Choosing the best of any medium is always complicated: what do we mean by “the best”? What criteria do we follow? There may be many, but in this selection of comics published during 2024 we choose risk, novelty and originality above all.
‘Imbécile’, by Camille Vannier (Wow!)
The French author based in Barcelona Camille Vannier is hilarious. He has an innate talent for telling anything through humor, and his work, in fanzines and comics, has become a reference and a breath of fresh air for years. Moron It compiles some stories that previously appeared in fanzines, plus other unpublished ones, and is a catalog of all its virtues: an original and ground-breaking drawing, tremendously expressive, an impeccable command of humorous rhythm and an absolute lack of scruples about exposing itself.
Vannier seems to resort to the tradition of self-deprecating humor, which has borne so much fruit in comics, from Robert Crumb to Joe Matt, but he renews it with spark and self-confidence, which he applies to all kinds of topics, but with special attention to relationships. and to sex. The result is a hilarious book, which provokes laughter and shows her ability to laugh at herself, and at absolutely everything else.
‘If you dance, you will understand the lyrics better’, by Lorenzo Montatore (ECC)
The versatile Lorenzo Montatore dares everything, from a half-apocryphal biography of Francisco Umbral to a story about addictions. His most recent work is a playful and personal exploration of the music of Talking Heads, a very special band for him, whose keys he adapts to with his ‘cartoon’ style and a series of graphic decisions that experiment with the lines to replicate the use of ‘samples’ and the tone of the creators of hymns such as Once in a Lifetime either Burning Down the House.
Montatore, one of the most expressive and personal comics artists on the Spanish scene, moves between adolescent—and not so adolescent—memory, documentary fragments and fiction to compose a purely emotional approach, which moves away from conventional biography to establish a dialogue with the music, which translates into the visual with its control of rhythm. If you dance, you will understand the lyrics better, a phrase that David Byrne himself said, more or less, is one of the best and most original books by an author who, with each new work, climbs one more step on his particular ladder.
‘Intelligence dies!’ by Jorge García and Gustavo Rico (Editorial Standard)
Of all the comics that address the recent history of Spain, in 2024 this one has clearly stood out. Intelligence dies! a precise and highly documented work on Millán Astray, founder of the Legion and personal friend of Francisco Franco. The authors, the screenwriter Jorge García and the cartoonist Gustavo Rico, aware of the controversy that accompanies the character and the activism of his fervent followers, take on a complicated task: approaching it from rigor, with a cold look that sticks to the sources and It omits explicit personal evaluations, so that it is the drawing that provides the subjective and critical.
García and Rico are more interested in the era and historical processes than in the anecdotes surrounding Millán Astray; For this reason, they construct a story that is very historiographic, a visual essay that benefits from Rico’s excellent work in the treatment of images, including photographs, and from García’s ability to synthesize information, based on the most recent studies. and balanced. This is an excellent example of how comics can approach a topic like this from rigor, but also from risk and commitment to images that are anything but innocuous.
‘The River’, by Julie Doucet (Fulgencio Pimentel, trans. Joana Carro)
One of the best news of the year when it comes to comics has been the return of a great author: the Canadian Julie Doucet. Key in the 90s with its epiphanic Dirty Plot, and despite having won the Grand Prize at the Angoulême Festival in 2022, Doucet had been away from the medium for years, partly due to the artistic limitations she encountered at her time, partly due to the prevailing machismo in the sector, which led her to dedicate herself to other arts.
His return to comics could not be a mere exercise in nostalgia or a return to what has already been done: quite the contrary, the river It is a totally new work, free and experimental, an exercise unconcerned about its reception among the public, which seems, at times, a pure automatic drawing, done directly in ink, without a pencil. Drawn in reverse, from bottom to top, Doucet takes us adrift through the story of a youthful love whose mature gaze reveals its toxicity. But it does it in a new, unique and fascinating way, without rules or ties. The best pool to jump into.
‘Flamenco Sunday’, by Olivier Schrauwen (Fulgencio Pimentel, trans. César Sánchez and Joana Carro)
With permission from Chris Ware, Belgian Olivier Schrauwen is the great innovator of comics language. His ironic look, his mixture of reality and fiction and his unique way of approaching the representation of all this have made him a reference author. flamenco sunday It compiles in its entirety the story on which he has been working for several years: an ordinary Sunday in the life of his cousin, almost minute by minute, in which Schrauwen turns the narrative of the self and the epic of the everyday on its head.
Because Schrauwen laughs at everything and constantly deceives us: neither is this protagonist exactly the same as his cousin, nor is this just any Sunday. Quite the opposite: what seems like just another day ends up being a unique and decisive day in the protagonist’s life. Along the way, what is truly important is the author’s incredible ability to explore the abstract, boredom, drunkenness, obsession and, in short, human thought, in one of those works that you know from the first reading will remain for posterity.
‘Sentimental Melody’, by Tadao Tsuge (Gallo Nero, trans. Yoko Ogihara and Fernando Cordobés)
At the end of the 1950s, a group of young manga authors created a new style, a new way of approaching the medium that they called ‘gekiga’, ‘dramatic drawing’, a current of authorial intention, which was a pioneer in addressing reality without the filters of conventional narrative genres. Tadao Tsuge, brother of the cartoonist Yoshiharu Tsuge, was one of its greatest exponents; Gallo Nero, little by little, is recovering his job, along with the rest of his generation colleagues.
sentimental melody is a compilation of short pieces published by the author between 1969 and 1972, his best period. His stark vision of society focuses on everyday life, not exempt from a certain miserable poetry, of the marginalized, of all those who the Japanese economic miracle left on the margins. Stories like Garbage collectorwhich approaches a group of men who sell their blood as the only way to survive, delve into human misery in a direct, implicitly critical way, but which avoids unnecessary moralisms. The pages of sentimental melody They exude authenticity.
‘Sibylla’, by Max Baitinger (Fulgencio Pimentel, trans. César Sánchez and Núria Molines)
The foray into the biography of the enigmatic and prematurely deceased Sibylla Schwarz, a German baroque poet, serves as Max Baitinger’s starting point for a work that is pure drawing, a comic that celebrates the joy of drawing lines on paper. Hardly anything is known about Sibylla, so, rather than telling her life, Baitinger imagines what happens in the gaps left by the little information available, always from the visual perspective, with a free and very daring conception of the page.
From the same author we had already seen another notable comic in Spain, Röhner, but it is in Sibylla where it goes one step further, where it finally lets go and demonstrates its full potential. At a time when biographical comics flood bookstores, with uneven quality, this book dazzles for its irreverence towards canons and formulas, and for its original and creative approach to a figure to be vindicated.
‘City Park’ by Carlos González Boy (Apa-Apa)
The best debut in the long work of the year has probably been that of Carlos González Boy, an author with a long career in self-publishing, owner of an untamed style, far from academicism and with deceptively rough and careless lines. His universe shines with a new light in this carefully edited book, city park, where the author proposes a world that is a deformed mirror of ours, a kind of open-world video game, perhaps, in which the characters that inhabit a park perform different functions in exchange for points.
With striking colors and original shapes, González Boy’s drawing hides more edges than it may seem; because this cute world is nothing more than the crudest representation of social Darwinism, the lack of empathy and, in short, the neoliberal order. The author does not underline it with explicit speeches, but shows it through the facts and images of a unique, inimitable book, which demonstrates that there is life beyond the literality that seems to dominate contemporary fiction or fantasy escapism.
‘Hex’, by George Wylesol (Walden Books, trans. Manuel Moreno)
The until now unknown in Spain George Wylesol bursts into our market with this collection of short stories published by Libros Walden, one of the publishers that is taking the most risks in recent years. Hex It is a leap into the void, a succession of varied pieces, with very different graphic and narrative tones, which have in common fleeing from realism and comfort.
Intentionally retro in appearance, Wylesol’s drawing constructs strange and alien worlds, sometimes from everyday life, and assumes points of view that elude empathy and identification. More than telling stories, the author defines spaces and recreates atmospheres, in always surprising ways, and with a twisted humor that is not based on the gag, but is present in all the pieces in one way or another. In a market so given to references and imitation, finding a unique way of telling things is invaluable. Hex It is a book that is not easily forgotten.
‘Letters to Vincent’ by Julio César Pérez (Red Fox Books)
If biographies are a genre on the rise, those of artists are the queens of the party. And if we talk about an artist with a reputation for being tortured like Vincent van Gogh, even more so. Julio César Pérez, who already surprised with the extraordinary The end of great art Three years ago, he delivered a book that, apparently, is based on the letters that Theo van Gogh wrote to his brother, in which he tries to express his feelings towards his brother and help him in his artistic career. But, of course, it’s all a lie: the author invents Theo’s letters and voice, based on his brother’s preserved letters.
Julio César Pérez draws as if he handled a furious and mutant calligraphy, crossing out and staining, which implies underlining the very nature of the drawing. In Letters to Vincent, Although the impressionists and the Paris of the time appear, there is no true intention of historical recreation; Quite the contrary, anachronism is used for sarcastic purposes, because there is a lot of humor in this book. Also tenderness and artistic sensitivity: they usually go hand in hand.
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