York: Columbia UP, 2016.

CHAPTER 3

Memory, Amnesia, and Forgetting: Graphic Representations of a Chronic Disease in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Spain Fernando Simón Abad

Comics have had a clear impact on Spanish society in recent decades, not only as a means of recovering historical memory—and thus doing justice to a large part of society that has gone underrepresented in art—, but also in the recognition of unhealed traumas. Similarly, this essay suggests that the graphic novel deserves a more central place in the academic field as an essential object for Hispanic cultural studies in the twentieth and twenty-­ first centuries. With an eye on the past that informs today’s socio-political situation, this essay analyzes the concepts of memory and forgetting from a clinical and historical perspective in three recent Spanish graphic narratives: Antonio Altarriba and Kim’s El arte de volar [The Art of Flying], Paco Roca’s Los surcos del azar [Twists of Fate], and Santiago García and Luis Bustos’s ¡García!. Although each of these graphic novels differs in

F. S. Abad (*) University of Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain SUNY University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 C. McKinney, D. F. Richter (eds.), Spanish Graphic Narratives, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56820-7_3

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form and style, they all address the impact of the Civil War and Francoism on the Spanish democratic society of the post-Transition. By tracing the line between these novels’ pedagogical and historical importance, one can see how the past continues to have echoes in the present.

Spanish Democratic Memoricide Forgetfulness in contemporary Spain has been a controversial subject since the 1970s, when the Franco regime began to unravel. After the years of the Transition1—and after supposedly having overcome the dictatorship— Spanish society has not been able, or willing, to provide a unanimous response to the dilemma of its memoristic recovery. What was the role of the Spanish State, a State that praises itself as a model of transition to democracy; a State that also considers itself modern and fully democratic? If one assumes that a solution has not been sought, when exactly was this path decided and who were the agents interested in not giving voice to the memories of a sector of Spanish society? The Ley de Amnistía [Law of Amnesty] of 1977 laid the foundation for the current democratic state. Some would argue that this law was a necessary step in the reconciliation of the divided “two Spains”—a “noventayochista” [Generation of 98] concept that Antonio Machado expressed in his book of poems Campos de Castilla—, clearing the way for a tense Transition that was taking place after the death of the dictator. At the same time, it marked the beginning of a pact, supported by the great majority of political forces of the time, and which still has direct social consequences today. In his book, La guerra persistente, Gómez López-Quiñones suggests that this pact of silence or oblivion became commonplace in the bibliography on that process of the Transition, with selective memory becoming one of its primary strategies (13). During a talk between the writers Günter Grass and Juan Goytisolo at the Centro Cultural de Círculo de Lectores in Madrid (collected by Galaxia Gutenberg under the title Diálogo sobre la desmemoria, los tabúes y el olvido), both authors spoke on this subject, referring to the cases of both Germany and Spain. Grass observes that, following World War II, there was an unspoken consensus that consisted in covering the past in a shroud of silence (14–15). Goytisolo 1  Scholars agree that the period of Transition to democracy in Spain began with Franco’s death in 1975. What is less certain is when this transition formally ended, with some suggesting that it was with the 1977 election or the 1978 Constitution, and others asserting that is was not until the 1981 attempted coup or the 1982 PSOE election victory.

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identifies a similar tendency in Spain, noting that the current generation is paying the price for the amnesia of the Transition (14–15). Notably, both authors use three terms that are repeated over and over when attempting to approach this period on both a cultural and historical level: silence, forgetting, and amnesia. In this way, step by step, a memoricide has taken place in Spain—protected by institutions and with the consent of part of the population—and with few possibilities of reversibility. Goytisolo used this concept to define what happened to the library in Sarajevo in August 1992, when the Serbian ultranationalists reduced it to ashes under a deluge of incendiary rockets (“El memoricidio” 55). Although it may seem somewhat exaggerated to compare a situation in a time of peace like the one in Spain with one lived in a time of war in the former Yugoslavia, I will try to explain briefly how the comparison is fruitful and how, in essence, the memoristic trauma may have similar results. When a national library or archive is deliberately reduced to ashes, what one wants to achieve with this action is, first of all, to violently eliminate a container of knowledge and memory. Second, it is a symbolic act of cultural annulment as its destruction is intended to erase any vestige of the existence of such memories. Similarly, when analyzing the events in the first two decades after the end of the dictatorship and the establishment of democracy in Spain one might ask: has there not been a self-sabotage—agreed upon by the different political factions—in the treatment of the trauma caused by a civil war that, in another context, would have been a genuine democratic transition? The aforementioned Ley de Amnistía made it impossible, on a continuous basis, to carry out any kind of legal revision of the political and social responsibilities of one side or the other. It created a tabula rasa that denied the losers the possibility of giving voice to their own experience of the trauma and, therefore, ostracized a large portion of the country’s collective memory. The simplest way for an event to be forgotten is, precisely, to not name it and to let the bearers of memories, those who lived the episodes that do not want to be remembered, become victims of time. In the words of José Antonio Gabriel y Galán, “Es como si el franquismo se hubiera visto agraciado con una tregua histórica, como si la historiografía le hubiese concedido un tiempo de hibernación” (n.p.) [It is as if Francoism had been blessed with a historical truce, as if historiography had granted it a time of hibernation].2 From 1977 to 2007, when the Ley de Memoria 2

 All translations are my own.

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Histórica was enforced, thirty years of silence had passed in which the main characters of history (with lower case) gradually perished. Sebastiaan Faber explains the importance of the observer or witness for the support of a credible argument, for the general public, of the prosecution of both Francoism and the Transition: [W]itness testimony is key not only for helping viewers understand and empathize with the suffering of the victims of the Civil War and Francoism; it is also mobilized within a quasi-judicial framework as incriminating evidence against the representatives of the Franco regime as well as the architects of a Transition to democracy that prevented the guilty from being tried and punished. (13)

This is the great tragedy that was allowed in Spain’s recent past, in which key witnesses were left to die without being given the opportunity—creating the relevant environment of freedom and protection—to simply leave their testimony, their evidence as witnesses to events, their memories to be studied, compared, analyzed and included, where appropriate, in the collective memory. For Spain, this period has meant the burial of the word and the implantation of a sort of global amnesia that, instead of transitory, is being established as chronic. Unlike other countries that experienced warlike conflicts on their own soil, with episodes as traumatic as the Spanish Civil War, the search for collective, family, and even individual identity in Spain was full of obstacles. The country succumbed to the partisan interests of its politicians even under the protection of the aforementioned Ley de Memoria Histórica. Beyond beginning to pave the way for a process of memoristic recovery, which has definitely begun to take place in recent years, what has been achieved is an interested use of memory as a political weapon.

The Absence of Memory in Comic Books Faced with this situation, it is worth asking what the response of the humanistic and cultural sector has been. It is not the aim of this work to make a compendium of each and every one of the different cultural manifestations that occurred from the 1970s to the present day. However, before beginning to analyze contemporary comics, it is necessary to contextualize how the graphic novel became what it is today. Michael Matly, in his book El cómic sobre la Guerra Civil, exhaustively compiles the comic

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strips and graphic novels published about the Spanish conflict, from the moment of the War until the decade of 2010. In chapters 4 and 5, Matly points out the fundamental differences between the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s in terms of the volume of pages dedicated to the Civil War and, above all, in terms of the tone with which the different messages are presented. The preferred format in these first decades was the short story and, rarely, the album. This was due to the proliferation of fanzines and satirical magazines, many of them marginal, and, therefore, these did not have an excessively large social impact. An important detail is Matly’s description of comics from the 1980s, which gave birth to an awareness of the need to unearth the voices of the losing side. Matly astutely points out that the perspective of the comics of this period was always Republican, and the Francoist is essentially absent. In these works, the winner remains mute, and is often portrayed as a Moor, an Italian, or a German, rather than a Spaniard. It is not so much a question of telling the war from the Republican perspective as is it of showing Republicans in the war, affirming the identity of the “other” Spain, and not just that of the winners (Matly 119). When Matly mentions the winner who remains mute, he reveals the fear of pointing the finger at those responsible, even after the democratization of Spanish society. The act of blurring the responsibility of the dictatorship by making it similar exclusively to the Moor, the German, or the Italian (allies of the military rebels in the Civil War), shows the continuity of a discourse that left a deep mark on the collective imagination, in which no settling of scores or any kind of social cleansing was contemplated. But on the other hand, it also allowed a starting point in the search for the identity of the “two Spains,” even if during the 1980s the Republican’s perspective on the war and the dictatorship was not evident. A panoramic look at the 1990s reveals the lack of interest of a broad sector of society—reflected in the comic book market—in treating any kind of memoristic discourse about the years before the Transition in a profound way. Thus, it is observed how the decisions taken to close the fratricidal stage of the war and the dictatorship, whose idealization with the passage of time seems to be adulterating little by little, decisively influence the cultural production of those years. A possible exception could be Un largo silencio by Miguel Gallardo, a work that was published in 1997 but until its reissue in 2012 went virtually unnoticed in the Spanish market. The search for a collective identity and memory ceased to be a primordial theme for society due to the abrupt manner in which the past was

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amnestied in order to move forward. It seems that the Spanish population, which was traumatized, democratized, and amnesiac, once again disdained their past as a bad nightmare about which they could not remember the details, nor did they want to. From this perspective, there were no flags, no colors, no sides. In terms of psychiatry, Spanish society could be diagnosed with a dissociative amnesia generated by the post-traumatic stress of war. The dictatorship increased the trauma and created a new sweetened memory, after which the Transition sedated Spain with the drugs of change, democratization, and freedom, thereby suppressing any impulse of revisionism. Daniel Ausente points to this problem in the cultural field when he notes that neither comic books nor other media have engaged critically with the history of the Transition and its social context (131). The comic, as a vehicle of remembrance, was used marginally and, although it cannot be said that it was non-existent, its social impact was minimal. The generation that should have shared its memories of both the war and the dictatorship during those years gave way to a new generation of authors at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Considering postmemory as “the relationship that the generation after those who witnessed cultural or collective trauma bears to the experiences of those who came before, experiences that they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories” (Hirsch 106), it can be affirmed that these new authors would correspond to a second generation of postmemory. At the beginning of the century, this generational changeover found a favorable moment to be able to investigate and recall family histories, all from a present and universal point of view, to which they were able to give a collective dimension, as suggested by Sánchez Zapatero (339–40). In Hijos de la razón, Jordi Gracia describes what for him was the great handicap of Spanish society until that time, noting that much of what happened is yet to be told, and this fear of remembering the past is an axis that defines the present (18). With the objectivity provided by the distance of time, it can be said that the generation of the graphic novel banished the fear of revisionism and remembrance without revanchism. With their works, they gave the public the keys to remember what happened. And certainly, they benefited from the political situation that occurred after the implementation of the Ley de Memoria Histórica and, at the same time, from the creation of the Premio Nacional del Cómic granted by the Ministry of Culture in 2007.

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The Twenty-First Century and the Graphic Novel Generation While the first decade of the new millennium seems to foreshadow a certain continuity with the previous one, in the mid 2000s a turning point occurred in the history of Spanish comic books. The changes seen in the production industry that were taking place in the last quarter of a century in countries in which comics enjoyed (and still enjoy) greater social respect—Japan, the United States, France, and Belgium—are slowly beginning to take hold in Spain. Changes are also occurring in relation to comics format, the creation of specialized bookshops, the rise of the so-­ called alternative comics, and the decline of the superhero genre. The graphic novel, according to Santiago García, continues to undergo very important processes of change in the evolution of its art, its authors, and its readers (La novela 273). Although younger than traditional plastic arts, literature or music, graphic novels draw from all of these and as a result have achieved a respect that had been denied the comics form in its earlier years. If the comic had to compete with television or video games as primary sources of entertainment for the youth, it could be said that the graphic novel constitutes a splinter of that graphic tradition, but with its own artistic values. Santiago García describes it as “una forma artística que ya no compite con la televisión como medio de masas, sino que se plantea como un medio culto con su propia identidad y sus propios espacios […] y su nuevo público, un público general” (La novela 266–67) [a new artistic form that no longer competes with television as a mass medium, which presents itself as an eductated medium with its own identity and its own spaces, and its new public, a general public]. As noted, the greatest advance came with the establishment of the Premio Nacional del Cómic in 2007. An additional breakthrough would come at the end of the same year with the publication of Paco Roca’s Arrugas, which confirmed the commercial potential of the graphic novel, reaching an incredible 20,000 copies sold in the first year. This fact, accompanied by very positive reviews, led to Arrugas winning the Premio Nacional in 2008. In a televised event in 2016, the authors Francesc Capdevila “Max” (winner of the prize in 2005), Ana Galvañ, David Rubín, and Santiago García (winner of the prize in 2015) noted that Paco Roca had become the preeminent author of Spanish graphic narratives due to the success of each graphic novel he publishes. García’s words during this event are especially enlightening:

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Me molesta un poco que a veces a la gente le dices, “Bueno […],” y dicen, “No, [solo] Paco Roca; Paco Roca es una excepción.” Y yo, “No, amigo, Paco Roca no es una excepción. Paco Roca es uno de nosotros, y lo único que está haciendo es enseñarnos que hay un camino, y darnos esperanza y un ejemplo que realmente se puede funcionar y se pueden hacer las cosas bien.” Y lo que está haciendo Paco Roca cada vez que tiene un triunfo es crear lectores para nosotros. (García et al. 30:50) [It bothers me a little that sometimes you tell people that [you do sell graphic novels] and they say “no, only Paco Roca; Paco Roca is an exception.” I tell them, “No, my friend, Paco Roca is not an exception. Paco Roca is one of us and all he’s doing is teaching us that there’s a way, and giving us hope and an example that you can really work and do things well.” What Paco Roca does every time he has a triumph is create readers for us.]

Paco Roca’s impact on the topic of memory is also noteworthy, with some of his publications making it difficult to dissociate the name of the Valencian author from this theme, as the author himself acknowledges: “deep down, I’m always talking about the same thing: about memory, about characters who fight stoically to maintain dignity” (qtd. in Pérez 55). Although in Arrugas he discusses memory from a didactic approach to Alzheimer’s disease—telling the story of Emilio, an old man with the illness—his work in terms of memory recovery most clearly manifests itself with the publication of Los surcos del azar by Astiberri in 2013. Roca’s Arrugas opened the market for a new generation of authors with backgrounds in the fine arts, art history, philology, illustration, animation, journalism, and advertising, authors such as Juanjo Guarnido, Santiago García, David Rubín, Alfonso Zapico, or Jaime Martín, among others. Some were born during the Franco period and lived their childhood in the death throes of the regime, while others were born after the transition to democracy. They belong, therefore, to the era of “postmemory” writers and illustrators since none lived the traumatic events in their own skin, but, rather, they received the trauma from their elders. Each of them has touched on issues of memory in their works, confronting and resolving them in a variety of ways, and thus helping the country recover from its state of amnesia. Their works give voice (almost life) to stories that had not been told, and they have reached a number of readers that would have been unthinkable a couple of decades ago when the Spanish comics industry found itself in a very delicate situation. They stood up to silence, oblivion, and neglect—in cultural production, in politics, and in

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society—to earn the respect not only of readers who know the medium, but also of general readers both inside and outside Spain.

Graphic Narratives and the Recuperation of Memory I have chosen three different works from this period—El arte de volar, by Antonio Altarriba and Kim (illustrator), Los surcos del azar, by Paco Roca, and ¡Garcia!, by Santiago García and Luis Bustos (illustrator)—each important for its unique work of recovery and for being, at the same time, didactic sources that seek to annul social amnesia in the context of the institutionalized Spanish silence of Francoism. Although the three are different in their argumentative approaches, each of them coincide on the same point: the use of fiction as a tool to facilitate remembrance. El arte de volar and Los surcos del azar both represent the Spanish exile from the Republican perspective and the search for memories of the generation that lived through the events of the Civil War, Francoism, and the Transition. One of the connections between both graphic novels is that they use older characters—Antonio Altarriba (father) and Miguel Ruiz—to recover stories from their forgotten or hidden personal memories. Altarriba recreates his father’s story based on the latter’s written personal history, but using fiction to avoid falling into mere biography.3 Using his present vision and the emotional impact of his father’s suicide, the reason for which he wrote the work, Altarriba commemorates his father as a member of a collective that suffered the loss of a war, driving him into exile. The novel arises from the need to take the father’s testimony and tell his story and, at the same time, to vindicate it. The suicide of the elderly Altarriba marks the beginning and the end of the novel, impregnated by the anguish and uneasiness of the trauma suffered. Although on the surface it could be taken as an example of individual memory, this graphic novel aims to give voice to a collective that was retaliated against and that, until its last days, lived the bitterness of personal and ideological defeat. Altarriba senior found in his written account a place where he recovers his

3  In El arte de volar (2009) Antonio Altarriba describes his father’s point of view regarding what happens in the family environment, although he would later pay tribute to his mother with El ala rota (2017), giving a more holistic view of the situations that occurred within the marriage. Both titles are complementary to one another and at the same time independent in their points of view.

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experiences, but above all a place to record what he is remembering as memory begins to fail him. The life of Altarriba’s father is marked by frustration, both personal (in his marriage) and ideological, having lost his fight against fascism during the Civil War. A sample of this can be seen during a nightmare that Antonio suffers due to illness (141, see Fig. 3.1). In this dream, Antonio is surrounded by the symbols of the Falange (the yoke and the arrows) in the middle of a field from which emerge the Christian cross and the figure of a black eagle outlined in the sky. The eagle becomes more visible and begins to pursue Antonio, who is eventually hunted down as prey, with the eagle gouging out his eyes. Later on, the eagle lands on the crossbeam and becomes the shield that Francoism used on its national flag, while carrying Antonio’s eyes in its beak. The allegory closes with a blind Antonio, bleeding from his eye sockets and surrounded by male figures doing the fascist salute while he says: “¡Qué bien, por fin no veo nada…!” (141) [How nice, at last I can’t see anything!]. The page serves as an allegory of how the Spanish people, and especially the defeated Republicans, began to act after the victory of the rebel side: they simply let things happen, put on a blindfold, allowed the suffering inside them to live on, and even felt the obligation to feel grateful for what happened. The author portrays his father as dejected, worn out by life, and defeated by the fascist ideology he so hated. Forced to live bootlegging coal in France and later smuggling raw materials for the manufacture of cookies in Spain, the protagonist has betrayed the anarchist ideals for which he had fought for decades. To make matters worse, he returns to Spain to work for an opportunist who joins the Falange as a means of making contacts and quick money, which leads to an inner conflict for the protagonist. In a way, that struggle is aggravated when he marries Petra, a traditional woman of strong Catholic convictions. For Antonio, this means living “sobre mi propio cadáver” (145, see Fig. 3.2) [on his own corpse] and “embriaga[ado] de olvido” [intoxicated with forgetfulness], imposing a silence that torments him and provokes the depression that leads him to suicide. Although Antonio decides to take the path of silence, there is certainly little more he could do in a society in which, simply because he has been a Republican combatant (and a deserter of the Nationalist side), he could end up arrested and executed: “No se trataba de traición sino de suicidio ideológico… Para afrontar el presente, debían acabar con el pasado… Morir para seguir vivos” (139, see Fig. 3.3) [It was not an act of

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Fig. 3.1  Allegory of the victory of Francoism and the “blindness” of the population (141) in El arte de volar by Antonio Altarriba and Kim

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Fig. 3.2  Petra and Antonio’s wedding (145) in El arte de volar by Antonio Altarriba and Kim

Fig. 3.3  “Die to stay alive” (139) in El arte de volar by Antonio Altarriba and Kim

treason but an ideological suicide. To face the present, they had to do away with the past. To die in order to stay alive]. In Los surcos del azar, meanwhile, Roca mimics investigative journalism by creating a fictional work in which a journalist named Paco, an alter ego of the author himself, travels to France to interview an ex-combatant of

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the Republican side. The elderly protagonist, Miguel Ruiz, is lonely and grumpy, but eventually he begins to tell Paco about his adventures as an exiled soldier in the French labor and concentration camps in the Maghreb and his subsequent enlistment in General De Gaulle’s CFA. The graphic novel intersperses the conversations of Paco and Miguel with the narration of his adventures as a soldier. Roca’s objective is none other than to tell the forgotten story of the 9th Company of the 2nd Armored Division of Free France, known as the Leclerc Division or La Nueve, made up of Spanish Republicans, in addition to Poles, Italians, Russians, and Germans, who fought in the Second World War. Among their milestones as combatants, they stood out for being the company that first entered Paris to begin its liberation, so they escorted De Gaulle in the victory parade. In this way, Roca recovers for the collective imagination an episode that had been eliminated and nearly forgotten by Spanish and French history books for decades. At the same time, during the years following the publication of the novel, the few survivors of La Nueve were recognized for their exploits by the Parisian institutions and, later, by Spanish institutions. From the beginning, the novel is marked by Miguel’s sadness and by the abandonment of the Republican side in exile. Paco manages to “recover” Miguel’s memory with the persistence of his questions and by helping him understand that it is important for his story to be recorded in the collective memory of the war. Indeed, Miguel behaves as so many other survivors of the losing side who were led to believe that their story was not only unimportant, but also dangerous to society. For this reason, the Franco regime simply tried to eliminate from existence any kind of pride for those associated with the Republican side. In Los surcos del azar, Miguel represents all the individuals who never spoke of their experiences out of fear, shame, or because they thought that nobody was interested in them (41, see Fig. 3.4). Initially, Miguel Ruiz avoids Paco, or attempts to elude his questions with curt responses. Gradually, however, the old man gains more and more trust in his interlocutor, as if he realizes that the story of his life really interests someone. It can be seen throughout the comic that, although Miguel is a grumbler and does not like contact with people, the attitude of his neighbors towards him did not help him to be more open. His neighbor Albert knows practically nothing about his life, as shown through Albert’s first conversations with Paco (24–26). Only after Paco’s arrival is there a conducive environment in which Miguel can begin digging up his memories, to the point that he reveals that his real name is Miguel Campos, a name that he abandoned in order to “evitar

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Fig. 3.4  Forgotten heroes (41) in Los surcos del azar by Paco Roca

problemas con la justicia francesa por haber desertado” (317) [avoid problems with French justice for having deserted]. The conversations with Paco take place in the kitchen and living room of Miguel’s house, which provides a warmth and closeness that is reflected in Miguel’s growing trust and intimacy. The answers flow in such a way that Miguel gradually requires less prodding from Paco in order to tell his story. His memories return over the course of a week as the two converse, producing in the old man a mixture of grief, repentance, sadness, anger, and finally, the joy of having remembered again, as he explains to Paco in the last moments of the novel: “Gracias […] por haberme hecho recuperar parte de mi vida que no me atrevía a recordar” (320, see Fig. 3.5) [Thank you […] for having made me recover a part of my life that I did not dare to remember]. Within Los surcos del azar, Roca creates a place of remembrance and, above all, of homage to the exiles who for years defended the antifascist cause, but who were written out of History by Franco and later ignored during the Transition. Set in Madrid in 2015, ¡García!, written by Santiago García and illustrated by Luis Bustos, is a uchronic graphic novel with clear comedic elements. The tone used in this work is quite different than the previous ones since the author uses satire as a resource to criticize contemporary Spanish society, as opposed to the crude realism of Altarriba and Roca. The Spain recreated in ¡García! is very similar to the one we see today in which two major political parties have agreed to join forces because of the threat of a

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Fig. 3.5  Remembering (320) in Los surcos del azar by Paco Roca

new extreme left-wing party. While García and Bustos do not explicitly name the political parties involved, most readers will understand those to be the Partido Popular (PP) and Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) who unite against the newly formed Podemos. Adding to this verisimilitude are a number of characters who clearly represent real politicians, such as Esperanza Aguirre, Pablo Iglesias, and Mariano Rajoy (1: 134, 139 and 2: 25, see Fig. 3.6). The proximity between fiction and reality created by these characters invokes a sense of déjà vu for the reader, or, at least makes them believe that what they have in their hands could be perfectly feasible. The story

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Fig. 3.6  Collage of political figures (1: 134, 139 and 2: 25) in ¡García! by Santiago García and Luis Bustos

begins with a young journalist named Antonia, one of the central characters in the graphic novel, who begins her adventure after following a clue that someone has left in her mailbox, which reveals that a “super agent” of Franco’s regime, named García, is frozen in a secret laboratory under Valle de los Caídos. After several twists and turns in the story, Antonia and García begin to work together to solve a plot that reaches the highest levels of government. García and Bustos create a story that mixes comedy and action with a high level of social criticism, both though the usage of current references—mainly media and politics—and by exposing new current social sensibilities. One aspect worth pointing out, especially within the present study of historical memory, is the amnesia suffered by García who, having been cryogenically frozen in 1961 and “resurrected” in

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2015,4 was unable to experience firsthand the Transition, nor the changes that occurred from that moment onwards in Spanish society. To make matters worse, García suffers from amnesia and remembers few details of his past. Santiago García thus criticizes the memoricide process described above, placing special emphasis on how it affects all sectors of the current population and on the prevailing global disillusionment effect. “El mundo ha cambiado, pero no ha cambiado tanto” (186) [The world has changed, but not so much], observes the titular character in the last pages of the novel, referring to the survival of many practices that after Francoism were perpetuated in Spanish society due to social neglect and the connivance of the political class. But unlike previous graphic novels, ¡García! opens a door to optimism about the future. Although agent García is the title character of the story, the weight of the plot falls on the character of Antonia who, for all intents and purposes, is the protagonist. Antonia subverts the role of the traditional sidekick of adventure stories. As she gets to know the social and political environment better she becomes more aware of reality, while García lives a fantasy and lacks the necessary social tools to function in contemporary Spain. Both are polar opposites: García is male, representative of the values and characteristics of the Regime, elegant, pragmatic, and loyal to the fundamental principles of Francoism; Antonia is female, representative of contemporary youth and of the opening values of today’s society, left-wing, idealist, and hard-working. Bringing these personalities together under “normal” conditions is complicated at best, but Santiago García makes the relationship between them work to the point that, at the end of the second book, readers can see the mutual affection they have for each other. As if this were not enough, García gets used to life in a democracy and embodies the necessary spirit of understanding, carefully navigating between the poles of the Spanish political spectrum, although always from a position of deep nationalist patriotism. ¡García! is thus a hymn to hope. It suggests the possibility of a future of coexistence and cooperation between the two Spains so that they may remember, recall, and commemorate their past without further aggressions; where the role of women in 4  Agent García is a reference to the Spanish comic books of the 1940s, like Roberto Alcázar and Pedrín, but the reader can also see the influence of characters from the comic and AngloSaxon novels, such as Jack Kirby’s Captain America or Ian Fleming’s James Bond. The cryogenisation of García’s character and his subsequent thawing create a parallel with Steve Rogers (Captain America) that can be seen in the way both characters fight and in the conservative and traditional attitude and manners that both espouse.

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Spanish society is equal to that of men; where traditional gender roles are overcome; and where the reconciliations of Spanish History can occur independent of the pressures of political parties. The common denominator in each of these three graphic novels is, precisely, the memoricide and the dissociative amnesia of the Spanish Transition to democracy. Antonio, Miguel, and García, each with their unique differences, are characters from whom the Civil War, Francoism, or the Transition has stolen a part of their lives and whose stories have been ostracized. Through them, readers can have a a more complete vision of history, one that helps to complement the part of the historical memory that has already been written and accepted as true. Through the stories of these characters, a small portion of lost memories are unearthed, thus enabling Spain’s own amnesia to slowly become eradicated. The three characters suffer some kind of memory loss, but in different ways they recover their past experiences. In their novels, Altarriba, Roca, and García use different models or formulas for the fight against oblivion. In all three, the existence of a character, one that we could frame in the context of postmemory, is the architect of the rehabilitation of memory, making the “main” characters abandon the memoristic trauma. Paco, Antonio (son), and Antonia are the real agents in charge of giving back a part of the life of Miguel, Antonio (father), and García. By unearthing and casting a light on those lost stories, these novels recall that, even today, there are still many narratives that need to be recovered, told, and added to the collective memory. The graphic novel, as part of fiction, has thus become a medium both respected and loved by readers for giving voice to a collective that, for many decades, was muted by fear or social impositions. Today, as they attract new general readers while still keeping specialized readers, graphic narratives have become the perfect vehicle for recovering memory.

Works Cited Altarriba, Antonio, and Kim. El arte de volar. Barcelona: Norma, 2017. Ausente, Daniel. “La memoria gráfica y las sombras del pasado.” Supercómic. Mutaciones de la novela gráfica contemporánea. Ed. Santiago García. Madrid: Errata Naturae, 2013. 107–35. Faber, Sebastiaan. “‘¿Usted, qué sabe?’ History, Memory, and the Voice of the Witness.” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos (2011): 9–27.

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Gabriel y Galán, José Antonio. “El pacto de silencio.” El País. 20 Feb. 1988. https://elpais.com/diario/1988/02/20/opinion/572310009_ 850215.html. García, José Pablo. La Guerra Civil española. Madrid: Debate, 2016. García, Santiago. La novela gráfica. Bilbao: Astiberri, 2014. García, Santiago, and Luis Bustos. ¡García! Vol. 1. Bilbao: Astiberri, 2015. ———. ¡García! Vol. 2. Bilbao: Astiberri, 2016. García, Santiago, et al. Cómics, narrativa visual contemporánea. Video interview dir. by Laura Barrachina. RTVE. 7 Apr. 2016. http://www.rtve.es/alacarta/ videos/cultura16/video-comics-narrativa-visual-contemporanea/3557964/. Goytisolo, Juan. “El memoricidio.” Cuaderno de Sarajevo. Anotaciones de un viaje a la barbarie. Madrid: Aguilar, 1993. 53–62. Gracia García, Jordi. Hijos de la razón. Barcelona: Edhasa, 2001. Grass, Günter, and Juan Goytisolo. Diálogo sobre la desmemoria, los tabúes y el olvido. Dos autores comprometidos conversan sobre la función del intelectual en la sociedad contemporánea. Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 1997. Hirsch, Marianne. “The Generation of Postmemory.” Poetics Today (2008): 103–28. López-Quiñones, Antonio Gómez. La guerra persistente. Memoria, violencia y utopía: representaciones contemporáneas de la Guerra Civil española. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2006. Matly, Michel. El cómic sobre la Guerra Civil. Madrid: Cátedra, 2018. Ortega, Tomás. Las caras de la Guerra Civil. La Guerra Civil a través de los personajes de viñetas. Sevilla: ACyT Ediciones, 2018. Pérez, Pepo. Premio Nacional del Cómic: 10 años (2007–2017). Servicio de Publicaciones y Divulgación Científica de la Universidad de Málaga, 2017. Roca, Paco. Los surcos del azar. Bilbao: Astiberri, 2016. Sánchez Zapatero, Javier. “Estrategias reescriturales en el cómic de la memoria: a propósito de El arte de volar y El ala rota.” Ficciones nómadas. Procesos de intermedialidad literaria y audiovisual. Ed. José Antonio Pérez Bowie and Antonio Jesús Gil González. Madrid: Sial Pigmalión, 2017. 339–63.

CHAPTER 4

Recovering the Irrecoverable: “The Memory of What Matters” in Three Works by Paco Roca Diego Batista

In recent years, comics, including graphic novels and memoirs, have emerged as a medium to embody and recover memory, especially as a means of representing the personal impact of conflict and war on communities and individuals. This is due in part to comics’ ability to “make use of specific visual components that provide interesting opportunities to relate traumatic and violent events” (Harris n.p.). In fact, Maaheen Ahmed and Benoît Crucifix indicate that the study of memory appears as a “key word” in much of contemporary comics scholarship, creating innumerable studies in the field of autobiographical comics, graphic memoir, and other forms of life writing (2–3). Cartoonist Chris Ware states further that comics themselves are “a possible metaphor for memory and recollection” (xxii). It is no surprise, then, that Spanish authors and illustrators have followed suit and embraced this medium to engage in a search for corrective

D. Batista (*) Weber State University, Ogden, UT, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 C. McKinney, D. F. Richter (eds.), Spanish Graphic Narratives, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56820-7_4

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justice in the early twenty-first century. For instance, in the epilogue to Paco Roca’s graphic novel La casa (2015), Fernando Marías points out that this work focuses, above all, on recovering “la memoria de lo que importa” (131) [the memory of what matters].1 Based on this assertion, we could infer that if all memories are equally important, not all efforts to recover memory are equally fruitful. From the onset, the treatment of memory is a difficult notion to conceptualize because it is first susceptible to blind spots and fragmentation, and second, it is strongly linked to the subjectivity of the individual who “owns” it. Therefore, it is not only intangible by nature but is also inconstant and fluid. One could even argue that memory as such does not exist, that only those events or episodes of memory that a person recovers and reconstructs in a conscious way are valid, thus creating a private version of the past. To complicate matters further, many of the testimonies on which this recovery of memory is based come from third parties, or from oral and written documents that have served to partially recreate a reality that has ceased to exist. Comics may be ideally suited to recreating such “nonexistent” reality. Scott McCloud observes that “comic panels fracture both time and space, offering a jagged, staccato rhythm of unconnected moments” (67). Moreover, Hillary Chute notes that “[l]ines on the page, in how they juxtapose time and space, convey the simultaneity of experience—the different competing registers—so often a feature of traumatic experience, such as the concomitant presence and absence of memory, consciousness, agency, and affect” (Disaster 262). To that end, this chapter will examine how Roca tries to recover the absent memory of certain individuals through the recounting of episodes that at times serve to re-establish and reconstruct a shared memory, and at others, act as a traumatic reminder of the irrecoverable. For that purpose, I will discuss three of his most recent graphic novels, Arrugas (2007), Los surcos del azar (2013), and La casa (2015), since in them Roca uses graphic language, visual metaphors, and a symbolic color scheme as tools to rescue memories that do matter, both at a personal level and for subsequent generations.

 All translations are mine, unless otherwise noted.

1

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Transforming Memory The concept of the remembrance of memories is what germinates in the so-called literature of memory, a literature that “da cabida a todos los marginados y derrotados, a todos aquellos a los que se intentó un día expulsar de la historia” (Sánchez Zapatero 29) [accommodates all the marginalized and defeated, all those who were almost expelled from history]. Many of Paco Roca’s graphic works emerge within this literature of memory. The three novels included in this chapter propose an understanding of history, either on a personal or generational level, as an (auto)biography of the Other. That is to say, that through personal recollections and the experiences of witnesses, communicated orally, Roca sometimes creates a nostalgic vision of certain people including his father Antonio, while other times he drafts a discarded perspective of important historical events such as those produced after the Spanish Civil War. The result is a transformation of the narration from an oral record to another discursive register, in this case, the graphic novel. For Gonzalo Navajas, postmodernist aesthetics creates a relationship with the historical past “de modo subjetivo filtrando la objetividad de la reflexión histórica a través de la mirada personal de un observador que altera su conexión con ese pasado por medio de la transfiguración de sus procesos mentales personales” (28) [in a subjective way filtering the objectivity of historical reflection through the personal view of an observer who alters his connection with that past through the transfiguration of his personal mental processes]. Nevertheless, the work of Paco Roca goes beyond the simple observation and the subsequent transfiguration of his memories since he also performs this same transformation with his father’s memories in La casa, through Emilio, the protagonist of Arrugas, and through the semi-fabricated character of Miguel Ruíz in Los surcos del azar. According to Darío Betancourt Echeverry, “nuestra memoria se ayuda de otras, pero no es suficiente que ellas nos aporten testimonios” (126) [our memory leans on others, but not enough that they can provide us with testimonies]. Therefore, Roca draws upon the Other to create a series of prints, loaded with memories, where the author himself appears first as a secondary character and later as the creator and maximum participant of those memories. According to the ideas of the French thinker Jean Baudrillard, this procedure corresponds to the type of simulation where the representation copies and matches what is imitated or even replaces the original. In other words, “estos modelos que suplantan la realidad no

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son en sí la realidad misma sino una construcción que responde al deseo de lo que se quiere que sea la realidad” (Martín Galván 33) [these models that supplant reality are not in themselves reality but a construction that responds to the desire of what one wants reality to be]. Through this mechanism, Roca manages to present a biography first borrowed, and later shared (slightly different from the collective memory), a pluralized story that combines at least two voices: on the one hand the main character, either his father, Emilio, or Miguel Ruiz, and on the other the author himself who reconstructs the stories that have been transmitted or told by their interviewees, which he comes to co-appropriate. In this way, the double recovery (or reconstruction) of memory surfaces; first, that of the initial witness who chooses the most significant events and memories by telling his story orally, and second, that of the author, who reconstructs the stories later through his own selective memory. The narrator tells episodes of his life to the interviewer, who in turn, becomes a new narrator for the reader. Although Mikhail Bakhtin referred to the modern novel when he said that “se alcanza un dialogismo y una polifonía, es decir, una multiplicidad de voces y valores que dialogan dentro de un mismo texto” (qtd. in Martín Galván 34) [a dialogism and a polyphony is reached, that is, a multiplicity of voices and values that dialogue within the same text], the same idea could be applied to much of Paco Roca’s graphic work. In the case of Roca’s novels, the (re)construction of memories goes through a long evolutionary process, where memory is first recalled, then reconstructed, and finally emerges as one of the possible variants of a shared “reality.” According to Pepo Pérez, “la memoria es, también, el gran tema personal de Paco Roca” (144) [memory is also Paco Roca’s great personal theme], and readers see it populating many of the pages of his work. From El faro (2004) to La encrucijada (2017), through Memorias de un hombre en pijama (2010) and El invierno del dibujante (2010), Roca immerses himself in his own and others’ memories to tell stories that must be told. Memory often appears as something universal and ordinary while, at other times, it is presented as an individual and intimate concept. But in each of his works there is a strong desire to establish a connection between the past and the reader’s own reality. In other words, in many of Roca’s graphic novels there occurs what Francesca Crippa explains as the desire to “establecer una conexión más directa entre las dimensiones del pasado y del presente. De forma más específica, pasado y presente interactúan en estos textos, es decir, el presente entra físicamente dentro de la obra” (23)

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[establish a more direct connection between the dimensions of the past and the present. More specifically, the past and the present interact in these texts, that is, the present physically enters into the work]. In the three graphic novels discussed here, Roca presents these two realities in an anachronistic or atemporal way since the author is not interested in representing the truth from the point of view of traditional historians. Carlos Giménez, author of Paracuellos and 36–39: Malos tiempos, told Álvaro Pons in an interview that, no soy historiador. Ni tengo los datos ni me interesan las fechas o las batallas. Sólo he querido contar lo que es la puta guerra. El hambre, el miedo, las bombas, todo lo que traen las guerras. Lo cuento desde la perspectiva del que la sufre… Por eso voy adelante y atrás en el tiempo, para que los datos dejen de tener importancia y sólo la tengan las personas. (“El horror” n.p.) [I’m not a historian. I do not have the data and I’m not interested in dates or battles. I just wanted to tell what war is. Hunger, fear, bombs, everything that wars imply. I tell it from the perspective of the sufferer… That’s why I go back and forth in time, so that the data no longer matters and only the people do.]

Similarly, Roca emphasizes in his novels the idea that memories cannot always be organized in a logical or chronological sequence, especially when they are damaged by mental illnesses, as in the case of Emilio, or when time and distance have been able to affect the veracity of the stories. Instead, they depend firmly on the individual’s emotions and experiences associated with specific memories. Thus, memory becomes something fluid where what is most important are not the reported facts but the social and emotional impact generated by the restitution of the forgotten memory. In this way, Roca becomes the narrator who establishes the path as well as the guide who leads his readers along a figurative journey into the past, thus becoming the bridge that will restore the forgotten history to the reader’s truncated present.

Visualizing the Past in Los surcos del azar Chute points out that by “[a]ctivating the past on the page, comics materializes the physically absent. It inscribes and concretizes, through the embodied labor of drawing, ‘the spatial charge of a presence,’ the tactile presence of a line, the body of the medium. The desire is to make the

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absent appear” (Disaster 27). To achieve his goal of “activating the past on the page,” Roca reverses one of the traditional narrative techniques of many comics and graphic novels regarding the presentation of the two temporal planes with which the author links his narrative, that is, the present and the past. In Los surcos del azar, Roca uses a simpler style with lighter lines where white, black, and sepia predominate in the panels that are placed in the reader’s present (see Fig. 4.1). For narrations in the past, however, Roca uses color to emphasize scenes and events in the preterit that are more important than the chromatic sobriety of the panels in the present. Likewise, the images of the present do not have borders that

Fig. 4.1  Usage of color (13, 226) in Los surcos del azar by Paco Roca

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demarcate them, producing open panels with rounded corners that give the reader the impression that the current moment is in flux and undefined. The panels of the past, however, appear framed with a wide black line that fixes the facts represented as something unalterable. Through this technique, and by using the color panels as well as the darker lines in the representation of scenes and characters, the author manages to accentuate the tangibility of the protagonist’s memories by highlighting them both visually and symbolically from the episodes of the present. According to Pérez: Los surcos del azar es una de las obras que han contribuido a recuperar [la] memoria del olvido impuesto por el franquismo. En ella, la alternancia de pasado y presente se representa con diferente estilo gráfico: el presente es el trabajo de campo, con un dibujo más suelto, como de cuaderno de bocetos; el pasado sobre la Guerra Civil, la lucha de republicanos en el frente africano de la II Guerra Mundial y luego en la liberación de Francia se dibuja con un dibujo de trazo contundente, en color. Porque el pasado está cerrado, marcado ya en la memoria. El dibujo del presente hace que este también parezca abierto y espectral, menos real que el pasado. (12) [Los surcos del azar is one of the works that have helped to recover the memory of oblivion imposed by the Franco regime. In it, the alternation of past and present is represented with a different graphic style: the present is fieldwork, with a looser drawing, like a sketchbook; the past relates to the Civil War, the struggle of the Republicans on the African front of World War II, and the liberation of France, all of which are portrayed with strong drawings, and in color. That’s because the past is closed, already branded in the memory. The drawing of the present makes it also appear open and spectral, less real than the past.]

In the same way that the memories presented by the author are still alive in Miguel Ruíz’s mind, the colors and bold lines in the graphic novel serve to emphasize the need to recover and keep alive many of the forgotten or ignored episodes of the Spanish Civil War and World War II. At the same time, Roca presents the moments of the “now” still to be finished. These panels in the style of a “sketchbook” signal to the reader that the characters that represent the next generation need to live the moment completely. That is, that the present moment as well as the panels are, symbolically speaking, yet to be colored. At its core, Los surcos del azar seeks to recover one of the many forgotten episodes of history, specifically, the exile of Spanish Republicans and

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their participation in World War II.  Roca is responsible for conducting exhaustive research while rewriting the history of the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent World War through the memories of Miguel Ruíz. We discover throughout the text that the protagonist is not the only voice that historians have omitted. According to Rubén Varillas, many of the Spaniards who joined the cause of the war became invisible heroes who: una vez concluido el conflicto no tenían casa a la que regresar, ni familia o seres queridos con los que reencontrarse. Los nombres de casi todos ellos han permanecido relegados en el olvido hasta fechas recientes, silenciados por las autoridades francesas que prefirieron obviar su papel fundamental en la victoria final, ignorados por su propio país, el mismo que les había obligado a huir de su casa y, finalmente, borrados de la Historia, como unos parias idealistas que nunca vieron su sueño final convertido en realidad. (118) [once the conflict was over had no home to return to, no family or loved ones to meet again. The names of almost all of them have remained relegated to oblivion until recently, silenced by the French authorities who preferred to ignore their fundamental role in the final victory, ignored by their own country, the same one that had forced them to flee their home and, finally, become erased from History, like some idealistic pariahs who never saw their final dream come true.]

In order to enable the reader to recover the lost voices of history, Roca emphasizes the contrast between what is real to the reader (using black and white images), and what is just a memory (with drawings in color). This, however, is not the only mechanism Roca uses to highlight this dichotomy. Through the novel, the character of Miguel Ruíz seems to hide a secret, or rather, a memory that torments him. It is not until the end of the story that we discover that Miguel still mourns the death of his comrade Estrella, a woman whom he loved deeply and whose memory lingered with him throughout his life. Just as the novel includes scenes of war activities, successful missions, and unknown characters as we learn about La Nueve (the Spanish brigade that participated in the liberation of the French territory and its capital), it also presents the reader with another reality: that of the fallen as a result of battle. On the one hand, in his analysis of the novel, David Fernández de Arriba suggests that: “Los surcos del azar se configura como el homenaje a unos héroes largamente descuidados que, pese a las continuas derrotas y a las humillaciones, nunca dejaron de luchar, empujados por la nostalgia de España y por la esperanza de poder derrocar al dictador” (24) [Los surcos del azar is configured as a

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tribute to long-neglected heroes who, despite the continuous defeats and humiliations, never stopped fighting, driven by the nostalgia of Spain and the hope of overthrowing the dictator]. On the other hand, with the graphic representation of these forgotten episodes, Roca manages to outline the importance of the history not remembered. However, he does not achieve this by solely concentrating on the facts and deeds done during the war, but by offering a detailed zoom-in of the lonely tombstone of Miguel Ruiz’s lover, which bears the inscription “Comrade Estrella” (Roca 310). It is only after the recovery of this woman’s story and memory, even if only through the eyes of Miguel, that the reader glimpses the true loss caused by the war. Roca’s narration and panels indeed focus on rescuing historical memory, but they leave the reader, ultimately, with the inescapable certainty of the irrecoverable.

Losing Memory in Arrugas If in Los surcos del azar Roca applies a specific range of colors to help the reader distinguish between memories of the past and the present, in Arrugas the author employs a similar technique to represent the continuous and uninterrupted loss of the main character’s memory. A clear parallelism is thus created between the protagonist Emilio’s heartless illness and the aesthetic composition of the graphic novel. In the same way that Emilio’s Alzheimer’s advances, the pages (and panels) of the novel begin to detach themselves from demarcating boundaries, lines, drawings, and text. Toward the end of the work, the reader is only able to distinguish the weak contours and silhouettes of the characters (see Fig. 4.2). The depicted reality unravels until reaching two completely blank pages (98–99). These stark pages create an obvious contrast with the rest of the work. From the colorful and dynamic episodes that populate the majority of the novel, the reader arrives at two empty pages that emphasize, or perform, the inevitable disorientation of the character. According to Felice Gambin, this technique serves so that: el lector, entre humor y compasión, [acabe] por confundir, como Emilio y los demás personajes, la vida real con recuerdos que visitan al enfermo de Alzheimer de manera desordenada. También acaba el lector por no distinguir las tiras que pintan la monotonía y soledad que se respiran cotidianamente en la residencia de ancianos con las tiras que ilustran con irónica ligereza y pietas los recuerdos de los pacientes. (178)

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Fig. 4.2  Miguel’s face becomes a mere sketch (96) in Arrugas by Paco Roca

[the reader, between humor and compassion, ends up confusing, like Emilio and the other characters, real life with memories that come to the Alzheimer’s patient in a disorderly manner. The reader is also unable to distinguish the sections that paint the monotony and loneliness evident in the nursing home from the parts that illustrate the memories of the patients with ironic subtlety and compassion.]

Similarly, Roca is responsible for maintaining, or in many cases recovering his characters’ most important recollections. The author becomes not only the interlocutor of some characters who have lost their voice and memory, but also a curator in charge of choosing which memories should be told and which are relegated to oblivion. This deliberate selection of memory in turn underlines the importance of the memories included in the narrative. If Roca chooses them among all the possible representations of memory, one must deduce that they contain the elements that the author considers most valuable in portraying the reality of the main characters.

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Throughout much of the graphic novel Arrugas, Roca experiments with the chromatic range, as well as with visual elements associated with the denouement of life. On the pages where Emilio’s son talks to the center’s director about room prices and residency services, for example, the first two panels focus on the trees in the yard (9). A rich visual metaphor, the fall of the leaves connect the autumn season to the consummation of the protagonist’s life. Just as the leaves drop slowly but continuously, the same decadent process happens with Emilio’s memories as they begin to detach from his mind. Thus, when at the end of that series of panels Emilio is shown alone, standing in front of the doors of the residence with a few flying leaves covering the background, and while his son responds “No creo que podamos venir muy a menudo” (10) [I don’t think we can visit very often], the metaphorical association is verified and the feeling of loneliness and abandonment produced by the images is confirmed. From this moment, Roca uses the same technique to introduce several of the characters in the graphic novel. When Miguel and Emilio reach the room where Mrs. Rosario sits, a female resident who spends all day looking out the window, believing she is on her way to Istanbul (18–19), we see the same autumnal leaves that again suggest the fleeting nature of memory. The same happens during the physical therapy class where Miss Ana performs mobility exercises with the residents (27, 30). On one occasion, the leaves flying through the yard coincide with the precise moment that Emilio loses his ability to connect the word “ball” with the object in his hands. In the same way that the leaves are blown by the wind, without being able to stop or be restored to their previous state, the signifier is disconnected from its meaning and Emilio cannot do anything but stare at the ball without finding a way to describe what he is experiencing. Similarly, the reader feels powerless before a reality that vanishes in plain sight. After all, the objective of these panels is to help the readers reconsider the magnitude and importance of even the simplest things. This alienation occurs frequently in Arrugas where “el protagonista comparte con los otros enfermos una situación de extrañamiento de la vida. El grupo protagonista discurre variadas e inútiles estratagemas para mantener bien aferrados sus recuerdos; cada uno de ellos intenta reivindicar una lucidez que disminuye a ojos vistas y procura salvaguardar su propia dignidad” (Gambin 177) [the protagonist shares with the other patients a situation of estrangement from life. The protagonist’s group

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attempts various useless stratagems to keep their memories well attached; each of them tries to claim a lucidity that diminishes in plain sight and seeks to safeguard their own dignity]. This desire to cling to memories, as described by Felice Gambin, has a variety of nuances in this graphic novel. The case of the aforementioned Mrs. Rosario, who thinks she is traveling to Istanbul, for example, illustrates an aspect opposite to the idea of memory recovery. With Mrs. Rosario’s condition, Roca presents the idea of the trip as a symbol of the inhabitants’ lives at the residence. As the cover of the graphic novel suggests, during the metaphorical journey of life, individuals collect visual memories of their existence, mental photos or postcards captured both by their retina and by their experience. Mrs. Rosario remains perpetually stuck in a concrete memory or illusion. Through her selective memory, she is able to recreate and freeze that moment in time. As a result, Mrs. Rosario is in constant “movement” and at the same time in a lethargic state of memory. With a single panel on page 19 (and implied on the book’s cover), Roca is able to remind the reader not only of the fragility of life, but also of the importance of preserving the most treasured episodes of our memory. In other words, the memories made by Mrs. Rosario have as much or even more value than the experiences themselves. As discussed at the beginning of this chapter, all memory is to a certain extent a fabrication of the individual. Toward the end of the novel, another woman from the residence decides to share with Mrs. Rosario that frozen moment (97). Suddenly, and through this empathic action, memory converges and becomes, in a certain way, a shared memory even if it is based on a completely fabricated one.

Shared Memory in La casa In La casa, Roca uses a range of colors even more extensive than in his previous works: electric blue represents the coldness of the hospital room (109), different shades of yellow in the warmer summer scenes depict family togetherness and collaboration (88–89), and sepia undergirds a sense of meditation and seriousness when the brothers consider the final days of their father’s life (92). Regardless of the ample color palette, La casa primarily focuses on composition and visual metaphors to emphasize the importance of the memories chosen for the graphic novel. Unlike Los surcos del azar, where the author was introduced as the character-journalist who would be responsible for writing the memoirs of Miguel Ruíz, in La casa Roca uses a multiplicity of voices that little by little become a

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collective testimony of his father’s life. The communal perspective of the siblings, as well as that of Manolo the neighbor, shows that the memory of an individual can be reconstructed through the nuanced vision of many spectators, each of them offering a different point of view. These perspectives are symbolized by using the colors already mentioned, as well as others that serve to represent as many versions of the memory as characters appear in the narrative. In this way, the colors that Roca selects for his panels create, on the one hand, feelings associated with certain images, while the stories offered by the multiple voices included in the narrative also establish the father-character as a heterogeneous and multi-faceted being. And yet, each of these versions of the father is valid, as are the various reconstructions of his memory. If for one brother the father was a tireless worker, for the other he was an introverted and inflexible person. The range of colors used by Roca becomes a visual metaphor, which first embodies the character’s polarity, and second gives him his own identity. On one particularly evocative page Roca uses the image of a garbage container full of objects as a visual mechanism for the disordered representation of certain memories (20, see Fig.  4.3). The circular panels, each with different colors associated with objects as varied as a table, a sofa, some shoes, or a lamp offer the reader a nostalgic look into the life of the characters in this novel. For Pérez, this representation of objects takes greater importance because “el hombre crea objetos ‘a su imagen y semejanza’, digamos, y de ahí la carga emocional asociada a esa cisterna que quedó por arreglar, la higuera que no termina de ‘tirar’ pero que ‘algún’ día dará higos, la garrafa para acarrear agua del manantial o la manguera que gotea, directamente relacionada al último instante de vida del padre” (148) [man creates objects “in his image and likeness,” we could say, and hence the emotional charge associated with that water tank that needed to be fixed, the fig tree that never got pulled because “someday” it will bear figs, the jug to carry water from the spring or the hose that drips, each item directly related to the last moment of the father’s life]. Roca’s images are loaded with affective associations that gain more intensity either by presenting them individually, isolated from other images, or as part of a collective group. Thus, the two bricks next to the wall surrounded by dry leaves (116), the empty chairs in the doctor’s room (116), or the abandoned ladder leaning against the house (64) not only symbolize unfinished projects but also represent, when viewed as part of the whole, a series of associated memories, of unfinished conversations, of moments without resolution. Chute states that the “medium of comics can perform

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Fig. 4.3  Memories attached to objects (20) in La casa by Paco Roca

the enabling political and aesthetic work of bearing witness powerfully because of its rich narrative texture: its flexible page architecture; its sometimes consonant, sometimes dissonant visual and verbal narratives; and its structural threading of absence and presence” (“Texture” 93–94). That is perhaps why, at the end of the novel, when Manolo opens the chained gate of the empty house and the reader discovers that the property is for sale, the text immediately bears witness of the inevitability of the narrative. One can see that fixing the house served two distinct purposes. First, it brought the three estranged siblings together, but most importantly, it allowed them to close an unresolved chapter in their lives. However, the death of the family patriarch, as well as the selling of the summer home, becomes the unavoidable absence that accentuates the pain of all that is lost. Roca carries out what Georges Perec suggests in Lo infraordinario (2008) when he says that “de lo que se trata es de interrogar al ladrillo, al cemento, al vidrio, a nuestros modales en la mesa, a nuestros utensilios, a nuestras herramientas, a nuestras agendas, a nuestros ritmos. Interrogar a lo que parecería habernos dejado de sorprender para siempre” (24) [what

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is intended is to interrogate the brick, the concrete, the glass, our manners at the table, our utensils, our tools, our agendas, our rhythms. Interrogate what seemed to have stopped surprising us forever]. Ultimately the reader will remember the garbage bin packed with objects, the fruitless fig tree full of nostalgia, and the image of the family having dinner for the first and last time under the new pergola (La casa 123). Roca ends the novel by offering the reader a solitary view of the house, a neighbor who recalls what could have been the definitive conversation with his friend (125–27), and a black and white photo with the author’s father, now out of the narrative. All these images work together to suggest that if some episodes of the memory fulfill their purpose by recovering a shared memory, others only exist as a painful reminder of the irrecoverable. Roca’s three graphic novels also fulfill a third and final purpose. In La casa, as in Arrugas and Los surcos del azar, the reader perceives what Marianne Hirsh calls postmemory, a term that Viviane Alary further elaborates by stating that it refers to, la relación que una generación en un contexto dado mantiene con el trauma tanto colectivo y personal como cultural vivido por las generaciones anteriores. En las obras gráficas que la historieta nos proporciona, cada autor, dibujante o guionista encuentra su propia resolución narrativa y gráfica para escenificar el trauma o el rescate tardío de un acontecimiento. (15) [the relationship that a generation in a given context maintains with the collective, personal and cultural trauma lived by previous generations. In the graphic works that comic strips provide, each author, illustrator or storyteller finds their own narrative and graphic resolution to stage the trauma or the ultimate recuperation of an event.]

Consequently, through his works Roca is able to stage the trauma produced by silences in relation to the amnesia of the omitted national history, the void that a disease produces in the memory of an individual, or the absence created by the passing of a family member. His novels contain a large number of pages without dialogue or text. Those panels, such as the ones depicting the suicide of the Republicans in the port of Alicante in Los surcos del azar (36–39), or the sequence that illustrates the neglect of the country house after Antonio’s death in La casa (6, see Fig. 4.4), serve to shed light on the many other silences of memory. Through graphic language, the symbolic usage of color, and visual metaphors, Roca positions himself as a spokesman of these new shared memories. In his graphic novels, it is not so crucial to present the facts as they

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Fig. 4.4  Examples of visual silence (6) in La casa by Paco Roca

occurred, but to show the psychological and affective consequences that such events caused. For this purpose, the author focuses on exposing the story from his point of view, while combining the voices that make up a shared memory. The result is a narrative that bifurcates and deviates, that loses contact with the temporal or chronological sequence of events, but that always ends up reappearing among the memories that matter most. If in 1912 the Spanish poet Antonio Machado already questioned, “¿Para qué llamar caminos / a los surcos del azar?” (Machado 234) [Why call the furrows of chance pathways?], Roca makes the same query today by means of his own graphic interventions. As a result, in Los surcos del azar the author’s alter ego confesses that it seems incredible that people that were separated during the course of their lives would again find themselves in a fortuitous way in some remote place many years later. Miguel Ruíz’s character then replies “Parece mentira, pero pasaba. Los surcos del azar que decía Machado” (69) [It seems impossible, but it happened. The furrows of chance as Machado called them]. Roca’s novels are indeed those furrows of chance, that is, the mechanism through which memory and the

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present can meet again after so many years of silence and negligence. After all, Roca’s works remind the reader of the imperative need to remember the fundamental aspects of a person’s perceptions while at the same time compelling them to recognize that if there are episodes of life that are unforgettable, there are many others that regrettably end up being irrecoverable.

Works Cited Ahmed, Maaheen, and Benoît Crucifix. “Introduction: Untaming Comics Memory.” Comics Memory: Archives and Styles. Ed. Ahmed and Crucifix. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 1–12. Alary, Viviane. “La Guerra Civil española vista desde la historieta.” Diablotexto digital 1.6 (2016): 6–28. Betancourt Echeverry, Darío. “Memoria individual, memoria colectiva y memoria histórica. Lo secreto y lo escondido en la narración y el recuerdo.” La práctica investigativa en ciencias sociales. Ed. Absalón Jiménez Becerra and Alfonso Torres Carrillo, Bogotá: Universidad Pedagógica Nacional, 2006. 124–34. Chute, Hillary L. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2016. ———. “The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s ‘Persepolis’.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 36.1–2 (2008): 92–110. Crippa, Francesca. “La narrativa gráfica contemporánea y la memoria de la Guerra Civil Española.” El genio maligno: revista de humanidades y ciencias sociales 20 (2017): 18–26. Fernández de Arriba, David. “La memoria del exilio a través del cómic. Un largo silencio, El arte de volar y Los surcos del azar.” CuCo, Cuadernos de cómic 4 (2015): 7–33. Gambin, Felice. “Las figuras y los signos de la memoria en Paco Roca.” Biblioteca di Rassegna Iberistica 4 (2017): 173–86. Giménez, Carlos. Interview with Álvaro Pons. “El horror de la Guerra Civil, a golpe de viñeta.” El País, 25 Nov. 2007. https://elpais.com/diario/2007/11/25/cultura/1195945202_850215.html. Harris, Sarah. “‘I Had Not Dared to Remember’: Trauma and Historical Memory in Recent Spanish Comics.” ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comic Studies 9.1 (2017): n.p. http://imagetext.english.ufl.edu/archives/v9_1/harris/. Machado, Antonio. Poesías completas. Ed. Manuel Alvar. Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1996. Marías, Fernando. Epilogue. La casa. By Paco Roca. Bilbao: Astiberri, 2007. 131.

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Martín Galván, Juan Carlos. Voces silenciadas: la memoria histórica en el realismo documental de la narrativa española del siglo XXI. Madrid: Ediciones Libertarias, 2009. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. The Invisible Art. New  York: Harper Perennial, 1993. Navajas, Gonzalo. Más allá de la postmodernidad. Barcelona: Ediciones Universitarias de Barcelona, 1996. Perec, Georges. Lo infraordinario. Madrid: Impedimenta, 2008. Pérez, Pepo. “La casa: Paco Roca.” CuCo, Cuadernos de cómic 5 (2015). http:// cuadernosdecomic.com/docs/revista5/la_casa.pdf. Roca, Paco. Arrugas. Bilbao: Astiberri, 2007. ———. La casa. Bilbao: Astiberri, 2015. ———. Los surcos del azar. Bilbao: Astiberri, 2016. Sánchez Zapatero, Javier. “La cultura de la memoria.” Pliegos de Yuste 11–12 (2010): 25–30. Varillas, Rubén. “La novela gráfica española y la memoria recuperada.” Historieta o Cómic Biografía de la narración gráfica en España. Ed. Alessandro Scarsella, Katiuscia Darici, and Alice Favaro. Venice: Edizioni Ca’ Foscari 2017. 103–22. Ware, Chris “Introduction.” The Best American Comics 2007. Ed. Ware and Anne Elizabeth Moore. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007. xiii–xxiv.

CHAPTER 5

The Persistent Memories of Federico García Lorca: History, Poetry, and Spanish Graphic Narratives David F. Richter

The proliferation of biographical and historical themes in graphic narratives has accelerated with great pace in Spain since the early 2000s. In his comprehensive study of the origins, history, and present-day graphic novel, Santiago García suggests in On the Graphic Novel that current Spanish comic writers and artists “appear to be focused on discovering new thematic fields—personal and historical memoir, biography—and relegate formal experimentation to a secondary function” (181). This emphasis is symptomatic, at least in part, of institutional initiatives such as the polemical 2007 Ley de Memoria Histórica [Historical Memory Law]1 that sought to recuperate historical memory and officially recognize and broaden the rights of those who suffered prosecution or violence during the Civil War (1936–1939) and the Franco Dictatorship (1939–1975). In 1

 Unless otherwise noted, all translations in this essay are my own.

D. F. Richter (*) Utah State University, Logan, UT, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 C. McKinney, D. F. Richter (eds.), Spanish Graphic Narratives, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56820-7_5

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their function as comics that are more serious, dense, and geared toward adults (Kyle 3–4; García 20, 154; Wiener 17), graphic novels in Spain in recent years have grappled with the reconstruction and re-membering of the past in a variety of ways. Marianne Hirsch and others, for example, have referred to the concept of “postmemory” as an attempt to understand the inheritance of memories by descendants of those who suffered trauma in previous generations, “the relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before—the experiences they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up” (Hirsch, Generation 5).2 Those histories, realities, and narratives precede the birth of the descendants but figure as ever-present events that are difficult to fully conceptualize or articulate for subsequent generations. In many cases, historically-based graphic narratives seek to recover voices lost due to war, trauma, suicide, political oppression, and mysterious “disappearances.” As such, many contemporary Spanish graphic novels aim to give visual texture to the life, legacy, and artistic works of the marginalized, oppressed, or deceased. Such is the case, for example, in Antonio Altarriba and Kim’s El arte de volar (2009), Paco Roca’s Los surcos del azar (2013), Enrique Bonet’s La araña del olvido (2015), Sento’s Dr. Uriel (2013–2017), Ana Penyas’s Estamos todas bien (2017), Cecília Hill and Josep Salvia’s Antonio Machado: Los días azules, and many others. The focus on Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) has been no exception to the meta-literary inclination toward the politics of memory and the search for missing (hi)stories in recent graphic narratives. Numerous new volumes of research and investigation dedicated to Lorca’s life and works are published continually, and in recent years he has become the central figure and what G. Cappa has referred to as “un superhéroe de la poesía y de la amistad” (n.p.) [a superhero of poetry and friendship] in Spanish sequential art. Since 2011 there have been at least six graphic novels published on the poet’s biography 2  For more on postmemory, the interested reader could refer to Hirsch’s writings since the 1990s, especially “Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-Memory” (1992), “Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile” (1996), and her most recent engagement of the topic, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (2012). In the Spanish context, studies on historical memory and postmemory are abundant in the last two decades. Articles by the following critics discuss the issue in recent Spanish comics and graphic novels: Ana Merino and Brittany Tullis (2012), Sarah Harris (2017), and Jordan Tronsgard (2017).

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and oeuvre: La huella de Lorca (Carlos Hernández and El Torres, 2011) [Lorca’s Footprint], La araña del olvido (Enrique Bonet, 2015) [The Spider of Oblivion], Lorca: Un poeta en Nueva York (Carles Esquembre, 2016) [Lorca: A Poet in New York], Los Caballeros de la Orden de Toledo (Javierre and Juanfran Cabrera, 2017) [The Gentlemen of the Toledo Order], Vida y muerte de Federico García Lorca (Ian Gibson and Quique Palomo, 2018) [The Life and Death of Federico García Lorca], and Residencia de Estudiantes (Susanna Martín Segarra, 2019) [The Students’ Residence].3 Referred to as “Spain’s most celebrated twentieth-century author” (Anderson 595), “a master of visual imagery” (Cavanaugh 13), a “ubiquitous popular icon” (Maurer vii), and an “anti-fascist martyr” (qtd. in Mayhew 120), it is not hard to understand why Lorca has occupied so much attention in recent graphic narratives; indeed, works on Lorca now constitute what illustrator Carlos Hernández recently called a “‘sub-­ género’, el tebeocomic lorquiano” (“Orgullo” n.p.) [“sub-genre,” the Lorquian comic]. The persistence of Lorca’s legacy noted in recent graphic narratives in Spain appears alongside, and in conjunction with, Spain’s obsession with its own history, with the Civil War, with the ensuing Franco regime, with the years of the transition to democracy, and with the twenty-first century’s reckoning with past atrocities. In her study of the comics genre and historical memory in Spain, Sarah Harris suggests that Spanish trauma comics “allow the non-experience to be real, even if simultaneously present and absent” (n.p.). For some, the recourse to historical memory initiatives is simply a re-opening of old wounds; for others, it has been a way to memorialize and never forget the atrocities of the past. In 2008, and against the wishes of the remaining Lorca family members, the aftermath of the Ley de Memoria Histórica led to a legal judgement demanding that 19 mass graves be opened in order to determine the identities of the deceased. Lorca’s grave was allegedly among them but his remains were not found. Subsequent excavation attempts from 2009 to 2017 have also failed to locate the body of the Granadine poet. For Jo Labanyi, “‘historical memory’ is a form of collective and not personal memory, quite apart 3  On April 25, 2019, and in conjunction with the “Año Lorca 2019,” the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid hosted Juanfran Cabrera, Carles Esquembre, Carlos Hernández, and Quique Palomo in a roundtable discussion titled “Lorca en viñetas,” which discussed the presence of Lorca in recent Spanish graphic narratives. Later in 2019, Enrique Bonet joined Cabrera, Hernández, and Palomo at the Centro Federico García Lorca in Granada for a similar gathering, held on September 22 and titled “Lorca en el cómic.”

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from the fact that citizens have the right to express their personal memories in the public sphere. […] Indeed, the key issue at stake is that memory of the violence of the civil war and dictatorship has been forced to remain a private matter until very recently” (120). Each of the graphic novels discussed in this chapter seeks to, in its own way, highlight personal memories (and postmemories) of the past, uncovering them as private experiences and offering them visually to the public sphere. Sequential art is particularly adept at making public the lost voices of the past as it “relies on a visual experience common to both creator and audience” and by evoking “images stored in the minds of both parties” (Eisner 1, 7). In the case of visual narratives dealing with Lorca, the graphic medium is linked with the poetic—the artistic with the literary— as both genres require the interpretation of encoded images and rhetorical language. Scott McCloud frames the interpretive imperative in comics in terms of iconography, by “using the word ‘icon’ to mean any image used to represent a person, place, thing or idea” (27), from realistic to abstract, where “meaning is fluid and variable” (27–28). In fact, in her study of what she refers to as “comics poetry,” Tamryn Bennett suggests that “[c]omics, like poetry, concentrate on the aesthetic audio-visual arrangement of segments whereas other literary forms are more concerned with syntax than spatial composition” (108). Inasmuch as the graphic novels devoted to Lorca also engage Lorca’s poetry, in both visual and thematic ways, they demonstrate an artistic attempt to interpret literary and poetic language. This chapter focuses on the thematic impulses of the works by Hernández, Bonet, and Esquembre (their storylines and representations of Lorca’s life and works), and also their incorporation of many structural elements inherent to graphic narrative, including aspects such as visual metaphors, analepsis and prolepsis, onomatopoeias, splash pages, raccords, zoom-ins, and others.4 At their core, these graphic narratives dedicated to Lorca underscore the role of history, poetry, (post)memory, and personal narratives in contemporary Spanish graphic novels, all the while calling attention to one of the most recognized poets of the Spanish tradition.

4  In the interest of space, I have omitted discussion of Los Caballeros de la Orden de Toledo, Vida y muerte de Federico García Lorca, and Residencia de Estudiantes.

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Memories of Lorca in La huella de Lorca Published in 2011, Carlos Hernández and El Torres’s La huella de Lorca constitutes the first graphic novel focused on the life and death of Federico García Lorca.5 The volume offers primarily black, white, and sepia tri-­ color conventional panels spanning 12 unrelated and non-linear sections or chapters, each one inspired by anecdotes and personal memories of individuals who knew Lorca. As the reader follows in Lorca’s footsteps they are transported from Granada, Madrid, and Cadaqués to New York, Havana, and Riaza, and are confronted with a series of memories within memories and continual flashes forward and backward in time. The book seeks to recuperate voices that were silenced by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Lorca’s included, as well as to make meaning of the many enigmas of the ensuing war and dictatorship. Hernández’s visual images and poetic dialogue invoke the memories of innocent youth, wounded International Brigadiers, silenced Republican sympathizers, friends and colleagues of the Andalusian poet, and the spirit of Lorca himself. At each moment throughout the text, and by way of the visual symbols, analepses, prolepses, zooms, and onomatopoeias characteristic of graphic narrative, La huella de Lorca highlights the persistent Lorquian tone of compassion that is present in the minds and hearts of all that remember him. In doing this, Hernández’s volume conjures anew the specter of Lorca and allows him to continue to live on through his poetry, plays, friendships, and associations. La huella de Lorca follows the story of Alfonso Hernández, the author’s father, as a young boy who had heard of Lorca, but who had to flee Granada with his family at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. Mixing literary fiction, memories, and postmemories with historical and biographical events—and in self-referential meta-literary fashion—, the reader sees the processes and development of the book as Carlos Hernández appears in the final chapter alongside Alfonso in 2011, eager to discuss his father’s childhood memories. Alfonso states that he is “una de esas personas” (110) [one of those people] who lived during Lorca’s time and he then proceeds to tell of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and the voyage to Riaza in 1936. Each chapter commences with a tall narrow 5  The volume’s title page names Carlos Hernández as author and illustrator, and indicates that El Torres “limpia, brilla y da esplandor” (3) [cleans up, brightens, and gives added splendor]. Hernández has stated that El Torres served as a sort of mentor or “director de tesis” (Cappa n.p.) [thesis director] for the project.

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panel that orients the place of each section’s series of memories, whether it be the nighttime sky of Granada, the architecture of Madrid or New York, or the natural landscapes of Fuente Vaqueros, Havana, or Cadaqués. All of the chapters (except two of them) are also separated by an original black and white silhouette image of Lorca, each one evoking a different moment in the poet’s life, and each one framing the personal memory of Lorca to be treated in the subsequent chapter. As such, even though Lorca only appears a handful of times over the course of the 111-page book, Lorca is omnipresent in the memories referred to throughout the text. According to G. Cappa, Lorca’s imprint is seen in the “doce historias con el poeta como sujeto elíptico. Está en todas las páginas pero en muchas ocasiones no se le ve” (n.p.) [twelve stories with the poet as the focal point. He is on every page, but most often he is not seen]. Following the departure from Granada of Alfonso’s family in 1936, the book achronologically traces the imprint that Lorca left on individuals including Carlos Morla Lynch, Phillip Cummings, friends from the poet’s youth, hotel workers associated with Lorca in Havana, Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí and others at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, conversations between Lorca’s biographer, Ian Gibson and Manolito “the Communist” who supposedly buried the poet on the outskirts of Víznar, participants in the traveling Barraca theater troupe, and International Brigadiers involved in the Spanish Civil War. Alongside the historical, personal, and fictive elements of the narration, Hernández includes sketched versions of several actual photographs of Lorca. For example, images of Lorca in profile, seated at the piano, as a young boy, with Dalí, with the Barraca, and from Un chien andalou give historical weight and visual texture to the volume (18, 20, 25, 56, 78, 88). From the onset of the book, Hernández embeds the texts with a tone of mystery, secrecy, and sinister motivations. The first image of the first chapter, titled “Granada 1936,” depicts a small rural home with an expansive nighttime sky above it, a symbol of the menacing darkness invading the home. The tall thin panel on page 6 directs the reader’s eyes to the stars above the home and one gets the sense that the darkness of the panel mimics the uncertainty of Alfonso’s father Tomás’s statement to his wife Amparo at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War: “Nadie está seguro en ninguna parte…” (7, emphasis in original) [No one is safe anywhere]. The remainder of the chapter details the departure of Alfonso’s family toward Riaza and the militiamen they encounter along the way. The final images of the first section also act as a framework for the book. As the tired boy

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Alfonso succumbs to sleep while riding in the car, his mother whispers a song, lines from a popular lullaby that Lorca commented on in his lecture titled “Canciones de cuna españolas” wherein he noted the song’s “rara angustia misteriosa” (García Lorca, Obras 3: 122) [strange mysterious anguish]. The words of the lullaby, A la nana, nana, nana a la nanita de aquel que llevó el caballo al agua y lo dejó sin beber (qtd. in Hernández 12) [Lullaby, lullaby / lullaby of the one / who took his horse to the water / and left him without drinking]

include motifs similar to those that Lorca would incorporate into his play Bodas de sangre and establish a thematic substructure for Hernández’s book. Images of the “caballo grande / que no quiso beber el agua” (García Lorca, Obras 2: 421–22) [large horse / that wouldn’t drink the water] from the lullaby sung by the Suegra and Mujer in Act 1 of Bodas de sangre suggest at once a discourse enshrouded in longing, desire, anguish, and loss—motivations that permeate both texts. In conjunction with the darkness of the first images of the book, La huella de Lorca also includes a variety of prolepses and analepses, flashes forward and backward in time, which allow the author and illustrator to engage a multiplicity of voices and memories throughout he text. In the fifth section, titled “Granada 1980,” we read of the memories of Don Manuel, Paco Molina, and others who discuss the disappearance of Lorca. The first words of this chapter offer a literary simile: “Creo que Granada es como el río que la atraviesa […] Lo que debería ser hermoso y correr libre entre la luz… es algo que los mismos granadinos entierran en la oscuridad” (39–40) [I believe that Granada is like the river that goes through it. What should be beautiful and run freely in the light… is instead something that the Granadans themselves bury in the darkeness]. This statement is accompanied by a dark visual simile that shows the Río Darro running near the Alhambra and then disappearing out of sight into a black underpass and underground waterway (39). These images draw further attention to the mystery of Lorca’s death and the difficulty of speaking of him even until recent years in his hometown. In the latter images of the chapter, Don Manuel offers information regarding Lorca’s death, and the side-by-side panels of the soldier imply that he was among those that shot

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Lorca. His declaration of “¡ARRIBA ESPAÑA!” [RISE UP, SPAIN!] from the past, via analepsis, is now transposed into a more resigned and remorseful “Arriba España” (43) [Rise up, Spain] in the 1980s present, through visual prolepsis (see Fig. 5.1). Like visual flashbacks used in film, the analepsis used here links past with present, just as the influence of Lorca reappears throughout the text and motivates the actions of those in the book’s present time. In his Diccionario terminológico de la historieta, Manuel Barrero writes that analeptic images in comics often appear as “imágenes ‘fantasmales’, como las del pasado que conviven con los personajes en el presente de la historia” (25) [phantasmal images, like those of the past that coexist with characters in the story’s present]. This spectral presence of Lorca (and others) is clearly manifest throughout La huella de Lorca, as it is also in Bonet’s La araña del olvido and Esquembre’s Lorca: Un poeta en Nueva York. Similar memories within memories and juxtapositions of past and present are evident in the seventh and ninth sections of La huella de Lorca as well, titled “Cadaqués 1951” and “Residencia de Estudiantes 1928,”

Fig. 5.1  Visual flashbacks (43) in La huella de Lorca by Carlos Hernández and El Torres

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respectively. These chapters deal with memories of Lorca by Dalí and Buñuel, and include images that recall the obsessions with putrefaction, violence, and desire of both surrealist practitioners. In the chapter on Dalí, the reader is confronted with multiple panels of a rotting donkey on the beach, from an initial close-up of the animal’s eye and face, to a gradual zoom-out of the donkey’s rotting body, a swarm of bees, and finally a panorama of the Mediterranean landscape with the dead animal in the distance (55, see Fig. 5.2). Subsequent panels in this chapter use analepsis and prolepsis further to connect the present moment of Dalí’s 1951 interview with images of Lorca’s 1927 visit to Cadaqués (56–57). These memories are linked to those of Buñuel later on in the volume when the filmmaker is seen in the Residencia de Estudiantes enacting scenes from the 1929 surrealist film Un chien andalou. On pages 74 and 75, for example, Hernández uses additional zoom-ins and visual surrealist metaphors to allude to the violent opening scene of the surrealist film where the subject’s eyeball is sliced by a razor. A subsequent detailed panel shows a close-up image of a moth with a skull-like pattern on its back (another image that imitates the film, see Fig. 5.3), suggesting once again the morbid obsessions and anxieties of the avant-garde artists and drawing attention to Buñuel and Dalí’s critique of “el putrefacto clasicismo de nuestro amigo” (77) [the rotten classicism of our friend]. Images in both chapters evoke the spirit and memory of Lorca for those that knew him best, Dalí and Buñuel. The analepses and prolepses connect present with past, and the close-up zooms and allusions underscore the principal concerns of desire, putrefaction, and violence for the surrealist poet, painter, and filmmaker. Throughout the graphic novel, Carlos Hernández gives emphasis to Lorca’s ethical posture toward others and the impact that his kindness had on those that associated with him. This compassionate sensitivity is noted most directly in chapter four, which focuses on “Fuentevaqueros 1906.” In this chapter centered on Lorca’s early years, the reader sees a group of boys in the rural setting of Fuentevaqueros killing a frog by boiling it in a covered pot of water. Hernández uses the repeated onomatopoeia “TAP! TAP!” to reflect the failed attempts of the frog to escape the pot. One of the boys among the group appears affected by the brutality of the scene and is depicted plugging his ears to avoid hearing the violent thumping of the dying frog (32, see Fig. 5.4). He finally tips the pot over and allows the frog to escape. The boys later encounter young Federico singing in the forest and they start to harass him. The boy who let the frog go, however,

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Fig. 5.2  Zooms in and out (55) in La huella de Lorca by Carlos Hernández and El Torres

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Fig. 5.3  Visual surrealist metaphors (74) in La huella de Lorca by Carlos Hernández and El Torres

comes to Federico’s aid because he knows Lorca from a prior encounter when Federico saved the boy from drowning in a stream. After the unkind youngsters leave, the friendly boy says to Federico, “Tú y yo ya estamos en paz para siempre, ¿no?” (35) [You and I will always stick together, right?]. Notwithstanding the violence and unkindness in the world, Hernández’s novel shows that kind acts still have a lasting impact. In the final pages of La huella de Lorca, the volume instructs readers as to how the memories and postmemories of lost voices can allow the spirit of the deceased to live on. An injured International Brigadier named Eric instructs the young Alfonso that “Federico estará vivo siempre que leas sus poemas. Dentro de algunos años, cuando todo esto haya pasado, irás a ver sus obras de teatro… y sentirás que vive en cada canción y en cada palabra” (102) [Federico will live on whenever you read his poems. Later on in life, after all of this has passed, you will go see his plays at the theater… and you will feel that he lives on in every song and in every word]. The spirit of Lorca persists in the memory of those that knew him, of those that hear

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Fig. 5.4  Usage of onomatopoeia (32) in La huella de Lorca by Carlos Hernández and El Torres

stories of him, and of those that read his works. In his essay on postmemory and Spanish graphic novels, Jordan Tronsgard writes that “[p]ostmemory mourns with the power to raise the dead, to give visibility to the forgotten. As such, the frames not only give voice to the victims in life, but also in death. If you can draw the living, you can draw the dead” (273). In the epilogue to La huella de Lorca, titled “Huerta de San Vicente 2011,” the meta-literary text comes full circle as we see the author, Carlos Hernández, discuss with his father, Alfonso, the goals and focus of the book he is attempting to construct: “La obra tratará sobre personas que conocieron a Federico… Hacerlo vivir a través de las impresiones de

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quienes tuvieron la suerte de estar con él” (110) [The work will deal with people that knew Federico… To make him live on through the impressions of those that were lucky enough the be with him]. Alfonso then relates his memories of 1936 and the trip to Riaza that is treated in the book’s first chapter. Hernández’s volume ultimately suggests that the best way to combat the enigmas of Lorca’s disappearance and the silence following his premature death is to “give voice” to the victim in death and “hacerlo vivir” [make him live on] by remembering the goodness of his life and the poetic lines that he penned.

Enigmas Without End in La araña del olvido Author and illustrator Enrique Bonet’s 2015 graphic novel, La araña del olvido, also focuses on Lorca’s life, literary accomplishments, and enigmatic death in 1936. It presents an invaluable contribution to Lorca studies as it draws attention to the investigative work of Spanish-born Agustín Penón who was born in Barcelona in 1920, spent time in New York City as a translator, later went to Spain in the 1950s to uncover information about Lorca’s death, and finally passed away mysteriously in 1976 while living in Costa Rica. In this book, Bonet turns Penón into a literary character and graphically reconstructs his experiences in Spain, primarily his time in Granada from 1955 to 1956. Mixing a heavy dose of history with literary imagination, Bonet gives body and visual texture to Penón’s life’s work, which culminated in the posthumous appearance of the Penón papers thanks to his friend Marta Osorio, who published the notes and files in 2000 as Muerte, olvido y fantasía: Crónica de la investigación de Agustín Penón sobre Federico García Lorca. The 170-page La araña del olvido lacks chapter divisions, but the reader can organize the work into approximately 16 sequences based on location, chronology, characters involved, and topics discussed. Further, the book can be a challenge for those not familiar with the long list of historical references or individuals named in the book, acquaintances both of Lorca and of Agustín Penón. Some of those many characters include members of the Rosales family, Thornton “Toño” Wilder, William Layton, actress Marta Osorio, theater director José Martín Recuerda, Lorca’s cousin Enrique González García, Lorca’s family servant and chauffeur Angelina and Paquito el Loja, Granada mayor Manuel Fernández Montesinos, Ramón Ruiz Alonso, who was responsible for Lorca’s detainment, Lorca’s close friend from his youth, Emilia Llanos, Fuente Grande individuals

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such as Manuel “Manolito” Castilla (who allegedly buried Lorca), and the poet and translator, Ben Belitt. Bonet’s novel relates Penón’s research and experiences, always encircled by tales of deceit, distrust, silence, and an ominous dark shadow that seems to track Penón’s every step, ultimately leading to his mysterious death in the final pages. Penón’s activities are motivated by three overarching questions, which are generated during a dinner party with José Rosales and others: “¿Por qué fue asesinado [Lorca]?” [Why was Lorca killed?], “¿Quién lo mató?” [Who killed him?], and “¿Dónde está enterrado?” (16) [Where is he buried?]. The text, then, takes the reader through a series of interviews, encounters, close calls, and friendships. Penón meets most of the Rosales family, who was close to Lorca’s family and tried to keep him safe in his final days; he receives the visit of American professor and author William Layton; he carries out a series of meetings with remaining Lorca family members; he spends time in conversation with Emilia Llanos, Lorca’s close childhood friend; he visits the alleged burial grounds of Lorca near Víznar and Fuente Grande, just outside of Granada; he investigates the role of Ramón Ruiz Alonso in the arrest and death of Lorca, meeting with Alonso in Madrid; and finally, he leaves Spain in fear of his safety. In circular meta-fictional fashion, in the final pages of the book we see Penón in Costa Rica in 1976, organizing and sending his papers to Bill Layton, as noticed in the opening pages. Temporally, it is as if the entire graphic novel is one long flash-back to the 1950s from the 1976 present, just before Penón’s untimely death. The analysis of La araña del olvido here focuses on what could be considered three defining topics and graphic motifs from Enrique Bonet’s novel: first, Lorca’s transcendence as a specter that returns; second, the visual metaphor of the sombra, or all-encompassing shadow; and third, the issue of writing and history itself. Bonet demonstrates how in Penón’s time, as in ours, Lorca’s legacy is still very much alive in Granada. La araña del olvido shows, according to Juan Mata’s prologue, the “latidos, costumbres, lugares y sonidos de la época” [pulsations, customs, places, and sounds of the period] along with offering a “testimonio de un tiempo y de una cuidad” (7) [testimony of a particular time and city]. Even though Lorca does not appear physically in the text, he is ever-present just as he is in Hernández’s La huella de Lorca; he motivates all that happens, and his image from the past conditions all those who speak of him in the present. We notice this at the beginning of Penón’s research in Granada when he tapes the photo of Lorca on his wall (14, see Fig. 5.5). In the sequential zoom-ins seen in those panels, we get

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Fig. 5.5  Lorca as dots on a page (14) in La araña del olvido by Enrique Bonet

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the sense that the search for Lorca is like the infinitesimal series of dots: experiences, histories, questions, or uncertainties. On page 59, we see a similar image of Lorca, which again is reduced to a pattern of dots watching over the conversation between Penón and Emila Llanos. Lorca’s writings and drawings also serve as the backdrop of the conversations later in the text as Emilia shows Agustín the book that Lorca gave her many years prior (60). This transcendence of Lorca’s life, spirit, and legacy is perhaps framed most clearly by Emilia, who suggests that all the actions related to Lorca in 1955 and 1956 are somehow enabled by the spirit of Lorca, “que nuestros actos siguen condicionados por su presencia” (109) [that our actions continue to be influenced by his presence], that Lorca stills lives on for Agustín, and that all the success that Penón finds in his research is due to Lorca’s help (110). The specter of Lorca appears in the most unlikely places, such as in the office of Ramón Ruiz Alonso, who arrested Lorca in 1936, where Penón sees a volume of the Obras completas (141). Moreover, seemingly everyone in town has a story about Lorca, an opinion, or an answer to the questions left by his death. Even the young child at Fuente Grande seems to know the truth of his disappearance; “aquí lo mataron” (158) [this is where they killed him], he tells Penón. Just as Lorca’s spirit lingers, another more sinister supernatural force permeates the text as well. Throughout the novel, Penón’s character refers to a shadow that continually threatens him. Additionally, and from the first page, the novel is framed in keeping silence (much like some of Lorca’s own works, such as La casa de Bernarda Alba), as Penón recalls a joke he heard in Granada, where the Spaniard goes to Portugal to get his dental work done because in the Spain of the Franco regime, “no podemos abrir la boca” (9) [we cannot open our mouths]. This image of silence is elaborated on page 12 in an all-encompassing single panel splash page wherein Penón appears strangled by the dark sombra that will pursue him throughout the text (see Fig. 5.6). The sinister shadow appears in the streets (20), in Agustín’s dreams (111, 143), in his research, as he visits with Ramón Ruiz Alonso (145), and in his final moments, on the last page of the book (170). Perhaps the most impacting reference to the sombra is the chaotic full spread of disjointed and abstract images on pages 86 and 87, where the shadows engulf everything: the images of the past, the memories of those with whom  Penón has spoken, the threatening interrogations by others, the drawings by Lorca, and the still unanswered questions. On page 87, the shadow is composed in part of Federico’s tears, as well as with the repetition of words of negation, “nunca, nunca, nunca” [never, never,

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Fig. 5.6  Splash panel sombra (12) in La araña del olvido by Enrique Bonet

never]. The sombra is a rich visual metaphor employed by Bonet throughout the text and could be interpreted as the oppression of the Franco regime or the ambiguity of history, as well as the fears, nightmares, obsessions, or desires of the protagonist himself. The textuality and form of Bonet’s graphic novel present a penetrating study of the nature of writing and history making. This meta-history, or story about the writing of history, puts at the forefront the process and production of research and writing. Agustín Penón is constantly seen

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jotting notes in a binder and filing the papers in his briefcase. At the end of the novel, he types his notes into written form, but he still struggles with his own expressive capacities (161). Finally, after some years of not touching the files, he organizes them in his briefcase and sends them to William Layton (168). Biographer Ian Gibson would consult the papers in the 1980s and 1990s, and Marta Osorio, the common friend of both Layton and Penón, would publish the papers in 2000. Bonet’s commentary on the nature of writing itself is suggested in the many versions of history that riddle Penón’s research, each one in search of truth. On page 40, Penón says, “[a]sí es mi trabajo, remover en el fango de la memoria, cribar los recuerdos, los olvidos, las opiniones, las fantasías… para intentar encontrar alguna verdad” [such is my work, to stir up the mire of memories, sift through the past, the forgotten opinions, and fantasies… in order to try to find some bit of truth]. Finding historical truth is a complicated task, Bonet’s book tells us, as Penón also laments later that “todavía no he encontrado a dos personas que coinciden en indicar el mismo lugar [del enterramiento de Lorca]” (90) [I still have not found two people that agree on the place of Lorca’s burial]. This understanding of meta-history echoes Hayden White’s writings on the “fictive element in all historical narrative” wherein “history belongs to the category of ‘discursive writing,’ so that when the fictional element—or mythic plot structure—is obviously present in it, it ceases to be history altogether and becomes a bastard genre, product of an unholy, though not unnatural, union between history and poetry” (83, 99, emphasis in original). Despite his obsession and efforts, Penón becomes resigned to the fact that he has not been able to expose any “última verdad de unos hechos que nadie ha sido capaz de revelarme por completo” (156) [definitive truth regarding events that no one has been able to completely uncover]. In postmodern fashion, La araña del olvido is fragmented both chronologically and spatially, and the reader is transported from place to place and from time period to time period following Penón in his travels, memories, and investigations. Formalistically, this disjointed manner of storytelling comes to a head at the end of the book, where from pages 159 to 167 the number of panels per page increases from 1 to 2, to 4, to 8, to 12, to 16, to 30, and finally, to 48 (167, see Fig. 5.7). The accelerated rhythm and vertiginous flutter of images in this sequence recreates the memories, encounters, and fragmented truths experienced by Penón during his time in Spain. What lingers still, though, is uncertainty, the same anguished questions that the writer had at the beginning of his quest: “¿Por qué?”

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Fig. 5.7  Miniature visual metonymies (167) in La araña del olvido by Enrique Bonet

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[Why?], “¿Quién?” [Who?], and “¿Dónde?” [Where?]. Each of the miniature visual metonymies on page 167 connects to a larger history or memory of those that were in some way associated with Lorca or Penón. The images of the past reappear in fragmented form to suggest that even though the ghosts of the past return, they are still at times difficult to understand or capture with language. This idea is reinforced in the eight divided panels on page 168—emblematic of what Luis Gasca and Román Gubern call raccords (433–39)—, which visually imply that even though the writer seeks to formulate a coherent history, the result of the quest is still a fragmented narrative with holes seeking to be filled, with gaps in the (hi)stories just like the gutters between the panels (see Fig. 5.8). La araña del olvido’s meta-fictional levels also branch into the realm of intertextuality. At its core, this is a text about texts, about a writer, and about a poem. Bonet borrows the title of his book from one of Lorca’s early poems, the 1919 text from Libro de poemas [Book of Poems] titled “Sueño” [Dream] where the lyrical I prophetically tells the reader: “Mi corazón reposa junto a la fuente fría. / (Llénalo con tus hilos, / araña del olvido)” (1–3) [My heart is resting by the cool spring’s banks. / (Spin it full of thread, / spider of forgetting)].6 Perhaps Bonet is telling readers that the history of Lorca, and history in general, is just a web of stories, experiences, treasons, lies, loves, obsessions, and uncertainties. In the end, the yearning for certainty leads to melancholy and oblivion.

Surrealism and Poetry in  Lorca: Un poeta en Nueva York Carles Esquembre’s 2016 graphic novel, Lorca: Un poeta en Nueva York, treats the transcendence of the Lorquian spirit through recourse to the people, landscapes, and poetic lines of Lorca’s time in New York City from 1929 to 1930. This volume offers the reader a visual backdrop to the experience and poetic result of Lorca’s eight-month visit to New  York, during which time Lorca wrote the poems for one of his most difficult but well-known poetic collections, Poeta en Nueva York [Poet in New York]. In Esquembre’s book, according to Ángel Herrero, “no opera en primera línea el texto poético, sino el texto biográfico, que no es trasposición, sino 6  All quotations of García Lorca’s poems are from Obras completas. Parenthetical documentation refers to poetic line numbers. English translations come from Collected Poems.

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Fig. 5.8 Fragmented raccords (168) in La araña del olvido by Enrique Bonet

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obra de primera mano. Esta es una de las claves del libro de Esquembre. Evitar la tentación de trasponer versos y ensartarlos aquí y allá, de confundirlos con el texto” (4) [rather than the poetic text, the biographical text is the primary focus; and it is a first-hand interpretation, not a transposition. This is one of the keys to Esquembre’s book. One must avoid the temptation to simply transpose poetic lines and link them together here and there, confusing them with the text]. In reality, Esquembre’s text contains three stories at once, or three graphic and textual levels of Lorca’s experience in New  York: the real, which recounts the biographical and historical happenings of Lorca’s New  York voyage; the surreal, which demonstrates the abstract, subconscious, or psychoanalytical processes that seem to have been the internal undercurrents of Lorca’s reality; and lastly, a series of sketches that introduces each chapter, each one building on the next and resulting in an image of Lorca’s face amidst the machinery and structures of New York City. Perhaps the full-page splash panel images of this final textual level suggest that just as Lorca defined his New York experience through poetry and drawing, New York City actually constructed Lorca, or was integral to the person and poet that he came to be (see the progression of those images in Fig.  5.9). In fact, Lorca stated prior to his visit to New York that he knew that in order to write the great poetry that he was destined to write, he needed to immerse himself in the geometry and anguish of the great American metropolis, to witness firsthand the black man’s pain in a contrary world (García Lorca, Obras 3: 164, 167). In order to engage each of these levels of textuality, Esquembre’s volume pulls from Lorca’s letters, biography, photographs, lectures, drawings, and the poems themselves. The first two of these textual modes, the real and the surreal, or the biographical and the poetic, are woven together seamlessly throughout the text. Readers know about Lorca’s experience in New York from photographs, from the letters he wrote to his family and friends in Spain and elsewhere, and from the poems and drawings produced there, but Esquembre gives us a stunning visual interpretation with which to juxtapose the rest of what we know about Lorca’s life and work in New  York. Esquembre transfers a biographical and poetic code to a visual one. Along these lines, Herrero suggests that, “[l]a transcodificación siempre encierra descubrimientos […] La transcodificación gráfica, gracias al arte de Carles Esquembre, nos deja en la retina significados visuales de algo mucho más profundo, la propia experiencia de Lorca” (6) [transcoding always contains discoveries. Graphic transcoding, thanks to

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Fig. 5.9  The “construction” of Lorca in Lorca: Un poeta en Nueva York by Carles Esquembre

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the art of Carles Esquembre, offers a visual understanding of something much more profound, the experience of Lorca himself]. Esquembre’s graphic novel is divided into 12 chapters, the final one serving as an epilogue, and the volume employs only black and white tones throughout. This is an important feature since for Scott McCloud, “[i]n black and white, the ideas behind the art are communicated more directly. Meaning transcends form. Art approaches language” (192, emphasis in original). Esquembre’s black and white renderings likewise seek to focus on the ideas, ethical values, anxiety, and poetic experience related to Lorca’s time in New York. The book starts with a preliminary chapter, titled “El sueño de Lorca” [Lorca’s Dream], which frames Lorca’s trip to New York as well as underscores the anxiety and fragmentation that riddled his US experience. In the dream sequence of the first chapter, considered part of what I would call the “surreal” textual level, Lorca is shown playing the piano (10), being chased by a large ant that evokes the images of Buñuel and Dalí’s film Un chien andalou (13), falling into the darkness as ants crawl from a hole in a hand (another image from the surrealist film) (14), and finally, seen in a reproduction of a ripped photograph of Lorca and his former lover, the sculptor Emilio Aladrén (18). At once the reader is confronted in this chapter with Lorca’s past, which is what led him to abandon Spain in first place: the criticism he felt from his friends Buñuel and Dalí, the falling out that he had with Aladrén, and the depression that followed him to the Americas. The fact that the book is framed within a dream sequence of fear and anguish effectively foreshadows the ensuing series of confusions between the biographical and more dreamlike New York experiences that appear throughout the text. What follows in Esquembre’s graphic novel are chapters that detail biographical and historical events related to Lorca’s time in New  York, such as his arrival to the city; his friendship and outings with Fernando del Río, León Felipe, Gabriel García Maroto, and Colin Hackforth-Jones (29); visits to Broadway cabaret shows and Harlem jazz clubs (59, 61); time spent studying English at Columbia University; adventures on Coney Island (81); his trip to Vermont with Phillip Cummings (124); Wall Street chaos; and finally, six years later and now in Madrid, his delivery of the Poeta en Nueva York manuscript to his friend and editor, José Bergamín (143). Interspersed throughout the text are striking surrealistic or dreamlike sequences that highlight the suffocating nature of the massive city and the impact that it has on the individual. In the full-page splash panel on page 38, for example, which would constitute part of the “surreal” textual level,

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Fig. 5.10  Surreal visual text (38) in Lorca: Un poeta en Nueva York by Carles Esquembre

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Lorca imagines the young child he met on the boat voyage to the Americas and how the city will engulf him (see Fig. 5.10). Here, with an image of the helpless boy dressed in white appearing above a panoramic shot of the dark and expansive metropolis below, a menacing demon devours the child. And later, in the jazz clubs of Harlem, Esquembre’s novel shows images that evoke irrational sequences from Lorca’s surrealist poems, such as “El rey de Harlem” [The King of Harlem], where the lyrical I celebrates the invasion of African influence and culture through references to jungles and crocodiles. The initial lines of that poem read: Con una cuchara de palo le arrancaba los ojos a los cocodrilos y golpeaba el trasero de los monos. Con una cuchara de palo. (1–4) [With a spoon / he dug out the crocodiles’ eyes, / and swatted the monkeys on their asses. / With a spoon.]

The four panels on page 63 offer a graphic interpretation of those poetic lines, and they constitute a type of visual ascending climax, with each panel growing in size from top to bottom just as the energy and anxiety produced by the approaching crocodile increases (see Fig. 5.11). Subsequently, Esquembre details Lorca’s weekend outings to Coney Island, where he was struck by the masses of people, the spectacles, and the waste. In his poem “Paisaje de la multitud que vomita (Anochecer en Coney Island)” [Landscape of a Vomiting Multitude (Dusk at Coney Island)], the poetic subject laments its own loneliness, creative impotence, and inability to write as a “poeta sin brazos, perdido / entre la multitud que vomita” (36–37) [poet without arms, lost / in the vomiting multitude]. In Lorca: Un poeta en Nueva York, Lorca’s textual character envisions this sequence as a nightmarish encounter with Buñuel and Dalí wherein he appears without arms and as another spectacle at the fair (87). We cannot overstate the impact that Lorca’s time in New York had on the poet’s life and works. Depressed due to failed personal relationships, struggling to find an innovative and avant-garde voice, suffocated by the overwhelming architecture and hordes of people in the city, and in the midst of the crisis of the 1929 stock market crash, Lorca lashed out through his poems. In one of the most outspoken texts of the poetic

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Fig. 5.11  Visual ascending climax (63) in Lorca: Un poeta en Nueva York by Carles Esquembre

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collection, “Nueva York: Oficina y denuncia” [New York: (Office and Denunciation)], we read: Lo sé. Pero yo no he venido a ver el cielo. He venido para ver la turbia sangre, la sangre que lleva las máquinas a las cataratas ……………………. No, no; yo denuncio. Yo denuncio la conjura de estas desiertas oficinas que no radian las agonías, que borran los programas de la selva. (12–14, 64–68) [But I didn’t come here to see the sky. / I’m here to see the clouded blood, / the blood that sweeps machines over waterfalls […] No, no: I denounce it all. / I denounce the conspiracy / of these deserted offices / that radiate no agony, / that erase the forest’s plans.]

Noting the environment of death and condemnation, Esquembre gives graphic detail of the Wall Street mayhem, which adds to the bleak tone and suffocating surroundings of Lorca’s New  York poems (133, see Fig. 5.12). In this splash panel, Esquembre mixes the real with the surreal in order to create a chaotic and vertiginous visual scene that imitates the anguish, suffering, and pain evident in Lorca’s poems. Esquembre captures the sense of melancholy in an image of Lorca sitting atop the newly erected Chrysler Building, and this further highlights the expansive sense of loneliness and hopelessness that Lorca felt in New York City (120). This tone appears continually throughout Lorca’s New York poems, and it is exposed visually throughout Esquembre’s graphic novel. Drawing attention to Lorca’s poetic genius as well as his lingering insecurities and anxieties, Esquembre’s graphic novel masterfully interweaves the biographical and the poetic, the real and the surreal. He demonstrates how Lorca represented New  York in his poems, but also how Lorca was shaped and constructed by the city he deeply admired and feared.

Conclusion In their own ways, each of the three graphic novels devoted to Lorca’s life and works discussed here gives an added visual component to the study of Lorca’s transcendence and legacy. They each seek to pay homage to the

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Fig. 5.12  Wall Street mayhem (133) in Lorca: Un poeta en Nueva York by Carles Esquembre

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Spanish poet and, through recourse to historical memory, personal memory, and (post)memory, they each demonstrate the persistence of Lorca’s spirit in contemporary Spanish literature. Carlos Hernández’s volume seeks to recover the memories of Lorca from those that knew him and followed in his footsteps, and “hacerlo vivir” [to make him live on] through (post)memory and narrative. Enrique Bonet’s meta-historical text takes the enigmas of Lorca’s death and subsequent attempts to uncover the mysteries of his disappearance as the backdrop for a tale centered on memory, history, and intrigue. And Carles Esquembre’s novel fleshes out part of Lorca’s history by giving visual texture to his poetry and interpreting difficult written metaphors and symbols with his own rich and at-times difficult visual metaphors and symbols. Ultimately, each of these graphic novels dedicated to Lorca treat him as a specter that continually returns, continually present in the minds and hearts of those that knew him or know his work, notwithstanding the absence of his body and the enigma surrounding his death. These graphic works underscore anew the persistent memory of the Andalusian poet in the latest manifestations of sequential art in the Spanish context.

Works Cited Anderson, Andrew A. “Federico García Lorca.” The Cambridge History of Spanish Literature. Ed. David T. Gies. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. 595–608. Barrero, Manuel. Diccionario terminológico de la historieta. Sevilla: Asociación Cultural Tebeosfera (ACyT) Ediciones, 2015. Bennett, Tamryn. “Comics Poetry: Beyond ‘Sequential Art’.” Image [&] Narrative 15.2 (2014): 109–23. Bonet, Enrique. La araña del olvido. Prologue by Juan Mata. Bilbao: Astiberri, 2015. Cappa, G. “Lorca, superhéroe de la poesía.” Diario de Sevilla. 30 Mar. 2011. h t t p s : / / w w w. d i a r i o d e s e v i l l a . e s / o c i o / L o r c a - s u p e r h e r o e poesia_0_464654327.html. Cavanaugh, Cecelia J. Lorca’s Drawings and Poems. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1995. Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and Practices from the Legendary Cartoonist. New York: Norton, 2008. Esquembre, Carles. Lorca: Un poeta en Nueva York. Prologue by Ángel Herrero. Torroella de Montgrí, Girona: Panini, 2016. García Lorca, Federico. Collected Poems: Revised Bilingual Edition. Trans. Catherine Brown et al. Ed. Christopher Maurer. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.

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———. Obras completas. Ed. Miguel García-Posada. 4 vols. Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg-Círculo de Lectores, 1996–97. García, Santiago. On the Graphic Novel. Trans. Bruce Campbell. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 2015. Gasca, Luis, and Román Gubern. El discurso del cómic. Madrid: Cátedra, 2011. Gibson, Ian, and Quique Palomo (ilustr.). Vida y muerte de Federico García Lorca. Barcelona: Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, 2018. Harris, Sarah. “‘I Had Not Dared to Remember’: Trauma and Historical Memory in Recent Spanish Comics.” ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comic Studies 9.1 (2017): n.p. http://imagetext.english.ufl.edu/archives/v9_1/harris/. Hererro, Ángel. Prologue. Lorca: Un poeta en Nueva York. By Carles Esquembre. Torroella de Montgrí, Girona: Panini, 2016. 4–6. Hernández, Carlos. “Orgullo de ver…” Facebook, 8 Nov. 2018. https://www. facebook.com/carlos.hernandez.71653318. Hernández, Carlos, and El Torres. La huella de Lorca. Barcelona: Norma Editorial, 2011. Hirsch, Marianne. “Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-Memory.” Discourse 15.2 (1992–93): 3–29. ———. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. New York: Columbia UP, 2012. ———. “Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile.” Poetics Today 17.4 (1996): 659–86. Javierre, and Juanfran Cabrera (ilustr.). Los caballeros de la Orden de Toledo: Buñuel, Lorca, Dalí. Motril, Granada: Arian and El Ángel Caído, 2017. Kyle, Richard. “The Future of ‘Comics’.” Wonderworld 2 (1964): 3–4. Labanyi, Jo. “The Politics of Memory in Contemporary Spain.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 9.2 (2008): 119–25. Martín Segarra, Susanna. Residencia de Estudiantes. Barcelona: Bruguera-Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, 2019. Mata, Juan. Prologue. La araña del olvido. By Enrique Bonet. Bilbao: Astiberri, 2015. 5–7. Maurer, Christopher. Preface. Collected Poems: Revised Bilingual Edition. By Federico García Lorca. Trans. Catherine Brown et al. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. vii–ix. Mayhew, Jonathan. Apocryphal Lorca: Translation, Parody, Kitsch. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New  York: Paradox Press, 2000. Merino, Ana, and Brittany Tullis. “The Sequential Art of Memory: The Testimonial Struggle of Comics in Spain.” Memory and Its Discontents: Spanish Culture in

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the Early Twenty-First Century. Ed. Luis Martín-Estudillo and Nicholas Spadaccini. Hispanic Issues On Line 11 (2012): 211–25. Tronsgard, Jordan. “Drawing the Past: The Graphic Novel as Postmemory in Spain.” Romance Notes 57.2 (2017): 267–79. Weiner, Stephen. Faster Than a Speeding Bullet: The Rise of the Graphic Novel. Intro. Will Eisner. New York: Nantier, Beall, Minoustchine, 2003. White, Hayden. “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact.” Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. 81–100.

PART II

Transforming Identities: Race, Gender, Immigration

CHAPTER 6

Polemic Collision: Race, Immigration, and Gender Violence in Olimpita Jeffrey K. Coleman

Two issues that have continuously dominated Spanish news media in recent years are African immigration and gender violence. The first is portrayed as a problem of national security often framed as an invasion of Spain in which mostly Black African men are purportedly stealing jobs from white Spanish men (Corkill 52). On the other hand, the second issue is an internal cultural concern that reflects the national discourse of (toxic) masculinity, as in the recent case of the far-right party Vox, whose male spokesmen refuse to acknowledge that gender violence even exists (Rosati n.p.). The 2009 graphic novel Olimpita, written by Hernán Migoya and illustrated by Joan Marín, combines these two pressing issues in order to create what I will describe as a polemic collision. Through its use of binary black and white drawing and compounded stereotypes, the novel’s plot is an emotional roller coaster with an unanticipated crash ending. This collision not only facilitates a better understanding of how race and gender are constructed and hierarchized in Spain, but also recognizes the importance of graphic novels within Spanish cultural production because, as Bart

J. K. Coleman (*) Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 C. McKinney, D. F. Richter (eds.), Spanish Graphic Narratives, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56820-7_6

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Beaty outlines, comics “mirror key attitudes of the time in which they were produced” (8–9). Thus, it is important to recognize that Olimpita is a product of the 2008 global financial crisis, during which gender violence and anti-immigrant sentiments were both on the rise. Olimpita is composed of two prologues, three central parts, and an epilogue, which portray the stories of two main protagonists: Olimpita and Ass. The novel primarily follows the life of Olimpita García García, a 32-year-old woman in Barcelona, who is the victim of gender violence by her husband Carmelo. The couple runs a fish market stand in the Mercat de l’Abaceria Central, located in the Gràcia neighborhood of Barcelona where they live. As a secondary plot, the novel portrays the journey of Ass, an undocumented migrant from Senegal who has come to Barcelona in search of a better life. He also lives in Gràcia and struggles to find work in the area due to his race and lack of documentation. Ass and Olimpita meet when he goes to the market in search of food and is dismissed by Glòria (a xenophobic and racist Catalan woman who runs a neighboring stand), to which Olimpita responds by gifting Ass some leftover perch. Olimpita’s act of kindness gradually develops into a full-blown affair as she begins to fantasize about Ass and spends more and more time with him. It is strikingly clear that the tryst serves to help Olimpita escape the confinement of her abusive marriage to Carmelo. In Part II, she convinces her husband to hire Ass to help at the stand. Carmelo agrees, and the stand becomes extremely popular with locals. However, as Carmelo notices his wife’s mood brighten and libido diminish, he becomes suspicious of her relationship with Ass and beats her with the threat of killing her if he finds out that she is cheating on him. In Part III, Olimpita begs Ass to kill Carmelo, but he is unable to do so because he fears what repercussions that might provoke, especially considering his status as a migrant. Instead, he gives Olimpita an ultimatum to leave Carmelo for him or else he will tell Carmelo the truth; alternatively, Ass will go to the police to report Carmelo for domestic violence. Olimpita, rather than lose her husband (and her financial security), opts to kill Ass and plant the knife so that it looks like a suicide. She goes on to live her life as if nothing ever happened. The epilogue takes place in Ass’s hometown of Saint Louis, Senegal with Fatou, Ass’s lover, waking up as she hears her name, the last word that Ass mutters while bleeding to death in Barcelona. Before delving into the various literary and artistic techniques that Migoya and Marín utilize to intertwine the fates of Olimpita and Ass, it is worth exploring the social and historical context from which this graphic

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novel emerged. In 2009, Spain was beginning to experience the sharp decline of its economy as a result of the global financial crisis that started the year before; unemployment had skyrocketed, leading to an eviction epidemic as many could not afford their rent or mortgages. The crisis created social despair throughout Spain as jobs became scarce across all sectors. In addition, austerity measures imposed by the Spanish government threatened the survival of the welfare state. Simultaneously, Spain was the European nation of choice for immigration, having the world’s second highest rate of immigration after the United States (Moffette 3–4). In his book Racism and Discourse in Spain and Latin America, Teun van Dijk details how the media has had a major role in determining social perceptions on race and immigration in Spain (14–18). Most notably, the face of immigration in the Spanish media since the 1990s has been that of sub-­ Saharan Africans who arrive to Spain by way of the Mediterranean Sea, despite the fact that these immigrants constitute a very small portion of Spain’s actual immigrant population. The obvious racial Otherness of sub-­ Saharan Africans in Spain makes them an easy target and scapegoat for many issues connected to immigration. Barcelona, as one of Spain’s largest cities and economies, has continually been a hub for immigration, which has made the city more cosmopolitan. But this demographic shift has also stoked old xenophobic flames from the mid-twentieth century when there was mass immigration from Andalucía and Murcia by those in search of jobs in the more prosperous region of Catalonia. These southerners were pejoratively referred to as xarnegos in Catalan (charnego in Castilian Spanish).1 The word is commonly used to refer to a Spaniard of non-Catalan origin who migrated to the region. Its etymology reveals its sinister nature since xarnego is a term for dogs, thus animalizing these migrants as subhuman, a common xenophobic tactic. For the purposes of this essay, it is worth noting that Olimpita and Carmelo are the children of xarnegos, and thus should not be immune or unfamiliar with the xenophobia that is directed towards the novel’s immigrant characters, Ass and Doris. The national economic crisis also correlated with an uptick in gender violence, producing seventy-six deaths in 2008, the highest number of deaths in recent history according to data from the Ministerio de Sanidad, Servicios Sociales e Igualdad 1  There is no direct translation for xarnego, but it functions similarly to the slur “wetback” in reference to Mexican immigrants who enter the US for economic and labor reasons and are likely not speakers of the primary language of the receptor culture.

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[Ministry of Health, Social Services, and Equality] (“Víctimas” n.p.). This alarming statistic may have been inspiration for this thematic thread in the novel as a way to call awareness to the issue because, as Jorge Catalá-­ Carraso notes, “[u]sing the language of comics, these artists have contributed to the debate surrounding the causes, implications, and consequences of the long crisis in Spain” (175).

Illustrating Violence in Black and White Ass and Olimpita each embody one of the two main themes of African immigration and gender violence mentioned previously, but their collision intertwines their precarity as marginalized figures within the fatalistic social constructs of racism and patriarchy. One way in which the author and illustrator make this apparent is through the deliberate choice to use black-and-white throughout the novel. As Scott McCloud explains, “[t]he differences between black-and-white and color comics are vast and profound, affecting every level of the reading experience. In black and white, the ideas behind the art are communicated more directly. Meaning transcends form. Art approaches language” (192, emphasis in the original). In Olimpita, the absence of color serves to accentuate the gravity of gender violence and racism that the novel portrays. With regard to the portrayal of gender violence, the first prologue, entitled “Un año en la vida de Olimpita García García (32) resumido en 12 dibujos” (Migoya and Marín 1) [A Year in the Life of Olimpita García García (32) summarized in 12 drawings],2 captures the ways in which black and white emphasizes violence. For example, the prologue’s title image is an extreme closeup of Olimpita’s right eye. The mostly white panel only uses black to sculpt her facial features and hair. Her eye looks to the right, connoting a sense of mystery as the reader turns the page to see the first six panels (3–4, see Fig. 6.1). These square panels are divided by color and gender into two columns: Olimpita has panels on the left side of the page with black backgrounds, whereas Carmelo has three panels on the right side of the page with white backgrounds. In each of Olimpita’s panels, she says nothing and her face transforms from untouched to battered, which coincides with the crescendo of Carmelo’s voice as he yells “¡¡Cállate!!” (3) [Shut up!]. The contrast in Olimpita’s panels between the background and her face allows the reader to clearly see the black eye and bruises she incurs on her 2

 All translations are my own.

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Fig. 6.1  Colors and genders (3–4) in Olimpita by Hernán Migoya and Joan Marín

face. The next page inverts this pattern as the six panels show Carmelo being overly affectionate through the use of the onomatopoeia “muac” [muah] for kisses as Olimpita’s face heals (4). The use of black-and-white is essential in creating suspense vis-à-vis gender violence. One clear example of this is in Part II when Carmelo forces Olimpita to sing “La falsa moneda” [The Fake Coin] out on the balcony after having beaten her (73–75). The song, a Flamenco classic, tells the story of a man who has been cheated on by a gypsy woman who he compares to a fake coin, “Que de mano en mano va y ninguno se la queda” (73) [that goes from hand to hand and no one keeps it]. This metaphor is quite poignant considering the historical context of the financial crisis. Just as money seemed to have slipped through the hands of Spaniards during the crisis, Olimpita slipped past Carmelo’s masculine gaze to have an affair with Ass. The song choice also reflects Carmelo’s

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Andalusian heritage, marking him as an Other in Catalonia. When Olimpita opens the windows to begin singing, her face is entirely blacked out, and  the chromatic focus is on her white blouse (72). Throughout her performance the illustrator directs the reader’s attention to Carmelo’s three friends on the street listening, or on the background, so as to not show the extent of the abuse. However, on the following pages there is a juxtaposition between the men crying from the beauty of Olimpita’s singing and the liquid that rains down on them from the balcony (74–75). The fact that this liquid is drawn as black drops could give the impression of rainfall to coincide with the sadness of the song and the men listening. However, one of the men stammers, “¿Os habéis visto? Tenéis…” (74, see Fig. 6.2) [Have you seen yourselves? You have…], as he looks at the faces of his two comrades. The ellipsis simultaneously creates suspense and confirms the readers’ suspicion that the liquid is actually Olimpita’s blood. As a result, the man’s inability to say the word sangre [blood] out loud is a critique of Spanish men’s inability to denounce gender violence and firmly establishes these men as implicit accomplices to Carmelo’s violent abuse. The use of black-and-white plays out differently in displaying racism, as the contrast in color serves to accentuate Otherness. In one episode, Ass and three Latin American migrant men looking for work approach a construction foreman (17). The three white-passing men are given jobs, but Ass is not. When he asks why, the foreman responds, “¿Para ti? Si se presenta el inspector estos aún se pasan por españoles… pero tú, ¿dónde te escondo? Lo siento, es lo que hay. Ven cuando se te haya aclarado un poco el bronceado, hombre” (17) [For you? If the inspector comes, these guys still pass for Spaniards… but you, where do I hide you? Sorry, it is what it is. Come back when your tan has faded a little bit]. The panel in which this quote takes place has a black background, with Ass towering over the foreman, staring angrily as he receives the racist comment. His blackness blends in slightly with the background, while his white plaid shirt provides contrast. This scene and the foreman’s quote reflect Frantz Fanon’s psychoanalytical reflections on race in his iconic Black Skin, White Masks, where he writes that the Black man subconsciously states, “I want to be acknowledged not as Black, but as White” (45, emphasis in the original). If blackness must fade in order for one to achieve work, and therefore have value within a capitalist framework, then an approximation to whiteness is expected of Ass. However, neither Ass’s words nor his body language imply a desire to acquire whiteness, but rather for Blackness to be seen as valid and equal.

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Fig. 6.2  Drops of Olimpita’s blood (74) in Olimpita by Hernán Migoya and Joan Marín

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This approximation is also seen artistically when Ass is drawn as darker skinned in panels in which he appears alone. The opposite is true when he appears in panels with white people. This does not suggest that Ass experiences a transformation regarding his blackness, but it rather demonstrates that race is a social construct more focused on relational dynamics. In addition, to continuously draw Ass as dark-skinned would make his presence sinister, as in the case of the African men who appear on pages 41 and 42 when Olimpita seeks Ass amongst the group of Black men with whom he lives. In one panel, Marín draws the group as a continuous, black shadow in which white is only used to demarcate their eyes, teeth, and the background. The panel gives the sensation of darkness overcoming Olimpita as she steps into unknown territory, coinciding with the Spanish definition of negro [black] as dark, sinister, and ominous.

The Discourse of Xenophobia Such stereotyping is not only found in the artistry, but also throughout the novel’s plot. The undercurrent of xenophobia and racism that marks Ass’s storyline highlights the subtle and explicit ways in which these issues are manifest in Spain today. One character who embodies outward prejudice is Glòria Rius, the Catalan woman who owns the sandwich stand across from Carmelo and Olimpita’s fish stand. In Part I, Glòria rebukes Ass for asking for food at her stand. When he returns several days later in search of work, she lashes out at him with racist commentary: “¡Que no te acerques más por aquí, ja estic farta! Al final seguro que dejas preñada a la sudaca y tengo camada de conguitos. ¡Y por ahí sí que no!” (29) [Don’t come around here again. I’m fed up! I’m sure in the end you’ll knock up the Latina woman and I’ll have a litter of conguitos. There’s no way I’m having that!].3 Glòria singles out and dehumanizes both immigrant characters (Ass and Doris) by connoting them as hypersexual, savage, and animalistic. Her hatred for immigrants is made clear when she states earlier, “Hace 40 años nos invaden los españoles, hace 10 los moros… Y ahora los latinos y los negros…” (22) [Forty years ago the Spanish invaded us, the Moors ten years ago… And now the Latinos and Blacks]. Glòria’s prejudice is not simply racist, it is more so xenophobic as it includes white foreigners, such as the Andalusians who came in the 1960s. 3  Conguitos (Little people from the Congo) is a popular candy in Spain, consisting of chocolate covered peanuts, and is often used as a term of endearment for Black children.

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A subtle use of stereotype in the graphic novel appears in the form of what in theatrical works I refer to as dramaturgical blackface, deliberate textual changes to spelling and/or grammar to indicate a character’s Latin American origin, which visually insinuates that Latin Americans and their dialects of Spanish are inferior. Such is the case of Doris, a prominent Latin American character in the novel. For example, after Ass leaves the market for the first time, having received a fish from Olimpita, Doris quips, “Te he visto bien fasinada, linda” (24) [I saw you quite fascinated, dear]. The misspelling of fascinada, though not highlighted, is a deliberate decision on the part of Hernán Migoya to accentuate Doris as Latin American. Whereas there is a distinction between how Spaniards and Latin Americans would pronounce this word, the intentional misspelling functions to further marginalize Doris as a Latin American immigrant. Her lines throughout the novel are flirtatious in nature, playing into the stereotype of the sexy Latina. In the end, Glòria fires her “por sisadora. Es que arriben aquí con sus costumbres y…” (143) [for being a petty thief. It’s that they arrive with their customs and…]. This excuse that she gives to an infrequent customer covers up that readers are aware of the fact that Doris knew that Olimpita and Ass were having an affair. By firing Doris, Glòria washes her hands of any connection to the murder of Ass.

Fetishization of the Black Penis The trope of the hyper-sexualized Black man is used throughout the novel to further the plot. Three notable examples are: the meta-literary moment when Olimpita buys a graphic novel called El príncipe de ébano (56–58) [The Ebony Prince]; the two-page panel entitled “Recuperación eréctil de Ass en 24 pasos” (86–87) [Ass’s Erectile Recuperation in 24 steps]; and Olimpita crying and caressing Ass’s penis after she kills him (142). All three scenes exemplify the way in which Ass functions as an exotic toy for Olimpita. In Part II, after her first sexual encounter with Ass, Olimpita walks to a kiosk where the owner asks her, “¿Desea algo, señora?” [Do you desire something, ma’am?], to which Olimpita responds, “Sí. Eso. Deseo. Deseo” (56) [Yes. That. I desire. Desire]. The play on words between the verb desear [to desire] and the noun deseo [desire] allows the reader to enter Olimpita’s logic: what she wants most is to be desired. Her affair with Ass allows her to feel wanted and cared for in ways that her husband Carmelo cannot make her feel due to his abusive nature. As readers, we only learn the topics of the graphic novel she buys from the kiosk through

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the eyes of Carmelo, who reads it as Olimpita cooks him dinner. El príncipe de ébano is the story of a white woman explorer who gets lost on the border between the African savannah and the expansive desert. Suddenly, she hears a noise and turns around to see a dark-skinned, muscular African man on horseback. As the omniscient narrator states, “La belleza que vio me resulta indescriptible. Ella sintió que por fin había llegado el momento que tanto ansiaba. El momento de ser fiel a un ideal” (58, see Fig. 6.3) [The beauty she saw is indescribable to me. She felt that the moment she had so longed for had finally arrived. The moment to be faithful to an ideal]. Not only is the African man wearing primitive garb in contrast to the Western clothes that the explorer wears, but he also has an expressionless face in contrast to the beaming smile of the explorer. The height differential between him on horseback and the woman on foot implies a power discrepancy, but her sensual gaze connotes the direction of power as determined by the author. The word “ideal” is also a double entendre as it could refer to the perfection of the African man or to a standard of perfection that this man embodies that the explorer cannot find elsewhere. Keeping in mind that we are exposed to this graphic novel through Carmelo’s experience as a reader, it is clear that these panels are what causes him to suspect that Olimpita is attracted to Ass, if not having an affair with him. Later in Part II, Olimpita borrows the keys to Glòria’s downtown apartment so she can have sex with Ass. The sexual act is not shown, but rather a two-page panel, “Recuperación eréctil de Ass en 24 pasos” [Ass’s Erectile Recuperation in 24 steps], illustrates the process by showing Ass’s penis at each stage of the sexual encounter (86–87). This panel is immediately preceded by a two-page panel entitled “24 expresiones inéditas hasta hoy en el rostro de Olimpita” (84–85, see Fig. 6.4) [24 Unprecedented Expressions on Olimpita’s Face Until Today]. As the number of expressions and erectile states coincide, the reader must assume that they go hand in hand. What is striking is that in Olimpita’s panel, we see variations of facial expression, connoting humanity, whereas in the case of Ass, we only see his penis, reducing him to only his sexual organs. As Stuart Hall avers, “stereotyping reduces, essentializes, naturalizes and fixes ‘difference’” (247, emphasis in the original). By employing the stereotype of the big black penis, the author and illustrator do more harm than good in advocating for the humanity of African immigrants such as Ass. In fact, the

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Fig. 6.3  Encounter on the African savannah (58) in Olimpita by Hernán Migoya and Joan Marín

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Fig. 6.4  24 expressions (84–85) in Olimpita by Hernán Migoya and Joan Marín

panels serve to fix difference between Olimpita as a white damsel in distress and Ass as the Big Black Cock. Reduced to his penis, Ass is a mere tool to satisfy Olimpita. As she states during post-coital talk, “Esto es… Esto es mejor que el amor” (88) [This is… This is better than love]. Though Ass does not appear to understand the nuance of this phrase at the time, it is clear to readers that the relationship is utilitarian in nature. Olimpita has no intention of leaving her husband, even though he continues to savagely beat her, as seen at the end of Part II. Instead, she asks Ass to murder Carmelo, which absolves her of responsibility in resolving her own crisis. When he is unable to do so, she begins to fear that Carmelo will catch on to the affair. This is coupled by the fact that she walks in on Ass having sex with Glòria at the latter’s apartment. He attempts to justify it by stating, “Pero… Ella me ayuda. Yo debía eso… Y está muy sola… […] Quiero decir que te amo…” (131) [But… She helps me. I owed that… And she’s very lonely… […] I mean, I love

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you]. Ass’s work at the fish stand does not pay enough for him to take care of himself and send money to his wife and daughter in Senegal, so it is clear that he chose to prostitute himself for extra funds. Whereas he may have feelings for Olimpita, her response to him confirms that the relationship was never truly romantic: “Yo ya tengo quien me ame. Mi Carmelo jamás me haría esto que me has hecho tú” (131) [I already have someone who loves me. My Carmelo would never do what you did to me]. Though this is true regarding Carmelo’s fidelity (as he rejects Doris’s advances throughout the novel), his physical and emotional abuse could hardly be called love. Once Ass is no longer available to satisfy her emotionally or sexually, Olimpita ends the relationship by killing him. The polemic collision comes to a head via premeditated murder as Olimpita gives money to Ass to pay off his roommates so the two of them can have privacy, she then gets him naked, straddles him and slits his throat with a fishing knife. Olimpita’s final words to Ass reveal her motive, “No lo hago por celos, Ass. Te lo prometo. Pero es la única manera de que pueda seguir viviendo” (140, see Fig. 6.5) [I’m not doing this out of jealousy, Ass. I promise you. But it’s the only way I can stay alive]. The decision of the illustrator to have Olimpita’s panels placed upside-down serves several purposes. First, the flipped orientation privileges Ass’s position as the victim of premeditated murder. Second, just as Olimpita’s speech bubbles explain why she is killing Ass and her concern with not leaving a trace of the crime, the upside-­ down orientation demonstrates the self-deception that she employs in order to justify the murder. Third, the juxtaposed panels provide the reader the opportunity to see the murder from the perspective of both characters. The disorienting nature of this page mirrors the unsettling nature of this murder, which serves as the major plot twist that shocks the reader.

After the Collision: Who Is the Real Victim? Olimpita’s decision to stay with her abusive husband because he promises to never beat her again, so long as she does not give him motive to do so, speaks to her pathology as a protagonist. This panel also subverts the victim-­villain dichotomy. Up until the end of the novel, there is empathy for Olimpita and her terrible situation, but in killing Ass, her victimhood drives her to sinister acts because having to choose between Ass and Carmelo proves to be too hard for her. In choosing to kill Ass rather than

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Fig. 6.5  Upside-down panels (140) in Olimpita by Hernán Migoya and Joan Marín

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Carmelo, Olimpita has not only chosen economic dependence over liberation, but also whiteness in order to maintain the racial and national orders. What is most disturbing about Ass’s death is Olimpita’s final action before she leaves the scene: as he is bleeding to death, Olimpita begins to cry and then reaches for his penis, which constitutes the phallic object of her obsession (141, see Fig. 6.6). There is a full-page panel that displays this action, drawn vertically such that the penis is the center of the panel, demonstrating that, as Kobena Mercer notes: “The primal fantasy of the big black penis projects the fear of a threat not only to white womanhood, but to civilization itself” (185). Ass and his Black penis represent a threat to Olimpita’s life and rather than address the true source of the threat, she chooses to eliminate Ass in hope that his death with remove a resurgence of Carmelo’s abuse. The panel makes clear that Olimpita’s attraction to Ass is not authentic, but rather a fetish. In fetishizing Ass, he becomes a taboo, which her societal and patriarchal norms come to reject. Ass’s fatal end speaks to the Fanonian impossibility of a Black man to achieve whiteness (or shed his Blackness) through a relationship with a white woman. Ass’s approximation to whiteness is portrayed through his relationship with Olimpita, because as Fanon notes, “who but a white woman can do this for me? By loving me she proves that I am worthy of white love. I am loved like a white man. […] When my restless hands caress those white breasts, they grasp white civilization and dignity and make them mine” (45). Throughout the novel, Ass appears to have achieved some semblance of stability and happiness in Spain via his relationship with Olimpita, but in reality it is a farce. For instance, as noted earlier, the relationship was only viable so long as it alleviated Olimpita’s emotional and sexual desires. Furthermore, Ass’s intentions are never made clear, but the reader is aware that he has a wife and child back in Senegal, which could suggest that on his end the relationship with Olimpita was not entirely romantic, if at all. Ass’s employment at the fish stand, which allows him to send home remittances, is obtained through Olimpita’s influences. Therefore, maintaining the relationship is as much a financial necessity as it is a sexual or emotional need. Further complicating his motives is the fact that he engages in sexual relations with Glòria for money since Carmelo pays him very little and under the table (which, ironically, in Spanish is pagar en negro [to pay in black]). What Olimpita demonstrates through the collision of race, immigration, and gender, are the ways in which white womanhood is weaponized against people of color, particularly Black men. Both Olimpita and Glòria

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Fig. 6.6  Phallic objects (141) in Olimpita by Hernán Migoya and Joan Marín

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speak ill of immigrant characters while simultaneously engaging in sexual relations with Ass. While this may seem paradoxical, the fetish object (Ass, or more specifically, his penis) is attractive to both of these women, despite the disdain and/or disgust they display publicly. It is for this reason that once the fetish object has been acquired, there is no more psychological attraction. In the case of Olimpita, once she kills Ass, she goes back to life as normal and tries to act as though nothing ever happened. One year after the murder, a female customer comes by the market and asks Glòria what ever happened to Ass. Glòria tells her he killed himself with a knife from the fish market. But she adds that the woman should go ask Olimpita for more information and then smirks. The conversation between Olimpita and the customer provides some insight into Olimpita’s justifications: OLIMPITA:

No recuerdo de quién me habla. Por aquí ha pasado mucha gente. CLIENTA: Sí, mujer. Cómo no se va a acordar. Ese chico tan majo… Era negrito… una joya de hombre. OLIMPITA: Ah, ese chico. Ya no está. Se murió, creo. De suicidio, dijeron. CLIENTA: ¡Ay! ¿Y cómo cree que pudo hacer una cosa tan terrible? ¡Un suicidio! ¡Con lo contento que se le veía aquí! OLIMPITA: Bueno, ya sabe cómo es esa gente que viene emigrada… A veces no saben pedir ayuda cuando lo están pasando mal… CLIENTA: Hm. Sí, ya lo veo… (144) [OLIMPITA: I don’t remember who you’re talking about. Many people have passed through here. CUSTOMER: Yes, ma’am. How can you forget? Such a nice guy… He was Black… a gem of a man. OLIMPITA: Ah, that guy. He’s not here anymore. He died, I think. Suicide, they said. CUSTOMER: Oh! How do you think he could do such a terrible thing? Suicide! He seemed so happy here! OLIMPITA: Well, you know how those immigrants are… Sometimes they don’t know how to ask for help when things are going badly… CUSTOMER: Hm. Yes, I see…]

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This conversation is the final page of Part III, concluding Olimpita’s role in the novel. At first, she tries to deny knowing Ass, which does not work because the customer very clearly remembers who he is. In addition, Glòria is watching Olimpita to see what she says, which could imply that she knows the truth of Ass’s death and is blackmailing Olimpita. This is artistically demonstrated through Olimpita’s body language, sheepishly looking down as she speaks. Calling Ass’s death a suicide deflects attention from her and Carmelo since the murder weapon came from their fish stand. But such a death is incredulous to the customer, hence Olimpita’s final comment about immigrants. She opts for leaning into xenophobia in order to prevent more probing. However, her last line could actually be seen as a reflection of her own marital situation, given that there is clearly a bruise on her face. The customer’s remark thus could be in response to Olimpita’s xenophobic comment or a snide response after seeing Olimpita’s battered face. Both interpretations leave Olimpita without much room to respond, allowing the reader to know that she has simply returned to business as usual, unable to escape the vicious cycle of her husband’s violence. However, submitting to Carmelo allows her to stay alive, until he deems otherwise. Migoya and Marín construct a narrative in Olimpita that gives a realistic portrayal of the precarious state of affairs for women in abusive relationships and for undocumented immigrants in Spain. The juxtaposition of these two conditions ultimately reveals that the systems that maintain them, patriarchy and racism, are intertwined such that neither Olimpita nor Ass can escape and both suffer as a result, though in drastically different ways. The novel’s shocking ending in which Olimpita murders Ass says more about the power of white male supremacy than it does about Olimpita herself since Carmelo is the only character who maintains power throughout the novel. His physical absence in the final pages conveys a sense of omnipotence that steers Olimpita’s life. This fatalism connotes a bleak outlook for Spanish women. Similarly, the fatalism of Ass’s narrative trajectory connotes that Black immigrants are better off not coming to Spain at all because their prospects are slim due to xenophobia and racism. This critical commentary by way of the author and illustrator are more important than ever in the current era of the #MeToo and immigrants’ rights movements. Olimpita, through its polemic collision, demonstrates what Anne Magnussen outlines as the impact and importance of Spanish comics, which is that “the comic is both the result and an interpretation of the society of which it is a part” (58–59). Migoya and Marín therefore

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illustrate that the plight of Spanish women experiencing gender violence and that of immigrants subject to racism and xenophobia are intertwined even though the reader may see that their problems are mutually exclusive. Fighting the two together will make Spain a better nation, more apt to succeed in the twenty-first century in which women and people of color have more prominent places in society.

Works Cited Beaty, Bart. Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2007. Catalá-Carrasco, Jorge L. “Neoliberal Expulsions, Crisis, and Graphic Reportage in Spanish Comics.” Romance Quarterly 64.4 (2017): 172–84. Corkill, David. “Race, Immigration and Multiculturalism in Spain.” Contemporary Spanish Cultural Studies. Ed. Barry Jordan and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas. London: Edward Arnold, 2000. 48–57. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove, 2008. Hall, Stuart. “The Spectacle of the ‘Other’.” Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. Ed Stuart Hall et al. London: SAGE Publications, 2013. 215–71. Kleiner-Liebau, Désirée. Migration and the Construction of National Identity in Spain. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2009. Magnussen, Anne. “The New Spanish Memory Comics: The Example of Cuerda de Presas.” European Comic Art 7.1 (2014): 56–84. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. Mercer, Kobena. Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies, New York: Routledge, 1994. Migoya, Hernán, and Joan Marín (ilustr.). Olimpita. Norma Editorial, 2009. Moffette, David. Governing Irregular Migration: Bordering Culture, Labour, and Security in Spain. Vancouver: UBC, 2018. Rosati, Sara. “Por qué hay que llamar violencia machista a la violencia machista.” El País, 19 Sept. 2019, https://elpais.com/sociedad/2019/09/19/actualidad/1568914462_661679.html. van Dijk, Teun A. Racism and Discourse in Spain and Latin America. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 2005. “Víctimas mortales por violencia de género, año a año.” Epdata, 2020. https:// www.epdata.es/victimas-mortales-violencia-genero-ano-ano/6c264132acb0-4c00-b923-4771c8febba7.

CHAPTER 7

“I Hate Being Chinese”: Migration, Cultural Identity, and Autobiography in  Quan Zhou Wu’s Gazpacho agridulce Adrián Collado

Since the 1990s, the arrival of immigrants to the Iberian Peninsula has generated profound social, political, economic, and cultural changes. The subject of migration is presently a constant in Spanish literature, cinema, and other cultural manifestations, even though until relatively recently it was a topic exclusively dealt with by migrants.1 While there are numerous academic studies on the discourse of contemporary immigration in Spain in novels, stories, films, and plays, this chapter studies the Spanish graphic novel and its relationship with the subject of migration.2 Since 2007, a 1  This chapter is part of my doctoral thesis: “Caricaturas del Otro: Contra-Representaciones Satíricas de la Inmigración en la Literatura y la Cultura Visual Española Contemporánea (1993–2017),” UCLA, 2018. 2  Two of the most recent works on migration studies in the Spanish context include Emigrant Dreams, Immigrant Borders: Migrants, Transnational Encounters, and Identity in

A. Collado (*) Colegio Madrid, Madrid, Spain Universidad Francisco de Vitoria, Madrid, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 C. McKinney, D. F. Richter (eds.), Spanish Graphic Narratives, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56820-7_7

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number of graphic novels have broached the topic of contemporary immigration in Spain. Futuros peligrosos (2008), by Elia Barceló, Jordi Farga, and Luis Míguez, is a compilation of science fiction stories, several of them about migration. El nord (2009), by Miquel Àngel Bergés and Josep Maria Cazares, narrates the encounter between a Spanish historian and a young Moroccan in a neighborhood of Lleida. Olimpita (2009), by Hernán Migoya and Joan Marín, describes a tragic love affair between a Spanish woman and a Senegalese man. Sansamba (2014), by Isabel Franc and Susanna Martín, recounts the true story of the emigration of a Senegalese man to Spain and an unlikely friendship with a Spanish woman. Barcelona, los vagabundos de la chatarra (2015), by Jorge Carrión and Sagar Fornies, is the first Spanish journalistic comic to document the lives of 300 immigrants making a living off the scrap metal from an abandoned factory on the outskirts of Barcelona. And La grieta (2016), by Carlos Spottorno and Guillermo Abril, is a journalistic testimony of the recent migratory movement to Europe that accounts for the identity crisis engulfing the continent. All of these graphic novels about immigration address various common themes in migratory narratives: demographic and social transformation, identity crisis, cross-cultural encounters, rejection by or integration into the host society, racism and xenophobia, and the reproduction of stereotypes, among others. In addition, they illustrate the process of identification, cultural negotiation, and national affiliation of a series of characters and authors, both local and migrant. The graphic novel Gazpacho agridulce: Una autobiografía chino-­ andaluza [Sweet and Sour Gazpacho: A Chinese-Andalusian Autobiography] by Quan Zhou Wu (2015) engages similar issues of identity and migration in the Spanish context. The study of this “hibridación de modos de fabricación visual y narrativa del ‘yo’” (Trabado Cabado 224) [hybridization of ways of visual fabrication and narrative of the ‘I’] entailed in the autobiographical graphic novel allows the reader to account for the process of identification, cultural negotiation, and national affiliation of one of the most prominent post-immigrant authors in recent years.3 Quan’s work reformulates the autobiographical genre by

Spain (Vega Durán, 2016) and Rocking the Boat: Migration and Race in Contemporary Spanish Music (Bermúdez, 2018). 3  The term “post-immigrant” refers to second-generation immigrants in Spain; in other words, the children of immigrants born in Spain.

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combining family melodrama, tragi-comedy, a coming-of-age story, and the artist’s diary. Quan was born in a taxi in Algeciras in 1989 to Chinese migrant parents. She spent her childhood in Málaga but has been living in Madrid for over ten years. For two years (2014–2016), she published humorous cartoons about the Chinese community in the blog Migrados [Migrated] for the newspaper El País. In both her graphic novel and her journalistic endeavors Quan explores “cómo es nacer y crecer en España siendo china y andaluza” [what it’s like being born and growing up in Spain being Chinese and Andalusian] and attempts to “derribar algunos tópicos, porque en España todavía hay mucho desconocimiento sobre nuestra comunidad” (qtd. in Aldama n.p.) [tear down some stereotypes, because in Spain there is still a lot of ignorance about our community]. Because of her involvement in a national forum such as El País, Quan has become an active voice in favor of the integration of the Chinese community in Spain, in particular for second-generation immigrants. Her need—both personal and artistic—to express the migratory experience of her family in Spain led her to write a blog, also called Gazpacho agridulce, in which she relayed through words and illustrations her experiences, feelings, and frustrations about finding the “perfecto equilibrio entre sus raíces orientales y un estilo de vida muy occidental” (“Carta” n.p.). [perfect balance between her eastern roots and a very Western lifestyle]. Here, the author explains the genesis of her debut work: Hace ya 3 años, durante una comida cualquiera en un día cualquiera, nació la idea de hacer un webcomic narrando aventuras y desventuras de una chini-andaluza en España y su familia. Quién me lo iba a decir, algo que empezó como un hobby, sin expectativa ninguna a que me leyeran más que cuatro gatos (compañeros de trabajo, amigos y familia) se convirtiera en novela gráfica, me llevara a firmar mi primer libro a toda España, a colaborar en Radio 3, a salir en muchísimos medios de comunicación, a conocer gente interesantísima e incluso a dar charlas en universidades. Ha sido sorpresa tras sorpresa, la gran mayoría de ellas, impresionantes. (“Hasta”) [Three years ago, during a random meal on routine day, the idea of making a webcomic narrating the adventures and misadventures of a Chinese-­ Andalusian in Spain and her family was born. Who would have guessed that something that began as a hobby, with no expectations other than a few people reading it (colleagues, friends, and family), would become a graphic novel, leading me to author my first book in Spain, to collaborate with Radio 3, to appear in multiple media outlets, to meet interesting people, and even give talks at universities. It’s been surprise after surprise, the vast majority of them awesome].

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In a world increasingly inclined to convert the private and intimate space into public and shared communication, where the self-representation in images has become a social norm (Facebook, MySpace, Instagram, YouTube, etc.), it is not unusual that Quan first chose a blog and, later, a graphic novel as formats with which to tell her story. Much has been said regarding the terminology related to sequential art with the intention of formulating a clear definition that distinguishes comics from graphic novels. While Kristin Kiely prefers the term “comic” to “graphic novel” when she claims that “[t]here is no such thing as a graphic novel” (278), according to the definition of Andrés Romero-Jódar, Gazpacho agridulce would be closer to a graphic novel, since the passage of time and the development of the protagonist is one of the most notable structural elements of the work: “character-change and narrative-time progression are the two basic concepts that may be said to define graphic novels in contrast to comic books” (132). On the other hand, José Manuel Trabado Cabado insists that the graphic novel—a more recent and modern genre—as opposed to traditional comics, “huye de las imposiciones temáticas y formales propias del cómic” (223) [flees from the thematic and formal impositions of comics themselves] and, furthermore, presents a special relationship with autobiographical discourse: “La novela gráfica, como formato que se deshizo de las trabas editoriales, y el carácter experimental e innovador de los creadores más inquietos, ha facilitado el encuentro entre el discurso del yo, anclado en la textualidad, y el lenguaje híbrido de la narración gráfica que se vale de una secuencia de imágenes para construir un relato” (223) [The graphic novel, as a format that rids itself of editorial obstacles, and because of the experimental and innovative nature of the most restless creators, has facilitated the encounter between the discourse of the self, anchored in textuality, and the hybrid language of graphic narration that uses a sequence of images to develop a story]. In this sense, an autobiographical work on migration and intercultural issues such as Gazpacho agridulce would, according to Trabado Cabado, represent a thematic innovation with respect to the more conventional plots of adventures, science fiction, and fantasy in comics. Meanwhile, Heloíse Guerrier, editor of Sins Entido—one of the leading graphic novel publishers in Spain, along with Astiberri and Norma—states that graphic novels are comics that, although they have changed the format and deal with “temas más sociales, más intimistas, que van dirigidos a un público más adulto” (qtd. in Altares n.p.) [more social, intimate issues, aimed at a more mature audience] nonetheless maintain the same narrative language.

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In the paratext of Gazpacho agridulce—cover, prologue, and back cover— the terms “comic” and “graphic novel” appear indistinctly to identify the work. For this reason, both terms are used interchangeably throughout this essay.

The Migrant Story As mentioned above, there are several graphic novels about migration in Spain. However, Gazpacho agridulce is the only one written by a post-­ immigrant author, whose bicultural protagonist embodies the contrast between two different worlds. Quan occupies a position that we could identify as transnational—a position that avoids both opposition and assimilation—from which she questions the Western conventional perceptions of Chinese culture and invites Spanish readers to reevaluate their beliefs about this community while helping other Chinese migrants in Spain to not feel, as the author states, “tan bicho raro” (Sotorrío n.p.) [such a weirdo]. This transcultural position is presented through a mixed or transitional medium, the graphic novel, which embodies the crossroads between the iconic and the literary, and whose limited acceptance confirms its interstitial condition. In an article about a different transnational graphic novel, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Rocío G. Davis states: [W]riters sensitive to how differences in cultural contexts and paradigms create specific responses revise established genres to destabilize ideology and conventional strategies of meaning in order to enact distinct sociocultural situations […] As they gesture toward new perceptions of cultural contexts and choices, transcultural autobiographies challenge the generic scripts prescribed by Euro-American autobiography. (265)

Persepolis is an autobiographical graphic novel published in French by the Iranian author Marjane Satrapi in 2000. It is divided into three volumes in which the author narrates her childhood immediately following the Islamic Iranian Revolution of 1979 and her subsequent emigration to Europe during her adolescence. According to Davis, the fact that Satrapi chooses comics as an autobiographical medium reveals a willingness, both formal and ideological, to review the modes of construction or reconstruction of identity within a narrative (265). Through her experimentation with the autobiographical genre, Quan, like Satrapi, makes the reader a witness to her bicultural heritage (that of the author) and uses it to try to change

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certain reductionist notions about the construction of otherness. Beyond the limits of family, the work reaches a collective resonance that concerns the group of citizens, migrants, and non-migrants by promoting and normalizing the integration process of ethnic minorities in Spain. Gazpacho agridulce tells the true story of the Zhou family, Chinese immigrants who arrived in a village in Andalusia, in southern Spain, in the 1980s. The family comes from the Chinese district of Qingtian, a rural region in the Zhejiang province in the southeast of the country with a long international migratory tradition since the 1920s and 1930s.4 Written and illustrated from the perspective of the protagonist, the middle daughter of the family, and with an unmistakable humorous tone, the work presents a series of daily anecdotes illustrating the tension between the imposition of the Chinese culture of Mama Zhou and the resistance of her daughters with respect to their maternal culture. The secondary position occupied by the father in the entire work is striking, as he is an almost invisible character whose only characteristic, which is humorously exploited, is his difficulty in obtaining a driver’s license. He only acquires a certain prominence in the work’s epilogue, where, in a parodic flashback, he appears to be characterized as a seductive and macho youth. The mother, on the other hand, occupies an integral space throughout the work and offers a series of reflections that lead the author to reevaluate both the mother’s personality and her own mother-daughter relationship. While this relationship is a source of constant conflict that is ultimately irreconcilable, the exploration of the family’s past also facilitates the discovery and recognition of maternal culture. The work addresses various topics, including stereotypes about the Chinese community, interracial and intercultural relations, building identity and identity crisis, and the debate between integration into Spanish culture and preservation of Chinese culture. Gazpacho agridulce ironizes various stereotypes related to the Chinese community, such as the use of dog meat in Chinese restaurants (43). However, it also unconditionally confirms other beliefs, such as that a high percentage of Asians—mainly Chinese, Japanese and Koreans—do not tolerate alcohol well due to the lack of an enzyme that metabolizes it in the blood (112). Although some have dismissed her cartoons as racist (much of the humor in her work comes from the hyperbolic and stereotypical representation of the Chinese mother, who appears as an authoritarian, demanding, thrifty, and not very 4

 Over 70% of Chinese immigrants in Spain come from this region (Sáiz López 154).

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affectionate woman obsessed with work and family honor), Quan suggests that the humor and political incorrectness of her drawings “hace pensar” [makes you think] and “sirve para quitar hierro a temas serios” (qtd. in Aldama n.p.) [takes the heaviness out of serious themes]. After the re-­ appropriation of ethnic humor in relation to the Chinese community, Gazpacho agridulce highlights the conflicts of assimilation experienced by Chinese families in Spain and expands the image of this group by promoting its negotiation of and inclusion in the social milieu. Humor in Quan’s text aims to heal, never hurt. This work is written entirely in Spanish, although two different types of font are used to distinguish between what is spoken in Chinese and what is spoken in Spanish. On the back cover, we find a “manual de cómo leer esta novela gráfica” [instructions on how to read this graphic novel] where the difference between the two types of fonts is explained. Cultural hybridity thus manifests itself at the linguistic and textual level in a way that alters traditional reading norms by requiring the reader to imagine parts of the dialogue in Chinese. The work follows a fragmented structure—similar to the structures of memory from which it arises—comprising concatenated episodes that chronologically narrate different moments in the life of the Zhou family, except for the flashback of the last chapter. In reference to the family restaurant where much of the novel takes place, the book is comprised of four parts, divided as if it were a Chinese restaurant menu: appetizers or “Mini Zhous al estilo andaluz” [Mini Zhous Andalusian style], first course or “Familia feliz agripicante” [Hot and sour happy family], second course or “Hormigas bajan del árbol” [Ants climbing down a tree], and dessert or “Macedonia china” [Chinese fruit salad]. Throughout the work, we see how the family expands: first with the birth of each of the three daughters, then with the arrival from China of the maternal aunt, who arrives to (finally) welcome the birth of the expected male child. Toward the end of the book, the two oldest daughters become independent and live outside the family home, one in Miami and one in Madrid. The sequel to Gazpacho agridulce, titled Andaluchinas por el mundo: gazpacho agridulce II [Andaluchinese Around the World: Sweet and Sour Gazpacho II] (2017), deals precisely with the emigration of the three Zhou sisters, now adults, beyond the Andalusian and Spanish borders.

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Stranger at Home Several sociological studies on the Chinese diaspora recognize the importance of transmitting Chinese culture among its different members, born inside and outside of China, to maintain cultural ties with their country of origin (Beltrán Antolín; Sáiz López; Nieto). Of the various cultural elements, language is perhaps the one most eagerly protected, as shown by the proliferation of Chinese schools in Spain. The fervent transmission of traditions and values, however, does not prevent the integration of the younger generations in the host country where, in fact, biculturalism holds high positive value for the social and economic progress of the family. Children born in Spain do not always identify with the origin of their parents and, in many cases, they reject their parents’ language and culture. This intergenerational mismatch for preserving traditions is broadly portrayed in Gazpacho agridulce, where domestic life, family conflicts, and, above all, the tension between Chinese customs and local culture occupy most of the plot. Quan depicts her childhood as a world full of contradictions, a constant struggle of apparently irreconcilable positions through which she constructs her vision of the world. First, she rejects everything that has to do with Chinese culture: “¡Odio ser china! ¡Odio las costumbres chinas!” (Gazpacho agridulce 54, see Fig. 7.1) [I hate being Chinese! I hate Chinese customs!]. This rejection of Chinese culture is translated, by association, into an aversion toward her mother. Furthermore, the coloring in this panel is divided into black and white, with Quan in the middle. A series of visual and cultural antitheses such as this one undergirds much of the tension throughout the novel. This detachment also increases due to the figure of Dolores, a Spanish babysitter who embodies and transmits the local customs with which the protagonist is identified. Because of this animosity toward Chinese culture, the mother laments the behavior of her daughters: “se están volviendo muy españolas … van mucho a la playa …. Prefieren la comida española a la china … hablan español entre ellas todo el rato … usan más el nombre español que el chino. ¡Y sólo tienen amigas españolas!” (27) [they are becoming very Spanish … they go to the beach a lot … they prefer Spanish food to Chinese … they speak Spanish with each other all the time … they use their Spanish name more than their Chinese name. In addition, they only have Spanish friends!]. Language, food, the use of Spanish names, daily activities, social relationships with

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Fig. 7.1  Rejection of Chinese culture (54) in Gazpacho agridulce by Quan Zhou Wu

classmates, attachment to the Spanish nanny, and rebellion against their mother function as prominent cultural markers throughout the entire work that, when combined and by force of habit, lead the protagonist to distance herself from her maternal model. For the mother, Quan’s lifestyle and that of her sisters is inadmissible, and thus she accuses them of being “foreigners”: “vosotras estáis yua fa ba” (70) [you are yua fa ba], “total strangers” in the Qingtian dialect spoken in the region where the Zhou family is from—which is ironic considering that the daughters live where they were born. Mama Zhou struggles in vain to limit her contact with the local culture and tries to counteract the Iberian customs of her daughters by strengthening the link with the Chinese diaspora. For the mother, the Chinese identity of her daughters can only exist through the preservation of language, absolute respect toward parents and other relatives, working in the family business, marriage with a Chinese man, and, ultimately, everything that brings honor to the family. To maintain Chinese cultural capital, their daughters attend Sunday school, where they learn Mandarin Chinese (at home they speak their regional dialect) and spend summers in camps with other Chinese in Spain. In addition, the

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mother insists that they work in the restaurant: “¡¡¡Te quitaré de estudiar como sigas así!!! ¡Te he parido para que trabajes y honres a la familia! ¡Hija desagradecida!” (72) [I’ll take you out of school! I gave birth to you so you would work and honor the family! Ungrateful daughter!]. Sáiz López affirms that the Chinese community tends to perpetuate the ethnic-­ economic niche based on the concentration of its workers in the same sector (156). This tendency toward autonomy and self-employment, which aims to overcome the rivalry with the local professional market, explains the hopes that Mama Zhou has for her daughters to maintain the family business as a way of perpetuating the link with Chinese traditions and culture. However, none of the daughters has continued the family business, and all have studied in the university and are dedicated to various professions. The abandonment of the ethnic economic niche and their participation in the general labor market evinces the triumph of this new generation of Spaniards—bicultural, bilingual, and of migrant parents—, embodying and reclaiming Gazpacho agridulce. To transmit the Chinese culture and to deal with the indomitable character of her children, Mama Zhou threatens to send the daughters to China as a last resort: “¡Ya basta! ¡Sois demasiado malas y rebeldes! ¡Estáis muy mimadas! ¡Os mandaré a China con la abuela para que os enseñe!” (Gazpacho agridulce 51) [Enough! You are too naughty and rebellious! You are very spoiled! I will send you to China with your grandmother so she can teach you!]. While this “punishment” never comes to pass, the author avoids any idealization of the country of origin by portraying it in an unflattering light, as if it were a feared punishment or unwanted torture. Quan traveled to China for the first time as an adult. Although she recognizes that it was a great experience in terms of learning about her family and her roots, one that allowed her to better understand the mentality of her parents, she says that “allí se dan cuenta en seguida que no somos chinos-chinos y nos intentan timar como a cualquier otro extranjero. ¡Incluso a mi madre!” (qtd. in Aldama n.p.) [there they realize right away that we are not Chinese-Chinese and try to rip us off as with any other foreigner. Even my mother!]. The fact that Quan has been discriminated against in Spain for her bicultural identity, that her parents punished her and called her “foreigner” for not following family traditions, and that in China being a Westerner betrayed her, is not only ironic but illustrates the conflict of identity and belonging that she and her family have experienced throughout their lives. Quan prefers to express this with humor, although the experience of being treated as a foreigner in China (both she

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and her mother) recalls the well-known maxim of Stuart Hall: “Migration is a one-way trip. There is no ‘home’ to go back to” (44). The characterization of Mama Zhou as tiger mother—strict, irascible and not very affectionate with her daughters—recalls, in a parodical and feminized way, the protagonist of the painting Saturn Devouring his Son by Spanish painter Francisco de Goya (1823).5 The graphical style of Gazpacho agridulce, usually supple, gentle, rounded, almost childish, adopts here features of abstraction through hyperbolic vignettes that disfigure the human expression of the mother (see Fig. 7.2). Writing about the aesthetics of comics, Trabado Cabado asserts that “[d]eformar la apariencia realista no implica un atentado contra la verdad sino una forma de hacerla visible” (241) [deforming a realistic appearance does not imply an attack against the truth but rather a way of making it visible]. As the esperpento [grotesque] demonstrates, deformation is a way of reflecting and seeing reality. By stripping the image of the enraged mother of realistic details, the drawing becomes grotesque, caricature-like, without preventing the reader (migrant or not) from identifying with the protagonist’s family experience. In Gazpacho agridulce, the feared acculturation comes, in large part, from Dolores, a Spanish babysitter whose influence on the daughters poses a threat to the mother’s cultural heritage: “Tanto tiempo con la niñera española no puede ser bueno!” (26) [So much time with the Spanish nanny cannot be good!]. Beltrán Antolín asserts that the loss of one’s original identity and their strategies of integration largely depend on the context and the treatment that the Chinese receive by the general society (“Diversa” 266). The “treatment” that Quan and her sisters receive from the nanny certainly facilitates the adaptation to which Antolín refers. The inevitable discrepancy between the mother, representative of Chinese culture, and Dolores, a symbol of Spanish culture, generates at this point in Quan’s childhood an encounter between, in principle, inconceivable elements that the author can only reconcile with the passage of time, finally ending up accepting and appreciating both of her cultures. Despite the efforts of the mother to avoid it, Quan and her sisters demonstrate an unavoidable curiosity toward Spanish culture. After asking her 5  Amy Chua (U.S.A., 1962) coined the term tiger mother in her memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011). Chua, born in the United States of Chinese migrant parents, defends in her work a severe (for some even cruel) method of education that contrasts with the supposed permissiveness and freedom of Western parents.

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Fig. 7.2  Hyperbolic vignettes of disfiguration (72) in Gazpacho agridulce by Quan Zhou Wu

mother about the Three Kings, she responds: “¡Eso es para los niños españoles! ¡Un cuento! ¡Los chinos no tenemos Reyes Magos” (46) [That’s for Spanish children! A story! We Chinese don’t have the Three Kings]. This answer reveals that the mother does not want to recognize her daughters as Spanish citizens. The daughters, unhappy with their mother’s version, decide to question Dolores about the origin and meaning of the traditions. The ensuing dialogue echoes Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s thesis on the invention of traditions, according to which many of the old traditions and customs that make up the identity and national symbolism of a country are relatively recent and, in some cases, invented:

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—¿Los Reyes son los padres? ¿Y el Ratoncito Pérez? ¿Todo es mentira? ¿Por qué nos engañáis? —No es mentira… es una tradición. —¿Qué es eso? —Tradición es algo que se hace siempre… —¿Y los chinos que tenemos? ¿Otra mentira? (47, see Fig. 7.3). [—Are the Three Kings the parents? And the Tooth Fairy? Is everything a lie? Why are you deceiving us? —It’s not a lie… it is a tradition. —What is that? —Tradition is something that is always done… —And the Chinese, what do we have? Another lie?]

The question—what determines identity?—is latent throughout the text. For Quan, the response comes from the accumulation of different experiences and relationships, both outside of and within the family. Her identity is flexible and oscillating, perhaps even contrary to her roots. After the publication of her second graphic novel, Quan stated in a 2017 interview that “mi ascendencia china es solo parte del conjunto de lo que soy, pero no es lo único ni lo más importante” (qtd. in Llanos Martínez n.p.) [my Chinese ancestry is only part of what I am, but it is not the only thing or the most important thing]. Additionally, in an article for El País entitled “Reflexión sobre la nacionalidad y la identidad” [Reflection on Nationality and Identity], Quan laments that, for most people, being Spanish is defined by “haber nacido en España con padres españoles; tener raza española; ser de cualquier religión menos musulmán” (n.p.) [having been born in Spain of Spanish parents; being of the Spanish race; being of any religion other than Muslim]. Lastly, she concludes that “si has nacido en el seno de una familia inmigrante, aunque compartas valores, ideas, te sepas la geografía española de pe a pa, te guste la forma de vivir de España, tengas DNI y hasta cantes coplas rocieras, no te esfuerces porque NO vas a ser español, te pongas como te pongas” (“Reflexión” n.p.) [if you were born in an immigrant family, even if you share Spanish values and ideas, you know Spanish geography like the back of your hand, you like the way of life in Spain, you have your national ID card and even sing rocieras couplets, don’t even try because you are NOT going to be Spanish: they see you as they see you]. Quan proposes a new way of thinking regarding Spanish identity, where preferences and habits prevail over physiognomy, race, religion, place of

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Fig. 7.3  Identity and national traditions (47) in Gazpacho agridulce by Quan Zhou Wu

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birth or origin of the parents or, as Stuart Hall would say, “a new conception of ethnicity as a kind of counter to the old discourses of nationalism or national identity” (46). Hall, a promoter of unconventional ideas against metanarratives, proposed in the 1980s a conception of identity based on difference, according to which each individual is determined by his or her belonging to a place, language, and history. However, this specificity does not imply a fixed, immovable or inalterable character whose defining feature is exclusion: “[i]t is not tied to fixed, permanent, unalterable positions. It is not wholly defined by exclusion” (46). For Hall, identity, inseparable from history and culture, is always a product in constant movement and development, which never becomes entirely finished or fully stabilized. Similarly, in opposition to rigid and monolithic views, Gazpacho agridulce proposes an idea of fluid identity that changes from person to person and from generation to generation, whereby individuals are capable of reinventing themselves according to their circumstances. In the dialogue with her nanny, the young Quan turns her skeptical gaze toward the concept of tradition, both Chinese and Spanish, and thus questions the idea of a national identity based on seemingly fallacious practices.6 Quan therefore casts doubt on the very concept of authenticity. For Quan, identity is not determined exclusively by adherence to certain customs, neither is it dictated by one’s passport or by the geographical boundaries wherein one is born or grows up: “Mi identidad no está definida ni por mi nacionalidad ni por mi pasaporte, no soy sólo española, soy española de nacimiento, andaluza de corazón, de ascendencia china” (“Reflexión” n.p.) [My identity is defined neither by my nationality nor by my passport; I am not only Spanish, I am Spanish by birth, Andalusian at heart, of Chinese descent]. Quan not only controls the representation of her own plural subjectivity, but also consciously uses her autobiographical discourse to broaden the concepts of identity and ethnicity and, without imposing an alternative model, breaks existing norms.

Humor and Reconciliation Gazpacho agridulce closes with a flashback to China wherein the author humorously rewrites the courtship and final engagement of her parents (see Fig. 7.4). The entire final episode is a satirical representation of the 6  Interested readers should refer to Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge UP, 1983), for more on this topic.

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Fig. 7.4  Engagement of Zhou Wu’s parents (122) in Gazpacho agridulce by Quan Zhou Wu

strict Chinese marriage impositions, according to which a man can only honor the family by having a male child from marriage, and the woman must marry before the age of twenty-five to be socially accepted. The clearly satirical humor in this section derives from the linguistic fusion of a signifier of supposedly Chinese appearance and a Spanish signified.

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Through this scathing re-semantization of language, different toponyms invented by the author connote a new meaning in Spanish: feigned Chinese words with Spanish value. For example, the father is represented as an irresistible young man for the young women of the town, “Suelh-­ Tiyas” (122) [Loose Women]. In his conquering zeal, he tries to take his future wife (mother Zhou) to the village of “Pica-Derong” (131) [Bachelor Pad]. The humorous slipping of the senses aims to imbricate the two cultures of Quan (Chinese and Spanish) at the linguistic level, although in reality she never comes to use a real Chinese signifier that accompanies the Spanish signified. The humorous technique Quan employs attempts to reproduce the crossing or cultural hybridization proposed by her work as one of its central themes. However, it is noteworthy that this verbal mixture does not use authentic Chinese lexical elements but rather a surrogate, Spanishized and orientalist version of supposedly Asian appearances. The rigid social marriage conventions parodied in this final chapter are the same as those that Mama Zhou, in Spain, will try in vain to impose upon her daughters. Quan makes clear throughout the text that she will not marry a Chinese man, nor will she continue the family business as her mother wishes. In general, she rejects any imposition—social, cultural or domestic—that determines her way of life. However, the fact that the author, at the end of the story, is capable of laughing at and being ironic about this situation signals, at the very least, some type of understanding. If it is true that the past can only be known and understood from the narrative (Davis 265), this episode, which takes place in a distant time and space, illustrates the importance that the author finally gives to her Chinese cultural roots. Quan explains the meaning of the work as follows: me daba miedo que se entendiese mi cómic como un rechazo a mi cultura, porque yo no siento desprecio por ella, sino que, cómo decirlo, digamos que la he terminado de aceptar ahora. Cuando creces con una crisis de identidad, porque de niño quieres ser como los demás, pero con las obligaciones del restaurante o las acusaciones de que comes perro no puedes, pues acabas al final supercansada y triste. Te preguntas: “¿Si yo me siento como los españoles por qué me tratan así?”. Eso a su vez me hacía sentir rechazo hacia lo chino. Y como mi madre era la que englobaba todo lo de ser chino tradicional, la obligación de casarnos y abrir una tienda de frutos secos, le guardaba hasta rencor. Por eso mi libro no tiene que entenderse como un rechazo, es hacer las paces. Ahora he entendido quiénes eran mis padres, de dónde venían, todo lo que han hecho y por qué; ahora lo acepto e intento extraer lo

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mejor de mis dos culturas, la china y la española. (my emphasis, qtd. in Corazón Rural n.p.) [I feared that my comics would be understood as a rejection of my culture, because I do not feel contempt for it, but how do you say, let’s say that I accept it now. When you grow up with an identity crisis, because as a child you want to be like the others, but with the responsibilities of the restaurant or accusations that you eat dogs, you can’t be like them, you end up feeling super-tired and sad as a result. You ask yourself: If I feel Spanish, why do they treat me like this? This in turn made me reject anything Chinese. And because my mother was the one that embodied everything that was traditionally Chinese, the obligation to marry and open a dried fruits store kept me feeling resentful. That is why my book should not be understood as a rejection: it makes peace. Now I understand who my parents were, where they came from, everything they have done and why; now I accept it and I try to extract the best from my two cultures, the Chinese and the Spanish. (my emphasis)]

The initial “rejection” and “resentment” toward everything that represents Chinese culture evolves and allows for a reconciliation with her origins. The creative process, the result of the recovery and organization of the memory of her family, favors seeking out and building a bicultural identity capable of giving Quan a deep feeling of self-knowledge and acceptance. The title Gazpacho agridulce refers to the double identity of the author, Chinese and Spanish, as it combines two culinary elements characteristic of each culture. In addition, the title points to the ambivalent sensation— bitter and sweet—that Quan feels about her family and her childhood. The tragic and traumatic side occupies a very visible place in her autobiography: racial discrimination, identity crisis, alienation, family incomprehension. However, the humor permeating her memories counteracts those less pleasant experiences. Despite Quan’s bitter family anecdotes, the hybridization of disparate elements (linguistic, cultural, stylistic, and culinary) manages to make us laugh more than cry. From the title, the book’s humorous technique enacts the ultimate message of the work by blurring the boundaries between the disparate and the daring in order to conjugate the unconjugated.

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Works Cited Altares, Guillermo. “Novela gráfica, el cómic ‘respetable’.” El País, 30 Jan. 2009. https://elpais.com/diario/2009/01/30/cultura/1233270001_ 850215.html. Aldama, Zigor. “De pequeña me amenazaban con ir a China como castigo.” El ideal, 20 Aug. 2015. https://www.lasprovincias.es/sociedad/201508/22/ nina-amenazaban-china-como-20150822154127.html. Beltrán Antolín, Joaquín. “Diversa y dispersa. La compleja construcción de la identidad china’.” Perspectivas chinas. Ed. Joaquín Beltrán Antolín. Barcelona: Ediciones Bellaterra, 2006. 249–67. ———. “The Chinese in Spain.” The Chinese in Europe. Ed. Gregor Benton and Frank N. Pieke. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998. 211–37. Bermúdez, Silvia. Rocking the Boat: Migration and Race in Contemporary Spanish Music. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2018. Carretero, Nacho. “Yo también soy español.” El País, 18 Sept. 2016. https:// politica.elpais.com/politica/2016/09/13/actualidad/1473758176_ 296143.html. Carrión, Jorge, and Sagar Fornies. Barcelona, los vagabundos de la chatarra. Barcelona: Norma, 2015. Cazares, Josep Maria, and Miquel Àngel Bergés. Calle del Norte. Lleida: Mileno, 2010. Chua, Amy. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom. New York: Penguin, 2011. Collado, Adrián Alejandro. “Caricaturas del Otro: Contra-Representaciones Satíricas de la Inmigración en la Literatura y la Cultura Visual Española Contemporánea (1993–2017).” Diss. UCLA, 2018. Corazón Rural, Álvaro. “El andalucismo chino de Quan Zhou.” Jot Down. http:// www.jotdown.es/2015/12/el-andalucismo-chino-de-%E6%B3%89quanzhou/. Davis, Rocío G. “A Graphic Self: Comics as Autobiography in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.” Prose Studies 27.3 (2005): 264–79. Franc, Isabel, and Susanna Martín. Sansamba. Barcelona: Norma, 2014. Hall, Stuart. “Minimal Selves.” The Real Me: Post-Modernism and the Question of Identity. Ed. Lisa Appignanesi. London: The Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1987. 44–46. Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012. Kiely, Kristin. “Spanish Comics as Genre.” Hispania 101.2 (2018): 278–85. Llanos Martínez, Héctor. “Una ventana a la vida de españoles hijos de chinos en España.” El País, Verne, 30 Sept. 2017. https://verne.elpais.com/ verne/2017/09/26/articulo/1506418693_950295.html. Migoya, Hernán, and Juan Marín. Olimpita. Barcelona: Norma, 2009.

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Nieto, Gladys. La inmigración china en España. Una comunidad ligada a su nación. Madrid: Catarata, 2006. Romero-Jódar, Andrés. “Comic Books and Graphic Novels in their Generic Context. Towards a Definition and Classification of Narrative Iconical Texts.” Atlantis: Revista de la Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos 35.1 (2013): 117–36. Sáiz López, Amelia. “La migración china en España: Características generales.” Revista CIDOB d’Afers Internacionals 68. Migraciones y relaciones internacionales entre España y Asia: Los casos de Filipinas, Pakistán y China. (Dec. 2004– Jan. 2005): 151–63. Santaolalla, Isabel. Los “Otros”: Etnicidad y Raza en el cine español contemporáneo. Zaragoza: Prensa Universitaria, 2005. Satrapi, Marjane. The Complete Persepolis. New York: Pantheon Books, 2007. Sotorrío, Regina. “Una china que habla andalú.” El Sur. Málaga, 21 Aug. 2015. h t t p s : / / w w w. d i a r i o s u r. e s / c u l t u r a s / 2 0 1 5 0 8 / 1 9 / c h i n a - h a b l a andalu-20150819105541.html. Trabado Cabado, José Manuel. “Construcción narrativa e identidad gráfica en el cómic autobiográfico: retratos del artista como joven dibujante.” RILCE: Revista de Filología Hispánica 28.1 (2012): 223–56. Vega Durán, Raquel. Emigrant Dreams, Immigrant Borders: Migrants, Transnational Encounters, and Identity in Spain. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2016. Whitlock, Gillian. “Autographics: The Seeing “I” of the Comics.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006): 965–79. Zhou Wu, Quan, Gazpacho agridulce. Una autobiografía chino-andaluza. Bilbao: Astiberri, 2015. ———. “Carta abierta a las adolescentes chinas adoptadas en España.” 22 May 2014. https://cuadernoderetazos.wordpress.com/2014/05/22/carta-abiertaa-las-adolescentes-chinas-adoptadas-en-espana-quan-zhou-wu/. ———. “¡Hasta luego! Gazpacho agridulce se toma un respiro para reformular la salsa.” http://gazpachoagridulce.tumblr.com/post/150957426470/hastaluego-gazpacho-agridulce-se-toma-un/embed. ———. “Reflexión sobre la nacionalidad y la identidad.” Migrados, El País, 21 Sept. 2016. https://elpais.com/elpais/2016/09/21/migraos/1474439400_ 147443.html. ———. Andaluchinas por el mundo. Gazpacho agridulce II. Bilbao: Astiberri, 2017.

CHAPTER 8

Black and Basque Power: Visualizing Race and Resistance in Black is Beltza N. Michelle Murray

Joyce Goggin and Dan Hassler-Forest begin their volume The Rise and Reason of Comics with the phrase: “Welcome to the gutter” (1). With this statement, they express “the cultural ghetto to which the comics medium has been relegated for most of its existence” and “the theoretical space [between the panels on the comics page] in which the reader performs the suturing operation that ultimately enables the interpretive act” (1). I use this gutter space as a point of departure for not only studying comics, underground comix, and graphic novels—complementary media that share in presenting sequential narratives that combine images and words— as a gutter space of Western cultural production despite their undeniable artistic, political, and social contributions and merits, but also the 2014 text Black is Beltza.1 A graphic novel coauthored by Basque musician 1  This essay limits its analysis to the 2015 Castilian translation of the graphic novel Black is Beltza, which was originally published in Basque in 2014. The essay will not discuss the 2018 animated film Black is Beltza.

N. M. Murray (*) Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 C. McKinney, D. F. Richter (eds.), Spanish Graphic Narratives, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56820-7_8

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Fermín Muguruza, Basque author Herkaitz Cano, and the Argentine illustrator now based in Mexico, Jorge Alderete, Beltza delves into a historical gutter of sorts—the appalling history of racial oppression of black Americans—to craft an action-packed story about Manex, a Basque man who joins up with the Black Panthers and becomes immersed in violent, mid-century struggles for liberation in the Americas and the Maghreb.2 Turning to the real history that animates Beltza is essential for my analysis of the work. In 1965, Pamplona’s troupe of giant figures participated in a parade in celebration of the World’s Fair in New York City (1964–1965), which bore the slogan “Peace through Understanding.” The procession of giants has been part of the San Fermín celebration in Spain since the sixteenth century. In 1860, the City Council commissioned Tadeo Amorena to build giants for the festival, and these are the ones still in use today. The giants consist of four enormous pairs—a king and a queen— who are approximately twelve feet tall and who represent Africa, America, Asia, and Europe. Owing to racial strife brought about by Jim Crow, local officials prohibited the black giants from joining the other three pairs in the New York parade. Ironically, the dark-skinned giants Toko-Toko and Braulia, who actually represent the Americas, were the ones banned. The authorities allowed the giants symbolizing Africa (Selim-pia Elcalzao and Larancha-la), Asia (Sidi abd El Mohame and Esther Arata) and Europe (Joshemiguelerico and Joshepamunda). The black giants never even departed for the United States, which the people of Pamplona saw as a slight; and they never allowed the giants to leave their city again (Milligan 74). Muguruza describes his interest in this story in the following way: Desde que observé la foto tomada en New York en el año 1965 en la que aparece la comparsa de los gigantes de Pamplona, imagen típica de las fiestas de San Fermín, desfilando por la Quinta Avenida de Nueva York, y el pie de foto en el que se podía leer que debido a los disturbios raciales, se prohibió la participación en el desfile a los dos gigantes negros, supe que aquí había una historia. (qtd. in Gutiérrez n.p.) [When I observed the photo taken in New York in 1965 in which you see the troupe of giants from Pamplona, a typical image of the San Fermin festival, parading down Fifth Avenue in New  York, with a caption that read 2  Muguruza was the front man of the Basque ska punk band Kortatu [Hitting] in the 1980s and the underground fusion band Negu Gorriak [Crude Winters] in the 1990s; he has been a solo artist with diverse projects since. He is renowned for combining the Basque language, topics of global injustice, and world music in his art.

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that due to racial disturbances, the black giants were not permitted in the parade, I knew there was a story there].3

Muguruza’s focus on the Basque man, Manex, and his dedication to civil rights and decolonial struggles of the mid-twentieth century aims to create important linkages among the oppressed; however, bringing this real episode out of a historical gutter and into the gutter territory of the graphic novel poses many problems. Indeed, comics, comix, and graphic novels are the paradigmatic spaces of heroic men; and Manex, rather than serving as a collaborator with the groups in question, transforms into a savior with a questionable hero status. As a graphic novel devoted to the marginalized and the oppressed who dwell in the real and aesthetic ghettoes and gutters of Western culture, Beltza must attend to issues of particularization and collectivization. By foregrounding Manex, the text unwittingly undermines the collective work of mid-century groups focused on combating their own oppression. And in so doing, the text reveals its twenty-first-century focus on charting violent 1960s struggles of people of color worldwide as a way to comprehend the Franco Dictatorship (1939–1975).4 Through these gestures, the novel adopts black and Latino struggles of liberation as a way to refer to the different, albeit important issue of Francoist persecution. Through my reading, I venture out of the ghettoes of Harlem and the marginalized spaces such as the Casbah that are continually depicted in Beltza to a theoretical “gutter” where, following Goggin and Hassler-Forest, I interpret the complex relationships between word, image, and ideology in the graphic novel. My reading concentrates on the political purposes of remembering civil rights and decolonial movements and how these movements assume new dimensions in twenty-first-century Spain as a way for well-intentioned, present-day activists and artists to envision local struggles.

 All translations are mine.  The fight against Francoism manifests itself most clearly in the maquis, anarchist and communist guerrillas exiled in France after the Spanish Civil War who kept the fight against Franco going until the 1960s. The last maquis, Ramón Vila and José Castro Veiga, were shot and killed in Catalonia in 1963 and in Galicia in 1965, respectively. Francoist censorship caused the majority of the Spanish public to be unaware of resistance to the regime. Ultimately, the Spanish maquis perished before they achieved their goal of toppling Franco, who would remain in power until 1975. 3 4

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Sketching the 1960s While published in the 2010s, Black is Beltza alludes to the 1960s and decisive moments in the global fight for justice and liberation. Referencing this moment nearly a half century after its end evinces the extent to which moments of history no longer exist as they were. Rather, as Walter Benjamin contends, “to articulate the past historically […] means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” (255). History thus operates as a tool of dominant groups to legitimate their trajectory of ruling or their ideologies. Benjamin emphasizes this point, noting that, “not man or men but the struggling oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge” (260). Within this framework, enslaved ancestors take historical priority over liberated grandchildren, who could also be important agents of historical change (260). Similar operations are at work in the construction of Beltza. At the key moment of the post-2008 economic and social crisis, when social movements ranging from the Arab Spring and the Spanish indignados to Occupy Wall Street critique society’s foundations, Beltza opts to engage with those supposedly transnational “enslaved ancestors.” The graphic novel saves them through the character of Manex. The novel’s episodes thus seemingly use race and history to comment on Spain’s own past as a fascist, National-Catholic dictatorship and its twenty-first-century questioning of not only Francoism, but also the democracy that followed. In analyzing the role of racial histories in Beltza, venturing into the aesthetic “gutter” of sequential art and its theorization requires a detailed analysis of the 1960s and an ongoing leftist fascination with the politics of that decade. The mid-twentieth century was a key moment for “the ninth art,” and the representation of multicultural tensions within the medium. The 1960s witnessed a renaissance of superhero comic strips (Gabilliet 58) following a post-World War II moral scare that stigmatized the medium (Baetens and Frey 38). In Seduction of the Innocent (1954), the radical psychiatrist Fredric Wertham not only condemned comics in general, but also denounced the racist underpinnings of American comics, which presented “natives, primitives, savages, ‘ape men’, Negroes, Jews, Indians, Italians, Slavs, Chinese, and Japanese, immigrants of every description, people with irregular features, swarthy skins, Oriental features” as inferior to tall, white, blond characters and as “suitable victims for slaughter” (101). Interestingly, the United States’ government’s COINTELPRO campaign (1956–1971) used cartoons against the Black Panther Party.

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Hence, despite their deceptively simple form and intended use for children, comics had overtly ideological designs. Miguel Ángel Gallo argues that, Comic books are an excellent vehicle for ideology. They can help reinforce the dominant order, or, on the contrary, they can be an important medium for consciousness raising […] Comic books reflect the society and the historical moment in which they are created. They are not only a product of economic structures, but also they summarize class struggles, political circumstances, ideology, aesthetic fashions, and their own relationship to mass communication media, film, and literature. (qtd. in Pérez-Sánchez 148)

For Wertham and the CIA, comics had the dangerous potential to reinforce racial hierarchies in mid-century America. Racist cartoon imagery proliferated in Spain as well, in comics such as El Guerrero del Antifaz (1943–1966; 1972–1978), popular advertisements for chocolates such as Conguitos (since 1965), and even in a purportedly humorous vignette about chattel slavery and the plight of Africans that precedes the popular 1968 film ¡Cómo está el servicio! (dir. Mariano Ozores). As Juan Marsé contends, comic books in Spain provided an apparent yet false escape from the brutality of the postwar period; indeed, “some of those comics […] contained the Falangist seed of the nightmares lived by the children” (qtd. in Harris 123). Rosalía Cornejo-Parriego examines the 1960s leftist magazine Triunfo and its fascination with the Black Panthers and racial matters in the United States, concluding that although the magazine showed solidarity with civil rights movements focused on black liberation in the Americas, many of the articles also contained paternalist and condescending representations of black people or exoticized and violent portrayals of black bodies (169). Tracing representations of race in mid-century Spanish and American visual culture thus elucidates the ideological power of these materials, which upheld racism and white supremacy or succumbed to problematic conceptualizations of race and people of color. Beltza’s strength resides in its explicit desire to reverse and remedy such portrayals in celebrating black nationalism rather than creating a spectacle of black suffering, a flaw Cornejo-Parriego critiques in her analysis of Triunfo and the progressive Spanish press of the 1960s (162). At the same time, merely including people of color in comics, underground comix, and graphic novels has not necessarily equated an antiracist stance. For Carolene Ayaka and Ian Hague, “multiculturalism can be as disruptive

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and divisive as it is freeing, and the determination of the value of multiculturalism is not something that can be generalized universally” (1–2). Similarly, Leonard Rifas asserts in “Race and Comix” that images of racial difference may be satiric, ironic, parodic, or even idiotic (35). What these representations require is a trip to the interpretive gutter, to the essential work of deciphering the significance of the image-text combination. Rifas describes this process as “an antiracist [reading that] asks where these works stand in relation to struggles to end special privileges based on race and advance the well-being of all people” (28–29). Thus, despite the medium’s frequent focus on a singular hero, in showing the marginalized through a popular and appealing format and in telling stories about collectives that unite to combat oppressive ideologies, the graphic novel as a genre is uniquely equipped to advance an antiracist worldview. Returning to the real moment of the 1960s, as Beltza requires, it was a time of global struggles, which often appeared in surprising contexts. In his memoirs De mal asiento, University of California professor and Spanish exile Carlos Blanco Aguinaga shares a surprising anecdote from the 1966 to 1967 academic year.5 That spring, a group of students from the University of California-Berkeley traveled to Spain to study at the Complutense University of Madrid. While there, they participated in a demonstration to oppose the Vietnam War, and Roberta Alexander, a Black Panther, gave a speech. More than 1000 people attended what became a monumental and polemical event in which protestors burned an American flag. Learning that the Policía Armada [Armed Police Corps] had attempted to locate them in their dormitories, Alexander, along with Karen Wynn and J.  Watanabe, sought refuge in Aguinaga’s home. The women were eventually arrested and deported to the United States for participating in a demonstration, an illegal activity that allegedly violated the hospitality of the Spanish state. Against the aforementioned realities of the racist portrayal of Afro-descendants in 1960s sequential art and the real activism of horizontal, multiracial, transnational collectives committed to denouncing imperialism—albeit in incendiary ways—, I situate my reading of the graphic novel Black is Beltza and its concentration on a single European protagonist as a hero of multiple social movements.

5  I am grateful to Miguel Martínez for this information, which is also available on his Twitter feed, @fusonegro.

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Beltza Power Despite referring to what Alan Moore terms an “expensive comic book” (qtd. in Baetens and Frey 1) or what renowned author Art Spiegelman considers “a comic book that you need a bookmark for” (qtd. in Fingeroth 4), the term graphic novel was part of a bid for social acceptability, an attempt to pull sequential art from the gutter of marginalization as a genre. Despite its difficult categorization, Baetens and Frey single out the graphic novel as a medium that features sequential art and a narrator, adult content, and an un-serialized book format that is typically published independently (10–15).6 Moreover, the graphic novel constitutes “play with a purpose” insofar as its comic-book-style format enables it to engage with historical narratives, reportage, and other important political issues through appealing text-image work (Baetens and Frey 19–20). Beltza forms part of a growing body of sequential art that engages visually with politics and culture within Spain.7 Teresa Vilarós points out the significance of the work of comics in her analysis of the Spanish Transition to democracy, noting that representing everyday life in comics was an important characteristic of post-Franco, democratic Spain (198). Unlike the comics Vilarós references, the graphic novel Beltza, though intended for a Spanish audience, does not focus on quotidian realities. On the contrary, by focalizing an extraordinary narrative about struggles of liberation through a European man, it becomes a meditation on the ways one singular hero could have collaborated with the Black Panthers and other revolutionaries. Thus, through its content, the graphic novel Beltza distances 6  This do-it-yourself philosophy resonates both with the graphic novel Beltza and with the punk ethos of Muguruza. Referring to the musical production of his band Negu Gorriak, Muguruza states:

We record our records ourselves, release them ourselves and decide how to promote them, and we decide when we go on tour. We are the masters of our own labour. And instead of buying shares in the arms industry or in petrochemicals, as most multinational corporations do, we invest the small profit we make in our record company, Esan Ozenki [Say it Loud], to support other bands singing in the Basque language. In order to see how different we are from the dinosaurs of rock, you have to see us play live. Nothing we’ve done has ever appeared on MTV. I can’t imagine why. (qtd. in Urla 177)

7  See Amago and Marr’s “Introduction” in Consequential Art for a comprehensive overview of comics and their reception in contemporary Spain.

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itself from the lived experiences of its intended audience, yet encourages its readers to identify with the Basque hero who advances the plot. At the beginning of Beltza, Manex, the Basque man who would have operated the black giant from the Americas pleads with his peers to let the giants into the parade, but they yield to the racist pressure of their American hosts. Manex condemns his contemporaries stating, “¡Posibilistas de mierda! Con gente así, Franco morirá en la cama” (Muguruza et al. n.p.) [Shitty opportunists! With people like that, Franco will die in his bed]. This quote hints at narrative’s broader concern with situating the Franco dictatorship and Spain as part of the international strife of black Americans and those under the yoke of colonial rule. This statement about the dictator dying in his bed rather than being overthrown or removed in some other fashion continually arises within twenty-first-century political debates in Spain.8 These disputes broach the difficult topics of Spain’s Transition to Democracy and the “Regime of 1978,” the political processes rooted in collective forgetting and silence that enabled the nation to sally forth as a constitutional democracy. Beltza juxtaposes twenty-firstcentury discourse in Spain that questions Franco’s peaceful death in his bed and 1960s activism largely occurring outside of Spain. These movements sought to remedy injustices associated with the very colonization, imperialism, and white supremacy Franco and his regime envisioned as integral parts of Spanish nationalism. The text resolves issues of real antagonism between Black Nationalism and Spanish state nationalism through the Basque hero whose marginalization in Franco-era Spain seemingly allows him to align with oppressed people globally.

8  In 1980, Franco apologist Fernando Vizcaino Casas published ¡Viva Franco! (con perdón) in which he points out that the dictator died in his bed, and his opponents only dared to give “signs of life” after this date (13). Vizcaíno Casas also published a literal reproduction of the phrase in the chronicle 1975, El año que Franco murió en la cama. These titles reflect Eliseo Bayo’s assertion that at the onset of the democracy, the extreme right bandied about the phrase to demonstrate the success of the regime (14). Complicating these viewpoints, the journalist Gabriel Jaraba points out that Franco did not die in his bed, but on an operating table in a Madrid hospital. He writes, “Franco no murió en la cama porque se les quedó en el quirófano cuando su físico no pudo resistir más. Aquello fue un sacrificio humano en toda la regla: el ofrecimiento sangriento y despiadado al fascismo de su propio líder por parte de los acólitos del culto” (Jaraba n.p.) [Franco did not die in his bed because they kept him in the operating room when his body could no longer hold on. That was a human sacrifice in every sense: the bloody and merciless offering to fascism of its own leader by the acolytes of the cult].

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The initial episode with Manex advocating for the rights of the black giants to parade is both historically and symbolically significant. Beltza starts by showing the European giants parading down Fifth Avenue. It then jumps to the activity of days before, occurring at the docks in Battery Park, where the reader views the black giants alongside a ship. With this imagery, the novel powerfully conveys the plight of African people in the Diaspora, victims of chattel slavery and the Middle Passage of the Atlantic Ocean. While staring at the black giants—which, as mentioned, never left Pamplona—, Manex claims they appear dead (see Fig. 8.1). His companion Juanpe states they look like they are dancing—the giants frequently dance in processions—because of the breeze. Manex then muses to Juanpe, “¿Te imaginas que cobraran vida?” (Muguruza et al. n.p.) [What if they came to life?] (see Fig. 8.2). The novel unfolds with Manex, banned from the parade, roaming around Manhattan, where he becomes embroiled in the riots that occur after Malcolm X’s death. In addition to the “dead” black giants, the death of Malcolm X is another event the authors include for symbolic purposes; indeed, the World’s Fair parade involving the giants

Fig. 8.1  “They look dead” (n.p.) in Black is Beltza by Fermín Muguruza, Herkaitz Cano, and Jorge Alderete

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Fig. 8.2  “What if they came to life?” (n.p.) in Black is Beltza by Fermín Muguruza, Herkaitz Cano, and Jorge Alderete

occurred in October 1965, nearly eight months after Malcolm X’s death on February 21. Yet again, the reader considers the multiple, symbolic black deaths that push the novel and its European male hero protagonist forward. Through his ramblings, the reader learns that it is important for Manex to be everywhere after not being the black giant in the parade. Manex’s presence is the central axis around which the plot develops as he assumes the identity of the black giant. The removal or death—as he described it—of the black giants allows the narrative to proceed and enables Manex to come into being as a subject through the appropriation of the identity of the marginalized and erased black figures. Here, I am referring not only to the giants, but also to the black people he will encounter throughout Beltza. Following discussion of the dancing giants, Manex parties in Harlem where he dances marvelously, another clear connection to the aforementioned dancing black giants. And prior to attending a Muhammad Ali fight, Manex wows onlookers with his boxing skills:

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first in an attack on a racist Spaniard who is telling him that it is time to disembark and return to Spain, and then against an African-American stranger who tries to rob his boots. His new Harlem friend Rudy Johnson exclaims, “¡Joder, Gigante! Dos K.O. en una mañana” (Muguruza et al. n.p.; my emphasis) [Shit, Giant! Two K.O.s in one morning]. Soon after, Rudy calls Muhammad Ali “nuestro gigante negro” (Muguruza et  al. n.p.) [our black giant], an overt reference to the excluded figures who Manex hopes to imbue with life through his jaunts through Africa and the Americas. These figures now also symbolize Manex as the Basque-black giant who advocates for the marginalized. Hence, in the graphic novel, decontextualized and superficial references to racialized individuals and histories convey a desire not only to embrace, but also to control and redefine memories of racialized people. The ultimate mission of Beltza consists of Manex saving a Black Panther from the CIA. Instead of taking him directly to Cuba, he uses a roundabout route to avoid the American Intelligence Agency, traveling through Canada, Algeria, and Spain before sending the fugitive to his allies in Cuba. Once the Panther safely departs Madrid, Manex goes to Biarritz in the French Basque Country. The book separates each location into distinct episodes, with color coordination: blue for New  York, green for Cuba, orange for Mexico and California, red for Canada, purple for Algeria, a paler orange for Spain, and blue for Biarritz. Through these phases, the book forms an arc through which the reader comprehends the diverse experiences that shape Manex’s formation as a global revolutionary. The blue color that begins and ends the narrative gestures toward the monumental changes Manex has experienced, yet also his continuity as a Basque man intrinsically positioned to fight for justice. The chromatic schema outlined above shifts to portray the riots that occur in Harlem. The book creates separation from the blue that signifies New  York and instead uses black and white imagery to draw these sequences. The drawings express the rage of the black citizens who confront the police and the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) on the streets of Harlem; along with the violence of the police and the white supremacists, storefronts signal separate entrances that uphold segregation. And while segregation and a KKK presence in 1960s Harlem are unlikely, these images, like those of the ship in the background behind the black giants, powerfully express the experiences of Africans in the Americas. They specifically acknowledge the state violence and police brutality that black people endure, in addition to the social manifestations of white supremacist

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hatred. These black-and-white images emphasize Rudy’s declaration: “No hay más que un color después de que mataron a Malcolm X. El de la rabia” (Muguruza et  al. n.p.) [Since they killed Malcolm X, there is only one color. The color of rage]. Beltza seizes the outspoken, polemical figure of Malcolm X as the hope of the black community in Harlem, and his demise supposedly represents the loss of a “joven campeón… valiente” (Muguruza et al. n.p.) [young, brave champion] for a community that is “asediada, desgraciada” [under siege, in despair]. The reader intuits that the new champion the graphic novel will offer is the young, brave, Basque Manex, the unexpected black giant. In Hernán Vera and Andrew Gordon’s definition of a white savior: The messianic white self is the redeemer of the weak, the great leader who saves blacks from slavery or oppression… or leads Indians in battle for dignity or survival […] Often, the white messiah is an alienated hero, a misfit within his own society, mocked and rejected until he becomes a leader of a minority group of foreigners. (33–34)

Manex’s isolation is an essential component of his flawed representation as a white savior: he is not part of a collective mobilizing for change, but an idiosyncratic loner who drifts into nearly every revolution occurring during the 1960s. His isolation begins with the exclusion of the black giant and continues as he traverses the globe in pursuit of revolution. The form of the graphic novel emphasizes this point. Achim Hescher posits: “In comparison with drama and verbal narrative fiction, I hold that there is no narrator in graphic narratives unless it is marked on both the verbal-narratorial and the pictorial plane” (4). Such is not the case with Beltza, where Manex narrates the entire story, frequently explaining and contextualizing much of the action the reader sees. The reader often views Manex alone, in visualizations in Beltza that complement his narrative function as the controller of the narrative and consolidate his portrayal as an isolated savior figure. For example, on the Cuban battlefield, he is alone, brandishing a machete, in what the reader imagines is a battle with other people (see Fig. 8.3). His skill as a boxer on the streets of Harlem later informs his prowess with a machete in Cuba. Manex’s ability to assume the characteristics of the locals, in an extraordinary fashion, accentuates his implied ability to lead and protect them. Manex’s inexplicable exceptionalism extends to his profession as a photographer. The camera around his neck is a salient feature of his persona;

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Fig. 8.3  The Cuban battlefield (n.p.) in Black is Beltza by Fermín Muguruza, Herkaitz Cano, and Jorge Alderete

and he photographs the Harlem riots after Malcolm X’s death, James Brown’s performance at the Apollo, Andy Warhol’s Factory, and even the illustrious 1967 Monterey music festival. This profession supposedly explains his skill in battle, for “un fotógrafo debe saber disparar” (Muguruza et  al. n.p.) [a photographer should know how to shoot]. Beltza presents Manex taking pictures constantly, in imagery that presupposes his subjectivity and the objectivity of those he photographs (see Fig. 8.4). As Anne McClintock contends, photography, proven integral to acquisition of colonial knowledge, is fueled by a desire to control bodies, lands, and resources (124). The imagery of Manex shooting, as a fighter or as a photographer, coupled with other images where he looms over black luminaries like Otis Redding—during an Otis Redding performance in which the singer ought to be the focus—emphasize his subjectivity and his black giant status in the novel. Manex’s work as a photographer thus deepens his characterization as an isolated savior figure who unknowingly captures and objectifies those he purports to aid, thereby perpetuating colonial logics wherein a European person asserts dominance over people of color in Africa and in the Americas. The novel eventually reveals that Manex’s skill as a photographer and his revolutionary spirit are part of his lineage. Manex explains his decision to stay in America and abandon his Basque colleagues accordingly: “Soy hijo de mi padre” (Muguruza et  al. n.p.) [I am my father’s son]. The reader learns that Manex’s father was a working-class man from Manchester

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Fig. 8.4  Manex the photographer (n.p.) in Black is Beltza by Fermín Muguruza, Herkaitz Cano, and Jorge Alderete

who fought with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War and photographed the Vietcong. The Civil War, much like the American Civil Rights movements of the 1960s, figures as a “good fight.”9 The Civil Rights movements pursued equality for all American citizens; and the Spanish Civil War—which Time magazine termed “The Little World War” as early as 1937—was arguably the first confrontation between fascism and democracy on European soil. In connecting Manex to a well-intentioned European man risking his life for a “good fight,” the graphic novel deepens his messianic characterization; indeed, the graphic novel becomes a family history of sorts focused on his unique heritage rather than the multinational groups clamoring for global justice. Manex’s connection to the International Brigades and the Spanish Civil War strengthens his portrayal as a subject of the Spanish state. Drawing upon the work of Román Gubern, Antonio Gil González points out that global cinema tends to cast Spaniards through an array of recurring stereotypes, one of which is a soldier in the civil war and another is the violent terrorist of the Basque Country (Gil González 71, 95). Seeing Manex through these stereotypes reveals the “doble fenómeno de colonización 9  I use the term “good fight” with intention here, as The Good Fight (dir. Mary Dore et al.) is also the title of a 1984 documentary that presents the experiences of the men and women of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the American volunteers who served in the Spanish Civil War.

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cultural” (Gil González 96; emphasis in original) [double phenomenon of cultural colonization], wherein globalization creates unitary, reductive narratives, even of those who may have once wielded the same power over others. These complexities of Beltza offer fertile terrain on which to theorize the “ninth art” as the “gutter” genre that is marginalized within Western literary traditions and also explores peoples marginalized within Western culture, thus analyzing the challenges of globalization through an aesthetically innovative form that is open to diverse identities and viewpoints. As a text that narrates a European man’s experiences with the American Civil Rights movement and decolonial battles, Beltza has a singular opportunity to explore national and social borders. Shane Denson, Daniel Stein, and Christina Meyer argue that: Graphic narrative[s] are predisposed toward crossing national borders and cultural boundaries because their unique verbal-visual interface seems to translate more readily—though not without transformation and distortion—across cultures than do monomedial forms of literature, nonnarrative artworks, or even such visual narrative media as film. (5)

Combining image and text, the graphic novel already violates neatly erected borders and contravenes longstanding conventions about aesthetic production. In sketching the 1960s, Beltza can reimagine and repurpose histories and invent visual worlds that do not represent or complement the empirical realities of the time—neither the 1960s nor the time of publication, 2014. This dynamic of reframing and reenvisioning is unique to the graphic novel. Unlike other art forms, sequential art does not purport to render the empirical world perfectly; rather, it creates a mediated vision of reality to reflect upon the state of the world or the human condition.10 Neil Cohn broaches this world-making and border-­ making issue in asking: “To what degree do drawers create their own unique systems of drawing—their own idiolects—and to what degree do they participate in patterns reflecting a larger visual language of their culture” (28). In fact, one could argue that Beltza is revolutionary in 10  Other media supposedly present more accurate renderings of reality. Yet, the idea that film or photography is an unmediated version of the empirical world is dubious, as argued in the work of theorist W.J.T. Mitchell, who scorns “the questionable assumption that there are certain kinds of images (photographs, mirror images) that provide a direct, unmediated copy of what they represent” (12).

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­ resenting lesser-known global histories about race and decolonization to p a Spanish-European audience. The visual language of the intended reader would probably not include iconography around James Brown, Viola Liuzzo, or Otis Redding. In its paneling, Beltza seems to uphold its groundbreaking, border-crossing spirit. The images in the novel appear in a sequence, but there are no borders on the panels. The rigidity of the boxes, nevertheless undermine this fluidity. In other words, while borders are not present, neat boxes make the contents of each panel apparent. Hence, undoubtedly an ambitious project of reimagining the 1960s struggles through Manex, Beltza nonetheless suffers from an ideological undercurrent that inadvertently perpetuates what it attempts to critique. This trend is even visible in its form, in the border dynamics of its panels. The title Black is Beltza emerges from an endearing exchange between Manex and the Black Panther he has carried to safety. He asks Manex how to say “black” in Basque. The man says goodbye to his friend with the following phrases: “Black is Beltza! Beltza power!” (see Fig. 8.5). The novel juxtaposes this exchange with a poster for the 1967 film Grandes amigos [Great Friends] (dir. Luis Lucia) on the following page. In the film, a fatherless child travels from the countryside to Madrid with his mother and works to make friends, with the help of a puppeteer neighbor, his teacher, and Jesus Christ. Although the movie contains undeniable elements of the Franco dictatorship’s National-Catholicism, the parallels with Beltza are clear, including lost fathers, saviors, puppets, and the significance of friendship. Once the mission is complete, the movie poster reminds the reader that Manex’s grandes amigos have fueled his revolutionary trajectory; and like the messiah of the Christian faith, he was willing to sacrifice his life for others, in the hope of ushering in a new world order.

Global Racial Memories and the Possibilities of the Present While Manex, the hero of the novel, frequently functions as a problematic white savior for the African and Latino characters in the novel and for the implied European male reader who ought to identify with him, Beltza does illustrate the potential of the international racial category “black” as a critical worldview against imperialism and global exploitation. Thus, the

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Fig. 8.5  “Beltza power!” (n.p.) in Black is Beltza by Fermín Muguruza, Herkaitz Cano, and Jorge Alderete

novel’s treatment of the Black Panthers is undoubtedly useful. Annie Olaloku-Teriba observes that: The Party was among the first political groups in the US to attempt to integrate the antagonism between blackness and whiteness into a broader theory of racial dynamics through Minister for Defense Huey P.  Newton’s concept of intercommunalism […][which] framed [racism] as merely one iteration of America’s incursions on collective self-determination. By reframing the black/white antagonism within the context of a broader critique of the USA’s imperialism, intercommunalism conceived of blackness as historically contingent and aspired to the abolition of race altogether. (98)

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In other words, despite misconceptions about the platforms of the Party, many of the Black Panthers, including the group’s leaders, sought to abolish racial categorizing through intercommunalism. In a similar fashion, “Marxist scholars have […] typically approached the question of ‘race’ through resistance, emphasising solidarity as instances in which the barrier of ‘race’ has been overcome to achieve working-class unity” (Olaloku-Teriba 105). Combining race and class struggle, the term “black” could thus potentially create solidarity among the oppressed rather than reinstitute hierarchies through which white Europeans continue to assert dominance over people of color. For example, marginalized Britons of numerous races adopted the term “black” to oppose Thatcherism during the 1980s.11 Muguruza similarly encourages Basques to see themselves as Afro-Basques to join in an international struggle against the cultural hegemony of white nationalism and class-­ based oppression. To memorialize blackness and to embrace the term “black” wields the potential to depart from a history of struggle to focus on contemporary liberation rather than past sufferings, to return to my earlier discussion grounded in Benjamin’s theoretical interventions and the political purposes of the past. It is my contention that the greatest flaw of Beltza is its focus on the past. Through racial histories like those presented in Beltza, race becomes bound up in what Marianne Hirsch has termed “postmemory.” For Hirsch: Postmemory describes the relationship that the generation after those who witnessed cultural or collective trauma bears to the experiences of those who came before, experiences that they “remember” only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up. But these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right. Postmemory’s connection to the past is thus not actually mediated by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation. (106)

As a new generation interrogates Basque oppression, Afro-descendants and the colonized come to form part of their thinking. My theorization of “postmemory” includes topics of race and racial memories, often ignored in academic scholarship on the topic, thereby broadening and complicating Hirsch’s astute conceptualization of intergenerational trauma and the  See Goulbourne, Ramdin, Sukura.

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unity integral to the transmission of trauma. That Beltza is a graphic novel is essential to these ideas; indeed, much of Hirsch’s conceptualizing of “postmemory” emerges from readings of Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus. Sequential art offers a unique sort of access to historical events; its easy assumption of iconic and symbolic power makes it a uniquely powerful medium for the transmission of past events and intergenerational connections that remain unimaginable (Hirsch 107). Theories of “postmemory” have important resonances for collective conceptualizations of histories of injustice and race. Eva Hoffman asserts that: The paradoxes of indirect knowledge haunt many of us who came after. The formative events of the twentieth century have crucially informed our biographies, threatening sometimes to overshadow and overwhelm our own lives. But we did not see them, suffer through them, experience their impact directly. Our relationship to them has been defined by our very “post-ness” and by the powerful but mediated forms of knowledge that have followed from it. (25)

Beltza resonates with theories of memory, in presenting a highly mediated rendering of the 1960s civil rights and decolonial battles. As sequential art or consequential art (to borrow a term from Samuel Amago and Mathew Marr), the powerful Beltza sheds light on the world-making of graphic novels, the border-crossing of a “gutter” genre that outrageously unites word and image, and the visual languages that structure quotidian life.12 How can works committed to antiracist principles engage with racial histories and memories of blackness distanced from our present-day context, which suffers from different, albeit analogous circumstances of injustice? The different historical moments and racial questions make these representations complicated. Beltza’s formidable vision of the past is perhaps its tremendous pitfall as the text invites a question frequently posed to multicultural works: “When does cultural appropriation become inappropriate? […] [this question] stands near the center of life in a globalized world” (Birken 146). Crafting a genealogy that begins with Manex’s father’s 12  In their Introduction to Consequential Art, Amago and Marr contend, “[c]learly, comics have come into their own as a consequential art form with manifold cultural and epistemological functions. […] Spanish comics have broached an array of national concerns, from the economy and the housing crisis, to disability, history, memory and the environment” (14–15).

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v­ olunteering in the Civil War and culminates with Manex clashing with the KKK and imperialists is undoubtedly a useful intervention in consolidating a global history of oppression that remains at large. Yet, foregrounding Manex’s unique heroism as a possible remedy to those past injustices undermines the revolutionary potential of “black” as a current and collective term, showcased in the very title Black is Beltza, and the present tense of the verb used to construct an important equivalence between distinct but complementary signifiers. According to anthropologist Jacqueline Urla, “[a]ppropriations and border crossings are always inflected by histories of power that shape when cultural, ethnic, or linguistic boundaries are asserted, when they are transgressed, when they are misunderstood” (173–4). These power differentials could lead to race-based critiques of the appropriation of black history for European purposes. For instance, in addition to embracing the term Afro-Basque as a sociocultural unifier, Muguruza and his punk band Negu Gorriak [Crude Winters], openly admitted that they admired black culture and identified with Black Nationalism (qtd. in Abley 161). Yet, when the politically conscious hip-hop group Public Enemy performed in Spain in 1992, the encounter with Negu Gorriak was disastrous. Public Enemy balked at playing in Bilbao, the largest city in the Basque Country, for what they deemed a white audience. They suggested a different venue with a potentially larger black crowd: the American military base outside Madrid (Urla 188). Negu Gorriak was shocked that Public Enemy would choose to perform at a site that symbolized USA’s imperialism. The gulf between the two groups was vast, with Negu Gorriak unable to understand the racial solidarity of the rappers with black American soldiers or the class politics that drives poor Americans of color to enlist in the armed forces (Urla 188). Furthermore, while proponents of Black Nationalism, Public Enemy could not accept Basque nationalists as allies. Negu Gorriak member Kaki Arkarazo attributed the differences to the trappings of American exceptionalism: [W]hat I think happened with them is a problem you see in the U.S. as a whole. The people there see themselves as the center of the universe and everyone else’s struggle is insignificant. I don’t know if it’s misinformation, lack of information, or not wanting to be informed. (qtd. in Urla 188)

Here, despite the invocation of “black” to create community, national and racial distinctions nevertheless separated the musicians. These tensions

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elucidate the extent to which conceptualizations of race and blackness are continually shifting as a consequence of both global openness to the black struggle and the perceived threat of identity loss. Reflecting the underlying themes of racial distinctions evidenced in the very title Black is Beltza, Paul Gilroy situates this “crisis of raciology” as a specific byproduct of dissident traditions and histories of struggle—such as the decolonial and civil rights movements the novel represents—that require a radical humanism unhinged from race (14–18). In an analogous fashion, Achille Mbembe argues that blackness and race represent “twin figures of the delirium produced by modernity” leading him to question the ongoing significance of race despite its purported extinction in an increasingly globalized, neoliberal context (2). Like Gilroy, Mbembe concentrates on marginalized, dissident groups to question racial logics and their simultaneous reaffirmation as a methodology for determining and exploring difference and domination. While it is undoubtedly a powerful and groundbreaking text, Beltza makes apparent the possibilities and problems of organizing around the term “black.” The problems I signal in Beltza emerge from its difficult negotiation of blackness, specifically its focus on individualization and its emphasis on the past as an idealized state of radical blackness, which crafts an impossible genealogy oriented around Manex. If black is a capacious term growing from racial classifications that can eventually refer to an undifferentiated critical mass, or “beltza” as the text under consideration hopes, invoking racial histories would operate to emphasize the present prospects of current liberation rather than the fraught battles of enslaved ancestors, as Benjamin reminds us. In so doing, “black” would become a tool to unite ostensibly divergent groups, as it did in the spring of 1967 at the Complutense. In such a paradigm, blackness would signify more than individual identities, evincing the limitations of the white savior Manex and the supposed possession of blackness as an identity that trumps all other categorizations, as evidenced in the debates between Negu Gorriak and Public Enemy. The quote and concept “Black is beltza” is the vision of the authors of the graphic novel and of the intercommunalism that seeks to unite the oppressed against eco-terrorism, imperialism, and white supremacy, among other issues. “Black is beltza” is an invitation to thrive in the gutter of marginalization—the sidelining of graphic novels as genre and of the marginalized groups graphic novels like Beltza often depict. This space enables readers to envision the world differently through the medium of sequential art and to think differently, as the authors endeavor

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in their weaving together of anti-Francoist Basque identities with decolonial struggles throughout the globe. It is my contention that thinking through blackness enables collectives to honor the past without succumbing to the trappings of postmemory, or inventing extraordinary, individualized narratives to find solidarity with an unjust past or critique the social ills of today. In short, artists and activists should not feel obliged to have a direct connection—be it racial or otherwise—with Malcolm X, Ossie Davis, or Viola Liuzzo to upset the status quo and rewrite the present.

Works Cited @fusonegro. “¿Sabíais que lxs Panteras Negras dieron un mitin en el Madrid franquista de 1967?” Twitter, 1 May 2018, 1:14pm. twitter.com/fusonegro/ status/991410618879168514. Abley, Mark. The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches from the Future of English. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008. Aguinaga, Carlos. De mal asiento. Barcelona: Caballo de Troya, 2011. Amago, Samuel, and Matthew Marr. “Comics in Contemporary Spain.” Introduction. Consequential Art: Comics Culture in Contemporary Spain. Ed. Amago and Marr. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2019. 3–28. Ayaka, Carolene, and Ian Hague. “Representing Multiculturalism in Comics and Graphic Novels.” Introduction. Representing Multiculturalism in Comics and Graphic Novels. Ed. Ayaka and Hague. New York: Routledge, 2015. 1–18. Bayo, Eliseo. Los atentados contra Franco. Barcelona: Plaza y Janés, 1976. Baetens, Jan, and Hugo Frey. The Graphic Novel: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015. Birken, Jacob. “Set Pieces: Cultural Appropriation and the Search for Contemporary Identities in Shō gun Manga.” Representing Multiculturalism in Comics and Graphic Novels. Ed. Ayaka and Hague. New York: Routledge, 2015. 146–60. Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations. 1955. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. Cohn, Neil. The Visual Language of Comics. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Cornejo-Parriego, Rosalía. “Black is Beautiful: cuerpos negros en Triunfo.” Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 23.2 (2017): 153–77. Denson, Shane, et  al. “Introducing Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads.” Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads. Ed. Denson et al. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. 1–14. Fingeroth, Danny. The Rough Guide to Graphic Novels. New York: Penguin, 2008. Gabilliet, Jean-Paul. Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books. Trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 2010.

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Gil González, Antonio. +Narrativa(s): Intermediaciones novela, cine, comic y videojuego en el ámbito hispánico. Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2012. Gilroy, Paul. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000. Goggin, Joyce, and Dan Hassler-Forest. The Rise and Reason of Comics. London: McFarland, 2010. Goulbourne, Harry. “Aspects of Nationalism and Black Identities in Post-imperial Britain.” Racism, the City, and the State. Ed. Malcolm Cross and Michael Keith, New York: Routledge, 1993. 177–92. Gutiérrez, Koldo. “Black is Beltza: Un paseo por los movimientos sociales de los 60.” Cactus, www.revistacactus.com/black-is-beltza-un-paseo-por-losmovimientos-sociales-de-los-60/. Harris, Sarah D. “The Monster Within and Without: Spanish Comics, Monstrosity, Religion, and Alterity.” Representing Multiculturalism in Comics and Graphic Novels. Ed. Ayaka and Hague. New York: Routledge, 2015. 113–29. Hescher, Achim. Reading Graphic Novels: Genre and Narration. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016. Hirsch, Marianne. “The Generation of Postmemory.” Poetics Today 29.1 (2008): 103–28. Hoffman, Eva. After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust. New York: PublicAffairs, 2004. Jaraba, Gabriel. “Franco no murió en la cama.” Medium 18 Aug. 2016. https:// medium.com/@GabrielJaraba/franco-no-muri%C3%B3-en-la-cama840ab0e70ba3. Mbembe, Achille. Critique of Black Reason. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2017. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest. 1995. New York: Routledge, 2018. Mitchell, W.J.T. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986. Muguruza, Fermín, et al. Black is Beltza. 3rd ed. Barcelona: Ediciones Bang, 2015. Milligan, Peter N. Bulls Before Breakfast: Running with the Bulls and Celebrating Fiesta de San Fermín in Pamplona, Spain. New York: St. Martin’s P, 2005. Olaloku-Teriba, Annie. “Afro-Pessimism and the (Un)Logic of Anti-Blackness.” Historical Materialism 26.2 (2018): 96–122. Pérez-Sánchez, Gema. Queer Transitions in Contemporary Spanish Culture: From Franco to La Movida. Albany: SUNY P, 2007. Ramdin, Ron. The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain. 1987. London: Verso, 2017. Rifas, Leonard. “Race and Comix.” Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle. Ed. Frederick Luis Aldama. Austin: U of Texas P, 2010. 27–38. Sukura, Kalbir. The Changing Pattern of Black Politics in Britain. London: Pluto Press, 1988.

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Urla, Jacqueline. “We are All Malcolm X!”: Negu Gorriak, Hip-Hop, and the Basque Political Imaginary.” Global Noise: Rap and Hip-hop Outside the USA. Ed. Tony Mitchell Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2001. 171–93. Vera, Hernán, and Andrew Gordon. Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003. Vilarós, Teresa. El mono del desencanto: Una crítica cultural de la transición española (1973–1993). Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1998. Vizcaino Casas, Fernando. 1975: El año en que Franco murió en la cama. Barcelona: Planeta, 1992. ———. Viva Franco! (con perdón). Barcelona: Planeta, 1980. Wertham, Fredric. Seduction of the Innocent. 1954. Laurel, NY: Main Road Books, 2004.

CHAPTER 9

Gender, Genre, and Retribution in Rayco Pulido’s Lamia: A Historical Novel for the Present Day Collin McKinney

Rayco Pulido’s Lamia is a genre-bending graphic novel with an aggressively anti-patriarchal message. It is also a meticulously constructed and timely story, characteristics which earned it the prestigious Premio Nacional del Cómic in 2017. Set in 1940s Barcelona, it tells the story of Laia, one of the female writers behind a popular radio program for women. The program responds to women seeking marital advice, and typically encourages listeners to endure the bad behavior of their husbands. What nobody knows is that Laia, disguised as a pregnant woman whose own husband has gone missing, secretly tracks down these misbehaving men, kills them, steals their wedding rings, and leaves behind bloody messages. The playfully wicked story may strike some readers as familiar, after all it shares many elements with other tales of revenge, has a number of stock characters from the hard-boiled detective genre, and evokes the familiar

C. McKinney (*) Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 C. McKinney, D. F. Richter (eds.), Spanish Graphic Narratives, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56820-7_9

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specter of Franco’s machista Spain. But if the story produces a feeling of déjà vu, it is because the problems that it addresses continue to trouble Spanish society, specifically a frustrating lack of progress regarding the mistreatment of women. When read against the backdrop of social movements like #MeToo and #YoTeCreo [#IBelieveYou], the recent fallout over the “La Manada” trial, or the alarming misogynistic rhetoric of the far-right in Spanish politics, Lamia feels alarmingly contemporary despite its historical setting. The rejection of patriarchy portrayed in this book is further emphasized by Lamia’s generic discontinuities, which destabilize traditional discursive fields and thus cast doubt on the reliability of hierarchical structures and social systems that are predicated on inequality.

More Questions than Answers It is 1943, and Laia works as a scriptwriter for El consultorio de la Doctora Elena Bosch [The Consulting Room of Doctor Elena Bosch], a radio program to which women can send letters asking for advice on a variety of issues, but primarily to get help with marital problems. The program, which is a fictional version of the long-running program El consultorio de Elena Francis, responds to the letters on air, or, in cases where the problem is extremely sensitive, by letter. Like its historical counterpart, El consultorio de la Doctora Elena Bosch is aired on Radio Barcelona and is managed by a team that writes the scripts for the fictitious, eponymous host. With the exception of Laia and one other writer, most members of the team embrace the bourgeois-Catholic values espoused by the on-air persona of Elena Bosch. This is especially true of Father Blas, a pastry-­ loving priest who heads the team, and Doña Leonor, a wealthy woman with ties to the welfare arm of the Francoist regime, the Auxilio Social. When she is not working, Laia, who is seven months pregnant, spends her time running errands in anticipation of the arrival of her first child. She explains to neighbors and shopkeepers that her husband, Alfonso, has gone to Asturias to sort out the family inheritance, but something is clearly amiss. For starters, Laia is not really pregnant. This first twist is revealed in the introductory chapter. Over the course of nine beautifully composed panels, sans paroles, Laia unbuttons her dress as steam rises from the bathtub (8, see Fig. 9.1). A bottle of wine waits nearby, ready to be drunk. Her dress slides to the floor. She pulls her slip from her shoulders and lets it fall. A bizarre image confronts the reader. The sixth panel is simultaneously titillating and bewildering. Laia stands facing the mirror, reaching behind

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Fig. 9.1  Laia gets in the bathtub (8) in Lamia by Rayco Pulido

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her back to unclasp her brassiere. Wearing thigh-high stockings, underwear, and a bra, she is young, slender and attractive. Yet any voyeuristic pleasure afforded to the male gaze is disrupted by the presence of a prosthetic pregnant belly. In the panels that follow she removes it, finishes undressing, and slips into the tub. No explanation is given. The reader is simply left to wonder. Like Laia’s disrobing, the story teases with clue after clue until the truth is eventually laid bare. The fake pregnancy is the first sign that not all is as it appears, but it is also the first detail which shows Laia exploiting a totalitarian system in which a woman’s only viable options are maternity or the monastery. In assuming the false identity of a married, pregnant woman, Laia is able to enjoy the limited privileges that her condition would afford a woman in 1940s Spain, namely social prestige and the freedom to move about the city without supervision. Another discrepancy in her story involves the husband that is supposedly in Asturias. In the book’s second chapter Laia travels to a seedy neighborhood and enters the office of a private detective, Don Mauricio. The waiting room of the detective’s office is full of women whose husbands have mysteriously vanished. When Laia speaks to Don Mauricio we discover that her husband is also missing and Laia has hired the detective to track him down. Only later is it revealed that Laia was abandoned by her husband a year earlier following a traumatic miscarriage that left her unable to bear children (72–74). He now goes by the name Carlos and works as a waiter in a cafe (70). To confound the situation further, Laia knows of Carlos’s whereabouts and often watches him from afar. But Laia’s biggest secret is revealed in the sixth chapter, which bears the ominous title “La caza” (36) [The Hunt]. Laia, it turns out, is a serial killer who has been tormenting Barcelona. Her victims are abusive husbands, the very same husbands of the women who write to the radio program in search of advice. While the scripts that she writes for the radio and the letters that she remits to the women offer the standard National-­ Catholic discourse—“estamos en esta vida para sufrir,” “procure complacerle hasta en los más mínimos detalles,” “rece a Dios” (22) [we are in this world to suffer, try to please him even in the most minimal details, pray to God]—Laia secretly tracks down the culprits and enacts bloody vengeance.1 Her methods vary (hammer, knife, poison), but after killing the men she always cuts off their ring fingers, scrawls a bloody warning on the 1

 All translations in this essay are my own.

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bathroom mirror with the severed finger, and makes off with the wedding band. By the end of the novel, her victims number twenty six.

A Road Map that Is a Maze Like most comics, Lamia relies on the conventions of its medium and some well-known generic models to help readers construct a coherent story. At the same time, it is a generic hybrid, highlighting the limitations of rigid classifications and promoting the possibility of breaking traditional boundaries. At a literary level this hybridity allows for moments of creativity and surprise, because it causes interpretive paths to break down as well-­ known storylines fall apart. It is during these breakdowns that readers may find themselves scrutinizing both our literary discourses as well as the social norms that inform our thinking. In discovering that seemingly stable literary categories are, in actuality, permeable or chimerical, one is left to contemplate new possibilities. Might other categories and hierarchies depicted in the graphic novel also be porous, surmountable or even illusory? Might the gender roles that dictate so many aspects of society be nothing more than cultural constructs? This rhetorical move opens up a space for reflection and encourages readers to question and possibly remake the models and structures that privilege hegemonic masculinity and subjugate women. Lamia does this at both thematic and discursive levels. Generic expectations create road maps for readers that facilitate the interpretive experience.2 When we pull a book off of the shelf labeled “humor,” we expect to laugh. If we choose to read a horror story, we expect to be scared. This is one of the reasons that genres appeal to us; they give us the order and predictability that we desire but rarely find in real life. The fact that we organize the literary landscape by genre only reaffirms our tendency to read in this way. If one searches the catalogue of Astiberri, the publisher of Lamia, they will find that the catalogue is organized by author or by genre. Thus, when someone chooses a title under the category “policíaco” [crime fiction], as in the case of Lamia, they will open the book with certain preconceived expectations.3 If, as José 2  I have borrowed the notion of “generic expectations” from E.D. Hirsch Jr.’s meditation on genre, Validity in Interpretation. 3  There is considerable disagreement as to whether “novela policíaca” [detective novel], “novela negra” [noir novel], “novela criminal” [crime fiction] and other similar terms are in

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F. Colmeiro notes in La novela policíaca española, the core element of this genre is a crime and the subsequent investigation of said crime (55), then Lamia certainly fits the bill.4 But to situate it neatly within the crime fiction genre is to overlook the ways in which Lamia ignores or subverts the patterns of this genre, ventures into other genres, or even resists any sort of tidy generic classification. Despite their usefulness in priming readers to view the text in a certain way or to recognize formal storytelling patterns, when adhered to too closely generic conventions can constrict and stifle both creator and consumer. E.D. Hirsch Jr. observes that too often a reader’s “interpretation is helplessly dependent on the generic conception with which the interpreter happens to start” (75). Similarly, storylines that are overly reliant on generic patterns run the risk of becoming predictable and devolving into clichés. Fortunately, Pulido is not afraid to abandon, blur, and bend generic conventions when needed. This genre crossing gives the work a freshness and challenges readers because they cannot be overly confident in their expectations. But we also find deeper implications in the transgression of genres, as it has the potential to make us reflect on the stability of categories in general. Although one could argue that Lamia defies generic classification, it is perhaps more accurate to say that it slips in and out of multiple genres, styles, and literary traditions, thereby creating what Fredric Jameson calls “generic discontinuities,” wherein a work tampers with the generic framework that it purports to represent (“Science”). In a blog post from 2016, Rayco Pulido describes Lamia as a structural hybrid, something between a graphic novel and a French album (“Un texto” n.p.). Regarding the tone and style, in the same blog Pulido notes the influence of Federico del Barrio and Felipe Hernández Cava’s series Las memorias de Amorós (“Un texto” n.p.) as well as Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy comic (“Diseño” n.p.). As for the actual narrative, critics have observed that Lamia owes an enormous debt to the noir tradition (Azpitarte; Cardona; “Rayco Pulido”). The result is a work that evokes all of these influences without resting comfortably in any one grouping. Just as Denson, Meyer, and Stein have fact the same thing. See Colmeiro, Santiago Mulas, or Vázquez de Parga for an examination of these terms. In this essay I use “crime fiction,” “detective novel,” and “noir novel” interchangeably. 4  Colmeiro points out that this definition is frustratingly broad and offers a series of subgenres that provide added classificatory nuance (55–64). For my purposes, “crime fiction” is enough, since I am highlighting ways in which Lamia slides away from the entire genre.

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argued that “comics and other forms of graphic narrative are predisposed toward crossing national borders and cultural boundaries because their unique visual-verbal interface seems to translate more readily—though not without transformation and distortion—across cultures” (5), it seems reasonable to assume that the multimodality of comics also allows them to more easily cross generic boundaries.

Looking to the Past to See the Present While not a historical novel in the strictest sense of the term, Lamia shares characteristics with this genre. Set primarily in the summer of 1943, references to historical figures and events are sprinkled throughout the book, providing several touchpoints with a past, concrete reality: Radio Barcelona and the popular program El consultorio de Elena Francis; references to a Pastelería Prats, possibly based on the pastry shop Pastelería Prats-Fatjó (32, 79); a postage stamp with Franco’s face (87); the image of Benito Pérez Galdós’s novel Misericordia (21); and a radio report on the end of the Pacific War (87). Furthermore, the books imagery—specifically Barcelona’s architecture, the 1940s decor, and the fashions of the period— provides an undeniable veneer of historicity. Samuel Amago has described the historical bent in contemporary Spanish graphic literature as an attempt to “create a relationship of nearness between comics creators, historical witnesses, and contemporary readers” (33). And though Lamia is not historical in the same way that many of the Civil War graphic memoirs are, it certainly creates a bridge between the past and a contemporary audience, as Amago describes. As previously noted, the clearest example of this historical, mimetic tendency in Lamia is the radio program for which Laia works, which is based on the popular program El consultorio de Elena Francis, which began in the late 1940s and ran until 1984. Referred to as “la consejera de todas las españolas” (Viñolo 14) [the advisor of all Spanish women], Elena Francis was a completely fictitious identity created by a team of male and female writers tasked with selling cosmetics and doling out advice that was in line with the ideology of the day, which, according to one of the writers of the program, Juan Soto Viñolo, “encarnó los valores de la mujer de la época, con cierto paralelismo en lo educativo y cultural con Pilar Primo de Rivera” (16) [embodied the female values of the day, with a certain educational and cultural parallel with Pilar Primo de Rivera]. Many listeners will remember the introductory song, set to Victor Herbert’s “Indian

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Summer,” just as they will also remember the intimate and occasionally sordid themes that were discussed. Whether it was a young woman struggling with masturbation, or a desperate wife not knowing what to do about her closeted husband, Elena Francis had an answer for everyone. The program primarily dealt with marital problems, according to Pietat Estany, who was hired to reply to the many letters that arrived at El consultorio de Elena Francis: “En estos casos, los maltratos físicos, que se relataban con gran detalle, eran el epicentro del desastre” (69) [In these cases, physical abuse, which was recounted in great detail, was the epicenter of the disaster]. These were not isolated tales of abuse, but a societal problem: La violencia de los maridos, que se había convertido en sistemática, estaba a la orden del día. Las mujeres relataban aquellos hechos como una cosa insoportable y, en cambio, jamás eran capaces de explicarse a sí mismas cómo había comenzado o cuál había sido la chispa que había activado las agresiones. Lo explicaban llanamente, se lamentaban de su sufrimiento y padecían, hasta el fondo del alma, por los hijos pequeños que lo presenciaban todo. (Estany 69) [The violence of these husbands, which had become systemic, was the order of the day. The women described these events as something unbearable, and, on the other hand, they were incapable of explaining to themselves how it all began or what had provided the spark that ignited the abuse. They would explain the situation matter-of-factly, would lament their situation, and they suffered, profoundly, for their small children who witnessed it all.]

The tales of violence that Estany describes are not fictional accounts but real, lived experiences of Spanish women held captive by a machista society. In establishing a parallel between the fictional radio program and the real one, Pulido creates a story world that feels uncannily familiar for Spanish readers and, in doing so, he collapses the space between fiction and reality. Where Lamia diverges significantly from its historical antecedent is that Laia takes action, fighting back against abusive men and, by extension, against an oppressive patriarchy. According to Estany, there existed a metaphorical parallel between the home and the nation. Franco ruled Spain with an iron fist, suppressing political dissent with physical violence. Similarly, many homes had their own caudillo, or domestic dictator, who used the threat of physical violence to keep women in a state of perpetual subservience (Estany 25). In the case of Spain, only the death of Franco in

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1975 would free political dissidents from their seemingly endless state of oppression, providing a “paz sepulcral” (Estany 30) [sepulchral peace]. Similarly, for a woman trapped in this patriarchal prison, only her husband’s death could set her free. As the only witnesses to Laia’s crimes, readers find it hard to condemn her. The murders she commits are a form of vengeance—against abusive men, against an oppressive regime, against a complicit Church—and, given the popularity of Hollywood revenge films, modern readers are quick to side with murderous vigilantes.5 Laia never doubts the tales of abuse that she finds in the letters she receives from desperate women, and neither do we. How could we? There is simply too much evidence that the established order disenfranchised Spanish women, relegated them to a subservient role, and mistreated them in multiple ways. As Esther Rodríguez Ortiz and other historians have noted, the post-war years witnessed a rolling back of women’s legal rights, a return to traditional gender roles in which a woman’s primary responsibility was to bear children and serve her husband (77). Viñolo’s own description of the period is more blunt but just as true, calling it “el reino del falo” (106) [the reign of the phallus]. This may explain why a program like El consultorio de Elena Francis was so popular. According to Salvador Alsius, the program was not merely “un fiel reflejo de la sordidez de la época” (18) [a sordid reflection of the period], it also gave a voice to the women who were otherwise silenced, drawing back the curtain on “un panorama muy desolador constituido por sufrimientos, miedos y represiones” (16) [a desolate panorama made of suffering, fear, and repression]. According to Estany, the letters that she read “reflejaban la realidad de un contexto sociopolítico y religioso prolongado en el tiempo, que había podrido a un país hasta las raíces y que había desheredado a unas personas… Y aquellas mujeres desesperadas no entendían ni se podían plantear por qué tenían que soportar tanto dolor y tanta ignominia” (61) [reflected the reality of a prolonged sociopolitical and religious context that had rotted a country to its very roots and had disenfranchised certain people… And those desperate women did not understand and could not comprehend why they were forced to suffer so much pain and humiliation]. Both Estany and Viñolo note that the majority of women who wrote to Elena Francis were seeking

5  Kill Bill (2003), Taken (2009), Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), and John Wick (2014), just to name a few.

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advice on dealing with the physical abuse they received at the hands of their husbands (Estany 25; Viñolo 196). Despite Lamia’s parallels with El consultorio de Elena Francis and its historical context, this story is not really about Spain in the 1940s. Or, rather, it is not only about that period. Although this authoritarian gender paradigm may have been more socially acceptable during the dictatorship than now, we know that such examples are not limited to the past. Pulido says as much in an interview when he observes that, regarding gender norms, “tampoco hemos cambiado mucho” (qtd. in Jiménez n.p.) [we haven’t really changed very much]. We must therefore read Lamia within a larger hermeneutic circle that includes the ongoing, collective outrage at the persistence of gender violence in Spanish society. The publication of Lamia in 2016 is contemporaneous with a number of viral feminist movements. In the Spanish-speaking world the #NiUnaMenos [#NotOneWomanLess] movement emerged in 2015 and gained traction in 2016. And in 2016 and 2017 there was an uptick in #YoTeCreo and #NoEsNo [NoMeansNo] posts on social media in Spain in response to the infamous “La Manada” [wolf pack] gang rape of a young woman during the San Fermín festival in Pamplona in 2016 (Beatley, “Wolf Pack” n.p.). Following the trial the group was only found guilty of sexual abuse and sentenced to nine years, and subsequently released on bail, leading to massive protests in the streets of various Spanish cities (“Spain” n.p.; “Las manifestaciones” n.p.).6 And of course in October 2017, the same month that Lamia won the Premio Nacional del Cómic, the #MeToo movement erupted on social media in the US and around the world. That these movements resonated with so many in Spain should not come as a surprise. During the same year, 2017, over twenty-nine thousand women were victims of gender violence in the country (“Estadística” 2). The same twelve-month period saw fifty women murdered by their partners or ex-­ partners (“Mujeres víctimas” n.p.). While it is true that the Ministerio de Sanidad, Consumo y Bienestar Social ran a campaign in 2017 condemning gender violence, the need for such campaigns is a clear indication that Spain continues to struggle with the problem.7 As Tristan Cardona has so 6  At the time of writing this chapter, the original verdict of sexual abuse was changed by a higher court and the group was found guilty of the more serious crime of rape; their sentence increased from nine years to fifteen years. 7  The videos, one of which is titled “No permitas la violencia de género” [Don’t allow gender violence], ran with the hashtag #HaySalida [#ThereIsAWayOut].

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correctly noted: “Lamia es un retrato oblicuo de uno de los peores crímenes de nuestra sociedad tan machista. Como un sociólogo o un historiador, [Rayco Pulido] nos arroja luz sobre las raíces de la violencia que los hombres ejercen de manera cotidiana e impune sobre las mujeres aún en la actualidad” (n.p.) [Lamia is an oblique portrait of one of the worst crimes of our machista society. Like a sociologist or historian, Rayco Pulido casts a light on the origins of the daily violence that men continue to inflict on women today and which goes unpunished]. Koldo Azpitarte echoes these thoughts: “El mundo de la posguerra no es tan diferente del actual como quisiéramos creer… muchos de los hechos narrados son tristemente contemporáneos” (124) [The post-war world is not as different from ours as we like to believe… sadly, many of the situations described exist today]. Raul Silvestre reaches a similar conclusion: “los años cuarenta del siglo XX aún siguen viviéndose en muchos hogares de la España XXI” (n.p.) [the 1940s continue to be the lived reality in many homes in twenty-­ first-­century Spain]. The fact that readers believe the female victims of abuse without question in Lamia can be read as a subtle yet important alignment of the readers’ stance with the “Yo te creo” movement.

A Farce Too Real to be Funny While I have just argued that the references to concrete things, places, and events creates an illusion of realism, readers are confronted early in the narrative with a counterpoint. After an introductory chapter, in which readers get their first glimpse of the mysterious protagonist, comes a title panel that reads: “Lamia: Una farsa en dieciocho actos” (9) [Lamia: A Farce in Eighteen Acts]. The self-description seems to fly in the face of the tenets of historical fiction. If historical fiction is grounded in realism, then farce, which employs ridiculous and exaggerated situations to make readers laugh (and, secondarily, to provide a commentary on human nature), is its literary opposite. Perhaps the most obvious farcical quality of Lamia can be found in the characters themselves, specifically their caricaturesque appearances (58, see Fig. 9.2). These exaggerated physiognomies result in a comedic quality that stands in contrast to the seriousness of the topics portrayed, providing an example of the ways in which Lamia seems at odds with itself. Lamia’s visual style can also be read as an intertextual homage to other comics, such as Las memorias de Amorós, adding a meta level that further complicates the previously-mentioned historicity by distancing the narrative from a concrete reality. These caricaturesque figures

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Fig. 9.2  Caricaturesque appearances (58) in Lamia by Rayco Pulido

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aside, Lamia contains little else to make readers laugh, making one wonder if calling the work a farce is simply a red herring meant to serve as another generic discontinuity. Ironically, if it is the visual rather than the verbal that provides Lamia with a farcical quality, it is also the illustrations that lend the story an undeniable gravitas. Lamia consists of nineteen chapters (an introductory chapter without a title and eighteen titled chapters). The story is rendered entirely in black and white. Because Lamia is unusually large—approximately nineteen inches by twelve inches when the book is open—it feels more like reading a newspaper than it does a comic or graphic novel. In his study of film noir, James Naremore observes that black and white images lend a sense of authority to art, noting that 1940s documentary media such as newsreels and snapshots were in black and white, whereas “purely imaginary images” like easel paintings, Sunday cartoon strips and comic books were in color (169). He argues that this desire for “empirical or documentary truth” may explain why Picasso painted Guernica (1937) in black and white, so as to give it the documentary feel of newsprint (170). With its unusual size and black-and-white color scheme Lamia achieves a similar effect. It not only feels newspaper-like in one’s hands, but the black and white pages, as well as the parallel with current events, makes the effect all the more pronounced. One cannot ignore the blackness of Lamia: as a color, as a narrative tone, and especially as an echo of the noir genre. Pulido states that the hard-boiled detective genre was a key influence as he worked on Lamia, particularly the novels of Raymond Chandler and Jim Thompson (“Entrevista” n.p.). But even without this admission it hardly takes a detective to see that Lamia checks most of the boxes of the noir tradition. Private investigator? Check. Femme fatale? Check. Gritty urban setting? Check. Convoluted story structure? Check. Criminal violence? Check. Even the most untrained eye cannot fail to see that the black-and-white images evoke the iconography of classic film noir. But we should exercise caution in assuming that this is a straightforward hard-boiled detective novel. Does Lamia conjure up the sensibilities of this genre? Yes. But perhaps the question we should be asking is why does it do this? What is the narrative purpose in calling forth a specific discourse of Hollywood cinema and pulp fiction from the 1940s and 1950s? I would suggest that in doing so Pulido awakens the underlying anxieties that always emerge from this tradition: the genre’s need to critique corrupt institutions, the moral ambiguities it allows, the way it embodies social discontent and exposes

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brittle gendered power dynamics. Lamia may wear the robes of the crime novel and the noir film, but more importantly it possesses the same black soul. Yet Lamia, and Laia in particular, breaks the noir mold in some respects. The first is that Laia is a serial killer. According to Jamaluddin Aziz in his study of female characters in noir thrillers, the “serial killer narrative is not a strange or new phenomenon in the noir tradition, but it usually centres on the idea of women as victims of crime” rather than as the agents of crime (12). A female serial killer, then, diverges from the noir pattern because so much of the tradition is based on a gender binary in which male and female characters have clearly identifiable roles. In her book Policing Gender and Alicia Giménez Bartlett’s Crime Fiction, Nina Molinaro echoes the same points about a rigid gender binary in classic crime fiction, but she also highlights a recent trend in the genre in which female characters and storylines break free from this tradition: Crime fiction has, during the past several decades, afforded multiple opportunities to explore feminism by identifying and unpacking sexism and misogyny, and by asserting myriad scenarios whereby women, as detectives, criminals, or victims, assume (or are assigned) agency and aptitude, in acute contrast to the origins of the genre in which women, if present at all, were usually addenda to or obstacles for the detecting male heroes. In addition to underwriting the actions and attitudes of women detectives, crime fiction has increasingly trained its corrective gaze upon crimes frequently committed against women, such as sexual harassment and discrimination, domestic violence, incest, and rape. And the genre has also fruitfully probed these offenses in order to trouble the essentialist dichotomy of female victim–male victimizer. (28–29)

Lamia clearly belongs to this new branch of crime fiction described by Molinaro. With a female protagonist, and a criminal no less, it certainly upends the “essentialist dichotomy of female victim–male victimizer.” What is more, in making domestic violence a central plot line, Lamia clearly employs a “corrective gaze,” as Molinaro calls it. One way that Lamia manages to eschew the conventions of the genre is by avoiding classic examples of type-casting, such as the femme fatale, whose sexuality ensnares male heroes in existential quandaries. Laia is certainly dangerous, but it is not seductiveness that spells trouble for the men that she meets. Rather, by posing as a pregnant woman she relies on rigid gender norms and expectations—specifically notions of female

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vulnerability and male chivalry—in order to trap men in her murderous schemes. Her unique modus operandi does not entirely divorce her from the femme fatale archetype, but it is different enough to give readers pause as they consider a woman who ignores or manipulates established categories. She reveals exactly how dangerous she is in the sixth chapter when we first discover that she is the killer. The chapter begins with Laia waiting outside the home of Doña Emilia, who previously wrote a letter to Doctora Bosch in which she explains that her husband abuses her and their two children: Necesito ayuda de usted, pues estoy muy afligida. Llevo once años de matrimonio, no puedo desir [sic] que feliz, pues al mes de estar casada mi marido me dio una bofetada. Si le pido algo me contesta mal y se marcha de casa. Tengo 34 años y e [sic] criado a pecho a mis dos hijos, quedándome muchas veces sin comer por dárselo a él y a mis niños y creo que he cumplido como debe cumplir una mujer. Pero él tiene una manera muy brusca de actuar, hace seis años dió [sic] dos puñetazos en el vientre a mi hijo y a mi madre que lo sostenía en brazos y hace pocos días cogió a otro para reñirle, pegándole en la columna vertevral [sic] que tuvo la sangre cuajada un mes… Conteste por carta, porque si lo escuchara él por la radio, ya sé que serían los últimos días de mi vida. (20–21) [I need your help, since I am very afflicted. I have been married for eleven years, and I can’t really call them happy, since one month after getting married my husband hit me. If I ask for something he answers me sharply and leaves the house. I am 34 years old and I have raised these children single handedly, often going without food so that the kids and my husband have enough and I believe I have fulfilled my duty as a woman. But he is brusque with us, and six years ago he threw two punches into the stomach of my son and my mother, who was holding him, and a few days ago he grabbed the other one to punish him, and he punched him in the spinal column that left him with blood clots for a month… Please reply by mail, because if he were to hear about this on the radio, I am sure it would mean my last days.]

Laia responds in a letter, and her answer is in keeping with the discourse of the regime, which dictates the gender roles of the day. “Tenga resignación,” she writes, “el matrimonio es cosa muy seria, siendo un lazo de unión imposible de romper… no le lleve la contraria y haga lo que él desee” (22) [Be resigned, because marriage is a very serious commitment,

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an unbreakable bond… try not to contradict him and do whatever he desires]. Laia, however, has planned a solution to Emilia’s problem. Having studied the family’s schedule, Laia waits until the husband is home alone (39). She knocks at the door and when he answers she pretends to faint. The next page is organized into six panels divided into three tiers (38, see Fig. 9.3). The first tier consists of a single panel, showing Laia on the couch and the unsuspecting man offering to get her a glass of sugar water. Here we see the way that Laia manipulates the gender norms to suit her purpose. While the man is in the kitchen, Laia pulls a mallet from her purse and hides behind the wall of the entryway. In the final panel of this tier the glass that he was carrying falls through the air. The following panels are bloody; we see her hands about to clip his finger with a pair of shears as a dark pool forms on the floor, and in the final panel she holds up his ring, blood covering her face, hands, and clothes. Even without seeing the actual acts of violence, the savagery of what has happened is visually striking. On the next page, the first panel occupies nearly two thirds of the page. In what is arguably the novel’s most impactful image, Laia lies on the ground next to the man, gazing into his eyes (39, see Fig. 9.4). In rendering the images in black and white, Pulido forces us to contemplate the bloodiness of the scene, the dark pool and spatter contrasting with the white tile floor of the apartment and the white dress, shirt, and skin of the two individuals. As for the central image of Laia and the man lying on the floor, were it not for the unsettling brutality of the scene—a large pool of blood around the victim, the hammer still buried in his skull, a mutilated hand, a shoe that dangles half off his foot, blood spatter on her face and clothes—they might look like a happy couple resting in bed (39). The paradox produced by this strange tenderness is jolting, alerting the reader to the importance of the scene. Significantly, Laia carries out her violent attacks in the victims’ homes, rather than the street, reversing the typical vector of violence in domestic spaces. The image, with its juxtaposed themes of marital bliss and violence, can be read as a commentary on marriage and gender roles in Franco’s Spain. By setting the story in 1943, Pulido situates it squarely in a period of a resurgent right-wing patriarchy, one that ushered in a period of bellicose masculinity and systemic, systematic oppression of women that continues to have repercussions in Spanish society today. The same period is marked by a collective silence in which saying the wrong things could lead to retaliation, imprisonment, or even death. As for the consequences that this

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Fig. 9.3  Laia waiting to attack (38) in Lamia by Rayco Pulido

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Fig. 9.4  Strange tenderness after the kill (39) in Lamia by Rayco Pulido

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imposed silence had on gender relations, in turning back the clock on women’s freedoms it essentially locked them into the same repressive relationship with their husbands that existed between Franco’s regime and the Spanish citizenry. With potential legal, economic, social, and physical consequences, marital rebellion was no more an option than was political rebellion. As a result, couples maintained a facade of harmony that was often buttressed by the threat of violence. For women who found themselves in abusive relationships there was no solution, just silence and long-suffering. Lamia acknowledges the prevalence of abusive husbands—indeed, the plot is predicated on the pervasiveness of the problem—but it rejects the longstanding solution of stoic resignation proposed by the Church, the state, and radio programs like El consultorio de la Doctora Elena Bosch. Instead, the book suggests that when the system is designed to favor the oppressor, the oppressed must work outside of and against the system. Because justice and restoration are impossible, the only solution is retribution, which seeks to punish men who victimize women. This, of course, is how Laia ends up lying on the floor in a pool of her victim’s blood. Lest there be any misunderstanding as to why this man was killed, Laia leaves a message behind, using the severed finger to write the words “niña obediente” [obedient girl] on the bathroom mirror before putting on a fresh dress and walking out into the city, a sly smile on her face (40). We do not see most of her victims, but we do get glimpses of the bloody messages that she leaves behind, written on bathroom mirrors with a severed ring fingers: “esposa complaciente,” “madre sacrificada” (51, see Fig.  9.5) [accommodating wife, self-sacrificing mother]. The scrawled warnings give an air of menace to what would otherwise be complimentary labels. These labels are clearly meant to evoke the gender discourse of Francoist Spain, a discursive field in which women were categorized as domestic angels and relegated to the domestic sphere. In converting traditional praise into an ominous message, Laia begins to threaten patriarchal control by destabilizing the gender discourse. This is further emphasized by her stealing of wedding rings. In his influential work Comics and Sequential Art, Will Eisner explains that “the most important obstacle [for the artist] to surmount is the tendency of the reader’s eye to wander” (40). Pulido employs a deictic gaze in the final panel of page 38, which invites readers to contemplate the wedding ring that Laia holds in her blood-covered hand, thereby increasing its symbolic potential (see Fig.  9.3). By stealing the rings she removes the physical

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Fig. 9.5  Laia leaves bloody messages (51) in Lamia by Rayco Pulido

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symbol of the couples’ bonds (or the wives’ bondage), suggesting that these women are now free from the men who oppress them. The mere presence of a female criminal, and a serial killer no less, signals a desire to push back against the institutions and gender paradigm that informed daily life in 1940s Spain. A female serial killer does not fit in any category of the day, positive or negative. It is this type of classificatory confusion that allows Lamia to interrogate patriarchal power. The fact that her victims are paragons of male power (husbands, a priest, a police chief) suggests that male dominance is not a given. Undercutting the patriarchy is the order of the day, and this is done within the story through the retributive activities of the protagonist, and discursively through the mixing of generic categories. As the generic categories break down so too does the male-female binary, throwing the story, and by extension the framework upon which Spanish society is built, into a state of non-­ hierarchical free play, where women can kill and powerful men can be killed. This dynamic is further complicated by the readers’ reaction to these killings. One hardly sympathizes with the abusive husbands that fall victim to Laia, but this does not necessarily align the reader with Laia. In the spirit of the noir genre, the protagonist complicates the readers’ urge to situate characters clearly on one side of any sort of moral divide. Laia may avenge abused women, but she also kills an adolescent boy and a private detective who had been helping her. As a result, readers must grapple with a protagonist who resists a facile hero/villain classification. The generic slippages in Lamia can be read in a number of ways. On the one hand, they function as a literary sleight of hand, causing readers to be misdirected by conventions that do not carry through the whole narrative. When one’s habitualization is revealed through these cognitive dead ends, that is, when expectations turn out to be misguided, readers must reflect and think back to the moments where they went wrong and why. This leads to instances of expository potency. By highlighting interpretive tendencies or even biases, the author calls the reader’s attention to salient themes or details in the story, causing them to stand out. Take the example of the detective, Don Mauricio. Unlike other film noir detectives—Dave Bannion in The Big Heat, Mr. Wilson in The Stranger, or Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon—Don Mauricio never manages to resolve the story’s central mystery. Instead, just as he is on the verge of discovering Laia’s secret, she kills him, stabbing him to death in his own office when he tries to hypnotize her (77). The defamiliarization that results from such generic transgressions or slippages—what E.D.  Hirsch Jr. would describe as

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“breaking the rules of the game” (70)—offers critical insights into our assumptions, and opens up cracks in the discursive fields that shape our understanding of the world. In so doing, one might wonder what other logical fallacies create the classifications that we accept as reality. Only then can one perceive the constructedness of what Foucault calls “régimes of truth,” that is, discursive fields that inform our perception of reality and lead us to accept as natural what is actually fabricated (131). By forcing the reader to step back, away from their assumptions, they can appreciate gender for what it really is, a constructed identity formed by unique socio-­ cultural pressures rather than a coherent biological reality. These Wizard-of-Oz moments, in which the curtain is pulled open, represent a first step in tearing down the monolith of patriarchy.

Reaching Conclusions Amid the Confusion Pulido’s assumption that his readers will make interpretive shortcuts is analogous to the way comics derive meaning from the empty spaces of the gutters. Literature always has its non-diegetic elements, and structural or generic conventions can help bridge those gaps, but this is even more pronounced in the case in comics, where the importance of the gutter is key. Although the gutters are visually empty, they remain narratively potent because, as Scott McCloud explains, the gutters allow for “closure,” which he defines as “observing the parts, but seeing the whole” (63). It is in this process that the reader is most involved, as she “performs the suturing operation that ultimately enables the interpretive act” (Goggin and Hassler-Forest 1). In Lamia the gutters are also useful in depicting, or rather avoiding, scenes of violence. The actual killings committed by Laia occur in these visual breaks; we see the events leading up to the murders, but the construction of the page allows the reader to come upon the bloody scene after the fact (see Figs. 9.3 and 9.4). Graphic literature has long employed a “comics code,” which relegates sex and violence to the gutter. Thus the gutter serves multiple purposes. On the one hand it is an efficient form of storytelling, producing the illusion of action through a series of static images. On the other hand it makes violent stories like Lamia more palatable for a mainstream audience. But the gutter also performs a third job. By putting the interpretive onus on the readers, it draws them in and makes them “accomplices” according to McCloud (68). Put another way, it is the reader who strikes the fatal blow in that act of closure: “All of you

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participated in the murder. All of you held the axe and chose your spot” (McCloud 68, emphasis in the original). By making the readers complicit in Laia’s crimes, the text nudges them toward her cause. This is just one example of how readers reach the conclusion that something must be done about the toxic masculinity that continues to fester in the bowels of Spanish society. Pulido could have been talking about his very own Lamia when he described Las memorias de Amorós as, “Un espejo donde mirarse, pero que devuelve un reflejo cruel” (“Un texto” n.p.) [A mirror where you see yourself, but which returns a cruel reflection]. Lamia portrays one of the darkest periods in Spain’s recent history, but the reflection we see says just as much about Spain today. Miguel Ángel Gallo has argued that comic books “are an excellent vehicle for ideology. They can help reinforce the dominant order, or, on the contrary, they can be an important vehicle for consciousness raising” (qtd. in Pérez Sánchez 148). Under Franco we certainly find examples of comics reinforcing the dominant order, such as the jingoist storylines found in Flechas y Pelayos in the post-war period. But since the so-called “second boom” of Spanish comics the norm has been for graphic literature to reflect social anxieties and problems. Lamia clearly belongs to this tradition. Retributive feminism, the likes of which we find here, is an extreme solution, a last recourse when restorative justice cannot be obtained within a machista system. Not unlike Federico García Lorca’s Yerma, the drastic outcome in Lamia has the power to awaken the consciousness of the reader. I have argued here that Lamia is a critique of both Spain’s fascist past as well as its current machista culture. Laia’s victims—abusive husbands who are enabled by a misogynistic regime—are the embodiment of a corrupt Spanish patriarchy. Laia, in turn, embodies the overdue retributive feminism that neo-fascists like Vox fear.8 Does this mean that Laia is a straightforward feminist hero? Clearly not. Laia exists outside the confines of marriage and, therefore, of acceptable womanhood at that time, but this is less a deliberate rejection of that model than it is an unfortunate turn of events. She longs to be a mother, the embodiment of the domestic angel paradigm that Spanish-National discourse celebrates, but a medical complication made this dream impossible (although she eventually 8  For some context on Vox’s anti-feminist position, see Meaghan Beatley’s “Betting on Anti-feminism as a Winning Political Strategy” and “Andalusia’s Far-Right Vox Party Espouses an ‘anti-radical-feminist’ Platform,” and Mar Gallego’s “Algunos hombre con miedo.”

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becomes a mother when she kidnaps a baby from a neighbor whose husband is abusive). And though she despises Father Blas and Sister Fátima, who represent the authoritarian Catholic Church of Franco’s Spain, she echoes their rhetoric when she refers to a swingers club as “un antro de invertidos” (63) [a den of inverts]. To complicate this scene further, as she storms out of the bar she says, “Reza para que mi marido no se entere de esto” (63) [Pray that my husband does not hear about this], suggesting that her outrage is perhaps not genuine but instead just part of her “respectable woman” persona. It also appears that she still has feelings for Carlos, the husband who abandoned her. Early in the novel we glimpse her watching him from across the street. And at the end of the book she sends him a postcard from the Canary Islands, where she has apparently started a new life after fleeing Barcelona. We also see Laia drinking to excess in her apartment (22–23), and on multiple occasions we glimpse her scarred thighs, seemingly the result of self-cutting (23, 30, 40). This implies the possibility of severe emotional distress, meaning that it is possible to view her crime spree as the actions of a woman who is psychologically unhinged rather than someone acting out of feminist defiance. And, as was mentioned previously, she kills an innocent young man and the detective. Laia, much like the book that tells her story, does not fit snugly into any one category. But if Laia’s status as victim/victimizer is sometimes hazy, what never seems in doubt is the legitimacy of women’s complaints and the corrosive effect that toxic masculinity has had, and continues to have, on Spanish society. In Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics, Hillary Chute asserts that feminist graphic narratives “bring certain key constellations to the table: hybridity and autobiography, theorizing trauma in connection to the visual, textuality that takes the body seriously” (4). With the exception of autobiography, Lamia does all this. Chute also notes that such texts often “investigate concerns typically relegated to the silence and invisibility of the private” (4), something that is clearly true of domestic abuse. Readers should not expect to close this book with any solutions to our broken system. On one hand Lamia bears witness to a past that many would sweep under the rug, as well as to a current problem that is increasingly hard to ignore. On the other hand, Lamia appears to be content with simply tearing down what currently exists—much like the protagonist, who sails away on a ship as Barcelona smolders behind her. And while Lamia may not offer solutions, it does offer validation. Just as we derive pleasure from the grief we experience

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when reading or watching Othello and other literary tragedies, the anger we feel at the mistreatment of women, or the wicked pleasure at witnessing Laia’s revenge, is meant to be cathartic. This cathartic reading experience should be viewed as validation for those that feel justifiably angry at the current gender imbalance in Spanish society. Those who study the interplay of gender and emotion tell us that women struggle to make sense of their own anger because they are repeatedly told that “those feelings and behaviors are out of sync with femininity” (Chemaly 19). In other words, a woman that becomes angry is breaking a gender norm. But Lamia tells readers, especially female readers, that their rage is a rational response to a long history of misogyny, to ongoing gender violence, and to those who would invoke the trope of the angry feminist as a way to delegitimize those seeking change. Obviously Lamia is not advocating the type of vengeful violence carried out by its protagonist, but it can and should be read as a gauge of the current zeitgeist. If, as I have argued, the novel is a mirror meant to reflect the ugly reality of toxic masculinity past and present, then we would do well to note that Laia also reflects a society that has seen enough and is demanding change, one way or another.

Works Cited Amago, Samuel. “Drawing (on) Spanish History.” Consequential Art: Comics Culture in Contemporary Spain. Ed. Amago and Matthew Marr. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2019. 31–64. Azpitarte, Kold. “Ondas criminales.” Asociación de Críticos y Divulgadores de Cómic de España: Esenciales 2016. 124–25. Beatley, Meaghan. “Betting on Anti-feminism as a Winning Political Strategy.” 24 Apr. 2019. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/04/ spain-vox-feminism/587824/. ———. “Andalusia’s Far-Right Vox Party Espouses an ‘anti-radical-feminist’ Platform.” 11 Dec. 2018. https://www.pri.org/stories/2018-12-11/ andalusias-far-right-vox-party-espouses-anti-radical-feminist-platform. ———. “‘Wolf Pack’ Gang-Rape Verdict Spurs Thousands to Protest in Spain.” PRI. 26 Apr. 2018. https://www.pri.org/stories/2018-04-26/ wolf-pack-gang-rape-verdict-spurs-thousands-protest-spain. Cardona, Tristan. “Lamia. Violencia y geometría.” 23 Nov. 2017. https://www. zonanegativa.com/lamia-violencia-geometria/. Chemaly, Soroya. Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger. New  York: Atria Books, 2018.

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Chute, Hillary. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia UP, 2010. Colmeiro, José F. La novela policiaca española: teoría e historia crítica. Barcelona: Anthropos, 1994. Denson, Shane, et al. Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008. “Estadística de Violencia Doméstica y Violencia de Género Año 2017.” Instituto Nacional de Estadística. https://www.ine.es/prensa/evdvg_2017.pdf. Estany, Pietat. Queridas amigas: El secreto de doña Elena Francis. Barcelona: Deria, 2009. Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Trans. Colin Gordon, et al. New York: Longman, 1980. Gallego, Mar. “Algunos hombres con miedo.” El Salto. 6 Jan. 2019. https:// www.elsaltodiario.com/vox/algunos-hombres-con-miedo-vox-violenciamachista-feminismo-andalucia. Goggin, Joyce, and Dan Hassler-Forest. The Rise and Reason of Comics and Graphic Literature: Critical Essays on the Form. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010. Hirsch Jr, E.D. Validity in Interpretation. New Haven: Yale UP: 1967. Jameson, Fredric. “Science Fiction as a Spatial Genre: Generic Discontinuities and the Problem of Figuration in Vonda McIntyre’s The Exile Waiting.” Science-­ Fiction Studies 12.1 (1987): 44–59. Jiménez, Jesús. “Rayco Pulido: ‘Lamia es un thriller inspirado en el consultorio de Elena Francis’” RTVE. 27 Sept. 2016. http://www.rtve.es/noticias/20160927/rayco-pulido-lamia-thriller-inspirado-consultorio-elena-francis/1413345.shtml. “Las manifestaciones contra la puesta en libertad de La Manada recorren las principales ciudades.” El País. 22 June 2018. https://elpais.com/politica/2018/06/22/actualidad/1529680592_316650.html. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. New York: Harper Perennial, 1994. Ministerio Sanidad, Consumo y Bienestar Social. “No permitas la violencia de género.” YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m70HJd92Ds8&fea ture=youtu.be. “Mujeres víctimas mortales por violencia de género en España a manos de sus parejas o exparejas.” http://www.violenciagenero.igualdad.gob.es/violenciaEnCifras/victimasMor tales/fichaMujeres/pdf/Vmor tales_31_12_ 2017(1).pdf. Naremore, James. More than Night: Film Noir in its Context. Berkeley: U of California P, 2008. Pérez Sánchez, Gema. Queer Transitions in Contemporary Spanish Culture: From Franco to La Movida. Albany: SUNY P, 2007. Pulido, Rayco. Lamia. Bilbao: Astiberri, 2016.

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———. “Diseño de personajes.” Nunca trabajes solo. 4 Oct. 2016. http://nuncatrabajessolo.blogspot.com/2016/10/diseno-de-personajes.html. ———. “Un texto sin forma para reabrir un blog eterno.” Nunca trabajes solo. 13 Sept. 2016. http://nuncatrabajessolo.blogspot.com/2016/09/un-texto-sinforma-para-reabrir-un-blog.html. ———. “Entrevista.” Message to Collin McKinney. 16 Apr. 2019. E-mail. “Rayco Pulido, Premio Nacional del Cómic 2017.” El Cultural.es. 9 Oct. 2017. https://elcultural.com/Rayco-Pulido-Premio-Nacional-del-Comic-2017. Rodríguez Ortiz, Esther. “Vírgenes, madres y doncellas. Ser mujer durante el Franquismo a través del humor gráfico de la Nueva España.” Asparkía: Investigació Feminista 32 (2018): 75–93. Santiago Mulas, Vicente de. La novela criminal española entre 1939 y 1975. Madrid: Asociación de Libereros de Viejo, 1997. Silvestre, Raul. “Lamia.” 29 Sept. 2016. https://www.zonanegativa.com/lamia/. “Spain ‘Wolf Pack’ Case: Thousands Protest Over Rape Ruling.” BBC. 22 Apr. 2018. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43915551. Vázquez de Parga, Salvador. La novela policíaca en España. Barcelona: Ronsel, 1993. Viñolo, Juan Soto. Querida Elena Francis. Barcelona: Círculo de Lectores, 1996.

CHAPTER 10

Maternal Life Writing in Contemporary Spanish Graphic Narratives: From Blog to Book Marina Bettaglio

In recent decades, world-renowned female graphic artists have turned to an autographical mode of expression to elaborate their own family history, and in the process have challenged the androcentric gaze that has dominated graphic narratives as well as the scholarship on  the ninth art. As Hillary Chute points out in Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics, the innovative aspect of this medium has proved particularly apt for the articulation of life stories. As a hybrid of visual and verbal elements, the genre favors a “new aesthetics emerging around self-­ representation” (Chute 2), which allows artists to address traumatic world events as well as personal histories. Freed from the limitations of commercial comic strips, graphic novels that have attracted international critical attention—such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Are You My Mother?, to mention only a few—express autobiographical themes that link the personal life story

M. Bettaglio (*) University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 C. McKinney, D. F. Richter (eds.), Spanish Graphic Narratives, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56820-7_10

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with accounts of international conflicts. Exploring the interconnection between public history and private lives, “female artists blur the distinction between ‘private’ and ‘public’ histories” (Chute, “Comics” 453). In dialogue with other textual and visual modes of memorialization, “autographics” (Whitlock 965) are a privileged mode of expression, especially for women artists who bring to light previously taboo topics such as gender and sexuality, steeped as they are in family history. While many autobiographical graphic novels take a daughter-centric stance, in Spain the boom in women-authored autobiographical graphic narratives has extended to a new flourishing genre that foregrounds the identity of the mother. Challenging the invisibility of the maternal figure in the ninth art, this particular kind of self-reflective life narrative reproduces the plot and structure of what I term “maternal chronicles” (Bettaglio, “(Post)Feminist”), and in so doing relies on humor to document women’s complex journeys to motherhood and their misadventures as first-time parents. Recently published graphic narratives in this mode include Glòria Vives Xiol’s 40 semanas. Crónica de un embarazo (2012) and Mamá (2015), Gemma Sesar’s Vida de madre. El invierno (2013) and Vida de madre 2. La primavera (2014), Agustina Guerrero’s La Volátil. Mamma mía! (2015), Cristina Quiles’s La madre que nos parió (2015), Esther Gili’s 39 Semanas y mis experiencias como madre novata (2016), Cristina Torrón’s Mammasutra: 1001 posturas para madres en apuros (2016), Marga Castaño and Esther de la Rosa’s Hardcore Maternity (2017), Andrea Zaya’s Estoy embarazada, ¿Y ahora qué? Cuaderno del embarazo and Ya ha nacido, ¿y ahora qué? Cuaderno del puerperio (2017), and María Méndez-Ponte and Evaduna’s El regalo perfecto para mamá (2018).1 Foregrounding the maternal experience, these autobiographical

1  The popularity and commercial success of the graphic novel as a format to express maternal chronicles has inspired several authors to create hybrid texts, which blur the boundaries between illustrated books and graphic novels, e.g. Mamen Jiménez Lapsicomami’s 50 sombras de mami. Ser mujer, amiga, amante… y la madre que los parió (2019). Likewise, Verónica Sánchez-Mancebo a.k.a. Oh! MamiBlue’s Bi mother my friend. Porque, a veces, madre sí, hay más de una (2019) mixes visual elements within a maternal narration that chronicles a lesbian couple’s road to motherhood.

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graphic narratives,2 born in dialogue with a blogging community, participate in the autobiographical turn that has characterized the early twenty-­ first century, in Spain and in the rest of the world. Representative of a new sensibility rooted in the search for identity and self-representation that typifies liquid modernity, autobiographical graphic narrative in Spain reflects the peculiar sociocultural conditions of neoliberalism in that country, and displays the conflicts and anxieties that surround reproductive decisions and mothering practices in the twenty-first century. When analyzed from a cultural studies perspective, maternal graphic narratives confront the cultural contradictions of mothering (to use Sharon Hays’s well-known definition) by disclosing the complexities of negotiating a maternal identity at a time of profound economic crisis, decreasing fertility, and increased job precarity. In expressing maternal experiences by means of a visual-textual language traditionally marked by the pre-­ eminence of the male-dominated gaze, they carry out stylistic innovations in order to represent the corporeal metamorphosis of gestation. Combining semiotic and discursive analysis, this chapter will examine the visual-textual “masks” fashioned by authors of maternal “autographics” to recount maternal stories. It attends to the ways in which these “masks” allow the authors to articulate their identities in opposition to patriarchal notions of proper maternal conduct and neoliberal instantiations of parenting. While the vicissitudes of Spanish mothers chronicled in several media—blogs, maternal chronicles, novels, and movies—have begun to attract academic interest (Visa and Crespo, Bourland Ross, Bettaglio), graphic maternal memoirs, a hybrid of autobiographical accounts, advice and anecdotes, are still uncharted territory.3 As a step into this critical void, the present essay examines the discursive forces at work in this burgeoning autobiographical genre in order to expose how maternal expression confronts existing gender norms and enters into dialogue with the unanswered questions that prospective mothers often ask about

2  Throughout this essay, I will employ the term “graphic narratives” to describe a set of heterogeneous graphic volumes that display autobiographical aspects in their treatment of mothering. These texts are not necessarily novels, as many of them mix personal anecdotes with advice, and combine elements of numerous genres, mainly autobiography, self-help manuals, and comic books. 3  Outside of Spain, Mihaela Precup has analyzed fathering in graphic novels in her recent volume The Graphic Lives of Fathers: Memory, Representation, and Fatherhood in North American Autobiographical Comics (2020).

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an all-absorbing role whose mundane reality often remains hidden from view.

Out of Silence: Drawing a Mother’s Life The boom in the articulation of maternal life stories contrasts with their invisibility in other cultural contexts, primarily literature and the visual arts (Riera, Kristeva, Freixas, Etxebarria),4 and reflects a global phenomenon described by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, who point out that “[o]ver the past two decades, life writing has become a prized commodity in print and on-line venues” (127). In a confessional age—a time of self-exposure and revelations—new online technologies have afforded women unprecedented means of expression and self-expression. The blogosphere has emerged as a privileged site for educated middle-class women to show their discontent with mainstream discourses of mothering and to offer a more personal and nuanced view of a highly charged cultural construction. Creating a virtual community that replaces in-person connections, the maternal blogs that compose Madresfera [Mothersphere]—an online community created in 2011—have become a powerful discursive force that can reshape the representation of maternal identities and create important bonds of kinship and support for women. In those blogs, a growing number of journalists, illustrators, and graphic artists began to sketch their maternal life stories before publishing them in book format. Thanks to social media, blogs, Instagram, and Pinterest, Marianne Hirsch’s emblematic question, “where are the voices of mothers, where are their experiences with maternal pleasure and frustration, joy and anger?” (Hirsch 23) has elicited a response that is both textual and visual. In them, new mothers confront “the ubiquitous Western myth of placid, fulfilling maternity […] that holds such sway over all the mothers” (Lazarre xxi); likewise, the questions that feminist scholars have long asked about maternal expression  are addressed. The fact that “l’autobiographie est devenue de nos jours l’une des pratiques le plus representatives de la bande dessinée actuelle” (Alary et al. 13) [nowadays autobiography has become 4  Among Spanish writers, Carme Riera in her pregnancy diary Tiempo de espera (1999) and Lucía Etxebarria in her epistolary diary Un milagro en equilibrio (2004) address the lack of maternal voices in literature, a topic that Adrienne Rich, Julia Kristeva, and Jane Lazarre have explored from a more theoretical and philosophical perspective and that Laura Freixas has confronted in several of her works.

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one of the most representative practices of contemporary comic art] further aids in the attempt to express the wide range of emotions and experiences that overcome women on their often solitary journeys to the remote and uncharted territory of pregnancy. The syrupy, idealised portrait of maternal contentment is counteracted by daily misadventures, which postfeminist explorers share with their readers as a cathartic process that helps them make sense of their one-way ticket to planet Mom. By drawing their own pregnant bodies and turning themselves into the subjects of representation, the graphic artists analyzed here carve out new discursive spaces in which they challenge the devaluation of the biological and psychological aspects of gestation. This new creative phenomenon, which defies the silence surrounding this experience, expresses an attempt to reclaim maternal identities outside of the confining molds imposed on women. In doing so, it participates in the “reivindicaciones identitarias” [identity politics] that characterize contemporary autobiographical writings (Caballé qtd. in Santos 172). As Mariona Visa and Cira Crespo point out, “A principios del siglo XXI, las madres escriben, se describen y reconstruyen su propia identidad como tales” [At the beginning of the twentyfirst century, mothers write, describe themselves, and reconstruct their identity as such] (13). In doing so, they enter the social debate over reproduction and participate in the feminist enterprise to recuperate the maternal experience as a site of women’s empowerment.

Defying Eroticization: Stylistic Innovations In their search for a new artistic language that can defy the eroticization of the female body, mothers who create graphic narratives resort to a series of stylistic choices that challenge paradigms of corporeal perfection, thus seemingly freeing women from the tyranny of “the beauty myth,” to use Naomi Wolf’s familiar term. In their rebellion against current aesthetic canons these graphic artists create caricatured avatars to express their own biological and psychological transformations. In dialogue with feminist and postfeminist graphic artists who since the late sixties have represented  the gestational experience, mainly Núria Pompeia’s 9 Maternasis (1967), Claire Bretecher’s Les mères (1982), and more recently Maitena Burundarena’s Mujeres alteradas (2009), a new generation of illustrators share their maternal experiences with an audience of prospective and actual mothers. Although  the sequential art has traditionally displayed an “ambiguous relationship with maternal figures” (Bettaglio, “Madres” 69),

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Pompeia in Catalunya, Bretecher in France, and Maitena in Argentina carry out a critique of cultural constructions that deeply condition women’s existence. Published in Paris to avoid Franco’s censorship, 9 Maternasis is the first graphic narrative to offer a critical portrayal of gestation by visualizing the silencing mechanisms that erase women’s voices during what was commonly referred to as an “estado de buena esperanza” [state of good hope]. Using an artistic style consisting of simple black lines on white pages that turn pink, green, and then pitch-black as the protagonist enters into labor, 9 Maternasis reveals the impending threats implicit in reproduction for an intellectual woman. In its wordless pages, Simone de Beauvoir’s notion of pregnancy as a patriarchal trap is visually rendered through a double silencing mechanism: not only does the woman never utter a word but her mouth is always covered. She is deprived of the means of verbal expression as her subjectivity and voice are negated by an unplanned pregnancy. For instance,  the young  protagonist has to stop reading a book at a coffee shop because her pregnancy is suddenly announced by the onset of nausea (n.p.). By setting the stage for a gestational narrative, Pompeia’s maternal autographic expresses women’s antithetical relationship to society by illustrating a highly charged biological and psychosocial process that threatens to destroy her life trajectory and vital aspirations. With  the image of her swollen womb occupied by a time bomb, Pompeia visually expresses the imminent danger faced by the mother-to­be (n.p.), and recalls an observation made by the protagonist of Carmen Martín Gaite’s 1974 novel Retahilas: “En Espana, Lucía, no cabe compaginar, lo sabemos de sobra, o eres madre o te haces persona” (106) [In Spain, we know it full well, Lucía; it is impossible to balance both: either you are a mother or you become a person]. The incompatibility of acquiring a maternal role with developing an autonomous existence reflects de Beauvoir’s notion that motherhood keeps women enslaved to immanence, depriving them of the possibility of transcendence (429–30). Seen from this philosophical perspective, reproduction appears as a threat to women’s independence and emancipation; it constitutes an impending danger. As such, the collage that superimposes the time bomb on the woman’s swollen womb establishes an intertextual relationship with the iconic image of the bombs that often appear in the Spanish comics of the fifties and sixties as an allusion to the anarchist past of the city of Barcelona. In playful contrast to its chromatic shades, the book includes several black pages to represent labor and childbirth; when the bomb explodes, it is

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impossible to articulate and represent the fallout. Everything about the narrative is transgressive, including the nameless woman’s emergence from that dark experience: the images of the newly acquired maternal role show a disproportionately large child menacing a shrunken woman whose individuality has just been dwarfed by a new relational bond. A politically engaged visual artist and mother of five children, Pompeia contributed political vignettes to feminist publications such as Vindicación feminista and Charlie Hebdo. In her graphic narrative 9 Maternasis as well as in Y fueron felices comiendo perdices [And They Lived Happily Ever After] (1970) she dismantles every claim about pregnancy’s fairy tale ending by showing the miserable life of a woman whose married existence could not be bleaker. While feminist graphic artists of the seventies and eighties—like Montse Clavé, Elsa Plaza, and Marta Guerrero, among others—saw reproduction as a key site of gender oppression, current depictions of gestation and mothering sharply contrast with more critical representations of this cultural construction, which has kept women captive to the mystique of domesticity and motherhood for over forty years. As motherhood becomes a freely chosen option for women, it brings about greater psychological implications for mothers. During the eighties and nineties, Inés Alberdi points out, “[l]os hijos son mucho más importantes que en el pasado; cada vez más consecuencia de una decisión voluntaria” (145) [Children are much more important than in the past; increasingly so as a result of a voluntary decision]. This switch in attitude toward reproduction in general and motherhood reflects the “postfeminist celebration of mothering” which “reaches heights that would have been unimaginable a generation ago” (Negra 65). The resignification of motherhood in popular culture is predicated on the notion of enjoyment and fulfilment for the pseudo-empowered neoliberal subject. Entangled in the new demanding role made famous by glamorously ecstatic celebrity moms, the graphic artists who draw their own gestational and maternal misadventures do so in dialogue with paradoxical laudatory rhetoric that pervades popular culture.

New Maternal Humor Published in the wake of the success of Manel Fontdevila’s comic strip La Parejita, which appeared in the satirical magazine El Jueves from 1995 to 2014, these narratives resort to an amusing and endearing confessional style to interrogate cultural norms pertaining to the maternal role. Like

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Emilia and Mauricio, the famous fictional characters whose daily exchanges are collected in Fontdevila’s Manual para padres desesperadamente inexpertos [Manual for Desperately Inexperienced Parents] (2008), and Somos padres, no personas [We are Parents, Not People] (2010), the protagonists of maternal autographics often draw attention to the differential emotional involvement of the couple in the reproductive process. In this sense, Mauricio’s reluctance to leave behind his carefree lifestyle and his circle of male friends to attend to the responsibilities of fathering serves as an intertextual reference for many graphic artists that address their own personal choices. Emilia’s attitude towards motherhood and her insistence on conceiving a child—which she chronicles in her diary—are significant of a shift in the way women perceive the maternal role at the turn of the third millennium and into its first decades. As Cristina Molina Petit points out, motherhood has ceased to be a patriarchal imposition and has ostensibly turned into a personal choice, but a choice that participates in the insidious neoliberal discourse surrounding “free” choice (150). As such, it is worth mentioning that “la diferencia con la forma tradicional patriarcal de hacer madres a las mujeres es que ahora la demanda no parece venir del hombre (marido), que quiere hijos para hacerse fuerte y transmitirse en la familia, sino de las propias mujeres que eligen—según ellas—según su deseo” (Molina Petit 150) [the difference between the traditional way of turning women into mothers is that nowadays the request does not seem to come from the man (the husband), who wishes to have children to strengthen his position and perpetuate the family, but from the women who choose—according to them—according to their own desire]. As the result of a carefully meditated decision, mothering ceases to be criticized as an obstacle or a liability for women and now becomes perceived as a source of personal fulfillment. Idealized and romanticized, enshrined in beguiling pronativity propaganda, maternal love replaces romantic love in the life of many young women seduced by the new mythologies of contemporary mothering. While on the one hand motherhood is at the center of laudatory discourses that aim to “put motherhood squarely back at the heart of women’s lives” (Badinter 1), on the other it is devoid of symbolic value within the political and professional sphere (Concha and Osborne 7–8). Confronting this new maternal mystique based on the notion of a “maternidad romantizada” (Gimeno 23) [romanticized maternity], many mothers translate their ambivalent feelings, doubts, fears, expectations, and sense of inadequacy and guilt into graphic format in their blogs and then

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into book form for a reading public eager to see their own preoccupations addressed in sympathetic and reassuring tones. In this sense, the popularity of these graphic narratives responds to the level of identification it elicits from their readership (Caballé 65). Approaching motherhood at a time of decreasing birth rates, maternal graphic narratives point to a paradoxical situation that reflects a key feature of neoliberal practices. That is, while reproduction is celebrated as a potentially empowering personal life choice, the situation of flexi-insecurity in an increasingly precarious labor market caused by a decade of austerity measures has created profoundly anti-maternal conditions (Badinter, Gimeno et al., Álvarez, Despentes, Bettaglio “(Post)Feminist” and “Los cuidados”). Against the ghost of a patriarchal past and in the shadow of neoliberal economic measures, women who take up the pen to give graphic expression to their personal journey to mothering walk a fine line between celebrating the personal as political and succumbing to the commercialization and commodification of their life drawing. Often caught between “modelos impuestos que supeditan la experiencia maternal a los dictados del patriarcado y del capitalismo” (Vivas 16) [imposed models that subordinate maternal experience to the dictates of patriarchy and capitalism], they reveal the tensions implicit in the act of gestating, delivering, and raising children in a deeply anti-maternal climate.5 Confronting a situation of “structural infertility” (Marre 114), these graphic narratives wrestle not only with the myths of maternal perfection, maternal bliss, and unconditional love that characterize the discourse of intensive mothering in the twenty-first century, but also with the difficulties of conceiving a child.6 As for the fictional characters Emilia and Mauricio, flesh and blood couples for many, the spectre of infertility accompanies them on their rocky road to conception. In 40 semanas. Crónica de un embarazo [40 Weeks: Chronicle of a Pregnancy], Glòria Vives Xiol recounts her and her partner’s struggle to become pregnant 5  The level of societal pressure on women to have children is the subject of Irene Olmo’s recently published graphic novel No quiero ser mamá (2020). 6  Due to space constraints, graphic narratives centering on loss, like Paula Bonet’s Roedores. Cuerpo de embarazada sin embrión (2018), and on disability, like Cristina Durán and Miguel Giner Bou’s Una posibilidad entre mil (2009) will not be analyzed. Since this essay privileges the maternal perspective, works like Miguel Gallardo’s María y yo (2007) and María cumple 20 años (2015) are also not included. Likewise, Raquel Riba Rossy’s ¿Qué pacha, mamá?, which presents the daughterly perspective on the mother-daughter bond, will remain outside of the scope of this study.

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after they make the decision to have a child. With a poetic tone, the book opens with their naked embrace against the background of a starry night. Contrary to their expectations, however, like a growing number of Spanish couples they face the emotional ordeal of confronting their frustrated hopes. With a style that bears some resemblance to that of Bretecher, whose uninhibited mothers revolutionized the representation of the pregnant body, Vives Xiol draws her naked body in a way that normalizes nudity while empowering her to tell her personal story. Bretecher’s highly satirical depiction of motherhood gives way to a more intimate and poetic narration of her personal experiences with reproduction in Vives Xiol’s book. Resorting to a chromatic palette that privileges black and white, by means of simple lines she configures the tensions of reproduction, drawing attention to the carefully planned moments of intimacy. The sexual encounters that are visually delineated are poetically rendered in a way that underlines the emotional impact of frustrated conception and miscarriage (2–3, see Fig. 10.1). In Vives Xiol’s first book as well as in her subsequent maternal graphic memoir Mamá [Mommy], the psychological and biological dimensions of reproduction are visually displayed within a narrative that is not afraid of revealing the fragility and vulnerability, fear and elation that accompany the protagonist and her partner during conception, gestation, and mothering. As Vives Xiol indicates on the back cover, 40 semanas contains “[l]a agridulce crónica de un embarazo, en forma de aventura gráfica de primera mano, descarnada, sin ambages, con grandes dosis de información, humor y amor” [the bittersweet chronicle of a pregnancy, in the format of a first-person graphic adventure; vivid, straightforward, with a high dosage of information, humor, and love]. Without any concession to aesthetic embellishment, the book turns to a stylized representation that transcends the spatial organization of paneling in order to create a story full of ellipses, at times fragmentary, that  confronts the trauma of miscarriage and the need for mourning as well as the contrasting feelings that accompany her during the first trimester of her second pregnancy. The sense of bewilderment, the sudden mood changes, and the happiness and fear common to every pregnant woman find visual and textual expression in her pages, which offer prospective and gestating mothers a mirror in which they can recognize their own experiences. Following a chronological arrangement up to the moment of childbirth, 40 semanas zeroes in on the tragicomic aspects of gestation (the mix of expectation and apprehension) and  body dysmorphia

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Fig. 10.1  The emotions of conception (2–3) in 40 semanas. Crónica de un embarazo by Glòria Vives Xiol

(which  accompanies corporeal transformations); it also scrutinizes the mother’s relationship to the medical system with its impersonal approach to prenatal care. Highly regarded in Spain and translated into Italian, this graphic narrative is the prelude to a second volume, Mamá, in which new maternal adventures include the most embarrassingly exhilarating situations. Divided into chapters organized according to the child’s increasing clothes sizes, the book depicts the sense of surprise, overwhelming emotions, and insurmountable tiredness  characteristic of the postpartum weeks, when the absurdity of life takes central stage as the protagonist experiences the most bizarre scenarios: “Durante el postparto he vivido situaciones surrealistas que nunca me había imaginado que viviría. Como quedarme con las tetas al aire en una terracita de la Plaza Mayor” (n.p., see Fig. 10.2) [During the postpartum period I experienced surrealist situations that I never imagined possible, like sitting with my breasts exposed in an open-air café in the Plaza Mayor]. The mishaps of mothering are

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Fig. 10.2  The mishaps of mothering (n.p.) in  Mamá by Glòria Vives Xiol

interspersed with moments of tenderness when being a mom ceases to be an excruciating task and is made to reveal its most tender and loving aspects. In chronicling everyday situations, Vives Xiol brings to light her political views on reproduction, insisting on the need to challenge the individualistic aspects of contemporary society in favor of a community of care in which mothers can overcome the solitude of contemporary parenting. Her visual-textual narrative thus enters into dialogue with feminist debates over mothering and care work, in particular with Carolina del Olmo’s theorization about the need for a more child-friendly society.7 As a couple that strive for an egalitarian parenting style, Gloria and Guille opt for 7  In ¿Dónde está mi tribu? Maternidad y crianza en una sociedad individualista, Carolina del Olmo reveals the need for a different kind of social organization of care work within a feminist agenda that challenges the neoliberal organization of production. On this topic, see Bettaglio, “Los cuidados.”

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sharing childcare duties on an equal basis. Endorsing some of the tenets of attachment parenting, Vives Xiol participates in the feminist debate over obstetric violence as she insists on the need for a more respectful medical system during the birthing process, a key topic among feminist activists in Catalunya. In her books, Vives Xiol, like other graphic artists, reclaims a voice and a visual narrative of her own in an attempt to dismantle the notion that “[m]otherhood is an identity or social role imposed on mothers,” as Sara Ruddick denounces in Rocking the Cradle (1). While scripts of femininity and mothering are constantly being rewritten and renegotiated (Cruz and Zecchi), the image of the mother has acquired greater visibility in popular culture and in online and print form. Amidst these developments, one of the most beloved graphic artists, the Barcelona-based Argentinian Agustina Guerrero, has used her alter-ego La Volátil in her gestational narrative La Volátil. Mamma mía! to reveal, in endearing and hilarious terms, “la complejidad de la experiencia corporal que se produce durante este periodo y el trastocamiento y la reorganización de la vida cotidiana que impone la maternidad” (Imaz 19) [the complexity of the bodily experience that happens during this period and the upheaval and reorganization of daily life dictated by motherhood]. In her celebrated work, Guerrero employs her particular kind of humor in depicting the discrepancy between the airbrushed images of contentment that appear in parenting magazines and her own lived experiences. La Volátil is unabashed in the representation of her body and of her sexual encounters with her partner. This endearing and whimsical character is drawn with a naive, almost childlike appearance, which accompanies a subdued portrayal of nudity removed from eroticism (n.p., see Fig. 10.3). In this way, the character displays her sexual agency and empowerment while not succumbing to the voyeuristic desires of male readers. Though often depicted without clothes either in the bathroom or in bed, La Volátil appears enshrined in a tenderness that connotes love rather than inciting lust. In contrast to the representation of female sexuality in erotic graphic narratives of the transition period, where images of the femme fatale often take central stage in adult underground comics, self-representation in maternal graphic narratives frees the female subject from objectivization in order to empower women to address bodily functions related to reproduction. As in most maternal chronicles, in La Volátil. Mamma mía! the contrast between expectation and reality is played up in visual terms. Guerrero focuses on her own daily experiences of gestation instead of reproducing

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Fig. 10.3  Lovemaking scene (n.p.) in La Volátil. Mamma mía! by Agustina Guerrero

the saccharine images that appear in women’s and parenting magazines. The irony of the comparison is particularly striking in the narrative’s two contrasting splash pages. Imagining herself as the subject of a magazine article, on the page titled “En las revistas” [In Magazines] a pregnant woman is depicted in enthusiastic terms enjoying her newfound status by taking leisurely walks in nature, savoring healthy home-made meals packed with vitamins and vegetables, relaxing in yoga poses, sipping herbal teas, and indulging in amorous encounters (n.p., see Fig. 10.4). The facing page, titled “Mientras tanto tú” [Meanwhile you], offers an ironic commentary on the reassuring images purveyed by parenting magazines (n.p.). At the center of the visual composition, a significantly distressed Volátil sits exhausted on the bathroom floor with her arm on the toilet. Her bloodshot eyes and her tongue hanging out of her mouth leave nothing to the imagination. With her grotesquely deformed face, she has just suffered from morning sickness. In sharp contrast with the pleasant

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Fig. 10.4  Magazines vs. reality (n.p.) in La Volátil. Mamma mía! by Agustina Guerrero

activities illustrated in the media, she is a wreck, dishevelled, miserable. Tormented by her upset gastrointestinal system, she lets out a fart, as the brown squiggle coming from her behind indicates. The visual composition shows how the reading of the reassuring magazine has been interrupted by the sudden onset of nausea: she has just rushed to empty her stomach while her pregnancy magazine, El embarazo, lies abandoned on the floor. The reality of the bodily discomfort of gestation asserts itself over the airbrushed mystifications of popular culture that minimize the side effects of pregnancy. None of the serenity and bliss proposed by her magazine compares to her current state of misery. The situation is sadly familiar to all women who have been pregnant, and that sense of commonality between the comic’s character and the reader’s past experience creates a powerful bond, which as Caballé remarks is at the center of the success of many autobiographical narratives (65). All

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the graphic artists analyzed here point the finger to the misrepresentation of pregnancy and mothering in the field of popular culture, where the most disconcerting aspects of gestation are minimized and replaced by a neoliberal discourse that shifts the responsibility onto the woman to assure her own wellbeing. It is often the case in intimate autobiographical narratives that the impulse to recount one’s past comes as a result of a moment of crisis, which, according to Caballé, characterizes the diaristic form, especially its cathartic aspect: “[e]n la mayoría de los casos, la escritura de un diario se corresponde con una crisis de identidad” (54) [in the majority of cases, the writing of a diary corresponds to an identity crisis]. The crisis to which the Spanish theorist alludes constitutes a key element of maternal autographics, since the metamorphosis set in motion by the pregnancy, with its high degree of anxiety, is the event that sets the narration in motion. Whether the conception is the fruit of a long and troubled process of trial and error, as in the case of Vives Xiol’s 40 Semanas and Torrón’s Mammasutra, or a fortuitous event as in the case of Zayas’s Estoy embarazada, ¿Y ahora qué?, the gestating mother turns to graphic humor to make sense of the rollercoaster of emotions she experiences for the first time.

Unmasking Maternal Bewilderment In their drawings, these authors display a sense of disconnect and bewilderment beneath the “mask of motherhood” evident in the airbrushed images of serene and fulfilled celebrity during their so-called state “de buena esperanza” [of good hope]. Humor thus functions as a coping mechanism that helps them overcome the requirements of a highly demanding social role. As in the case of most maternal blogs, “tienen como protagonista central a la madre, que habla sobre todo de sus hijos, pero también de los cambios que la maternidad ha conllevado a su vida. Así, se explican anéctodas y experiencias personales a la vez que se difunde información” (Visa and Crespo 38) [the mother is the key protagonist, who talks especially about her children, but also about the changes that mothering brought into her life. In this way, they explain anecdotes and personal experiences while at the same time they share information]. The struggle to conceive, the lived experiences of morning sickness, the emotional turmoil that accompanies the hormonal changes, the sense of psychological unrest, and a plethora of contrasted feelings, including a sense of insecurity, find visual and textual form in most of these graphic narratives (n.p., see Fig. 10.5). Freed from the Sisyphean torture of housework

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Fig. 10.5  Insecurity and unrest (n.p.) in La Volátil. Mamma mía! by Agustina Guerrero

and less burdened by gender imbalance, the protagonists of these narratives face the paradoxes and incongruities of “sociedades formalmente igualitarias y en que la mayor parte de las personas declara apoyar el valor de la igualdad” (Miguel 9) [formally egalitarian societies, in which most people claim to support gender equality]. Now that mothers are speaking for, representing, writing, and drawing themselves, the popularity of this form of maternal expression foregrounds the sense of inadequacy that

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women feel when confronted with unattainable standards of maternal perfection. Read as symptomatic of the paradoxical situation in which mothers are situated, these graphic narratives represent a creative response to: los discursos políticos y culturales, tanto masculinos como femeninos, que proponen un modelo de mujer que, aun inserta en la esfera pública (profesional), añora la privada, mientras redescubre “valores” tradicionales como el matrimonio, la domesticidad y, sobre todo, la maternidad, los cuales, reivindicados ahora como ejercicio de libertad y vía de realización integral, acaban ocupando casi el mismo puesto de honor que ostentaran durante el franquismo. (Cruz and Zecchi 11) [male as well as female political and cultural discourses that propose a model of the woman who, although participating in the public (professional) sphere, longs for the private as she rediscovers traditional “values” such as marriage, domesticity, and, above all, maternity. These women, vindicated now as an exercise of freedom and a way of essential self-realization, end up occupying almost the same honorary place that they could boast during Francoism.]

Even as Spanish media seem to glorify the image of the mother in order to convince Spanish women to embrace it anew, alternative paradigms of motherhood are coming to the fore. These have the potential to reconcile female creativity and biological procreative power, thus exploring what Silvia Vegetti-Finzi calls the “creative dimension” of “the maternal process” (4). Nonetheless, in commercially successful accounts of maternal experiences, the subversive potential of maternal graphic narratives so powerfully expressed by graphic artists such as Núria Pompeia during the late Franco period and the Transition to Democracy tends to be diluted in favor of consolatory narratives. As a mirror held up to the daily (mis) adventures of gestating and mothering, they reassure new mothers of their doubts without challenging the overall inequality of a profoundly anti-­ maternal socioeconomic system. Enmeshed in the contradictions of the so-called “patriarcado de consentimiento” [patriarchy of consent], graphic narratives that purport to expose the myth of maternal glory participate in the neoliberal economics that commodifies maternal expression for a reading public. As we have seen here, the representation of female subjectivity is a key issue for women graphic artists who have to confront a male-dominated artistic medium. In their attempt to free themselves from an androcentric

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system of signification, they search for alternative visual codes of communication. Yet as Spanish graphic artist and theorist Marika Vila points out, “las creadoras deben cambiar el marco del discurso y la dirección de la interlocución” (31) [women creators need to change the discursive framework and the direction of interlocution]. Working in this medium, they carry out stylistic innovations that resist the codes of representation that characterized the so-called “cómic femenino” of the fifties and sixties as well as the symbolic violence that strips women of agency and voice. Each with its unique visual style, these graphic narratives respond to the anxieties that surround the maternal function, confronting the anti-­ maternal climate that pervades post-2008 Spain. While “el ideal materno oscila entre la madre sacrificada, al servicio de la familia y las criaturas, y la superwoman, capaz de llegar a todo compaginando trabajo y crianza (Vivas 15) [the maternal ideal wavers between the sacrificed mother, at the service of her family and children, and the superwoman, who manages to get everything done while balancing work and childrearing], maternal graphic narratives written in a confessional style provide comic relief for prospective and new mothers. As they face deeply anti-maternal conditions, they find humor and parody as powerful antidotes to the glamorization of motherhood and to the image of the supermother, who successfully fulfills all aspects of her professional and personal life while preserving her unflinching good moods and beautiful looks. Against the imperatives of the new “Mommy Myths” (Douglas and Michaels 3–4), and against the photoshopped selfies of celebrity mothers, these autobiographic graphic narratives show caricatured bodies whose facial features reveal eyes marked by dark circles. Exhausted by the demands of contemporary mothering, these self-fictional characters respond to the mystification of the maternal role by focusing on their own personal stories and bodily experiences, revealing their everyday misadventures rather than critiquing the structural inequalities of the social organization of care work. Humor thus functions as a safety valve that allows for the release of tension while leaving unchanged the economic structures and social practices that support the gendered division of labor.

Works Cited Alary, Viviane, Danielle Corrado, and Benoit Mitaine, eds. Autobio-graphismes. Bande dessinée et représentation de soi. Chêne-Bourg: Georg, 2015. Alberdi, Inés. La nueva familia española. Madrid: Taurus, 1999.

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Álvarez, Bruna. “Reproductive Decision Making in Spain: Heterosexual Couples’ Narratives About How They Chose to Have Children.” Journal of Family Issues 39.2 (2018): 3487–3507. Badinter, Elisabeth. La mujer y la madre. Trans. Montse Roca. Madrid: La Esfera de los Libros, 2011. Beauvoir, Simone de. El segundo sexo. Trans. H.M. Parshley. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Bettaglio, Marina. “Los cuidados en la economía neoliberal: reivindicaciones feministas en la España actual.” Todos a movilizarse. Protesta y activismo social en la España del siglo XXI. Ed. María José Hellín García and Ana Corbalán Vélez. Barcelona: Anthropos, 2019. 69–88. ———. “Madres de cómic: del silencio al protagonismo.” Con el lápiz en la mano: mujeres y cómics a ambos lados del Atlántico, special issue of Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 43.1 (2018): 69–91. ———. “(Post)Feminist Maternal Memoirs and their Discontents.” Letras Femeninas 41.1 (2015): 228–45. Bonet, Paula. Roedores. Cuerpo de embarazada sin embrión. Barcelona: Random House, 2018. Bourland Ross, Catherine. “Why We Are All in the Club. El Club de las malas madres.” The Changing Spanish Family. Essays on New Views in Literature, Cinema, and Theater. Ed. Tiffany Trotman. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011. 9–23. Bretecher, Claire. Les mères. Paris: Bretecher, 1982. Burundarena, Maitena. Todas las mujeres alteradas. Barcelona: Random House Mondadori, 2009. Caballé, Anna. Narcisos de tinta. Ensayo sobre la literatura autobiográfica en lengua castellana (siglo XIX y XX). Madrid: Megazul, 1995. Castaño, Marga, and Esther de la Rosa. Hardcore Maternity. Barcelona: Lumen, 2017. Chute, Hillary. “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative.” PMLA 123.2 (2008): 452–65. ———. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New  York: Columbia UP, 2010. Concha, Ángeles de la, and Raquel Osborne. Las mujeres y los niños primero: discursos de la maternidad. Barcelona: Icaria, 2004. Cruz, Jacqueline, and Barbara Zecchi. “Más que evolución, involución: a modo de Prólogo.” La mujer en la España actual: ¿Evolución o involución? Ed. Cruz and Zecchi. Barcelona: Icaria, 2004. 7–24. Despentes, Virginie. King Kong Theory. New York: Feminist Press, 2010. Douglas, Susan, and Meredith Michaels. The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined Women. New York: Free Press, 2004. Durán, Cristina, and Miguel Giner Bou. Una posibilidad entre mil. Bilbao: Astiberri, 2009.

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Etxebarria, Lucía. Un milagro en equilibrio. Barcelona: Planeta, 2004. Fontdevila, Manel. La parejita. Guía para padres desesperadamente inexpertos. Barcelona: El Jueves Ediciones, 2008. ———. La parejita. ¡Somos padres, no personas! Guía para padres desesperadamente inexpertos. Barcelona: El Jueves Ediciones, 2010. Freixas, Laura. “Maternidad y cultura: una reflexión en primera persona.” Claves de Razón Práctica 224 (2012): 8–19. Gallardo, Miguel. María cumple 20 años. Bilbao: Astiberri, 2015. ———. María y yo. Bilbao: Astiberri, 2007. Gili, Esther. 39 Semanas y mis experiencias como madre novata. Barcelona: Lunwerg, 2016. Gilmore, Leigh. Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self Representation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1994. Gimeno, Beatriz et al. (H)amor de madre. Madrid: Continta Me Tienes, 2016. Guerrero, Agustina. La Volátil. Mamma mía! Barcelona: Lumen, 2015. Hays, Sharon. Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. New Haven: Yale UP, 1996. Hirsch, Marianne, The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1989. Imaz, Elixabete. Convertirse en madre. Etnografía del tiempo de gestación. Madrid: Cátedra, 2010. Jiménez Lapsicomami, Mamen. 50 sombras de mami. Ser mujer, amiga, amante… y la madre que los parió. Barcelona: Lunwerg, 2019. Kristeva, Julia. “A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident.” The Kristeva Reader. Ed. Toril Moi. New York: Columbia UP, 1986. 292–300. Lazarre, Jane. The Mother Knot. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997. Marre, Diana. “Los silencios de la adopción en España.” Revista de antropología social 19 (2009): 97–126. Martín Gaite, Carmen. Retahilas. Barcelona: Destino, 1974. Menéndez-Ponte, María, and Evaduna. El regalo perfecto para mamá. Barcelona: Grijalbo, 2018. Miguel, Ana de. Neoliberalismo sexual. El mito de la libre elección. Madrid: Cátedra, 2015. Molina Petit, Cristina. “Género y poder desde sus metáforas. Apuntes para una topografía del patriarcado.” Del sexo al género. Los equívocos de un concepto. Ed. Silvia Tubert. Madrid: Cátedra, 2011. 123–59. Negra, Diane. What a Girl Wants? Fantasizing the Reclamation of Self in Postfeminism. London: Routledge, 2009. Olmo, Carolina del. ¿Dónde está mi tribu? Maternidad y crianza en una sociedad individualista. Madrid: Clave Editorial, 2013. Olmo, Irene. No quiero ser mamá. Barcelona: Bang, 2020. Pompeia, Núria. 9 Maternasis. Barcelona: Kairós, 1967. ———. Y fueron felices comiendo perdices. Barcelona: Kairós, 1970.

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Precup, Mihaela. The Graphic Lives of Fathers: Memory, Representation and Fatherhood in North American Autobiographical Comics. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Quiles, Cristina. La madre que nos parió. Barcelona: La Galera, 2015. Riba Rossy, Raquel. ¿Qué pacha, mamá? Barcelona: Lumen, 2018. Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: Norton & Company, 1986. Riera, Carme. Tiempo de espera. Barcelona: Lumen, 1998. Ruddick, Sara. Preface. Rocking the Cradle: Thoughts on Motherhood, Feminism and the Possibility of Empowered Mothering. Ed. Andrea O’Reilly. Toronto: Demeter Press, 2006. 1–6. Sánchez-Mancebo, Verónica. Bi mother my friend. Porque, a veces, madre sí, hay más de una. Barcelona: Libros Cúpula, 2019. Santos, Care. Supermami. Mil maneras de ser una mamá feliz. Barcelona: Grijalbo, 2009. Sesar, Gemma. Vida de madre. El invierno. Santiago de Compostela: El Patito, 2013. ———. Vida de madre 2. La primavera. Santiago de Compostela: El Patito, 2014. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography. A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 2001. Torrón, Cristina. Mammasutra: 1001 posturas para madres en apuros. Barcelona: Lumen, 2016. Vegetti-Finzi, Silvia. Mothering: Toward a New Psychoanalytic Construction. New York: Guilford Press, 1995. Vila, Marika. Derrumbando estereotipos. La subjetividad femenina en el cómic. Gijón: Semana Negra, 2018. Visa, Mariona, and Cira Crespo. Madres en red. Del lavadero a la blogosfera. Madrid: Clave Intelectual, 2014. Vivas, Esther. Mamá desobediente. Una mirada feminista a la maternidad. Madrid: Capitán Swing, 2019. Vives Xiol, Glòria. 40 semanas. Crónica de un embarazo. Barcelona: Thule Ediciones, 2012. ———. Mamá. Albuixech: Litera, 2015. Whitlock, Gillian. “Autographics: The Seeing ‘I’ of the Comic.” Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006): 965–79. Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. New York: Harper Perennial, 2002. Zayas, Andrea. Estoy embarazada, ¿Y ahora qué? Cuaderno del embarazo. Barcelona: Now Books, 2017. ———. Ya ha nacido, ¿Y ahora qué? Cuaderno del puerperio. Barcelona: Now Books, 2017.

PART III

Contemporary Issues

CHAPTER 11

“In This Country, the Past Never Dies”: Superheroes, Democracy, and the Culture of the Spanish Transition in ¡García! Alberto López Martín

The two-volume comic book, ¡García!, by Santiago García and Luis Bustos tells the story of a Francoist super-agent who, in the 1960s, is allegedly betrayed by his sidekick, Jaimito, and put into hibernation in a secret chamber in the Cuelgamuros valley. Agent García is accidentally awakened by Antonia, a young journalist, while she is pursuing a clue of mysterious origin about his location. After the initial shock of bumping into Franco’s tomb in the basilica and finding out that it is the year 2015, García must adapt quickly to a destabilized Spain on the verge of political collapse, immersed into a state of social tension of dangerous precedents (see Fig.  11.1). The super-agent is manipulated and betrayed again by Jaimito, now Don Jaime, leader of the secret intelligence service who pulls the political strings of Spanish democracy from the shadows, and who also happens to be Antonia’s father. The latter will help García escape his

A. López Martín (*) Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, IN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 C. McKinney, D. F. Richter (eds.), Spanish Graphic Narratives, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56820-7_11

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Fig. 11.1  García finds out Franco is dead (1: 92) in ¡García! by Santiago García and Luis Bustos

persecutors and amend his services to his former partner, giving the hero the opportunity to start a new life. Focusing on this setting of historical fiction, comedy, and riddles to be solved, this chapter examines ¡García! as a criticism of the problematic regime of 1978 and its inability to break with its Francoist roots once and for all. In particular, I examine the use of conventions from the superhero genre in ¡García! and their integration into a plot of socio-political content that parodies the Spanish media, combining pulp dystopia with events and actors that are disturbingly familiar to the contemporary reader. The superhero genre has often been regarded as one that addresses public issues in a superficial and trivial way, but García and Bustos’s work demonstrates an accurate sociopolitical and critical commentary. I will argue that, using humor, admonition, and the subversion of certain generic

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conventions, ¡García! problematizes and successfully points out the inadequacy of the narratives of legitimization of political power in contemporary Spain. One of the most interesting aspects of ¡García! is the change of aesthetics and formal codes when the story recalls the past adventures of García and Jaimito. With the collaboration of Manel Fontdevila at the drawing board,1 these sections and the leading duo are a clear reference to the cuadernos de aventuras [adventure notebooks] of Roberto Alcázar and Pedrín,2 and to times when comic books as a medium were still struggling to grow, limited by censorship and isolation. The simplicity of these parts of the story and its escapist Manichaeism, deprived of specific contextual references and featuring an archetypal villain named Nefastus inhabiting a castle and surrounding himself with a horde of zombies, is a reference to a moral world in black and white, longed for by García. In the story’s literary present, the actors have multiplied and their motivations with them. Nefastus, who for unknown reasons has hibernated alongside García and wakes up at the same time, is now Professor Neffenberg, a figure who shows no political ambition and just wants to disappear and get rid of his acolytes, a paramilitary group of sorts. Jaimito/Don Jaime is the central figure of this time, revealing himself as a villain for his lack of scruples when manipulating other characters to carry out an agenda that is equally unclear beyond his Francoist affiliation and his personal revenge against the Interior Minister. Santiago García and Luis Bustos’s work shows the influence of superhero comics, particularly those of Marvel (Ausente n.p., “Entrevista a Luis Bustos” 159, 162, 163), in the stylistic features of the plot that takes place in the present time. As Gerardo Vilches points out, even the lettering used by Bustos pays homage to the popular subgenre (“La novela gráfica” n.p., see Fig. 11.2).

1  Fondevila was initially slated as the illustrator for ¡García!, but the project was delayed and he was eventually substituted by Bustos. He nonetheless took part in the graphic novel, overseeing the drawing of those parts of the story that were set in the sixties (Portolés n.p.). 2  There is a tradition of intertextual references to “Roberto Alcázar y Pedrín” in Spanish comics that precedes ¡García! and that attests to the popularity of Eduardo Vañó and Juan Bautista’s work. It is worth mentioning the caustic parody “Roberto el Carca y Zotín” by Antonio Pamies, serialized in the underground magazine El Víbora (1980–1984). Another obvious reference is the nested comic-within-a-comic “Pedro Guzmán, el intrépido aventurero español” written by the protagonist of El artefacto perverso (1996), the critically acclaimed comic book by Felipe Hernández Cava and Federico del Barrio.

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Fig. 11.2  Collage of ¡García!’s distinctive drawing styles, past and present, in ¡García! by Santiago García and Luis Bustos

The premise of this group of characters making the leap into a more complex and nuanced comic style and reality is narratively related to the transition from Francoism to the current Spanish democracy. ¡García! shows the continuity of the Francoist regime in the actions of officials and bureaucrats like Don Jaime, capable of controlling the government or the police from the shadows to ensure that power does not change hands. Beyond the characters and conventions of the genre, the graphic novel seems to align with the idea of a defective democratization process, weighed down by undesirable deficiencies and the persistence of the old regime, and whose legacy would be what authors such as Guillem Martínez or Amador Fernández Savater have dubbed as the Culture of the Transition, hereafter CT.

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The CT Through ¡García! ¡García! is among many recent works in the comics genre that, during the last decade, have tried to showcase the social discontent and the growing distrust and institutional deterioration of the so-called 1978 regime. While not an exhaustive review, it is worth mentioning graphic narratives that deal with the consequences of the 2008 financial crisis, such as Aquí vivió: Historia de un desahucio (2016) by Isaac Rosa and Cristina Bueno, or works that denounce neoliberalism’s corruption and greed with inspiration or references to quincemayismo [the May 15, 2011 protest movements], such as Lo que me está pasando: Diarios de un joven emperdedor (2015) by Miguel Brieva, No os indignéis tanto (2011) by Manel Fontdevila, or Fagocitosis (2011) by Marcos Prior and Danide. Additionally, graphic novels such as El arte de volar (2009) by Antonio Altarriba and Kim, or Los surcos del azar (2013) by Paco Roca have revisited the Spanish Civil War and Francoism from a critical perspective, often questioning the official account of the transition. At this juncture, present errors are reevaluated in the light of omissions and amnesias in the configuration of a properly democratic culture. As Joan Ramon Resina explains, the pro-­ government culture during the transition to democracy appropriated the values of bourgeois liberalism, betting on a pro-European universalism that was suspicious of any deviations from its political-aesthetic norm, describing such production as sectarian and ideological (10). This binary universal/partial scheme also served to disguise Spanish nationalism as constitutionalism, presenting it as the side of progress and conciliation, and to oppose it to the backwardness and confrontation associated with peripheral nationalisms (Resina 10–11). In this endeavor, the treatment of historical memory is fundamental, and while any recovery task involves (re)constructing it, with omissions and additions that fill gaps, the Spanish transition to democracy was characterized by an active erasure of its social memory until the death of Franco. It could not otherwise have been avoided that the legal-political framework of the dictatorship became a source of legitimacy for the new democratic regime, and that, in essence, there was never a true rupture between both regimes (Cardús i Ros 19). The consequences of the deletion, as well as the importance of the subject in the current debate, are evident in the words of Gregorio Morán: “La primera igualdad que instauró la transición a la democracia en España fue la de que todos somos

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iguales ante el pasado. Una garantía para mantener la desigualdad ante el futuro” (n.p.) [The first equality that the transition to democracy established in Spain was that we are all equal regarding the past. A guarantee to maintain inequality in the future].3 Thirty years later, when the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent austerity policies triggered precariousness in all areas and compromised the promises of neoliberal prosperity, movements such as the indignados have pointed to the regime of 1978 and its strategy of consensus and forgetfulness. The 15-M, a branch of the Occupy movement that became known for their protest camps in squares all around Spain—starting with Madrid’s Puerta del Sol square on May 15, 2011—sought to generate an alternative culture capable of breaking with the frame of what was considered possible and debatable according to constitutionalist bipartisanship. Thus, Guillem Martínez speaks of the CT as a cultural production that is de-problematizing and fundamentally depoliticized insofar as the pillars of the 1978 regime, including the crown and the narrative of an exemplary transition, cannot be questioned without falling into marginality. Such punishment, as Martínez mentions, is not exercised by the State but by culture itself. The emphasis on conciliatory proposals would have resulted in an idea of culture as a “fiesta, es decir, como ámbito segregado de las tensiones sociales y políticas, como un lugar de encuentro y no de confrontación” (Echevarría n.p.) [party, that is, as a field detached from social and political tensions, as a place of encounter and not of confrontation]. Amador Fernández-Savater adds other keys to outline the CT: although the party system is beyond the discussion, “se escenifica un conflicto permanente en el que estamos invitados a tomar partido: PSOE o PP, izquierda o derecha, capitalismo ilustrado o capitalismo troglodita, ‘las dos Españas’” (Fernández-Savater n.p.) [a permanent conflict is staged in which we are invited to take sides: PSOE or PP, left or right, enlightened capitalism or troglodyte capitalism, “the two Spains”]. This false conflict works in two ways: first, it justifies the CT’s call for consensus and cohesion, to stay on the game board and abide by its rules, under the threat of a social fracture. Second, it creates an appearance of ideological plurality that does not correspond to reality. Both the Popular Party and the Socialist Party in Spain are driven by liberal economic principles, having favored the privatization of services and having folded to the dictates of the IMF and the recipe of austerity measures in order to deal with the  All translations are my own.

3

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2008 crisis.4 Moreover, these parties do not hide their connections with companies of the IBEX 355 and the controversial dynamics of revolving doors, which contributes to reinforce the idea of a political-business elite as a de facto ruler (Juste 299). Similarly, both liberals and conservatives have been strong advocates for both the crown and territorial unity, the two other red lines drawn by the CT. At the beginning of ¡García!, the Socialist and Popular parties govern in coalition and face an emergency situation with the kidnapping of an important political leader, the Capitana—a fictionalized, but easily recognizable version of the ex-minister of Education, Culture and Sports and former president of the Community of Madrid, Esperanza Aguirre. The story’s departure point is based on a prediction of the 15-M and Real Democracy Now that was later repeated by the emerging party Podemos, founded in 2014 to channel the indignation in the public squares and the growing discontent with the parties of the transition: the supposed ideological rivals would converge if their system was threatened by a true political alternative.6 When Don Jaime is updating García on the country’s current state of affairs, he introduces him to the secretary of state, a socialist. To his surprise, Don Jaime informs him of the coalition between these and “el legítimo gobierno, heredero de nuestro caudillo” (¡García! 1: 132) [the legitimate government, heir of our leader]. When he manipulates García to kidnap the leader of the radical left party, a fictionalized version of Pablo Iglesias and Podemos, Don Jaime expresses his concern about the possibility that Podemos could win in the next election (1: 138–39). The polysemy of the expression used by Don Jaime, “dé el golpe,” (1: 138), which can mean both “to win” and “to carry out a 4  Both parties undertook a constitutional reform to prioritize deficit control and the payment of public debt, thus submitting to the economic commands of Brussels. They put this modification ahead of other necessary and long overdue reforms of the Carta Magna, and carried it out without support from the remaining political parties or a referendum, which was also subject to strong criticism (“Aprobada la reforma” n.p.). 5  Initiated in January 14, 1992, the IBEX 35 has since been the benchmark stock market index of the Bolsa de Madrid, Spain’s main stock exchange. It comprises the 35 most liquid national stocks, which typically correspond to the 35 companies with the highest trading volume for each period considered (Juste 31–32). 6  One of the biggest internal crises in the recent history of the PSOE came after the general elections of June 2016, caused by the need for its deputies to abstain so that Mariano Rajoy could be invested president (Cruz n.p.). In this episode, voters saw the theses exposed above coming into fruition.

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coup,” evokes the anxiety generated by the failed coup d’état of February 23, 1981, known as 23-F, an episode that has been constantly brought up by the CT in its crusade for consensus. Later, Don Jaime communicates by telephone with the president, a version of the now-retired Mariano Rajoy, and offers to hand García over, referring to him as the “secuestrador del rojo” (1: 151) [kidnapper of the commie]. In the second volume of the story, the reader gains access to the other half of the dialogue, where the president formulates his goal: to reach the election “sin alternativa … reforzados o no … Si nos van a votar igual. Siempre que no haya otros, claro” (2: 24, see Fig. 11.3) [with no alternatives… reinforced or not… we will be voted anyway. As long as there are no other options, of course]. On the one hand, Don Jaime unambiguously establishes a direct connection in succession terms between the Popular Party and the Franco regime; on the other hand, it is the president himself who recognizes the absence of real political alternatives beyond the supposedly radical left-wing party, which he seeks to remove from the electoral contest. ¡García!’s reading of the recent socio-political context clearly puts into question the CT status quo, an approach that the graphic novel shares with other works in recent Spanish comic book production, such as Enrique Flores’ Cuaderno de Sol (2011) or Aleix Saló’s Españistán. Este

Fig. 11.3  The president seeks Don Jaime’s help against “the commie” (2: 24, 1: 151) in ¡García! by Santiago García and Luis Bustos

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país se va a la mierda (2011).7 However, its genre and conventions open up opportunities for sociopolitical commentary that differ from the aforementioned non-fiction, documentary comics’ approach. With the purpose of structuring my analysis, I will examine the work of García and Bustos as a modern dystopia. I will also analyze its problematic adherence to the superhero genre, its metafictional dimension and its deliberately confusing plot articulation. These elements dialogue with each other and interconnect. For instance, the story’s multiple loose ends constitute a tribute of sorts to the serial comic and its accessibility. In the words of Santiago García, “durante la infancia leíamos los cómics incompletos, que es algo que siempre pasaba. Nunca podías leer una serie entera de principio al final, había cosas que no sabías […] [N]o leíamos las cosas por orden sino que te caían y además incompletas” (qtd. in Ausente n.p.) [during our childhood we used to read comics incompletely, which is something that always happened. You could never read a whole series from beginning to end, there were things you did not know […] We did not read things in order, we came across them, and on top of that, stories were fragmented].

A Vigilante for Darker, Oblivious Times ¡García!’s dystopian premise is similar to Moore and Gibbons’s Watchmen in its portrait of the Cold War period and the tensions between Soviets and Americans. It is not a dystopia strictly speaking, located in a future time that looks drastically different from the current one, as a result of catastrophic events or decisions that would ruin the welfare and freedoms of the civilization in question.8 The historical time of ¡García!, post-15-M 7  The absence of references to the monarchy in ¡García! is surprising to say the least, and could even seem a deliberate omission. Santiago García mentioned that the reason behind it was mainly narrative: an attempt to keep the story from getting too overloaded with characters and allusions. Interestingly, he explained that the first script of ¡García! was set on Felipe VI’s coronation day, an idea that was discarded to keep focus on the politicians’ side of institutional corruption. The author, however, left the door open for a role of the Spanish Crown in García’s future adventures (García, “Re: Pregunta” n.p.). 8  ¡García! fulfills several of the defining characteristics of a dystopia as defined by Diana Palardy (10): a sub-sector of the population is oppressed to a greater or lesser extent—the different groups that make up the precariat; the origin of the current state of affairs is located in systemic sociopolitical problems that are not given the attention or the solutions they deserve; it has an admonitory function that challenges the reader to react; and it shows characters that are monitored and controlled, and experience a disappointment that, in the case of García, ends in his rebellion against the system.

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Spain, is made familiar to the contemporary reader through unequivocal cultural references and the inclusion of politicians and pop media figures in its catalog of characters. But this recognizable context quickly becomes foreign: the problems of the present juncture are hyperbolized and aggravated by the addition of intrigue and episodes such as the kidnapping and murder of the Capitana, which amplify the climate of social schism and imminent confrontation. Diana Palardy focuses on the increase in the publication of dystopian fictions in Spain after the outbreak of the crisis, and also points out that these contain geographical, political, and socio-­ cultural references that distinguish them from foreign influences (219). Indeed, and as the author points out, a dystopia is characterized by the exploration of an anxiety (219). ¡García! surely demonstrates this and seems to suggest that, in the Spanish case, such anxiety relates to the rupture of the consensus culture associated with the transition to democracy, which runs the risk of reopening wounds that could compromise coexistence. The proximity of ¡García!’s fictional Spain seems to invite the reader to wonder if Spain is already a full-fledged dystopia, as Javier Meléndez Martín tries to argue by analyzing the control of emotions and thought via the 2015 Gag Law and the use of Newspeak by the government (Meléndez n.p.). In addition to the return of García and his archenemy Neffenberg, the destabilizing sociopolitical incidents in ¡García!’s Spain are the kidnappings of the Capitana and Colibrí, the fictional versions of Aguirre and Iglesias. Kidnappings are not unknown to Spanish political life, having been part of the modus operandi of the Basque terrorist group Euskadi Ta Askatasuna [Basque Homeland and Freedom], or ETA, and its related organizations, who committed more than 80 kidnappings from the 1970s to 1997 (Llera and Leonisio 148). ETA has been one of the foremost common enemies of the CT’s political forces, serving as an aggregating antagonist under the umbrella of constitutionalism and contributing to the marginalization of peripheral nationalisms. It is worth remembering the multitudinous demonstrations after the last of these kidnappings, that of Ermua’s Popular councilman Miguel Ángel Blanco in 1997, which culminated in his murder and shocked the entire country. In ¡García!, the CT’s main adversary is the radical left, which is suspected to be behind the Capitana’s abduction; a left that, like its non-fictional inspiration, post-­15-M populism, has managed to keep in check the bipartisanship and logic of consensus of the regime of 1978. In this temporality of crisis, as much economic as cultural (Labrador 3), the dissent of the disenchanted

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generates the corresponding reaction in “los herederos del caudillo” (¡García! 1: 132) [the heirs of the leader], as Don Jaime defines them. Hence, the demonstration for the release of the Capitana is characterized by a belligerence more typical of the tension prior to the coup of 1936 than the peaceful citizen protests that normally took place as a response to the acts of ETA. Thus, on a stage with the #libertad [#freedom] hashtag and a background image of the hostage, one of the speakers in volume one of ¡García! harangues the protesters shouting that “la única solución es machacarles y machacarles y machacarles” (1: 133, see Fig. 11.4) [the only solution is to crush, and crush, and crush them]. The dystopian element of ¡García! takes us to the question of its morality and admonitions. The back cover of the first volume reads, “El pasado nunca muere. En España, el pasado siempre vuelve” [The past never dies. In Spain, the past always comes back], and it could be added that such a past never really left. Moreover, its continuance has been detrimental to the memory of the anti-Francoist struggle. But it is important to examine to what extent this past triggers dynamics that are different from those working on a global scale, in a scenario of ideological polarization and

Fig. 11.4  Protest at Puerta del Sol demanding the release of the Capitana (1: 133) in ¡García! by Santiago García and Luis Bustos

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growing distrust towards the liberal model. Two phenomena typically attributed to the CT that ¡García! emphasizes are the servility of the media and rampant political corruption, both combined with considerable doses of cynicism by journalists and leaders. The journalistic and media world is explored through Antonia, García’s coprotagonist. She is an intern reporter, and her precarious job and personal situation account for the difficulties of the workers in the sector to preserve their independence at all levels. She has been unable to emancipate herself and lives with her father, and she covers the most irrelevant stories for her newspaper. When she begins to investigate García’s case, she finds all kinds of obstacles in her own editorial office, with the exception of her immediate superior who, despite mildly helping her, always addresses her with paternalistic condescension. At the end of the story, in volume two, and when she offers her newspaper the exclusive story on García and the truth about the kidnapping of Colibrí, the director refuses to publish it in order to win the favor of the government. He justifies himself before Antonia in this way: [Queremos ayudarles] por dos razones. Una, no queremos romper el juguete. Dos, nos van a deber un favor muy gordo … necesitamos la pasta de la tele. Y el gobierno tiene que conceder nuevas licencias en la próxima legislatura. Eso suponiendo que siga existiendo un gobierno. Suponiendo que podamos apagar este fuego antes de que se queme toda España. (¡García! 2: 167) [We want to help them for two reasons. One, we do not want to break this toy. Two, they are going to owe us a very big favor … we need the TV revenue. And the government has to grant new licenses in the next term. Assuming that a government continues to exist. Assuming we can put out this fire before it burns Spain entirely].

This reasoning brings up the risks that media conglomerates pose to freedom of information, in addition to staging the docility of the Spanish press before power. If, as Gregorio Morán points out, “Prensa y poder marcharon juntos durante la Transición, sustentándose uno a otro” (n.p.) [Press and power marched together during the Transition, sustaining one another], at the present time the newspapers preserve that task of guardianship of the CT, aggravated by the participation of financial institutions in their decision-making bodies.9 The resolution of Antonia’s story is 9  According to Pere Rusiñol: “Hoy casi todos los grandes medios de España han sido absorbidos por el poder financiero. No con la clásica dependencia de la influencia publicitaria

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quite discouraging: the protagonist receives an offer of a permanent position by her newspaper and accepts it, even knowing that they will not publish her revelations. The decision is far from surprising for a reader familiar with the domestic labor market (see Fig. 11.5). ¡García! echoes frequent reproaches to a business culture that rewards obedience instead of sound professionalism, at the same time that it preys on the vulnerability of unprotected workers, habits that link directly with the treatment of political corruption in the comic. Like her real-life inspiration, Esperanza Aguirre, the Capitana is involved in several cases of corruption while she presents herself as a champion of honesty and transparency. In fact, it is her second in command, Manolo, who kidnaps her after finding out that she has handed him over to the anti-corruption prosecutor: “Tantos años juntos, tanto que nos hemos repartido, y al final me entregas para salvar tu culo … todos pringados de mierda, y tú siempre impoluta” (¡García! 2: 11) [So many years together, so much money made and in the end, you turn me in to save your ass … we are all covered in shit, and you, always clean]. Manolo’s comment alludes to the ability of the Capitana, clearly inspired in Aguirre, to stay politically afloat amidst scandals involving illicit activities of close collaborators. Ultimately, both fall into the hands of former partners, a gang of Russian mobsters who will not hesitate to assassinate the Capitana. The unscrupulous corruption in ¡García!’s not-so-alien Spain is motivated by greed and preservation of power, but first and foremost, it is understood in terms of its Francoist heritage: the graphic novel points this historical reality out as a systemic problem from which other evils afflicting society emanate. Fernando Hernández Sánchez explains that corruption was the lubricant of the dictatorship’s gears, and that Franco controlled his subordinates by fostering their loyalty with privileges and money (128). The author thus summarizes society’s resignation against such phenomenon and its many consequences: La tolerancia con la corrupción; la general presunción de deshonestidad en los gobernantes de cualquier tendencia, pero sin una coherente reacción colectiva destinada a erradicarla; la consolidación, en definitiva, de un bajo nivel de exigencia para con los representantes públicos y de ejercicio crítico o de los créditos, sino de forma mucho más profunda: directamente en la propiedad” (3) [Today almost all the major media outlets in Spain have been absorbed by financial power. Not with the classic dependence based on advertising influence or credits, but in a much deeper way: directly by ownership].

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Fig. 11.5  Antonia in her workplace (1: 150) in ¡García! by Santiago García and Luis Bustos por parte de la ciudadanía es la herencia que la sociedad española debe a Franco mucho tiempo después de su muerte. (154) [The tolerance for corruption; the general presumption of dishonesty in rulers of any tendency, but with no coherent collective reaction aimed to eradicate it; the consolidation, in short, of a low level of expectations for public representatives and of critical exercise by its citizens is the inheritance that Spanish society owes to Franco long after his death].

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In its own particular style and without taking itself too seriously, as will be explained later, the admonitory functionality of ¡García! as a dystopian fiction is to urge its readers to rethink the institutional foundations and sources of legitimacy of present-day Spain in order to overcome the current crisis and prevent future calamities. Focusing on the protagonist, the inclusion of García within the parameters of the superhero genre offers additional interpretive keys. Peter Coogan argues that a selfless mission, superpowers ranging from extraordinary abilities to highly developed physical or mental skills, and identity elements such as a codename and a costume are constitutive conventions of the genre (3). However, the latter are “much less frequently [shared] than mission and powers” with other genres (9), and thus seem to be more exclusively characteristic of superhero stories. Following Coogan’s criterion, García’s ascription to the genre would be questionable to say the least: some basic elements such as the existence of a disguise or mask that allows the character to maintain a double identity, with the consequent protection it grants, are absent. It seems a deliberate choice on the authors’ part. Stripping García of a proper name and establishing an ordinary person behind the heroic persona could seek to highlight his monolithic and transparent self. As previously mentioned, he belongs to the realm of comics from the fifties and sixties and struggles to find himself in the historical time into which he awakens. If we agree with Coogan’s argument, the Francoist super-agent would fit better within the populated group of “heroes that are super”—where Coogan locates Zorro or Jack Bauer— than “genre superheroes” (8). Nevertheless, the scholar admits that such genres are difficult to delimit. Several conventions from and homages to canonical superheroes come together in García: he has superhuman abilities and a certain mysticism that places him in the realm of the legendary.10 Acting as a father figure, he takes an orphan under his protection who later becomes a sidekick on his adventures. He also shows an altruistic and prosocial will of service to a community that, in his case, extends to the Spanish nation as a whole. Like most superheroes, García operates to preserve the established order (Dittmer 161, DiPaolo 12, Lewis 35). More 10  Agent García’s mythic status is detailed in the first volume by the far-right journalist Aquilino: “Se decía que era más que un hombre … capaz de hacer cosas que no estaban al alcance de cualquier persona, capaz de vencer a enemigos increíbles. Se decía que era sobrenatural…” (1: 103–4) [It was said that he was more than a man … capable of doing things out of reach for anyone, capable of defeating incredible foes. It was said that he was supernatural…].

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specifically, the character would fit into the subgenre of nationalist superheroes, first defined by Jason Dittmer (7), insofar as he identifies with a national project that he not only enables and protects, but also embodies. It is also worth noting that García is the most common surname in Spain (“García y González” n.p.), which, added to the fact that the protagonist lacks a given name, contributes to portray him as a collective impersonality. Being a Francoist superhero, the agent is imagined as uber-masculine, following the Falangist aesthetic parameters of appreciation of virility, vigor, and strength, characteristics that are not very different from other superheroes of democratic states. He is also sparing with words and sentiment, defining himself instead as an “hombre de acción” (¡García! 1: 139) [man of action], using physical violence as his primary method of conflict resolution. García fits well within the heteronormative and patriarchal patterns in which, according to Dittmer, the nationalist superhero resolves the nation-state duality: the latter, feminized, is protected from internal and external threats by the hero who, performatively and through his actions, also prevents the eventual feminization of a masculinized state (44–45). The allusion to territorial tensions since pre-democratic times resounds here, denounced by the Spanish centralism as attempts by the enemies of the country to “romper España” (Richart n.p.) [break Spain]. The most recent of these tensions is the Catalan sovereignty declaration in 2013, capitalized by the CT as a new cohesive antagonist. In the case of García, the absence of a dual superhero identity could find a justification in fascist ideology and its submission of the individual before the State. The identification of García with Francoism’s National-­ Catholic project replicates the patriotic incarnation of Captain America himself. Both figures share a strong moral integrity that occasionally makes them seem naive—they refuse to carry firearms and use them only in exceptional circumstances— in addition to having a similar story of transitioning, or traveling in time, to contemporaneity. In a certain way, it can be said that García is to Captain America what the Red Son is to Superman: a rewriting of an origin story where heroes are born and integrated into totalitarian or authoritarian states, developing a sense of duty and righteousness that will inevitably clash with values from contemporary democracies. Thus, García is shown proffering racist and threatening comments to a street vendor (1: 119), telling a macho joke to a perplexed audience (2: 80), or pejoratively calling one of Antonia’s gay friends an invert (2: 78). Returning to the Superman analogy, García has as much of Red Son

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as he has of the spoof hero Superlópez. Like Jan’s popular character, he dwells in the realm of parody, and it is through parody that he realizes his subversive potential as a criticism of the CT, while at the same time profiting from dystopian admonition. Dittmer argues that, despite its conservative nature, the Bakhtinian carnivalization that is inherent to the superhero genre offers the possibility of undermining certain hierarchies, questioning them through exaggeration and excess in the “carnal” representation of the hero (162). But the author goes further by alluding to a second degree of carnivalization that occurs when the objects of subversion are the generic conventions of the nationalist superhero: “This subversion brings the possibility of separating nationalism discursively attached to the individual hero from the understanding of power and authority embedded within the sub-genre itself, and turning them against one another” (162). ¡García! takes advantage of this procedure and calls into question not only the superhero and his outdated ideology, but also a society and a paradigm that has more in common with him than one would initially think. Indeed, García’s efforts to adjust to a democratic Spain offer multiple opportunities for commentary and sociopolitical criticism. The comedic contrast and surprise of the protagonist is a constant in the graphic novel, but it is overshadowed when the many connections related to the Franco regime are highlighted. The super-agent is presumably brought back for the cause by the same forces that withdrew him in the sixties and that continue to run the country, with his old associate among them. The revelation of a pro-Franco intelligence service ensuring that power remains in the hands of the same political families points to the heavy burden that the old regime poses for the CT’s narrative of the transition to democracy. Additionally, and as previous examples illustrate, the comic book by García and Bustos connects these democratic and legitimization deficiencies with the most concerning issues in the country at the present time (see Fig. 11.6). A final aspect through which ¡García! subverts the expectations of the genre has to do with the figure of the superhero as an object of heterosexual desire. García often fails in his encounters with women: first, during the wedding celebration of Antonia’s friends, he drives away a guest who approaches to chat with him, asking her if she is a Christian woman (2: 78). Later, he is attracted to the daughter of his former lover, Feli—à la Peggy Carter—due to the physical resemblance between the two. Julia notices this and warns him: “Te lo advierto para ahorrarte la humillación. Eres demasiado mayor para mí … de todos modos, nunca podría salir con

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Fig. 11.6  García’s struggles in modern day Spain (1: 107) in ¡García! by Santiago García and Luis Bustos

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un votante del PP” (2: 179) [I’m telling you to save yourself from the humiliation. You’re too old for me … anyway, I could never date a Popular Party voter]. His masculinity model appears obsolete, and the character will later confess to Antonia his need to adapt. The same conversation gives rise to a metafictional comment by García who, when reflecting on the usefulness of his skills in contemporary Spain, states: “Sospecho que los puñetazos están pasados de moda” (2: 184) [I suspect that throwing punches is out of fashion]. This assessment extends to the stylistic codes of the sixties subplot, where he is introduced to the reader for the first time, and to the comic books of the time period that ¡García! celebrates. As previously mentioned, the narrative structure and its generic codes are another element of the story that function as temporal markers and also as a metonymy of the complexity and cultural maturity of the comics during each time period. A common thread links the past and present: with a beginning in medias res and an end that is open to interpretation, it seems that García and Bustos try to recreate the reading experience of a serial comic where questions build upon one another and any closure or ending is permanently postponed.

Conclusion ¡García! bases many of its humorous twists on the contrast between García’s worldview and the social reality of contemporary Spain. Yet the plot underlines a disturbing continuity of power structures of the Franco regime, embodied in Don Jaime and his network of spies, who are revealed to be the true power in the shadows of a fragile contemporary democracy. This chapter has tried to demonstrate that the dystopian component of ¡García! and the challenges posed by post-15-M Spain in this alternative literary present test the CT to the point that it does not look significantly less extemporaneous than the Francoist super-agent. Considering him a nationalist superhero, agent García allows for several interpretations in the current sociopolitical context, some of them contradictory. On the one hand, he symbolizes the sociological Francoism that persists in contemporary Spain, with the connivance of the CT and its pacts of silence and tabula rasa towards a traumatic past. On the other hand, when Antonia asks him if he feels “en territorio enemigo” [in enemy territory] in this new Spain, García replies: “No, pero es España. Y yo soy español. Ésta es mi casa” (2: 84) [No, but it is Spain. And I am Spanish. This is home]. To the extent that he redeems himself and accepts the current Spain, even if

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it is foreign to him, he travels the opposite path of those constitutionalists inclined to more conservative positions by what they perceive as recent threats, such as Catalan sovereignty or advances in the struggles of feminism and the LGBTQ+ collective. It is interesting that, unlike Captain America, who frequently questions the implementation of the American ideology, but not traditional American values themselves—freedom, individualism, etc.—García seems ready to move from his National-Catholic worldview to one more aligned with recent times. At this point, the reader who has followed the criticism of the CT may wonder if these changes are purely cosmetic and emulate the trajectory of important figures of Francoism who embraced the new regime in order to stay in power. García is, in a sense, exhumed from the Valley of the Fallen. From the perspective of a more hopeful reading, this seems a condition of possibility to initiate a moral reparation, an exercise of memory toward the articulation of a more honest and democratic recounting of history.

Works Cited Ausente, Daniel. Interview. “Santiago García: ‘Los aficionados al cómic nos aferramos a criterios marcados por un niño de 11 años’.” Canino Magazine. 28 Dec. 2015. https://www.caninomag.es/ entrevista-santiago-garcia-los-aficionados-al-comic-nos-aferramos-a-criteriosque-marcaron-a-un-nino-de-11-anos/. “Aprobada la reforma constitucional con el apoyo de PSOE, PP y UPN.” Diario Público. 2 Sept. 2011. https://www.publico.es/actualidad/aprobada-reformaconstitucional-apoyo-psoe.html. Cardús i Ros, Salvador. “Politics and the Invention of Memory: For a Sociology of the Transition to Democracy in Spain.” Disremembering the Dictatorship: The Politics of Memory in the Spanish Transition to Democracy. Ed. Joan Ramon Resina. Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000. 17–28. Coogan, Peter. “The Hero Defines the Genre, the Genre Defines the Hero.” What is a Superhero? Ed. Robin S. Rosenberg and Coogan. New York: Oxford UP, 2013. 3–10. Cruz, Marisa. “Rajoy, investido presidente gracias a la abstención de todos los diputados del PSOE excepto 15.” El Mundo. 29 Oct. 2016. https://www. elmundo.es/espana/2016/10/29/5814b9cb46163fce668b4581.html. DiPaolo, Marc. War, Politics, and Superheroes: Ethics and Propaganda in Comics and Film. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2011. Dittmer, Jason. Captain America and the Nationalist Superhero: Metaphors, Narratives, and Geopolitics. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2013.

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Echevarría, Ignacio. “La CT: un cambio de paradigma.” CT o la Cultura de la Transición: crítica a 35 años de cultura española. Ed. Guillem Martínez. Madrid: DeBolsillo, 2012. Ebook. “Entrevista a Luis Bustos.” CuCo, Cuadernos de Cómic 8 (2017): 158–87. Fernández-Savater, Amador. “Emborronar la CT (del No a la Guerra al 15-M).” CT o la Cultura de la Transición: crítica a 35 años de cultura española. Ed. Guillem Martínez. Madrid: DeBolsillo, 2012. Ebook. García, Santiago. “Re: Pregunta acerca de ¡García!” Message to Alberto López Martín. 9 Sept. 2019. E-mail. García, Santiago, and Luis Bustos. ¡García! Vol. 1. Bilbao: Astiberri, 2015. ———. ¡García! Vol. 2. Bilbao: Astiberri, 2016. “García y González, los apellidos más frecuentes entre los españoles.” El País. 19 May 2016. https://elpais.com/politica/2016/05/19/actualidad/ 1463645157_682371.html. Hernández Sánchez, Fernando. El bulldozer negro del general Franco: Historia de España en el siglo XX para la primera generación del XXI. Madrid: Pasado & Presente, 2016. Juste, Rubén. IBEX-35: Una historia herética del poder en España. Madrid: Capitán Swing, 2017. Labrador, Germán. “Todo lo que era aire se disuelve en lo sólido: Eurocopa 2012, quijotismos y crisis española.” Viento Sur 124 (2012): 83–92. Lewis, A. David. “Save the Day.” What is a Superhero? Ed. Robin S. Rosenberg and Peter Coogan. New York: Oxford UP, 2013. 31–40. Llera, Francisco, and Rafael Leonisio. “Los secuestros de ETA y sus organizaciones afines, 1970–1997: una base de datos.” Revista Española de Ciencia Política 37 (2015): 141–60. Martínez, Guillem. “El concepto CT.” CT o la Cultura de la Transición: crítica a 35 años de cultura española. Ed. Martínez. Madrid: DeBolsillo, 2012. Ebook. Meléndez, Martín. “¿Es España una distopía?” Yorokobu. 22 Oct. 2015. https:// www.yorokobu.es/es-espana-una-distopia/. Morán, Gregorio. El precio de la transición. Madrid: Akal, 1991, 2015. Ebook. Palardy, Diana. The Dystopian Imagination in Contemporary Spanish Literature and Film. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Portolés, Ana. “García: un superhéroe facha en tiempos ‘progres’.” Crónica Global-El Español. 21 Nov. 2015. https://cronicaglobal.elespanol.com/creacion/garcia-un-superheroe-facha-en-tiempos-progres_28521_102.html. Resina, Joan Ramon. Introduction. Disremembering the Dictatorship: The Politics of Memory in the Spanish Transition to Democracy. Ed. Resina. Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000. 1–15. Richart, Jaime. “Romper España.” Eldiario.es. 8 June 2018. https://www. eldiario.es/opinionsocios/Romper-Espana_6_780132013.html.

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Rusiñol, Pere. Papel mojado. La crisis de la prensa y el fracaso de los periódicos en España. Madrid: Debate, 2013. Vilches, Gerardo. “La novela gráfica aquí y ahora: comparando ¡García! con El mundo a tus pies.” The Watcher and the Tower. 24 Sept. 2015. https:// thewatcherblog.wordpress.com/2015/09/24/la-novela-grafica-aqui-yahora-comparando-garcia-con-el-mundo-a-tus-pies/.

CHAPTER 12

The Right to Barcelona: Spectrality, Unbuiltness, and El fantasma de Gaudí Maria DiFrancesco

El fantasma de Gaudí [The Ghost of Gaudí] (2015), illustrated by Jesús Alonso Iglesias and written by El Torres, is a Spanish graphic novel about deceptive identities, ghostly apparitions, and gory murders.1 From the beginning of the novel, grocery market cashier Antonia (Toñi) appears to live in much the same way as other Barcelonans have lived in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis. She is overworked, exhausted, and appears

1  El Torres (1972–), from Málaga, is a prolific writer who has worked on PDM (Paquet de Mierda) with Pierre Paquet as well as with Olivier Visonneau on Lucky Luke. His works also include two collaborations with Gabriel Hernández Walta, El velo and El bosque de los suicidas, both published with Dibbuks. Jesús Alonso Iglesias (1972–) received a degree in Fine Arts from the Universidad de Madrid, specializing in design. He has worked in animation as well and has worked on diverse projects, such as Todos los perros van al cielo, Street Sharks, Pippi Calzaslargas, and Los tres Reyes Magos o La colina del dragón. Their first collaborative work, El fantasma de Gaudí, won the award for best work of the year at the Salón del Cómic de Barcelona in 2016. It has been translated into multiple languages. All quotes in this chapter are from the edition cited. All translations are mine.

M. DiFrancesco (*) Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 C. McKinney, D. F. Richter (eds.), Spanish Graphic Narratives, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56820-7_12

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displaced in a city increasingly occupied by businesspeople, entrepreneurs, and tourists, all of whom blur what it means for her, or anyone, to be a citizen or to have a “right to the city.”2 It is in this context and while waiting for a bus home from work that Toñi rushes to save an elderly man, who is the spitting-image of renowned architect Antoni Gaudí i Cornet (1852–1926), and who steps out into a busy street without seeming to have given any thought to consequences.3 As the novel progresses, Toñi questions whether the person for whom she risked her life is Gaudí’s ghost, and she tries desperately to uncover connections that link the ghost to a number of cold-blooded murders. As we follow Toñi and a handful of boiler-plate detective novel characters in their attempts to capture the perpetrator (or perpetrators) of these crimes, all of which take place in iconic buildings synonymous with the master architect and the city itself, it becomes clear that the relationship between Toñi and the phantasmagorical Antoni Gaudí is Derridean, in that it signals a disjointedness in time and space that is suggestive of what An/ Architect Gordon Matta-Clark calls “unbuiltness.” Perhaps more importantly, we come to see Toñi’s right to Barcelona and to a livelihood as dangerously predicated on a city haunted by previous iterations of itself and linked to violent architectures seemingly beyond her control. Comics studies can be perceived as a near perfect mechanism by which to examine the profound political, social, and economic iniquities underlying a Derridean reading. While it is true that the book’s engagement with criminality unquestionably reifies popular perspectives linking the genre to a naïve, popular consumer of pulp, Fantasma also subversively disavows this potentiality. Indeed, at its core, the narrative reflects comics’ rootedness in anti-establishmentarianism. As Frederik Byrn Køhlert points out, since “at least the late nineteenth century, comics have been deeply entwined with anti-authoritarian politics and resistance,” and comics have played a significant role in conveying “anarchist thought, whether in the form of satirical cartoons aimed at deflating authority, rousing calls to 2  The “right to the city” was coined by Henri Lefebvre in the eponymous book first published in French as Le droit à la ville (1968). Throughout this chapter, I refer to translated versions of key texts cited in the bibliography. 3  Despite the novel’s title and emphasis on the works of Gaudí, this chapter decidedly does not emphasize the architect’s life. It focuses, instead, on mutual affinities between characters who recognize and experience each other as citizens of the same city. Nonetheless, Robert Hughes’s Barcelona and Gijs van Hensbergen Gaudí: A Biography are excellent sources to begin learning about the man.

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arms, or visual histories portraying specific instances of anarchist organization” (11). Køhlert’s comments speak to the present study of Fantasma in that his words remind readers of Spain’s anarchist history as well as resonate with tensions among the nation’s current power structures.4 Additionally, as Fantasma’s readers work to make meaning of the text— their eyes moving back and forth and up and down across panels and pages—they participate in a complex editing process. This activity so wholly identified with comics studies necessarily compels us to reflect on the interplay between temporality, space, and history. They poke at the façade of stability in narrative structure, and challenge us to reflect on Derridean disjointedness.

City Space, Specters, and Anarchitecture Fantasma’s backdrop is Barcelona, a world city that has played multiple, many times polemic, socio-cultural roles throughout history, both in the autonomous region of Cataluña and in Spain as a nation. While the city’s strategic position as a Mediterranean port has made it a maritime trade hub and shipbuilding center since the thirteenth century (Tortella 118–19, Elbl 46–47), it is Barcelona’s early adoption of industrial mechanization and manufacturing processes (Vicente 152–53), its dramatic transformation in the post-Franco era—culminating in the 1992 Olympic Games (Illas 151–53, Gratton 244)—, and, more recently, the city’s status as a tourist destination plagued by visitors (Alvarez-Sousa, Burgen “Tourists”) that make Barcelona and its inhabitants especially complex spatial subjects. Henri Lefebvre’s Production of Space helps us begin to understand present-­day Barcelona as a spectral city inhabited by equally spectral subjects inasmuch as Lefebvre posits urban space as intrinsically rooted in human needs and extrinsically dependent on the limitations of built environments, which themselves are founded upon hierarchical structures of power (18). Lefebvre reckoned that in addition to perceived space (i.e., material, visible/visual renderings) and conceived space (e.g., people-­less; existing only in the conceptual, intellectual realm of politicians, architects, 4  Køhlert’s discussion of Rodriguez’s treatment of the Spanish Civil War in “Blood and Sky” (from Anarchy Comics) is particularly interesting (21). While Køhlert’s notes that “the four issues of Anarchy Comics clearly reflect 1970s punk sensibilities, “Blood and Sky” echoes both tensions in Spain’s contemporary period as well as its reliance on comics to narrate past political—and in this case Republican anarchist—ideals (21).

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and others who organize space in a rigidly systematic fashion), we must think of space as always already a consequence of pre-existing social interactions and circumstances (Production 34–35). Lefebvre additionally invoked Karl Marx to associate urban environments as dependent on vertical controls privileging capitalist ventures (i.e., sale of consumer goods, commodification of labor), which in turn organize underlying socio-political structures, including the physical day-to-day movement and orientation of city dwellers (10, 26–27). Far from promoting these dynamics, Lefebvre pronounced that his aim in describing them was to “detonate the state of affairs” (25), and to propose a citizenship based not on the legitimacy of one’s status in relation to the city, but on mutual responsiveness (184–85). Such a framework would assess a citizen’s worth as independent from legal status (i.e. regulated by the polis and external social contracts) or potential ability to economically contribute (i.e., tied to capital production) to community. Such a position implied radically shifting decision-making processes towards citizens, away from a “‘pyramidal order’ and hence [away from] a world of castes and classes, of laws and privileges, of hierarchies and constraints” (139). Though Jacques Derrida wrote Specters of Marx in 1993, and Gordon Matta-Clark’s work on An/Architecture dates to the 1970s, both dialog with Lefebvrian conceptualizations of the “right to the city” and help to reveal uncomfortable complicities and contradictions underlying such rights. Lefebvre’s provision for and anticipation of explosions in existing hierarchical systems resonates with Derrida’s neologism “hauntology”—a homonym of ontology that playfully yet poignantly signals a disjointedness in time and space (10). For Derrida, the specter manifests as an atemporal indicator of trauma and, in doing so, it commands us to rightfully respond. Derrida also states, however, that the ghost’s appearance marks “the place of a sententious injunction that always feigns to speak like the just” (xvii). That is, the spirit always arrives with a shield and helmet, and the armor it wears prevents us from wholly seeing, knowing, or even understanding what its presence signifies (8–9). As such, the arrival of Gaudí’s ghost in Barcelona in Fantasma implies not only socio-political parallels between the architect’s tumultuous lifetime and the present-day, but denotes risks involved in intervening in these. Matta-Clark’s An/ Architecture Group, for its part, made cuts into public and private buildings and spaces. In doing so, their projects dialogue with Lefebvre and Derrida by allowing us to focus on architectural structures as concrete signs of ruptures in socio-political stability. Using implements such as

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chainsaws and sledgehammers to slice up buildings, Matta-Clark aimed to uncover citizens’ alienation from homes and neighborhoods (Richard, “Spacism”). Disassembled edifices served both to critique “regimes of control”—colonialism, slavery, incarceration, capitalism—and to draw attention to the insidious ability of built environments to replicate and perpetuate existing regimes of control (Richard, Physical 124, 125). In Fantasma this insidiousness comes to light as prisms of spectrality and anarchitecture lay bare the tensions between citizens’ continued efforts to fight for the right to the city and the oppressive nature of architecture as it ostensibly serves only to replicate existing mechanisms of control (Richard, Physical 323).

Under Cover: Spectrality, Fragmentation, and Trencadís The cover of any book, particularly a graphic novel, tells a story. Through it, an illustrator begins to communicate what the book is about, shaping a reader’s mood and expectations. According to Manuel Barrero’s study of comic terminology, “suelen homologarse los conceptos de cubierta y portada” (92) [the concepts of cover and title page are often analogous to one another], and these initial images in a graphic novel often contain “una ilustración alegórica o referente a su contenido” [an allegorical illustration that refers to the book’s content] and constitutes an “elemento capital del tebeo” (296) [fundamental element of the comic]. The space depicted on Fantasma’s cover—the hallway of Casa Batlló’s loft—is thus not only mysterious in that it focuses attention on a shoddily clad, anonymous figure leaving a trail of blood across the building’s walls, but it is also curious in that it emphasizes a rather ordinary part of the popular tourist site (see Fig. 12.1).5 A spectral and temporal perspective that centers on the loft’s original purpose helps us to consider the ghost’s decision to appear there. To begin with, the loft points to advances in public utilities and changing hygiene standards that coincided with Barcelona’s first explosive period of urban development. From the 1860s onward, a centralized system transported water through neighborhoods, including the city’s newest Eixample 5  Excellent sources on Gaudí’s architecture, especially the buildings mentioned here, include Maria Antonietta Crippa and Peter Gossel’s Antoní Gaudí and Robert Hughes’s Barcelona.

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Fig. 12.1  Cover of El fantasma de Gaudí by Jesús Alonso Iglesias and El Torres

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district. Early Eixample residents like elite industrialist and textile factory owner Josep Batlló i Casanovas profited from easy access to municipal water since they could then dedicate household space to flushing toilets and, perhaps just as notably, to laundry rooms. This detail is crucial because while it draws attention to a relatively ordinary chore, it is still a task that had been previously and almost exclusively outsourced to women living in the outlying town of Horta-Guinardó, or modern-day La Clota (Sarasúa 71). The addition of utility rooms in private homes of the elite thus signified ruptures in underlying class divisions and configurations of power. As the distant Horta community once dependent on washing as a source of revenue lost its connection to this labor, those who lived there became further alienated, and not only from city-center dwellers, but also from themselves as their relationships to each other and to their neighborhoods shifted. Still, if Fantasma’s cover focuses readers’ attention on ghosts lurking in today’s Casa Batlló, then we must recognize that looking to the home’s past tells only a small fragment of the building’s story and of its relationship to Barcelona and its citizens. Digging deeper beyond the book’s cover, we may thus look at the crime scene staged on the building’s rooftop (see Fig.  12.2). Near the novel’s midpoint, an unseen third-person omniscient narrator speaking in captions speculates as to how a killer might have been able to maneuver a dead body through a heavily policed and heavily trafficked tourist site: “Cómo es posible que nadie se diera cuenta? […] Y es increíble la invisibilidad que proporciona un mono de trabajo” (63–64) [How is it possible that no one noticed? It’s astounding that a pair of worker’s overalls could provide such invisibility]. The narrator’s ponderings allow us to see defects in the structure as well as flaws in the way the space is administered. Surveillance images show exactly how the murderer was able to enter Casa Batlló well after public visiting hours. He wore overalls and a cap, the common, everyday uniform of a janitorial staff person. Thus, despite walking past a security guard and cameras, the killer raised no suspicion. When inspector Jaime Calvo finally identifies the body found in the Casa Batlló, he reveals it is that of Luis Barberá, “tesorero de la fundación que dirige la Casa Batlló durante cuatro años. Imputado por desfalco y malversación de bienes” (65) [treasurer of the foundation that directed the Casa Batlló for four years. Charged with embezzlement and misuse of funds]. Details of the scene point to parallels between the past and present and shine a spotlight on connections between the right to the city, spectrality,

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Fig. 12.2  Rooftop scene at Casa Batlló (65) in El fantasma de Gaudí by Jesús Alonso Iglesias and El Torres

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and anarchitectural unbuiltness. Forensic investigators poke at Barberá’s body to collect evidence. As they do so, their faces remain hidden from the reader’s sight, signaling their own invisibility and suggesting a link to nineteenth-century laborers—reminiscent of Horta washerwomen— whose contributions and personal value to the Batlló family as to the city may have gone largely unnoticed. Snapping photos to document the crime, these agents implicitly demonstrate dematerialization as a process bound as much to right action as to modes of capital production. As the accused embezzler’s body decays before our eyes, the corpse snapshots will, like Gaudí’s buildings, continue to exist as haunting traces open to “voyeuristic interpretation” (Kirshner, et al. 332). These photos, although solely meant for investigators, will subsequently become part of the house’s historic mythos as a tourist attraction. They will be absorbed, ironically, into an always already deteriorating narrative record reflective of what Matta-Clark might have called the “artistic play” of disassembling a structure (Lee xiii). A close examination of trencadís, an architectural and artistic style found in many of Gaudí’s buildings, demonstrates Matta-Clark’s conception of destructive play and adds further depth to an analysis of Fantasma, especially as anarchitecture dialogs with alienation and displacement. Trencadís comes from the Catalan verb “trencar,” “to break,” and denotes a practice whereby mixed materials of irregular shapes are cemented together to create mosaics (Hughes 488). While not the inventor of this technique, Gaudí—and thus Barcelona—have become synonymous with this process.6 Using colorful shards of debris from factories producing tile, ceramics, and glass, Gaudí created a composite building material with sandstone. The mosaics satisfied his desire to ornately embellish his buildings’ biomorphic curves while still attending to his personal frugality, interests related to environmental sustainability, and limits imposed by his clients’ own budgetary constraints (Hughes 488, Kent 92). Because Matta-Clark, like Gaudí, used “throwaway” resources to manufacture building provisions, the graphic novel’s trencadís motif—especially visible on the novel’s back cover and facing pages—establishes a 6  The best evidence of monetization is found in the ubiquity of tourist shops filled with products mimicking trencadís designs. Products include standard guidebooks and postcards, but also coffee mugs, bottle and can openers, refrigerator magnets, scarves, jewelry, mobile phone cases, chopsticks, plush toys for pets, coloring books, Christmas ornaments, and even caganers [typical Catalan figurines shown defecating].

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connection between the two architects as artists. Yet the novel’s emphasis on grayscale in contrast to Gaudí’s audacious multicolor palette, as well as snapshots of Barberá’s trencadís-covered corpse, refocus attention on anarchitecture and spectrality. Reminiscent of Matta-Clark’s works, we see Barberá’s torso, while grotesquely split open, is artistically posed and placed on exhibition on Casa Batlló’s rooftop. His arms form the shape of a cross and his widespread legs suggest emasculation. Corpse snapshots can only capture part of the scene, and only an instant in time. As such, the pictures reveal the perverse artificiality of façades and help turn our attention not towards any possibility of considering the structure’s homeliness (i.e., Casa Batlló’s function as a once private, intimate residence), but to its extraordinary unhomeliness (i.e., its function as a multi-million-dollar business). To this end, the building and Barberá become emblematic of what Jean Baudrillard calls a simulacrum: an effect and product of a spectral culture that used to exist, but that now exists only as a reproduction of itself (6). They shed light, too, on the displacement of communities from homes, on the failure of city administrators to tend to citizens’ needs, and on how even small aspects of city life have been commodified, making cities only partially accessible to all.

Masked Violence Having analyzed the novel’s cover and trencadís motif as illustrative of human invisibility, dislocation, and socio-political disenfranchisement, what now comes into question is how we might interpret Toñi’s enduring altruism and the book’s implausibly happy ending. One way of responding is that Toñi’s self-sacrifice as she leaps into traffic to save an older gentleman, whom we later identify as the ghost of Gaudí, communicates hope. Unlike passersby who disregarded Gaudí when he was trampled by a tram while on his way to daily mass, we may comprehend the novel as signifying humankind’s ability to act justly and make reparations for past injustices. Yet as we continue to confront the novel’s insidious violence and unearth incongruous details, it becomes almost impossible to read any noble hope in the novel, and we come to view citizens’ rights as themselves masked by multiple levels of deception. To explain, it is useful to look at initial images of Toñi. When we first see her at the grocery store where she works as a cashier, we do not see her entire body, rather only a hand and arm (see Fig. 12.3). Page 11 shows an initial strip of four close-up panels of items being scanned at the grocery

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Fig. 12.3  “Beep” at the grocery store (11) in El fantasma de Gaudí by Jesús Alonso Iglesias and El Torres

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store. An onomatopoetic “BEEP” in each panel echoes each time Toñi scans an item. The second tier of the page, which consists of a single panel, shows Toñi through a medium shot as she collects payment from an elderly man (11). The final strip, formed by two panels, shows Toñi leaving work and saying goodnight to a coworker. In a small panel—perhaps indicative of her distance from family—Toñi speaks on a mobile phone, saying “Hola nena, soy yo mamá. ¿Cómo ha ido el día?” (11) [Hi sweetheart, it’s me, mom. How was your day?]. The vantage points of Derridean haunting and anarchitecture allow us to bear witness to brutal undercurrents that lie almost imperceptibly beneath banal, mundane images of everyday life. The beeping cash register, far from merely representing the tedium that might be associated with Toñi’s job, points to the thousands of Barcelonans still reeling from the 2008 financial crisis. The bloodcurdling, red font of the cash register “BEEP” implies figurative death as citizens’ economic livelihoods have been destroyed and as many have been displaced from homes due to eviction (Burgen, “Spanish”). Torres and Iglesias’s juxtaposition of images focusing on elderly customers, on the one hand; and on Toñi’s cell phone conversation with her child, on the other, further draw attention to veiled violence since these images remind readers not only of distances separating families, but of how families have come to rely on increasingly expensive technologies to preserve connections to one another (García Alcaraz n.p.). That Toñi and an unnamed co-worker wear uniforms is also noteworthy. While uniforms connote sameness and belonging, here they metaphorically indicate “the mask of automatism. A mask, indeed a visor that may always be hiding no living gaze beneath the helmet” (Derrida 192). Examinations of Ignacio Pombo and of María Bonet’s murders and of the locations where their bodies are staged, shed light on the significance of this automatism and, ultimately, show how even characters like Toñi who unintentionally or unwittingly wear masks become vulnerable to them, and come to doubt their own abilities and values. To begin considering the Derridean “visor” effect, it is useful to examine the illustrator’s incorporation of trencadís in page design. On a page framed ominously in black, Iglesias depicts Pombo’s mutilated, blood spattered body from the point of view of Jueza Montaner and Inspector Jaime Calvo (16, see Fig. 12.4). He configures these characters in curiously shaped panels. As in the case of puzzle pieces, the combination of predictable straight edges and right angles together with irregular curves convey instability, both in the narrative and in Spain’s politics. Pombo’s

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Fig. 12.4  Death at Casa Vicens (16) in El fantasma de Gaudí by Jesús Alonso Iglesias and El Torres

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arms, tied in a “V” shape and hanging from the stairwell door of Casa Vicens’s smoking room, consequently become emblematic of underlying anarchical politics.7 On Pombo’s chest, the murderer has written “Sol, solet” (18) [Sun, Little Sun] in blood.8 Putting on white gloves, Calvo observes that despite the way Pombo’s body has been mutilated, the victim’s weight, haircut, and manicure indicate he was “pudiente,” a man of great wealth (18). Montull dashingly enters onto the scene just as Calvo repeats “Sol, solet” aloud. He instantly reacts by saying that those words are from “una vieja canción catalana” (19) [an old Catalan song] and then he introduces himself to Montaner and Calvo. He tells them that he has an administrative role in the Casa Vicens’s commercial operations and announces that the verses he has recited were formerly written around the frieze of the gallery (19). Exhibiting complete ignorance, Calvo responds, “¿Una canción?” (19) [A song?]. In an ensuing discussion, Montull laments that the house no longer retains the original frieze: “[H]a sufrido muchas reformas desde que la construyó Gaudí. Los antiguos jardines, por ejemplo, ahora están ocupados por ese horrendo bloque de viviendas” (19) [It has suffered through many renovations since Gaudí built it. The old gardens, for example, are now occupied by that horrendous block of apartments]. As Montull personifies the “suffering” Casa Vicens, he stresses the many times the building has been repaired and re-constructed. Alterations to the site made by previous owners speak to Montull’s own understanding of spectrality. It would seem that for him, the Casa Vicens does not simply symbolize a traumatic wound and a haunting injunction to right past injustices against the home; rather, it is that wound. Montull appears to see Casa Vicens as a body that has been split open and mutilated not by murderers but by boorish, ignorant building owners and inheritors. Montull’s posing of Pombo’s body in a cross-like configuration thus can be interpreted as demanding and demonstrating justice. The words “Sol, 7  His arms evoke Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta and may be inferred as suggestive of David Lloyd’s iconic mask, which has itself been adopted as much by Spain’s indignados as by Anonymous and its affiliates. 8  The lyrics to the popular Catalan nursery rhyme “Sol, solet” can be found in many places online. One English translation of the lyrics reads: “Sun, little sun, / Come and visit me, / Come and visit me. / Sun, little sun, / Come and visit me / ‘cause I’m cold. / If you’re cold, / Put on your cloak, / Put on your cloak. / If you’re cold, / Put on your cloak / And your cap. / I have neither cloak nor cap / To protect myself, / To protect myself. / I have neither cloak nor cap / To protect myself, / When it’s cold.”

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solet” reflect this symbolism. While in the song a speaker begs the sun to keep it warm, the sun tells the speaker to put on a coat and hat, callously discounting that the speaker tells the sun he has neither. If Montull sees Pombo as someone akin to an insensitive sun unwilling to share warmth and thus sacrifice itself for another (symbolically, Gaudí), then he similarly seems to have cast himself in a heroic role. Far from seeing himself as Pombo’s cold-blooded murderer, he looks beneath this mask to characterize himself as an avenging angel who has redressed wrongs by attacking the real estate building developer he associates with Casa Vicens. Marked similarities and differences join Manso to Montull, showing how appearances can deceptively hide truths and make it difficult to understand a ghost’s injunction. Manso enters the narrative wearing a neutral zip-up pullover, baggy trousers and shoes, all of which strikingly distinguish him from Montull, whose fashionable suits, ties, and well-­ coiffed hair draw public attention. Yet just as Montull takes vengeance on Pombo, having blamed him for altering and desecrating Gaudí’s Casa Vicens, so too Manso takes vengeance on Maria Bonet, holding her responsible for damaging Finca Güell’s gardens and thus for harming Gaudí’s integrity. The illustrator gives us insight into Manso’s murderous movements. Unlike Montull, whom we never catch in the act of killing, readers observe Manso’s activities and thought processes from up close (see Fig. 12.5). We watch him tape Bonet’s mouth, strip and bind her to a chair, and then administer a lethal injection to her. He waits for her to die before mutilating her body and moving it to a staging area (28–29). While the zoom-in on Bonet’s facial expressions moments before death communicate terror in the page’s first panel, close-ups focusing on Manso’s hands depict him coolly preparing a hypodermic needle and then lecturing Bonet on Jacint Verdaguer’s epic poem L’Atlàntida (1877), a poem Verdaguer wrote in honor of Antonio López y López when he was bestowed an aristocratic title (Hughes 332, 341–43). Manso’s treatise on the Catalan nationalistic masterpiece that so profoundly influenced the Güell family and consequently Gaudí’s designs of the Finca (Kent and Prindle 188) implies not only that Manso assumes Bonet knows nothing of the literature or of Gaudí’s genius, but that he believes such ignorance is grounds for capital punishment. One might further propose that Manso’s staging of Bonet’s body speaks to this logic. Indeed, Verdaguer’s poem alludes to the mythological dragon Ladon who, along with the Hesperides, guards Hera’s eternal life-giving oranges. In the myth, Hercules successfully robs Hera’s

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Fig. 12.5  Close-ups of Bonet’s final moments (28) in El fantasma de Gaudí by Jesús Alonso Iglesias and El Torres

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oranges, taking them away from Ladon. Symbolically, then, killing Bonet can be compared to killing Hercules, and as he delivers precious oranges back to the place, he returns them to their rightful place. From another, equally spectral yet deeper point of view, Manso’s metaphorical effort to atone for past violations can be perceived as a disavowal of knowledge underlying the history and context of the Finca’s development. Re-reading the scene from that perspective, the rug in which Manso wraps Bonet’s corpse may be associated with the textile industry through which the Güell family built its tremendous wealth (32). So, too, the oranges and Bonet’s body speak to multiple regimes of control still undercutting citizens’ right to the city today. Though Verdaguer’s poem exalts nationalism by making proud references to the successes of Christopher Columbus and Spanish colonialism, it fails to acknowledge the context of Antonio López y López’s status as a member of the “self-made” Catalan elite. It ignores rising middle-class, Spanish male industrialists’ pattern of traveling to and from the colonies, of exploiting crops such as cotton produced by slaves on plantations, and of opening factories where labor practices were far from ideal (Rodríguez n.p.). It also points to families who contracted marriages between women with aristocratic titles and entrepreneurial businessmen in efforts to create “a strong net of dynastic marriages and interlocking business partnerships” (Hughes 327, McDonogh 142). In turn, these exclusionary spatial processes systematically marginalized lower classes, propelling them deeper into the recesses of society. Turning to Toñi, we may be hard-pressed to see any way in which a spectral visor effect may influence her thoughts or actions. Indeed, in contrast to Montull and Manso whose disguises stand for this effect, Toñi wears no mask. Nonetheless, her work outfit serves as an early indicator symbolically suggestive of how uniforms can be used to spatially include and exclude “by bringing the members of one particular group closer together, while excluding other individuals and groups” (Lefebvre, Critique 284). Consider, for example, that when Toñi witnesses Bonet’s body being thrown from the van, this is a repercussion of an already existing trauma. Still in shock from the traffic accident she suffered, Toñi finds herself too emotionally distraught to go to work. As such, she wanders near the dragon gate and decides to call the grocery store to have a coworker cover for her, “Solo necesito que me cubráis este día…” (30) [I only need you all to cover for me today…]. Upon finding a substitute, Toñi briefly exudes calmness, and she sighs in relief, closing her eyes. Yet in a later panel, and after Toñi has been re-traumatized having seen Bonet’s

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body, one cashier gossips and criticizes Toñi, saying, “Como se entere Alberto…siempre está piando con las horas” (42) [When Alberto finds out…he’s always griping about hours]. In a subsequent panel, while we see Alberto—presumably a manager—fuming, we also see Toñi leaving her workplace. Some panels later, we see Toñi asking a salesperson for recommendations. She wants to know what easily accessible Gaudí books she might buy “por cien euros” (42) [for a hundred euros], a manifestation of how the ghost she is sure she has seen, and the mystery of the murders, have taken a hold of Toñi and impacted her ability to perform her past roles. Toñi’s decision to participate in a docuseries on Gaudí marks a significant turn as it manifests a spectral condition that Derrida describes as cyclical: “[T]he more the period is in crisis, the more it is ‘out of joint’” (109). That is, once she loses her cashier’s job and function—the visor of her own uniform and all its implications—she is propelled into greater states of instability which motivate her participation in the docuseries. This endeavor increases her contact with “spirits of the past,” which inevitably increases her borrowing from inheritance (Derrida 109). Small, regularly shaped, rectangular panels visually communicate this chain of interrelated events (see Fig. 12.6). As media outlets report on the murders, absorbing them into Barcelona’s existing history and Gaudí’s place within that history, Toñi begins to form part of the mythos and narrative of the city as a tourist destination (Ledsom n.p.). In one panel that demonstrates this, a person whose business relies on tourism tells an interviewer, “…Esto nos está hacienda perder mucho dinero” (68) […This is costing us a lot of money], and “No sé por qué tenemos que tenerlo todo cerrado. A la ruina voy” (68) [I don’t know why we have to keep everything closed. I’m going to be ruined]. Another reporter conducting a news piece in front of Toñi’s apartment building declares, “No hemos podido acceder al domicilio donde vive… Vemos protección policial… Justo aquí… En la esquina” (68) [We haven’t been able to get into her residence… We see police protection… Right here… On the corner]. And another panel shows a man dressed in a bright pink jacket shouting, “¡Y es exclusiva este programa, esta cadena, en exclusiva, los que estamos negociando con Toñi una entrevista en ex-clu-si-va!” (68) [And this is an exclusive program, on this channel only; we’re negotiating an interview with Toñi that is ex-clu-­ sive!]. These digital images demonstrate swift enmeshment of the past with the present. They similarly reflect not only how quickly citizens such as Toñi become products of exchange within the existing economy, but

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Fig. 12.6  Toñi’s commercial popularity (68) in El fantasma de Gaudí by Jesús Alonso Iglesias and El Torres

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how this process occurs without attention, seemingly without giving thought to freewill or to the choice of any given individual. An analysis of internal and external perspectives of Toñi’s home broadens insight into this crisis. At the top of page 69 an unframed panel shows fingers dunking a tea bag into a plain, white mug filled with steaming water (see Fig. 12.7). The image of the tea, a beverage often associated with social civility, hospitality, and emotional balance, in the context of the page creates dissonance inasmuch as it starkly contrasts with Toñi’s chaotic living space. To the right of the page, a small flat screen television sits on top of a media storage unit, and right next to the unit, a remote control sits on a coffee table. The television and remote symbolize both the omnipresence of visual culture and media and the quickness with which images can be turned on and off. The paradoxical power and impermanence of images is further iterated through print media. Most notably, in a square zoom-in panel, we see a number of books featuring Gaudí. While one can presume that Toñi acquired these books during her investigation into the architect and crimes, their sheer number suggests not only Gaudí’s pervasive influence on visual culture, but the multitude of narrative perspectives that each title represents. Thus, as Toñi reveals that she has lost her job— her eyes darting from side as she speaks with her mother on the phone— the reader may infer nervousness as mirroring both her domestic and economic situation. Iglesias and Torres visually communicate unhomeliness via the page layout. Though rectangular, the panels on the page are transformed into a Gaudiesque mosaic structure and epitomize Matta-Clarks’ notion of unbuiltness. While her home retains some semblance of wholeness, it is cut open and unsound at its core. This is confirmed through Toñi’s words: “Con ese finiquito, y esos treinta mil euros de la tele, podríamos tirar adelante una buena temporada” (69) [With that severance pay, and the thirty thousand euros from the TV work, we could get by for a good while]. She imagines that the supplemental earnings she will make for contributing to a docuseries on Gaudí and the crimes will be sufficient for her to survive while unemployed. Yet beyond the personal vulnerability that comes with having to sell intimate details of her life on television, including the traumatic car accident that precipitated events, the docuseries symbolizes how easily an individual’s image—like Gaudí’s ghost—can be monetized by another individual. For as long as her image can be viewed and reviewed in reruns, it may continue to generate revenue for the production company that made the project. The docuseries crew gives credence to this

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Fig. 12.7  Toñi’s apartment (69) in El fantasma de Gaudí by Jesús Alonso Iglesias and El Torres

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interpretation when their director tells Toñi, “no te preocupes. Tú simplemente paseas por ahí, y ya ponemos nosotros una voz en off” (73) [don’t worry. You just walk around there, and we’ll see about adding a voice-over ourselves]. This underscores their disinterest in anything more than capturing her image in the context of various Gaudí buildings, and they subsequently beg Toñi to be in just a couple more shots (“solo son un par de tomas” (78) [it’s just a couple more takes]) when she is obviously too exhausted to do any more work (79, 82). Tellingly, the television crew foreshadows what will happen in the final episodes of the novel when they decide to go to the Sagrada Familia basilica as their next location, despite the fact that no murder has taken place there. The ensuing scenes demonstrate the difference and interplay between what Derrida calls “l’avenir” (future), which refers to a “predictable, programmed, scheduled, foreseeable” time, and another “l’avenir” (a future that is to come), which is more real because it is “totally unpredictable,” and thus, inimitable (qtd. in Dick and Ziering 53). With respect to Fantasma, the television crew’s decision to go to the Sagrada Familia anticipates “l’avenir,” a foreseeable future. To explain, it may be useful to mention that the first time we see the Sagrada Familia in Fantasma is on an unnumbered page at the beginning of chapter 1, before any written words. The blood-spattered polaroid of the minor basilica lays on top of similarly blood-spattered photos of the Gaudí buildings and tourist sites that later become crime scenes. These are haunting photos since, as we read the book, we come to see and interpret them as manifestations of Derrida’s predictable future, and in stark contrast to the more peaceable visions of the Sagrada Familia seen elsewhere in the book (see Fig. 12.8). Soon after Toñi’s accident, when we again see the temple, it is in a full-page layout of a close-up featuring the Passion façade (23). On this page, the façade serves as the backdrop of an otherwise uneventful (predictable) moment. In the center of the page, a dark-skinned, red-­ headed woman wearing a casual tank top, shorts, and sunglasses poses for a picture taken by her companion, a man likewise wearing shorts, a short-­ sleeved jersey, and a bucket hat. Behind this couple, a balding, bearded man with a zombie-like expression holds a newspaper; next to him, a little girl with pigtails holds Woody and Buzz Lightyear dolls from the Pixar Toy Story franchise. As she holds these toys, the girl reminds readers of the commodification, production, and reproduction of global culture. In the foreground, a pug dog walking on a leash suggests some semblance of permanence. Pets, after all, indicate the presence of longtime residents,

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Fig. 12.8  Tourists at the Sagrada Familia (23) in El fantasma de Gaudí by Jesús Alonso Iglesias and El Torres

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who, in contrast to transient tourists, remain in neighborhoods, entrenched in the everyday events of the city. From a theoretical perspective, the significance of these scenes hinges on whether one interprets them as communicating the possibility of a “real”—spontaneous, improbable and yet possible—Derridean future rooted in anarchitectural hope, or whether they simply announce the coming of a copy of what has already been, a replication of past traumas. We can read the former option in the scriptwriter and illustrator’s decision to fix attention on the Passion façade. At the end of the novel as in the beginning, the Passion façade serves as a backdrop. Yet unlike the first time—when we see a close-up of the façade by day—, the latter scene takes place at night (90), where a dramatic darkness envelops the temple. A hovering helicopter, glaring spotlights that illuminate different areas of the structure, and Mossos d’Esquadra carrying automatic weapons all suggest the occurrence of an event that is simultaneously bizarre, incredible, frightening, and patently real. This interpretation of the scene is reflected in the characters’ actions. When Calvo swoops in, appearing to save Toñi, who is just on the brink of death, we see this event from Calvo’s point of view. As we share the inspector’s perspective, we come face to face with both Toñi and, behind her, Gaudí’s ghost (99). Both figures look head on; their terror-filled eyes pierce through the page to meet the reader’s gaze. It is only well after this moment—after Calvo fires fatal gunshots, after Manso’s body goes hurling down to the ground, and after a semblance of normalcy seems to have been reinstated in characters’ lives (106–7)—that we can assess the events taking place at the temple and consider whether the novel’s end provides conditions for new ruptures in regimes of control.

Unfinished Business: The Temple Split Open At first blush, the novel can be read as having a happy ending. Readers are transported to some predictable time in Toñi’s future; it is a time after the perilous incidents have taken place at the still-unfinished, unbuilt minor basilica. Captions relate Toñi’s words as written in a letter addressed to her mother. She reports that Laurita has just arrived by train to Barcelona. She tells her mother, “No te preocupes por el dinero. Aunque no he querido nada de las televisiones, y me despidieron del supermercado, aún me queda algo guardado. Y tampoco te preocupes porque vaya a llevar a Laura a visitar monumentos” (109) [Don’t worry about the money. Though I haven’t wanted anything to do with the television people, and though

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they fired me from the supermarket, I still have some money saved up. And don’t worry, I’ll take Laura to visit the monuments]. The narrator conveys Toñi and Laurita’s contentment through images that show the two holding hands, embracing, and otherwise expressing affection. Colors echo the characters’ delight. Warm yellow and orange tones reflect sentiments of deep fondness (109). Indeed, multiple panels—each showing mother and daughter enjoying sites such as Casa Batlló and Finca Güell— suggest a happy ending, one in which Gaudí’s ghost’s injunction has been met. Yet an alternative assessment of these scenes that takes into consideration the sharp, angular nature of the page’s panels unearths a more sinister reading. As we look at previously cited captions and illustrations, the book’s ending can be interpreted as a dream. One wonders if perhaps the entire story ends at the book’s beginning when Toñi runs out to save Gaudí’s ghost, a figment of Toñi’s overtired, overworked brain. Details suggest as much since Gaudí—the real Gaudí—did not die as an immediate result of the accident he suffered. Despite the architect’s fame and reputation, Robert Hughes reports that onlookers who came upon Gaudí after he had been trampled took him to be a “seedy old pensioner” like many others who lived “alone in the boardinghouses of Barcelona” (464). Hughes adds that since Gaudí carried nothing in his pockets, no one could confirm his identity (464). One thus wonders whether Iglesias and Torres’s Fantasma reflects a lucid dream, that of Toñi’s own experiences in a hospital after having suffered fatal injuries. Maybe she, like Gaudí, remained unidentified for hours and lingered for days before passing away. Because Toñi is drawn wearing a cross around her neck, we may further imagine that her experience is indicative of faith. This would explain why, at the novel’s end, Toñi no longer claims to be troubled by money or unemployment. This would also explain Toñi’s declaration that, despite what anyone might think, something like a spirit or dream continues to live on in Gaudí’s buildings and the city, and that these will continue to endure for an eternity (110). This interpretation, in sum, suggests that even the most consistent, coherent story can be like a trencadís structure, masking sharp edges and cuts, appearing whole but remaining decidedly divided. In whichever case, it also seems relevant to consider the status of the graphic novel genre as such, particularly given the narrative’s undeniable emphasis on the relationship between the production of space, the right to the city, and the commodities produced therein. One recent Spanish news article reported that the only literary genre to have seen an uptick in sales

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since the recent economic crisis has been comic books (“El cómic, único sector editorial en auge” n.p.). The Centro Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporáneo, for its part, notes that today’s graphic novels serve as viable platforms attracting a wide range of readers (“Crisis” n.p.). Yet given Fantasma’s price point (currently selling for 20.90 euros) and the fact that the book is sold all over Barcelona—in bookstores and many of the monuments cited—one wonders how beneficial the work itself can be to the general public, presumably a demographic made up of privileged tourists or even academics. At least one response to the obvious irony would be that by reading the novel from a spectral, anarchitectural point of view, at least some members of these audiences might themselves become vulnerable enough to begin seeing, even for a brief moment, the city and its buildings not as they are replicated for sale but in their brokenness. Torres and Iglesias’s decision to end the novel with an image of the Sagrada Familia seems to suggest this reading. The Sagrada Familia’s status as a building awaiting completion (still unbuilt, still open) and as a composite building (one that has come under the direction of multiple architects with distinct visions over the years) make it a perfect place—if ever there were one—to take a stab at cracking social foundations.

Works Cited Aibar, E., and W. E. Bijker. “Constructing a City: The Cerdà Plan for the Extension of Barcelona.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 22.1 (1997): 3–30. Alvarez-Sousa, Antonio. “The Problems of Tourist Sustainability in Cultural Cities: Socio-Political Perceptions and Interests Management.” Sustainability 10.2 (2018): 1–30. Anonymous. “Sol, solet.” https://www.mamalisa.com/?t=es&p=1793. “Barcelona Is Not a Souvenir.” Tourism. Ajuntament de Barcelona. https:// ajuntament.barcelona.cat/turisme/en/noticia/barcelona-is-not-asouvenir_619163. Barrero, Manuel. Diccionario terminológico de la historieta. Sevilla: Asociación Cultural Tebeosfera (ACyT) Ediciones, 2015. Bessa, Antonio Sergio, and Jessamyn Fiore. Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect. New Haven: Yale UP, 2017. Burgen, Stephen. “Spanish Rent Changes ‘Could Close 20,000 Small Businesses’.” The Guardian. 15 Dec. 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/ dec/15/spain-rent-increase-small-businesses. ———. “‘Tourists Go Home, Refugees Welcome’: Why Barcelona Chose Migrants Over Visitors.” The Guardian. 25 June 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/

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cities/2018/jun/25/tourists-go-home-refugees-welcome-why-barcelonachose-migrants-over-visitors. “Campaign For Inspecting Souvenir Shops.” Ecology, Urban Planning and Mobility. Ajuntament de Barcelona. 5 Aug. 2019. https://www.barcelona. cat/infobarcelona/en/campaign-for-inspecting-souvenir-shops_844635.html. “El cómic, único sector editorial en auge.” Ciudad de Tarifa. 26 Nov. 2011. http://www.ciudaddetarifaalminuto.com/articulo/cultura/el-comic-unicosector-editorial-en-auge/20111126110029001556.html. Crippa, Maria Antonietta, and Peter Gossel. Antoní Gaudí, 1852–1926: From Nature to Architecture. Cologne: Taschen, 2015. “Crisis.” Artium. Centro-Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporáneo. http://catalogo.artium.org/dossieres/exposiciones/novela-grafica-denuncia-y-criticasocial/crisis. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. New York: Routledge, 1994. Dick, Kirby, and Amy Ziering Kofman, eds. Screenplay and Essays on the Film Derrida. New York: Routledge, 2005. Ealham, Chris. Anarchism and the City: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Barcelona, 1898–1937. Preface Paul Preston. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2010. Elbl, Martin Malcolm. “Barcelona.” Trade, Travel, and Exploration in the Middle Ages: An Encyclopedia. Ed. John Block Friedman and Kristen Mossler Figg. New York: Routledge, 2000. 46–47. García Alcaraz, Teresa. “Could New Technology Help Older People in Barcelona Create Stronger Networks?” The Guardian. 28 Oct. 2014. https://www. theguardian.com/cities/2014/oct/28/could-new-technology-helpolder-people-in-barcelona-create-stronger-networks. Gratton, Chris, et al. “The Economics of Sport Tourism at Major Sports Events.” Sport Tourism Destinations: Issues, Opportunities and Analysis. Ed. James E. S. Higham. Oxford: Elsevier, 2005. 233–47. Hughes, Robert. Barcelona. New York: Vintage, 1992. Illas, Edgar. Thinking Barcelona: Ideologies of a Global City. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2012. Kent, Conrad, and Dennis Prindle. Park Güell. New  York: Princeton Architectural P, 1993. Kirshner, Judith Russi. “Interview with Gordon Matta-Clark.” Gordon Matta-­ Clark. Ed. Corinne Diserens. Valencia: IVAM Centro Julío González, 1993. Køhlert, Frederik Byrn. “Comics, Form, and Anarchy.” SubStance 46.2 (2017): 11–32. Ledsom, Alex. “Barcelona Is Threatening to Shut Out Tourists.” Forbes. 12 July 2019. https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexledsom/2019/07/12/barcelonais-ready-to-shut-out-tourists/#1410a05546d6.

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Lee, Pamela. Object to Be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark. Boston: MIT Press, 1999. Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life. Vol 2: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday. London: Verso, 2002. ———. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. ———. “The Right to the City.” Writings on Cities: Henri Lefebvre. Trans. and Intro. Eleanor Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. 147–59. Matta-Clark, Gordon. “Splitting the Humphrey Street Building: An Interview by Liza Bear. May 1974.” Gordon Matta-Clark: Works and Collected Writings. Ed. Gloria Moure. Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 2006. 165–77. McDonogh, Gary Wray. Good Families of Barcelona: A Social History of Power in the Industrial Era. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986. Moore, Alan, and David Lloyd. V for Vendetta. Burbank, CA: DC Comics, 2018. Richard, Frances. Gordon Matta-Clark: Physical Poetics. Oakland: U of California P, 2019. ———. “Spacism: Gordon Matta-Clark and the Politics of Shared Space.” Places Journal. Mar. 2019. https://placesjournal.org/article/gordon-matta-clarkspacism/. Rodríguez, Pau. “Para algunos empresarios de Barcelona el tráfico de esclavos fue la vía para acumular su primer capital.” El Diario: Catalunya. 3 Mar. 2018. https://www.eldiario.es/catalunya/empresarios-Barcelona-trafico-esclavosacumular_0_745426242.html. Sarasúa, Carmen. “The ‘Hardest, Most Unpleasant’ Profession: The Work of Laundresses in Eighteenth-, Nineteenth-, and Twentieth-Century Spain.” A Social History of Spanish Labour. Ed. José A. Piqueras and Vicent Sanz-Rozalén. Trans. Paul Edgar. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007. 64–91. “Shattered Dreams: Impact of Spain’s Housing Crisis on Vulnerable Groups.” Human Rights Watch. 27 May 2014. https://www.hrw.org/report/ 2014/05/27/shattered-dreams/impact-spains-housing-crisis-vulnerablegroups. Torres, El, and Jesús Alonso Iglesias (illus.). El fantasma de Gaudí. Preface Javier Sierra. Barcelona: Dibbuks, 2015. Tortella, Gabriel. The Development of Modern Spain: An Economic History of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century. Trans. Valerie Herr. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000. Van Hensbergen, Gijs. Gaudi: A Biography. New York: Harper Collins, 2001. Vicente, Marta V. “Crafting the Industrial Revolution: Artisan Families and the Calico Industry in Eighteenth-Century Spain.” Reconceptualizing the Industrial Revolution. Ed. Jeff Horn, Leonard N.  Rosenband, and Merritt Roe Smith. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010. 151–68.

CHAPTER 13

The Post-15M Condition: Liminality and Multitude in Spanish Graphic Narratives Xavier Dapena

The emergence of graphic narrative in the public sphere since 2007 has coincided, in the context of the Spanish state, with an exacerbation of the material conditions and precariousness of the economic crisis and its reaction to the consequent politicization of civil society. This generalized deterioration of living conditions also aroused a “moving” response at a global level: a succession of mobilizations, from the “revolution of the pans” (Búsáhaldabyltingin) in Iceland, the “Arab Spring” (‫ )لربيع العريب‬in the Middle

This article would not have been possible without the support of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Pennsylvania. Part of the research discussed here was funded through research grants awarded by the department itself, as well as by the Northeast Modern Language Association. I would also like to thank Linda Grabner, for reviewing this text; Joaquín Pascual Ivars and Albert Jornet Somoza, without whom this journey would have been more difficult; Luis Moreno-Caballud, who has been my incentive and guide; and siempre a Natalia. X. Dapena (*) Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 C. McKinney, D. F. Richter (eds.), Spanish Graphic Narratives, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56820-7_13

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East, the anti-austerity movements in Greece (with the occupation of the Syntagma square), and the occupation for several months of the Puerta del Sol in Madrid during the so-called “indignant movement,” or 15M, in reference to May 15, 2011.1 The reverberations of this “15M climate” (Fernández-Savater, “Cómo” n.p.) in graphic narrative have been plentiful and include the proposals made in the heat of those days of May in Madrid, such as Cuaderno de Sol (2011) by Enrique Flores and, in Barcelona, Acampada BCN 15-M (2011) by Sagar Fornies, whose works I will analyze in this essay. Months later, the collective volumes Yes, We Camp (2011) and Revolution Complex (2011) picked up this same movementist impulse, which I call here the post-15M condition, and which has been transferred more generally to a substantial number of productions. In this sense, graphic narrative has been one of the predominant forms of expression of this political impulse. This is confirmed by the archive of ephemeral materials of the revolt, evidenced by the growing list of collective volumes, graphic novels, and different studies on this subject.2 This project is part of a certain genealogy of reflections on emancipation, dissent, and politicization from Jacques Rancière, but also from the  As an event, 15M refers to May 15, 2011, when a peaceful but multitudinous demonstration was convened in some sixty public plazas around Spain. It was organized by different platforms, such as Democracia Real Ya [Real Democracy Now] and Youth Without Future, and more than two hundred associations, through the use of social networks. The movement questioned the Spanish monarchist-parliamentary regime and demanded a more participatory democracy, outside of the auspices of banks and corporations. The main demonstration took place in the Puerta del Sol in Madrid. After the meeting, a small number of attendees decided to camp in the square and spend the night. In the following days, this group was joined by more people, and they began to install tents to sleep in and offer minimal services. This occupation, known as Acampada Sol, served as a model for its spread through different parts of Spain, and additional camps were installed in major cities. In June 2011, their assembly decided by consensus to dismantle the encampment. As a movement, the 15M or Indignant Movement (or Indignados), refers to a citizen movement that emerged from this massive, delocalized demonstration and the encampments that followed. The name Indignado refers to the text of the French thinker Stéphane Hessel, Indignez-vous! (2010). This movement is characterized by its united front against austerity, for inclusion, nonviolence, horizontality and the absence of representatives or leaders, assembly decision-making, self-management, networking, and the use of social networks to mobilize, among others. The movement continued the cycle of protests that began with the Arab Spring and had resonances in other movements such as Occupy Wall Street. The Podemos political party, which won 21% of the votes in the last general election, represents a reformulation, in a political context, of some of the proposals of this movement. 2  The interested reader could refer to the works of Magnussen (2014), Dapena (2015, 2016, and 2019), Martínez (2016), Catalá Carrasco (2017), Fraser (2018), and Marr (2019), among others. 1

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“counterhistory of visuality” by Nicholas Mirzoeff, and the “art of occupation” of Yates McKee. It is also, on the other hand, an approach to cultural analysis from a “rearguard” position. Boaventura de Sousa Santos understands the role of the intellectual as having a function “de facilitación, de acompañamiento a los movimientos sociales, es decir, la teoría no está instigando a la práctica, sino que aprende con la práctica; busca profundizar algunos elementos de la práctica, trae elementos de comparación con otras experiencias, de emancipación” (21–22) [of facilitation, of accompaniment to social movements, that is, the theory is not instigating the practice, but learning with practice; it seeks to deepen some elements of the practice, brings elements of comparison with other experiences, of emancipation].3 In this sense, his epistemologias do Sul invert theoretical work, combining popular knowledge with scientific knowledge, and allow us to trace forms that relate one plane to another—in this case, the social creativity of popular mobilization and graphic production. Since 2013, I explored the links between the 15M imaginary and graphic narrative.4 This political event ruptured the Spanish national discourse and questioned not only the ways of counting us, the people, but also the conflict between capitalism and daily life and its economic and political resources that had been shaped in our social reality and that challenged the foundations of the monarchical regime, and by extension of authority and representation. This event, as a disrupting element in a new cultural field, had and still has multiple drifts in the form of a “new politicization” (López Petit; Fernández-Savater, “Una fuerza”; Garcés, Un mundo). This new political subjectivation, in open opposition to the systemic crises to which the neoliberal stage of advanced capitalism has led us, announced new models of political experimentation and representative democracy while reordering and reappropriating spatialities, and while the collective imaginary of the insurgency centered on care and on the defense of the common good. This “politicizing” emerged as a new mode of subjectivation with a syllabary barely articulated as a crowd, in which the subjects did not come with previous collective identities (Labrador; Moreno-Caballud; Fernández-Savater, “Política literal”). It was, in  All translations in this chapter are my own.  The imagination or political imaginary is understood in this essay in terms of the work of the School of the Annals. In particular, Jacques LeGoff defines it as the network of meanings, representations, or images that a collective creates to give meaning to its existence within a certain historical context and whose main foundation can be found in literary or artistic works. In addition, the work of Cornelius Castoriadis delves into two specific aspects of the institutionalization of this social imaginary and the role played by social change. 3 4

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Rancière’s terms, a political event in the strict sense because of its dissenting character within a parliamentary democracy articulated on basic pillars and paradigms, and the culture transformed based on the fiction of consensus. Paradoxically, this reconfiguration of the political and cultural landscape was also accompanied by a reconfiguration of sensibility, of the regime of art, and, in particular, of graphic narrative. In this essay, I intend to address the aforementioned social creativity from the visual study of culture, and, in particular, through various artifacts created directly or indirectly in that “climate,” examining how it has affected graphic production. I maintain that the set of works analyzed proposes a new condition of visibility, which I have called the post-15M condition, and which articulates a certain repertoire of idea-images. This condition of graphic narrative traces the materiality of the movement, which was the event and trigger for politicization that includes those days in May in 2011 and, at the same time, exceeds them. The previously mentioned genealogy of mobilizations at the global and national levels had marked, since the beginning of the century, ways of feeling and their political imaginaries, with demonstrations and protests such as the Nunca Máis [Never Again], the No to the War, and what I now want to extend to the 8M movement, or March 8, International Women’s Day. This post-15M condition arises from a basic drive for politicization and, nevertheless, ranges between three instantiations: a constellation of memories, precariousness, and feminisms that trace a “being affected” by reality. This condition is characterized by its processes and forms, by its idea-images, for example, the liminal spaces of occupied squares and other public places, or the crowd as an element of recurrent representation. These idea-images were produced at the dawn of the Indignant Movement, from the first repercussions in the press just a few days later, such as the work by Andrés Rábago García (known artistically as El Roto) for El País (see Fig. 13.1), or the anomie of the movement itself during those days in May as figures of Giacometti, an image among those that were subsequently collected in the Archivo 15-M’s file of ephemeral material (see Fig. 13.2). In 2007, everything changed for national graphic production in Spain, with Arrugas (2007) by Paco Roca and María y yo (2007) by Miguel Gallardo, at a moment when the graphic novel, understood at the time as a format, genre, or label, became, as Eddie Campbell understood it, a movement (“Manifiesto” n.p.). In the particular case of the Spanish state, this assumed a new and growing position in the cultural field, which takes into account that the emergence of this cultural field in the last decade

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Fig. 13.1  “Los jóvenes salieron a la calle y súbitamente todos los partidos envejecieron…” by Andrés Rábago García (El Roto). El País. 18 May 2011

(2007–2017) has been affected by a vertiginous temporality. This has been marked by the “appearance of a field with certain properties of fields of high cultures,” but also its own nature as the “product of an intersection between a set of relatively independent and structurally homologous changes that affect the readership, comics producers, and the intellectual field” (Boltanski 283). Different are the elements that constitute this new reality coinciding with the 15M climate: the immediacy and materiality of ephemeral graphic artifacts; the marginality of its production; the definitive collapse of the negligible reverberations of the industrial model, and, in the eighties and nineties, the model of the magazine; presence in the public sphere and in traditional media (El País, El Periódico, ABC, RNE, etc.) and emerging media (Jotdown, eldiario.es, ElSaltodiario); and its new institutionality, the aforementioned national prize, the growing number of theoretical publications, conferences, and the Chair of Comics at the

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Fig. 13.2  “No estoy solo…” from the Archivo 15-M file

University of Valencia, to give some examples. This new position, however, endorsed with major headlines as the “golden age of comics in Spanish” in The New York Times (Carrión) or the “golden century” in El País (Constenla) seems to contradict, from a quantitative point of view, the progressive decline of national productions since 2012 (Tebeosfera Report 2016, 2017); and, from a qualitative point of view, it comes at the cost of a process of “gentrification of the comic by the graphic novel” (García, personal interview). Among the “graphic reactions to a citizen movement” (VVAA, Yes 39), the examples of Cuaderno de Sol by Enrique Flores and Acampada BCN 15-M by Sagar Fornies stand out.5 Cuaderno de Sol (2011) is the body of notes and images that Extremaduran illustrator Enrique Flores made during the several month occupation of the Plaza del Sol in Madrid. In those images, “el espectador puede colocarse bajo los toldos de aquella república justa y entrar a formar parte de las conversaciones, las asambleas, de las pequeñas actividades que hacían el lugar habitable” (Lindo n.p.) [the spectator can sneak under the awnings of that just republic and enter to be part of the conversations, the assemblies, the small activities that made the 5  Other examples of mobilization sketches would be the watercolors visible on artists’ blogs, such as Puerta del Sol by Juan María, Barcelona by Lapin, 15M in Sevilla by Inma Serrano, 15M.ZGZ and Acampada ZGZ by Clara, and Valladolid Fuente Dorada by Félix Tamayo.

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place habitable]. Flores, with a long career in the field of editorial illustration, records and disseminates the reality of the square’s occupation through a myriad of lively colors and sketched bodies of loose lines, which transmitted the veracity of the event, its joy and spontaneity. The use of figuration strengthens the temporary suspension of the liminal space and, at the same time, allows us to clearly contrast the places and positions of the bodies that covertly confront the forces and powers of the State. Acampada BCN 15-M (2011) by Sagar Fornies, on the other hand, maintained its ephemeral nature without ever being edited, as in the case of the Flores notebook. The Aragonese illustrator, based in Barcelona, safeguarded and disseminated his graphic notes through his personal blog. Fornies has a long career in the world of illustration, film, set design, and comics, in which he stands out for his exploration of Barcelona’s geography and architecture in the research piece Barcelona: vagabundos de la Chatarra (2015) and the graphic essay Gótico (2018), both produced with Jorge Carrión. His notebook and sketched stroke-works denote a greater realistic drive and a particular fondness for portraits. They also transmit an increased tension due to the constant presence and greater exposure of the groups of riot police that ended up forcibly dissolving the portrayed demonstrations. In both projects, there is a deliberate repoliticizing operation in order to document the present. Both Cuaderno and Acampada try to “poner el cuerpo” [put the body] on display and “ser afectado” [be affected] by the social reality to which they are committed (Garcés 69). This putting the body on display and exposing one’s own vulnerability, as Judith Butler, Isabell Lorey, and Amador Fernández-Savater maintain, unite the emancipating force of occupations. The quick, slashing strokes of Flores’s markers seem to break over the crowd facing the line of police officers (see Fig. 13.3). The configuration of identities is then disseminated through the plaza as a liminal space (and through the page) and faces the crossed arms of the ideological apparatus of the police, in stark visual contrast to the upheld hands, chants, and protests of the demonstrators. These protesters expose their hands as a symbol of peaceful mobilization and point, in their own mise en page, to the top level of the police line, visually establishing a certain power relationship. The composition on the page shows a higher plane of faceless agents with arms crossed opposing the demonstrators in the lower plane, also unidentified, although the latter occupies most of the scene in front of the center of popular sovereignty, the Spanish Parliament in Madrid.

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Fig. 13.3  Police officers vs. protesters (114–15) in Cuaderno de Sol by Enrique Flores

In its attempt to register the present, the operations posed by these imaginary constructs and the liminal spaces of the occupation stress the renewal of the realistic code assumed by Mark Fisher, who explains this limited power of interpretation with the term “capitalist realism,” in a system that seems to be the only viable one, but where “it is now impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative to it” (2). The translation of this framework of capitalist realism and its limits establishes a relationship in the graphic narrative with a certain ethic of the gaze, and with the representation of social change and its conflicts over places, points of view, and agencies. Namely, the new political subjectivation of the multitudes is disseminated in liminal spaces, while the figures of the police force are presented as the frontier and limit of the collapse of order. This collapse of order is mediated by the possibility of pointing to new formulas of political experience against the imposition of limits.

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The representation of the crowds, understood as a “device of collective enunciation,” shapes this aesthetic translation of politicization (Deleuze and Guattari 51). Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt argue that the crowd is a class concept that brings together a set of singularities, whether these are class-specific or race-specific. For Negri and Hardt, all “political action aimed at transformation and liberation today can only be carried out on the basis of the multitude” (99). The graphic productions at the beginning of the movement deepen this process of collective identification and serve as a confirmation of this new politicization in graphic production. In the iconic event of the revolt, the space prevails over the faces, and at the same time, it is related as much by the oppositional as by the antirepresentational character. As W. J. T. Mitchell points out, these iconic moments of global mobilizations “are not those of face but of space; not figures, but the negative space or ground against which a figure appears” (101). From my point of view, it is the unfinished process of representation of the crowd and its limits that bring together the sense of the liminal experience of social change. The origin of the conceptual history of liminality is based on the first foundational studies of Van Gennep, who emphasizes its transitory condition with a concept introduced to analyze the intermediate stage in ritual passages. In the sixties, Victor Turner would point to the definitive association of liminality with transition and rites of passage, through a textual journey covering different discourses such as Homi Bhabha’s studies on cultural hybridity. In The Anthropology of Performance, Turner posited, in his development of “social drama,” the expansion of liminal experiences to the plane of political and social transformations. On the other hand, Bjørn Thomassen established four additional dimensions, based on Turner— subject, space, time, and scale—, in which liminality as a concept amplifies the senses, expanding it to contain not only the idea of transition but also of threshold and borderland (17). The plaza, as the privileged space of the 15M occupations, is still the space of passage par excellence in which the liminal experience is then rooted in a collapse of order that alters the social structure, as outlined in Cuaderno de Sol or Acampada BCN 15-M. Although the narrative development of Cuaderno de Sol is limited, the different panels establish a relationship of “iconic solidarity” (20) in Thierry Groensteen’s terminology, which allows a fragmentary closure of meaning. The sequence, in the context of the notebook, not only questions that closure but also explicitly explains the disciplinary and controlling society through the presence of the fence that protects the congress

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and, at the same time, the crowd. That is to say, the center of popular sovereignty is defended by the popular civic movement that grants legitimacy and, therefore, authority to the former. Furthermore, the implications of the movement make visible the deterioration and collapse of the structures of the state and the ideological crossed arms. In addition, the picture seems to formulate a contradiction that is not so much a violent confrontation, but a suspension that transitions from the questioning of authority to the questioning of the reader, who interrogates the position of the ideological apparatus. The scene quickly assumes a point of view located in the protest itself, with a deliberate strategy by both Flores and Fornies, as well as the mobilizing processes, of trying to describe that “putting of the body” on display and “being affected.” This organization registers a certain hierarchy of the dynamics and logic of power and domination that question proclamations like “Iros a casa nosotros vigilamos” (Fornies n.p.) [go home, we are watching] or “Se va a acabar la paz social” [social peace is going to end]; but they also highlight the visibility of the occupation as a liminal space of transition in an attempt to change the cultural paradigm. Fornies shares the rapidity of Flores’s strokes and his love for detail, but the absence of colors obscures a final result that contrasts with the vibrancy of Flores’s palette. Although both contributions propose a positive reading of the mobilization processes marked by the centrality of shared life, a violence beats in the black and white of Acampada that anticipates the sequence of repression. In the notebook, one can perceive how the messages of protest progressively occupy the spaces and tend to collapse the pages. It is through this visual and textual technique that the protest is made visible (its claims and demands), as well as a physical extension of the body of the protesters through the representation of the word and the visual form of the sound (see Fig. 13.4). In June 2011, following the violent eviction from Plaça Catalunya in Barcelona, the mobilizations of 15M moved to the Parc de la Ciutadella in front of the Catalan Parliament, as recorded in Fornies’s pages (see Fig. 13.5). Around the recurrent images of police violence during the expulsion of previous days, there was a growing context of “criminalization of the movement” (n.p.) as described by Vicenç Navarro. The two differentiating aspects within the same imaginary presented by Flores and Fornies would be the inscription of violence and protests, although with similar reluctance, since both images respond to different moments of the mobilization: its emergence in the case of Cuaderno, and

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Fig. 13.4  The body on display (n.p.) in Acampada BCN 15-M by Sagar Fornies

Fig. 13.5  15M mobilizations at the Parc de la Ciutadella (n.p.) in Acampada BCN 15-M by Sagar Fornies

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its decline in Acampada. In the pictures, we see similar compositions, in which the police apparatus occupies the upper plane in front of the inferior position of the demonstrators, who, in addition to carrying banners and raising their hands in a peaceful position, increase the dynamic of domination through their position seated below and in front of the police. In addition, in this case, the Mossos, or Catalonian police force, far from their conventional street clothes and crossed arms in Flores’s sketch, appear armed as special riot units, which are protected by grilleras, the vans that transport them and that will serve to transport the detainees. Again, the design favors the contradiction between the defense of the center of Catalan popular sovereignty, the Parliament building, and the popular civic mobilization. The protesters themselves claim “ningú en representa” (Fornies n.p.) [Nobody represents us] and, on the next page, “aquesta és la seva democràcia” [This is their democracy]. With both affirmations, the crowd alludes to two concrete dimensions of the revolt: they question both political representation and the democratic quality of the Spanish parliamentary regime. At the same time that the logic of occupation through presence alters the uses of space and time (the frames of order and disorder), it codifies a new reformulation of life. Soon the information about the eviction and repression by the police force in Barcelona, which is collected in Sagar Fornies’s notebook, reaches the rest of the State, and demonstrations of solidarity are organized with the demonstrators from Barcelona that connect both demonstrations. The informational drive of the movement, which had been initiated through social networks, facilitates this rapid connection between numerous places across the national geography. The liminal experience of the square first acquires a national and later global scale through the hashtag #spanishrevolution. The articulation of a new subjectivation, marked by that identity of the multitude and by that sense of the liminal stage of the mobilization itself, assumes a new boundary that exceeds a specific place. In Flores’s Cuaderno, the “mani de apoyo” (71) [hand of support] for the Barcelona camp upon its eviction comes framed by fraternal songs of “Bar-ce-lo-na soli-dari-dad!” (70) [Bar-ce-lo-na soli-­ dari-­ty] and of contestations of “Este sistema ese el problema” (71) [This system is the problem], but also by a visual support of flowers and hearts (see Fig. 13.6). Both Art Spiegelman and Joe Sacco assume a similar position to relate, in the former case, the horrors of the holocaust, and in the latter, the repression of the conflict in Palestine. Spiegelman and Sacco include

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Fig. 13.6  “Bar-ce-lo-na soli-dari-dad!” (70–71) in Cuaderno de Sol by Enrique Flores

themselves as characters trying to problematize their place of enunciation, where, as Sacco himself asserts, “[n]o soy objetivo, pero sí trato de ser honesto. Por eso entro en la escena” (n.p.) [I am not objective, but I do try to be honest. That’s why I enter the scene]. Flores’s and Fornies’s way of “entering the scene” is to put themselves and their bodies in place, by shaping not only the collective identity but the very hegemony of the public space in dispute. The symbolic economy—the management of the iconological reduction of the graphic narrative—allows the crowd to be concentrated in a clear way not only because of its messages of protest, but also because it validates the identification of that enunciative device constituted by the crowd. The practice and social experience of the occupation finally assumes different forms: the image by El Roto for El País, which transports us to its emergence, the original politicizing drive of the movement, in a myriad of colors and forms that supported the white flag of peace (see Fig.  13.1); the reproduction of a banner from the 15M

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Archive itself, which appealed to the bodies and especially the links that the protest generated towards a liminal horizon of common emancipation (see Fig. 13.2); the conflict in Flores’s and Fornies’s images that draw the resistance of the state and its inability to encircle the mobilizations (see Figs. 13.3 and 13.5); and the definitive occupation of the space by a new emancipatory grammar and its construction on the basis of solidarity and life (see Figs. 13.4 and 13.6). In short, the signifier of the people reduced to a faceless crowd and the constitutive element of liminality fulfill several objectives: to serve as a first representation of polyhedral political identity; to interrogate the position of the reader/viewer on their own point of view and position; to act as a symbol of mobilization and its popular civic impulse; and to question the logic of power and representation of authority. This new aesthetic translation of politicization also manifests an eagerness to memorialize and register the present as a “lenguaje plástico y performativo para afirmar la voluntad de cambio” (Ramírez Blanco 16) [plastic and performative language used to affirm the will to change]. The 15M occupation is, then, a process of explosion and transformation of collective energies, which does not close the horizon of emancipation. The liminal character is translated into graphic representation as an in-between phase between time and space, a transition zone. The boundaries of the crowd are marked by the rows of policemen delimiting the symbolic space of political subjectivation. Graphic narratives, and particularly those by Flores and Fornies discussed here, assume as their own the repertoire of the mobilization imaginary and trace the forms of new political subjectivation through the representation of the crowd and the liminal experience of the plaza. This representation and experience is recorded in the very development of the life of the plazas, how the demonstrators are organized, fed, or positioned, and how the horizon that inhabits their political pulse is revealed.

Works Cited Boltanski, Luc. “The Constitution of the Comics Field.” The French Comics Theory Reader. Ed. Ann Miller and Bart Beaty. Leuven: Leuven UP, 2014. 281–301. Campbell, Eddie. “El manifiesto de la novela gráfica.” Es Muy de Cómic de Pepo Pérez, 2005, http://pepoperez.blogspot.com/2010/06/el-manifiesto-de-lanovela-grafica.html. Carrión, Jorge. “La edad de oro del cómic en español.” The New York Times. 1 Feb. 2017. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/es/2017/02/01/ la-edad-de-oro-del-comic-en-espanol/.

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Carrión, Jorge, and Sagar. Barcelona: los vagabundos de la chatarra. Barcelona: Norma Editorial, 2016. ———. Gótico. Barcelona: Norma Editorial, 2018. Catalá-Carrasco, Jorge. “Cómic, 15M y crisis en España.” Tebeosfera 3.5 (2017). https://www.tebeosfera.com/documentos/comic_15m_y_crisis_en_ espana.html. ———. “Neoliberal Expulsions, Crisis, and Graphic Reportage in Spanish Comics.” Romance Quarterly 64.4 (2017): 172–84. Constenla, Tereixa. “El siglo de oro del cómic español.” El País. 31 July 2017. https://elpais.com/cultura/2017/07/28/babelia/1501264717_520065.html. Dapena, Xavier. “‘Ese fantasma es el capitalismo’: poéticas e imaginarios de la crisis en Fagocitosis y Lo que (me) está pasando.” 452oF.  Revista de Teoría de la Literatura y Literatura Comparada 15 (2016): 93–111. ———. “‘Nobody Expects the Spanish Revolution’: memoria indignada e imaginarios de la historia en la narrativa gráfica española contemporánea.” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 40.1 (2015): 79–107. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Kafka, por una literatura menor. Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1978. Fernández-Savater, Amador. “¿Cómo se organiza un clima?” Publico.Es, 2012. ———. “Política literal y política literaria (Sobre ficciones políticas y 15-M).” Eldiario.Es, 30 Nov. 2012, http://www.eldiario.es/interferencias/ficcionpolitica-15-M_6_71452864.html. ———. “Una fuerza vulnerable: El malestar como energía de transformación social.” Eldiario.Es, 27 Jan. 2017, http://www.eldiario.es/interferencias/ malestar-energia-transformacion_social_6_606199392.html. Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester, UK: ZerO Books, 2009. Flores, Enrique. Cuaderno de Sol. Madrid: Blur Ediciones, 2011. Fornies, Sagar. Acampada BCN 15-M. Sagar, 15/16 June 2011. http://sagarfornies.blogspot.com/. Fraser, Benjamin. “Miguel Brieva, quincemayista: Art, Politics, and Comics Form in the 15-M Graphic Novel Lo que (me) está pasando (2015).” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 8.1 (2018): 42–62. Garcés, Marina. Un mundo común. Barcelona: Edicions Bellaterra, 2013. García, Santiago. Personal interview by Xavier Dapena, Mar 2018. Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2009. Labrador Méndez, Germán. “¿Lo llamaban democracia? La crítica estética de la política en la transición española y el imaginario de la historia en el 15-M.” Kamchatka 4 (2014): 11–61. Lindo, Elvira. Prologue. “El trazo de Enrique.” Cuaderno de Sol. Madrid: Blur Ediciones, 2011.

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López Petit, Santiago. “Anomalías intempestivas.” Estado Mental, 2014. https:// elestadomental.com/diario/anomalias-intempestivas. Magnussen, Anne. “Spanish Comics and Politics: From Propaganda and Censorship through Political Activism to Cultural Reflections.” Comics & Politik. Ed. Stephan Packard. Berlin: Ch. A. Bachmann Verlag, 2014. 157–78. Marr, Matthew J. “Building a Home for Crisis Narrative: Intermediality and Comic(s) Pedagogy in Aleix Saló’s Españistán Project.” Consequential Art: Comics Culture in Contemporary Spain. Ed. Marr and Samuel Amago. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2019. 137–63. Martínez, Christine M. “The Affirmative Politics of Degrowth: Miguel Brieva’s Graphic Narrative Memorias de la tierra.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 18.2 (Apr. 2017): 191–212. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New  York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1994. McKee, Yates. Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition. London: Verso, 2017. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham: Duke UP, 2012. Mitchell, W.J.T., et al. Occupy: Three Inquiries in Disobedience. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 2013. Moreno Caballud, Luis. Cultures of Anyone: Studies on Cultural Democratization in the Spanish Neoliberal Crisis. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2015. Navarro, Vicenç. “¿Por qué y cómo surgió el 15-M?” Público. 15 May 2012. https://blogs.publico.es/vicenc-navarro/2012/05/15/%c2%bfpor-quey-como-surgio-el-15-m/. Negri, Antonio, and Michael Hardt. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. London: Penguin Books, 2014. “No estoy solo…” Archivo 15-M. CC-BY-NC-SA. http://archivo15m.no-ip.org/. Rábago García, Andrés (El Roto). “Los jóvenes salieron a la calle y súbitamente todos los partidos envejecieron…” Drawing. El País. 18 May 2011. Ramírez Blanco, Julia. Utopías artísticas de revuelta: Claremont Road, Reclaim the Streets, la Ciudad de Sol. Madrid: Cátedra, 2014. Sacco, Joe. “No soy objetivo, pero sí honesto.” Interview by Lucía Magi. El País. 25 Oct. 2009. https://elpais.com/diario/2009/10/25/cultura/1256421601_850215.html. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. Epistemologías del Sur: Perspectivas. Madrid: Akal, 2014. Tebeosfera, and Manuel Barrero. “La industria de la historieta en España en 2015.” Tebeosfera. 2016. https://www.tebeosfera.com/numeros/informe_ tebeosfera_2014_acyt_3_2015.html.

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———. “La industria de la historieta en España en 2016.” Tebeosfera. 2017. https://www.tebeosfera.com/documentos/la_industria_de_la_historieta_en_ espana_en_2016.html. Thomassen, Bjørn. “The Uses and Meanings of Liminality.” International Political Anthropology 2 (Jan. 2009): 5–27. Turner, Victor. The Anthropology of Performance. New York: PAJ Publications, 1995. VVAA. Revolution complex. Barcelona: Norma Editorial, 2011. ———. Yes we camp!: Trazos para una (R)evolución. Madrid: Dibbuks, 2011.

Index1

NUMBERS, AND SYMBOLS #MeToo, 22, 136, 184, 192 #NiUnaMenos, 192 #NoEsNo, 192 #YoTambien, 22 #YoTeCreo, 22, 184, 192 15-M movement, 240, 241 See also Economic crisis; Financial crisis; Indignados movement; Occupy movements; Protest 2007, 15, 17, 20, 49, 52, 53, 85 See also Ley de Memoria Histórica; Premio Nacional del Cómic A Abadía, Ximo Frank: La increíble historia de una dictadura olvidada, 17 Africa, 160, 169, 171 Aging, 21

Ahmed, Maaheen, 67 Aladrén, Emilio, 108 Alderete, Jorge, 160, 167, 168, 171, 172, 175 Black is Beltza, 22, 159–180 See also Cano, Harkaitz; Muguruza, Fermín Aleluya, 3–23 Altarriba, Antonio, 4, 19, 21, 29, 47, 55–58, 55n3, 60, 64, 86, 239 Amores locos, 19 El ala rota, 29, 55n3 El arte de volar, 17, 29, 47, 55, 55n3, 57, 58, 86, 239 El brillo del gato negro, 19 See also Kim (Joaquim Aubert Puigarnau); Pérez Vernetti, Laura Alzheimer’s disease, 54 See also Mental illness

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 C. McKinney, D. F. Richter (eds.), Spanish Graphic Narratives, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56820-7

303

304 

INDEX

Amago, Samuel, 4, 12, 14, 165n7, 177, 177n12, 189 Amnesia, 21, 47–64, 81, 239 See also Memoricide Amnesty, 38 Law of 1977, 38, 48 Analepsis, 88, 92, 93 Anapurna (Sainz Quesada, Ana), 20 Anarchy anarchist, 37, 38n4, 56, 161n4, 216, 258, 259, 259n4 Anderson, Andrew, 87 Angoulême Comics Festival, 15 Arab Spring, 162, 285, 286n1 Architecture, 22, 79, 90, 110, 189, 257–282, 261n5, 291 anarchitecture, 259–261, 265, 266, 268 Argentina, 19, 40, 216 Arqué, Clara-Tanit, 19 ¿Quién ama a las fresas?, 19 Astiberri, see Publishers Autobiography, 12, 21, 30, 34, 37, 44, 139–156, 206, 213n2, 214 See also Biography Autographics, 212, 213, 216, 218, 226 B Baetens, Jan, 12, 13n6, 162, 165 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 70 Baphomet, 36 Barcelona, 7, 23, 30, 34, 35, 42, 97, 120, 121, 140, 183, 184, 186, 189, 206, 216, 257n1, 258–261, 263, 265, 274, 280–282, 286, 291, 294, 296 International Comic Fair, 20, 23 Barrero, Manuel, 5, 8n2, 11, 13, 92, 261 Barrio, Federico de, 188, 237n2 Las memorias de Amorós, 188, 193, 205

See also Hernández Cava, Felipe Basque, 22, 159n1, 160, 160n2, 161, 165n6, 166, 169–171, 174, 176, 178, 180 Bataille, Georges, 19 See also Altarriba, Antonio; Eroticism; Pérez Vernetti, Laura Baudrillard, Jean, 69, 266 Beauvoir, Simone de, 216 Bechdel, Alison, 15, 211 Are You My Mother?, 211 Fun Home, 15, 211 Benjamin, Walter, 162, 176, 179 Bennett, Tamryn, 88 Bergamín, José, 108 Bettaglio, Marina, 4, 22, 212, 213, 215, 219 Biography, 15, 30, 37, 55, 69, 70, 85, 86, 106, 177 See also Autobiography Blackness, 22, 124, 126, 133, 175–177, 179, 180, 195 Blog blogging, 213 blogosphere, 214 Body, 14, 30, 33, 34, 36, 45, 72, 87, 93, 97, 114, 124, 136, 163, 165, 166n8, 171, 206, 215, 220, 223, 229, 246, 263, 265, 266, 268, 270, 271, 273, 274, 280, 290, 291, 294, 295, 297, 298 Bonet, Enrique, 21, 86–88, 87n3, 92, 97–99, 101–105, 114, 271–273 La araña del olvido, 21, 86, 87, 92, 97–104 Bordes, Enrique, 13 Braiding, see Icon, iconic solidarity Bretecher, Claire, 215, 216, 220 Bullfighting, 19 Buñuel, Luis, 90, 93, 108, 110 Buñuel en el laberinto de las tortugas, 18 Un chien andalou, 90, 93, 108

 INDEX 

Burundarena, Maitena, 215 Búsáhaldabyltingin, 285 Bustos, Luis, 47, 55, 60–62, 235–238, 237n1, 242, 243, 245, 248, 251–253 ¡García!, 22, 47, 55, 60, 62, 63, 235–254 See also García, Santiago C Cabrera, Juanfran, 87, 87n3 Los Caballeros de la Orden de Toledo, 87, 88n4 See also Javierre Cachorro, El, 8 Campbell, Eddie, 12, 288 Canales, Juan Díaz, 14 Blacksad, 14 See also Guarnido, Juanjo Cano, Harkaitz, 160, 167, 168, 171, 172, 175 Black is Beltza, 22, 159–180, 159n1 See also Alderete, Jorge; Muguruza, Fermín Capitalism, 219, 240, 261, 287 Capitán Trueno, El, 8 Cardona, María Elsy, 4, 188 Carrión, Jorge, 15, 19, 20, 140, 290, 291 Cartoons, 141, 144, 162, 163, 195, 258 Castaño, Marga, 212 Hardcore Maternity, 212 See also Rosa, Esther de la Cathartic, 43, 207, 215, 226 Catholic, 56, 153, 163, 166, 176, 239, 244, 251, 273 See also Nationalism Cavanaugh, Cecelia, 87 Charlie Hebdo, 217 Charlotín, 8 China, 145, 146, 148, 153

305

Chute, Hillary, 13n6, 33, 68, 71, 79, 206, 211, 212 Cilla, Ramón, 7 Cimoc, 8 Cities, 4, 23, 98, 108, 110, 112, 121, 160, 178, 186, 192, 201, 216, 258–261, 258n3, 263, 265, 266, 273, 274, 280–282, 286n1 Civil War, see Spanish Civil War Classification, 179, 187, 188, 203, 204 Close-up, 93, 266, 271, 278, 280 Closure, 33, 204, 253, 293 See also McCloud, Scott Clowes, Daniel, 11 Eightball, 11 Ghost World, 11 CNT (National Confederation of Workers), 37, 42 Colombia, 19 Color black and white, 74, 81, 90, 108, 119, 122–126, 146, 169, 170, 195, 198, 220, 294 usage of, 72, 81 Comics definition of, 142 stigma of, 9, 11 See also Comix; Graphic novel Comix, 161 underground comics, 8, 9, 13n6, 159, 163, 223 Constenla, Tereixa, 11, 15, 290 Crime, 4, 9, 38, 131, 188, 191, 192n6, 193, 196, 205, 206, 258, 263, 265, 276, 278 crime fiction, 187, 187–188n3, 188, 188n4, 196 See also Noir genre Crucifix, Benoît, 67 Cuadrado, Jesús, 14 Cubas, Francisco, 7 CuCo: Cuadernos de Cómic, 17

306 

INDEX

Cultural identity, 21, 139–156 See also Identity; Multiculturalism Culture of the Transition (CT), see Transition (to democracy) Cummings, Phillip, 90, 108 D Dalí, Salvador, 90, 93, 108, 110 Darici, Katiuscia, 4 Democracy, 22, 37, 38, 40, 42, 48, 48n1, 49, 54, 63, 64, 87, 162, 165, 166, 166n8, 172, 228, 235–254, 286n1, 287, 288, 296 De Qvommic. El Rrollo Aristocrata, 9, 10 Derrida, Jacques, 23, 260, 268, 274, 278 Dibbuks, see Publishers Dictatorship, 13, 17, 29n1, 36–38, 40, 48, 49, 51, 52, 88, 89, 162, 166, 174, 192, 239, 247 See also Franco, Francisco Domestic abuse, 206 See also Gender; Violence; Women Dominguín, 7, 8 Don Quijote, 3 Dopico, Pablo, 8–9, 14 Drugs, 9, 52 Durán, Cristina, 19, 140n2, 219n6 El día 3, 19 Una posibilidad entre mil, 219n6 See also Giner Bou, Miguel E Economic crisis, 23, 37, 40, 121, 213, 257, 282, 285 See also 15-M movement; Financial crisis; Indignados movement; Occupy movements; Protest Eisner, Will, 7, 9, 11, 11n5, 12, 88, 201

Comics and Sequential Art, 11n5, 201 A Contract with God, 11 Ellipsis, 124 Emplotment, 31 Enríquez, Bea, 20 Eroticism, 19, 223 See also Reproduction; Sex Escudero, I. L., 19 Diferente:140 artistas. Una única historia, 19 Espoy, José, 7 Esquembre, Carles, 21, 87, 87n3, 88, 92, 104, 106–114 La Brigada Lincoln, 17 Lorca: Un poeta en Nueva York, 18, 21, 87, 92, 104–112 Estrangement, 35, 77 Etxebarria, Lucía, 214, 214n4 European Comic Art, 13, 14 Evaduna, 212 El regalo perfecto para mamá, 212 See also Méndez-Ponte, María Exile, 38, 40, 55, 59, 60, 73, 164 F Falange, 56 Family, 30–32, 34, 37, 42, 50, 52, 55n3, 74, 78, 80, 81, 87, 89, 90, 97, 98, 106, 141, 144–149, 151, 154–156, 172, 184, 198, 211, 212, 218, 229, 251, 265, 268, 271, 273 See also Father; Mother Farce, 133, 193–204 Farriol Josep and Miquel, 8 Fascism, 56, 166n8, 172 Father, 5, 16, 30, 31, 33, 34, 37, 38, 40, 42, 43, 45, 55, 55n3, 56, 64, 69, 70, 78, 79, 81, 89, 90, 96, 144, 155, 171, 174, 177, 235, 246, 249

 INDEX 

Favaro, Alice, 4 Feminism feminist, 192, 205–207, 214, 215, 217, 222, 222n7, 223 postfeminist, 212, 217, 219 Femme fatale, 195–197, 223 Fernández, Ferran, 19 Poémic, 19 See also Pérez Vernetti, Laura Fernández, Miguel, 19 A las cinco de la tarde, 19 See also López Poy, Manolo Financial crisis, 40, 120, 121, 123, 239, 240, 268 See also 15-M movement; Economic crisis; Occupy movements; Protest Flaca, La, 7 Flashback, 30, 40, 42, 92, 144, 145, 153 See also Analepsis; Prolepsis Flores, Enrique, 242, 286, 290–292, 294, 296–298 Cuaderno de Sol, 242, 290, 292, 293, 297 Fontdevila, Manel, 217, 218, 237, 239 La parejita, 217 Forgetting, 21, 31, 47–64, 104, 166 See also Memory; Oblivion; Pacto del olvido Fornies, Sagar, 140, 286, 290, 291, 294–298 Acampada BCN 15-M, 290, 291, 293, 295 Foucault, Michel, 204 France, 8, 14, 53, 56, 58, 59, 73, 161n4, 216 Francisco, Miguel, 15, 21, 30–39, 30n2, 41, 43–45 Espacios en blanco, 15, 21, 29–45 Franco, Francisco, 4, 13, 17, 20, 22, 29n1, 36–38, 38n4, 48, 48n1, 50, 54, 59, 60, 62, 73, 85, 87, 100, 101, 161n4, 166, 166n8,

307

174, 184, 189, 190, 198, 201, 205, 216, 228, 235, 236, 239, 242, 247, 248, 251, 253 Francoism, 42, 48–50, 55–57, 63, 64, 161n4, 162, 228, 238, 239, 250, 253, 254 See also Dictatorship Fraser, Benjamin, 4, 5n1, 14, 286n2 Freixas, Laura, 214, 214n4 Frey, Hugo, 12, 162, 165 G Gallardo, Miguel, 8, 29, 51, 219n6, 288 María y yo, 16, 219n6, 288 Un largo silencio, 51 Gallo, Miguel Ángel, 163, 205 Galvañ, Ana, 19, 53 García Lorca, Federico, 21, 85–114 Bodas de sangre, 91 “El rey de Harlem,” 110 La casa de Bernarda Alba, 100 Libro de poemas, 104 “Nueva York: Oficina y denuncia,” 112 “Paisaje de la multitud que vomita (Anochecer en Coney Island),” 110 Poeta en Nueva York, 104, 108 “Sueño,” 104 García, Santiago, 4, 5n1, 9, 11, 12, 13n6, 14, 15, 17, 19, 47, 53–55, 60–64, 63n4, 85, 86, 205, 235–238, 241–246, 243n7, 243n8, 248–254, 290 Fútbol: La novela gráfica, 19 ¡García!, 47, 55, 60, 62, 63, 235–238, 237n1, 237n2, 241, 242, 243n7, 244, 245, 247, 248, 250–253 La novela gráfica (On the Graphic Novel), 4, 5n1, 14, 237 See also Bustos, Luis; Ríos, Pablo

308 

INDEX

Gasca, Luis, 4, 13, 104 Gaudí, Antoni, 258, 258n3, 260, 261n5, 265, 266, 270, 271, 274, 276, 278, 280, 281 Gender, 4, 5, 16, 19, 21, 22, 64, 119–137, 183–207, 212, 213, 217, 227 See also Masculinity; Patriarchy; Women Genre, 9, 11, 13, 19, 22, 53, 87, 88, 102, 140, 142, 143, 164, 165, 173, 177, 179, 183–207, 211–213, 213n2, 236, 238, 239, 243, 249, 251, 258, 281, 288 Gestation, 213, 215–217, 220, 223, 225, 226 Gibson, Ian, 87, 90, 102 Vida y muerte de Federico García Lorca, 87, 88n4 See also Palomo, Quique Gili, Esther, 22, 212 39 semanas y mis experiencias como madre novata, 22, 212 Giménez, Carlos, 15, 71 36-39: Malos tiempos, 17, 71 Paracuellos, 15, 71 Giner Bou, Miguel, 219n6 Una posibilidad entre mil, 219n6 See also Durán, Cristina Ginestà, Marina, 42 Goggin, Joyce, 13, 159, 161, 204 Goya, Francisco, 149 Goya: Lo sublime terrible, 18 Goytisolo, Juan, 48, 49 Granada, 87n3, 89–91, 97, 98, 100 Graphic novel, definition, 142 Groensteen, Thierry, 13n6, 32, 33, 41, 293 Guarnido, Juanjo, 14, 54 Blacksad, 14 See also Canales, Juan Díaz Gubern, Román, 4, 13, 104, 172

Guerrero, Agustina, 22, 212, 223–225, 227 La Volátil: Mamma mía!, 22, 212, 223–225, 227 Guilt, 22, 42, 218 Gutter, 13, 33, 104, 159–162, 164, 165, 173, 177, 179, 204 See also Closure Guzmán, Juan, 42 H Harris, Sarah, 67, 86n2, 87, 163 Hassler-Forest, Dan, 13, 159, 161, 204 Hatfield, Charles, 34–36, 44 See also Meta-comic Hays, Sharon, 213 Helms, Jason, 33 Helsinki, 30, 33–35, 40 Hernández, Carlos, 21, 87–97, 87n3, 89n5, 114 La huella de Lorca, 18, 21, 87, 89–98 See also Torres, El Hernández Cava, Felipe, 15, 188, 237n2 Las memorias de Amorós, 188, 193, 205 Las serpientes ciegas, 15 See also Barrio, Federico del; Seguí, Bartolomé Herrero, Ángel, 104, 106 Hill, Cecília, 19, 86 Antonio Machado: Los días azules, 18, 19, 86 See also Salvia, Josep Hirsch, Marianne, 34, 36, 52, 86, 86n2, 176, 177, 214 See also Postmemory Historical fiction, 193, 236

 INDEX 

Historical memory, 17, 20, 21, 29–45, 47, 62, 64, 75, 85, 86n2, 87, 114, 239 See also Ley de Memoria Histórica Historiography, 37, 49 Homosexuality, 16 Horror, 9, 187, 296 I Icon iconic, 8, 32, 41, 124, 143, 177, 216, 258, 270n7, 293 iconic solidarity (braiding), 41 iconography, 88, 174, 195 See also McCloud, Scott Identity, 4, 12, 14, 19–22, 40, 50, 51, 53, 79, 87, 139–156, 168, 173, 179, 180, 186, 189, 204, 212–215, 223, 226, 249, 250, 257, 281, 287, 291, 296–298 See also Cultural identity; Multiculturalism Iglesias, Jesús Alonso, 61, 241, 244, 257, 257n1, 262, 264, 267, 268, 272, 275–277, 279, 281, 282 El fantasma de Gaudí, 18, 22, 23, 257–282 See also Torres, El Immigration, 21, 119–137, 139, 140 Indignados movement, 240, 286n1 See also 15-M movement; Economic crisis; Financial crisis; Occupy movements; Infertility, 219 International Brigade, 172 See also Spanish Civil War Intertextuality, 33, 104 See also Meta-literature Irony, 35, 224, 282

309

J Javierre, 87 Los Caballeros de la Orden de Toledo, 87, 88n4 See also Cabrera, Juanfran Jiménez Lapsicomami, Mamen, 212n1 50 sombras de mami, 212n1 K Kiely, Kristin, 11, 142 Kim (Joaquim Aubert Puigarnau) El ala rota, 29, 55n3 El arte de volar, 17, 29, 47, 55, 55n3, 57, 58, 86, 239 See also Altarriba, Antonio Kristeva, Julia, 214, 214n4 Kyle, Richard, 11, 86 L Labanyi, Jo, 42, 87 Lanza en astillero: el caballero don Quijote y otras sus tristes figuras, 17 Layton, William, 97, 98, 102 Lázaro-Reboll, Antonio, 5n1 Lazarre, Jane, 214, 214n4 Lefebvre, Henri, 23, 258n2, 259, 260, 273 Ley de Memoria Histórica, 17, 20, 49–50, 52, 85, 87 See also 2007; Historical memory Liminality, 23, 285–298 Lopes, Paul, 9 López Poy, Manolo, 19 A las cinco de la tarde, 19 See also Fernández, Miguel Lorca, see García Lorca, Federico Love, 130, 131, 133, 140, 218–220, 223, 294

310 

INDEX

M Machado, Antonio, 48, 82 See also Hill, Cecília; Roca, Paco, Los surcos del azar; Salvia, Josep Madrid, 48, 60, 87n3, 89, 90, 98, 108, 141, 145, 164, 166n8, 169, 174, 178, 240, 241, 286, 286n1, 290, 291 Madrid Cómico, 7 Magnussen, Anne, 13–15, 17, 136, 286n2 Manada, La, 22, 184, 192 Marginalization racial, 22 Marías, Fernando, 68 Marín, Joan, 21, 119, 120, 122, 123, 125, 126, 129, 130, 132, 134, 136, 140 Olimpita, 21, 119–137, 140 See also Migoya, Hernán Mariscal, Javier, 8, 9 Marr, Matthew J., 4, 12, 14, 177, 177n12, 286n2 Martín, Antonio, 5, 7, 8, 13 Martín Gaite, Carmen, 36, 216 El cuarto de atrás, 36 Retahilas, 216 Martín, Jaime, 15, 54 Jamás tendré 20 años, 15, 17 Martín Segarra, Susanna, 87 Residencia de Estudiantes, 87, 87n3, 88n4, 90, 92, 93 Masculinity, 119, 187, 198, 205–207, 253 See also Gender; Patriarchy Maternity, 186, 214, 218, 228 maternal chronicles, 22, 212, 212n1, 213, 223 See also Mother; Pregnancy; Supermother; Women Matta-Clark, Gordon, 23, 258, 260, 261, 265, 266, 276 See also Architecture

Maurer, Christopher, 87 Max, 8, 53 McCloud, Scott, 7, 33, 68, 88, 108, 122, 204, 205 See also Closure; Icon Mecáchis, 7 Medem, María, 19 Cénit, 19 Melancholy, 30, 42, 43, 104, 112 Memoir, 4, 15, 16, 67, 78, 85, 149n5, 164, 189, 213, 220 Memoricide, 48–50, 63, 64 See also Amnesia; Memory Memory, 4, 17, 20, 21, 29–45, 47–64, 67–71, 73–83, 85–114, 145, 156, 162, 169, 174–180, 239, 245, 254, 288 See also Forgetting; Historical memory; Ley de Memoria Histórica; Oblivion; Personal memory Méndez-Ponte, María, 212 El regalo perfecto para mamá, 212 See also Evaduna Mental illness, 71 See also Alzheimer’s disease Merino, Ana, 4, 86n2 Meta-literature meta-comics, 34, 40, 43 meta-fiction, 98, 104, 243, 253 meta-history, 101, 102 See also Intertextuality; Self-reflexivity Metaphor, 21, 31, 36, 67, 68, 77–79, 81, 88, 93, 95, 98, 101, 114, 123 Metonymy, 103, 104, 253 Migoya, Hernán, 21, 119, 120, 122, 123, 125, 127, 129, 130, 132, 134, 136, 140 Olimpita, 21, 119–137, 140 See also Marín, Joan

 INDEX 

Miguel EN Cervantes: El retablo de las maravillas, 18 Mitaine, Benoît, 9 Montes Garcés, Elizabeth, 4 Mother, 55n3, 91, 144, 146–150, 155, 156, 174, 197, 201, 205, 206, 212–218, 220–223, 226–229, 276, 280, 281 motherhood, 22, 212, 212n1, 216–220, 223, 228, 229 See also Maternity; Pregnancy; Supermother; Women Muguruza, Fermín, 160, 160n2, 161, 165n6, 166–172, 175, 176, 178 Black is Beltza, 22, 159–180 See also Alderete, Jorge; Cano, Harkaitz Multiculturalism, 163, 164 Mundo Cómico, El, 7 N National Comic Award, see Premio Nacional del Cómic Nationalism, 153, 163, 166, 176, 239, 244, 251, 273 See also Catholic Navajas, Gonzalo, 69 Neoliberalism, 213, 239 Netflix, 19 New York City, 97, 104, 106, 112, 160 Ninth art, 162, 173, 212 Noir genre, 195, 203 See also Crime Nonfiction, 16 Norma, see Publishers Nudity, 220, 223 Nueve, La, 59, 74

311

O Oblivion, 29, 30, 40, 48, 54, 64, 73, 74, 76, 104 See also Forgetting; Memory; Pacto del olvido; Silence; Voice Occupy movements, 240 See also 15-M movement; Economic crisis; Financial crisis; Indignados movement; Protest Oh! MamiBlue (Verónica Sánchez-­ Mancebo), 212n1 Bi mother my friend, 212n1 Olmo, Irene, 219n5, 222, 222n7 No quiero ser mamá, 219n5 Onomatopoeia, 88, 89, 93, 96, 123 Osorio, Marta, 97, 102 Other, 5, 8, 9, 14, 15, 17, 20, 22, 29n1, 33, 40, 42, 45, 49–52, 59, 63, 67, 69, 70, 75–79, 81, 88, 119, 124, 139, 141–144, 146–148, 151, 160, 165, 165n6, 166, 170, 171, 173, 173n10, 174, 176, 179, 183, 184, 187–191, 187n3, 193, 197, 203, 204, 206, 207, 212, 214, 218, 223, 237, 240–243, 241n4, 247, 249, 250, 253, 257, 258n3, 260, 263, 268, 273, 281, 286n1, 287, 288, 290n5, 291, 293 otherness, 36, 121, 124, 144 P Pacto del olvido, 40 See also Forgetting; Memory; Oblivion Palomo, Quique, 87, 87n3 Vida y muerte de Federico García Lorca, 87, 88n4 See also Gibson, Ian Pamies, Antonio, 9, 237n2 See also De Qvommic. El Rrollo Aristocrata

312 

INDEX

Panini, see Publishers Parody, 229, 236, 237n2, 251 Patriarchy, 122, 136, 184, 190, 198, 203–205, 219, 228 Pellicer, José Luis, 7 Penón, Agustín, 97, 98, 100–102, 104 Penyas, Ana, 16, 19, 20, 86 Estamos todas bien, 16, 19, 86 Perec, Georges, 80 Pérez Galdós, Benito, 189 Pérez, Pepo, 54, 70, 73, 79 Pérez Vernetti, Laura, 19, 20 Amores locos, 19 El brillo del gato negro, 19 Poémic, 19 See also Altarriba, Antonio; Eroticism; Fernández, Ferran Personal memory, 4, 55, 87–90, 114 See also Memory Pinocho, 8 Poetry, 21, 85–114 Politics, 4, 36, 54, 62, 86, 162, 165, 178, 184, 258, 268, 270 Pompeia, Núria, 215–217, 228 9 Maternasis, 215–217 Y fueron felices comiendo perdices, 217 Pons, Álvaro, 4, 13, 71 Postmemory, 34, 36, 52, 54, 64, 81, 86, 86n2, 88, 89, 95, 96, 176, 177, 180 See also Hirsch, Marianne Postmodernism postmodern, 102 Precup, Mihaela, 213n3 Pregnancy, 186, 214n4, 215–217, 219, 220, 225, 226 See also Maternity; Mother; Women Premio Nacional del Cómic, 17, 19, 52, 53, 183, 192 Preston, Paul, 32 Prim, General D. Juan, 5, 6 Primo de Rivera, 37, 40

Prolepsis, 88, 92, 93 Protest, 13, 23, 38, 40, 192, 239, 240, 245, 286n1, 288, 291, 294, 297, 298 See also 15-M movement; Economic crisis; Financial crisis; Occupy movements Publishers, 3, 15, 16, 20, 54, 142, 187, 257n1 Apa-Apa, 16 Astiberri, 3, 15, 16, 20, 54, 142, 187 Delcourt, 15 Dibbuks, 3, 16, 257n1 La Cúpula, 20 Norma, 142 Ponent, 20 Sins Entido, 16, 20, 142 Puig Antich, Salvador, 38, 38n4 Pulgarcito, 8 Pulido, Rayco, 16, 19, 20, 22, 183–207 Lamia, 19, 22, 183–207 Nela, 16, 18 Q Quiles, Cristina, 22, 212 La madre que nos parió, 22, 212 R Rábago García, Andrés (El Roto), 288, 289 Raccord, 88, 104, 105 Race and identity, 4, 21 racism, 21, 122, 124, 126, 136, 137, 140, 163, 175 See also Blackness

 INDEX 

Radio y Televisión Española (RTVE), 19 Ramírez, Juan Antonio, 13 Rancière, Jacques, 286, 288 Reproduction, 21, 108, 140, 166n8, 215–217, 219, 220, 222, 223, 266, 278, 297 See also Sex Residencia de Estudiantes, 87, 87n3, 88n4, 90, 92, 93 Resina, Joan Ramon, 40, 239 Retribution, 22, 37, 183–207 Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, 14 Riba Rossy, Raquel, 219n6 Rich, Adrienne, 214n4 Riera, Carme, 214, 214n4 Tiempo de espera, 214 Ríos, Pablo, 19 Fútbol: La novela gráfica, 19 See also García, Santiago Roca, Paco, 15, 17, 18, 21, 29, 47, 53–55, 58–61, 64, 67–83, 86, 239, 288 Arrugas, 15, 17, 18, 53, 54, 68, 69, 75–78, 81, 288 El faro, 70 El invierno del dibujante, 70 La casa, 68, 69, 78–83 La encrucijada, 70 Los surcos del azar, 17, 29, 47, 54, 55, 58–61, 68, 69, 71–75, 78, 81, 82, 86, 239 Memorias de un hombre en pijama, 70 Romance, 9 Rosa, Esther de la, 212 Hardcore Maternity, 212 See also Castaño, Marga Rrollo Enmascarado, El, 8

313

S Salvia, Josep, 19, 86 Antonio Machado: Los días azules, 19, 86 See also Hill, Cecília Sánchez-Mancebo, Verónica, see Oh! MamiBlue (Verónica Sánchez-Mancebo) Satire, 13, 60 Satrapi, Marjane, 15, 143, 211 Persepolis, 15, 143, 211 Scarsella, Alessandro, 4 Second boom, 3, 19, 205 Seguí, Bartolomé, 15 Las serpientes ciegas, 15, 17 See also Hernández Cava, Felipe Self-reflexivity, 30, 34, 35 See also Intertextuality; Meta-literature Sento (Vicent Llobell Bisbal), 16, 86 Dr. Uriel, 17, 86 Sequential art, 4, 5, 7, 13n6, 14, 17, 20, 23, 86, 88, 114, 142, 162, 164, 165, 173, 177, 179, 215 See also Comics; Graphic novel Sesar, Gemma, 212 Vida de madre 2: La primavera, 212 Vida de madre: El invierno, 212 Sex, 9, 128, 130 sexuality, 16, 19, 196, 212, 223 See also Eroticism; Reproduction Silence, 31, 37, 38, 41, 43, 48–50, 54–56, 81–83, 97, 98, 100, 166, 198, 201, 206, 214–215, 253 See also Oblivion; Voice Soccer, 19 Social media, 192, 214 Soldados de Salamina, 18 Spanish Civil War, 4, 13, 16, 17, 20, 29, 29n1, 33, 37, 41, 42, 48–52, 55, 56, 59, 64, 67, 69, 71, 73–75, 85–90, 161n4, 172, 172n9, 178, 189, 239, 259n4, 288 See also International Brigade

314 

INDEX

Specter, 89, 98, 100, 114, 184, 259–261 spectrality, 22, 257–282 Spiegelman, Art, 11, 15, 34, 165, 177, 211, 296 Maus, 11, 15, 34, 177, 211 Splash page, 43, 88, 100, 224 Star, 8 Suárez, Laura, 19 Los cuentos de la niebla, 19 Subjectivity, 34–38, 44, 68, 153, 171, 216, 228 Suicide, 55, 56, 58, 81, 86, 120, 136 Superheroes, 15, 22, 53, 86, 162, 235–254 Supermother, 229 See also Maternity; Mother; Women Surrealism surreal, 106, 108, 109, 112 surrealist, 93, 95, 110, 221 Symbols, 36n3, 56, 78, 89, 90, 114, 149, 203, 291, 298 T Taboo, 9, 13, 133, 212 Tamarit, Núria, 20 TBO, 8 Tebeo, 7, 8, 8n2, 11 Tebeosfera, 13, 17 Time, 3, 13, 15, 21, 23, 31, 33, 35, 38, 43, 45, 48, 49, 51, 52, 54, 55, 55n3, 59, 68–71, 73, 78, 81, 83, 89–92, 97, 98, 102, 104, 108, 110, 120, 127, 130, 142, 146, 148, 149, 155, 163, 164, 169, 173, 184, 187, 192n6, 205, 213, 214, 216, 219, 220, 226, 237, 243–254, 258–260, 266, 268, 270, 278, 280, 288, 291, 293, 294, 296, 298 temporality, 289

Todorov, Tzvetan, 36 Töpffer, Rodolphe, 5 Torres, El, 19, 87, 89, 89n5, 92, 94–96, 257, 257n1, 262, 264, 268, 269, 272, 275–277, 279, 281, 282 El fantasma de Gaudí, 18, 257, 257n1, 262, 264, 267, 272, 275, 277, 279 La huella de Lorca, 18, 87, 89, 92, 94–96 See also Hernández, Carlos; Iglesias, Jesús Alonso Torrón, Cristina, 22, 212, 226 Mammasutra: 1001 posturas para madres en apuros, 22, 212 Transition (to democracy), 37, 38, 40, 42, 48, 48n1, 50, 54, 64, 87, 165, 166, 228, 238–244, 246, 250, 251, 253, 254 Trauma, 17, 21, 34, 36, 43, 47, 49, 52, 54, 55, 64, 81, 86, 87, 176, 177, 206, 220, 260, 273, 280 See also Violence; Wound Traverso, Enzo, 37 Trencadís, 261–266, 268, 281 Tronsgard, Jordan, 86n2, 96 Tullis, Brittany, 86n2 Two Spains, 48, 51, 63, 240 U Unbuiltness, see Architecture Uncanny, 36, 190 Unicómic, 23 V Verisimilitude, 36, 61 Víbora, El, 8, 237n2 Vila, Marika, 229 Vilarós, Teresa, 165

 INDEX 

315

Vindicación feminista, 217 Violence, 21, 85, 88, 93, 95, 119–137, 169, 190, 192, 192n7, 193, 195, 196, 198, 201, 204, 207, 223, 229, 250, 266–280, 294 See also Domestic abuse; Trauma; Wound Vives Xiol, Glòria, 212, 219–223, 226 40 semanas, 212, 219–221, 226 Mamá, 212, 220–222 Voice, 12, 43, 48, 49, 51, 54, 55, 64, 70, 74, 76, 78, 79, 82, 86, 88, 89, 91, 96, 110, 122, 141, 191, 214, 214n4, 216, 223, 229, 278 lost voices, 74, 88, 95 See also Oblivion; Silence Vox, 119, 205, 205n8

White, Hayden, 102 Wolf, Naomi, 215 Womb, 216 Women empowerment, 215 writers and illustrators, 19 See also Domestic abuse; Maternity; Mother; Pregnancy; Supermother; Violence World War I, 33, 37, 42, 49, 51, 52, 55, 59, 67, 71, 74, 75, 86, 88, 89, 172, 288 World War II, 33, 37, 42, 48, 49, 51, 52, 55, 59, 67, 71, 73–75, 86, 88, 89, 172, 288 See also Nueve, La Wound, 36, 43, 87, 244, 270 See also Trauma; Violence

W Wall Street, 108, 112, 113, 162, 286n1 See also Economic crisis; Financial crisis; Occupy movements; Protest War, see Spanish Civil War; World War I; World War II Ware, Chris, 15, 67 Building Stories, 15 Weiner, Stephen, 9, 11

Z Zapico, Alfonso, 54 La balada del norte, 17 Zayas, Andrea, 226 Estoy embarazada, 212, 226 Ya ha nacido, 212 Zhou Wu, Quan, 21, 139–156 Andaluchinas por el mundo, 145 Gazpacho agridulce, 21, 139–156 Zoom, 75, 88, 89, 93, 94, 98, 271, 276