Consequential Art: Comics Culture in Contemporary Spain

Description

Spanish comics have attracted considerable critical attention internationally: dissertations have been written, monographs have been published, and an array of cultural institutions in Spain (the media, publishing houses, bookstores, museums, and archives) have increasingly promoted the pleasures, pertinence, and power of graphic narrative to an ever-expanding readership – all in an area of cultural production that was held, until recently, to be the stuff of child’s play, the unenlightened, or the unsophisticated. This volume takes up the charge of examining how contemporary comics in Spain have confronted questions of cultural legitimacy through serious and timely engagement with diverse themes, forms, and approaches – a collective undertaking that, while keenly in step with transnational theoretical trends, foregrounds local, regional, and national dimensions particular to the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Spanish milieu. From memory and history to the economic and the political, and from the body and personal space to mental geography, the essays collected in Consequential Art account for several key ways in which a range of comics practitioners have deployed the image-text connection and alternative methods of seeing to interrogate some of the most significant cultural issues in Spain. Cover Half Title Page Title Page Copyright Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments 1 Comics in Contemporary Spain NOTES WORKS CITED Part One: Comics and Historical Memory 2 Drawing (on) Spanish History NOTES WORKS CITED 3 Comics, History, and Memory in the ’90s: Las memoriasde Amorós Memoir Popular Genres Historical Fables Showing (the Glass through which We See) History Overcoming Obstacles / Blazing Trails NOTES WORKS CITED COMICS CITED 4 “Shadows Have No Voice”: Democratic Memory in Felipe Hernández Cava and Federico del Barrio’s El artefactoperverso (1996) and Francisco and Miguel Gallardo’sUn largo silencio (1997) NOTES WORKS CITED Part Two: Comics and Economic Crisis 5 Building a Home for Crisis Narrative: Intermediality and Comic(s) Pedagogy in Aleix Saló’s Españistán Project NOTES WORKS CITED 6 Urban Ecology and Comics Journalism in Jorge Carriónand Sagar Forniés’s Barcelona: Los vagabundosde la chatarra (2015) Comics and the City: Towards an Urban Ecology Barcelona: Shadows of Design and Urban Wilderness “El cómic será en color”: Journalistic Process and Composition Conclusion: Comics and Ecology in Colour NOTES WORKS CITED Part Three: Comics and Personhood 7 Post-op in the Real World: Cancer and Queer Resistancein Isabel Franc and Susanna Martín’s Alicia en unmundo real (2011) NOTE WORKS CITED 8 How to Explain Comics to a Dead Hare: Intertextuality and Crisis in Rosana Antolí’s Neo-surrealist Graphic Novel Pareidolia (2014) Introduction: Pareidolia’s Radical Intertextuality as Critique Joseph Beuys and Anti-rationalism: The Artist as Shaman-Healer Deadly Intertextualities: Suicide, Comics, and Rock ’n’ Roll Bas Jan Ader and Ziggy Stardust: On Falling, Impersonation, and the Fragility of It All Conclusion: The Final (Magic) Dance NOTES WORKS CITED List of Contributors Index