Comic book

Lizzy Stewart signs one of the best British comics: a woman’s journey to emancipation in the shadow of a genius.

Famous man meets young woman and offers her everything she could wish for in exchange for his company. A fascinating life, advice that no one has asked for (a textbook mansplaining, wow) and the possibility of controlling her future under the condescending promise of “it’s for your own good”, or, further, “it’s best for both of us”.

What has been described is the lowest common multiple of many fictions, such as Tim Burton’s enigmatic Big Eyes (2014) or Sofia Coppola’s recently released Priscilla, which portrays Elvis Presley as a textbook manipulator. It is also, on paper, much of the essence of the graphic novel Alison (Errata Naturae), written and illustrated by Lizzy Stewart: the universal tale of a young working-class girl trying to make a place for herself in a world not designed for her.

The comic sold out its first edition in less than two months after its arrival in Spain in November and the newspapers The Guardian and The Telegraph named it Best Graphic Novel of the Year in the United Kingdom. It is a false autobiography: the author explains that the story is less than 10% about herself, but 90% about the women around her, who inspired her to create Alison. “One of them married a professor whom she admired very much. She learned a lot from him but her life was a torment,” she says from Barcelona, where she is presenting her work to the media and fans.

With a subtlety that tightens the lump in our throat, the book recounts, from Alison Porter’s old age, her life as a “village girl” born in the south of England in the late 50s and raised in boredom and monotony. The young woman’s expectations for the future are reduced to repeating the pattern of her mother and grandmother: to tie herself to a marriage with more routine than passion, to form a canonical family and to give up any hint of a professional career.

Patrick Kerr, a narcissistic painter 30 years older, from a cultured, wealthy and well-connected family who is making a name for himself in the art world, bursts into her bubble. Kerr promises to become her mentor and exhibit her work in the best galleries in London. And of course, despite the age difference and dangerous power games, Patrick becomes Alison’s safe-conduct to emancipate herself and finally break away from what the patriarchy expects of her.

“There’s a very good movie from the late ’60s with Audrey Hepburn, Two on the Road, where you see the complexities of such a relationship, the sense of imbalance. I was inspired by it and by the testimonies of many women who aspire to the perfect balance and don’t dare to ask themselves what would happen if they don’t want to get married or if they don’t want to have children,” explains the author.

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The MNAC of Barcelona discovers the character drawn by Jordi Longarón in an exhibition of originals. Pam Grier took her to the movies in the 70s but Norma did not publish the comic book in Spain until 2021.

In 1970, Friday Foster appeared for the first time in the pages of the Chicago Tribune presented as a “glamorous fashion photographer”. It was only two years since Martin Luther King had been assassinated. It was only five years since African Americans could vote in every state. And Friday Foster became (not without controversy) the first black heroine to star in a daily strip in major U.S. newspapers, among the Flintstones, Dick Tracy or Donald Duck. In reality, she was a fascinating and sophisticated photographer and detective who moved with the same ease in the Harlem underworld as she did among the cream of New York high society, thanks to her assignments for She magazine, a clear reference to the French Elle.

Friday Foster was a cult character, a feminist and African-American icon who, surprise surprise, was created by a Spanish cartoonist: Jordi Longarón (1933-2019). Although in Spain we didn’t even know about it, nor would his adventures have passed the censorship of the Franco regime. Neither did they in the southern states, where conservative and even segregationist newspapers vetoed it.

The Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC) vindicates Friday Foster with an exhibition of originals that seeks to popularize this milestone of national drawing under the title La heroína inesperada (The Unexpected Heroine). Longarón was the first Spanish cartoonist to work on a daily strip for the United States, sending the originals by plane by express mail three weeks before publication. Longarón’s name has always been associated with cowboys and the popular War Feats, but Friday Foster was his most transgressive character, which he brought to life based on the idea of screenwriter Jim Lawrence, author of the James Bond strips in the British Daily Express, which came out in parallel to the success of Sean Connery’s films. “Friday Foster is like a black female alter ego of James Bond,” compares Àlex Mitrani, curator of Contemporary Art at the MNAC and curator of this delightful micro-exhibition that “works like an installation” and can be seen until July 24.

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Marjane Satrapi, author of the comic book and film that subverted feminism in the Islamic world, has received the Princess of Asturias Award for the Humanities.

It is almost 25 years since the first edition of her comic book was published and yet, unfortunately, her cartoons are still highly topical. Marjane Satrapi, Iranian cartoonist and film director, justified in the midst of the boom of her masterpiece Persepolis, already a cult film, that it was in no way a documentary about her life nor a political allegation, that what she had done was art: “Political films offer answers and I only ask questions. That’s the difference.

And yet, however Persepolis was conceived, its irruption first in the literary panorama and later in the cinematographic one, was received internationally as a clear message against the Islamic fundamentalism that ravaged then and continues to devastate with renewed cruelty Marjane Satrapi’s native country, Iran, from which she left at the age of 14 and to which she will only be able to return if the regime falls.

The first of the four volumes that make up Persepolis was published at the turn of the century, but it referred to 20 years ago, shortly before the Iranian Islamic Revolution. The protagonist, Marjane, is then 10 years old and belongs to a progressive family. Great-granddaughter of the last shah of the Kadjar dynasty, Ahmad Shah Qajar, and granddaughter of the prime minister under the last shah, Reza Pahlavi, the girl grows up in a highly politicized and militant environment. Her parents demonstrate in the streets against the coming to power of the Islamists while Marjane, who is a strong believer, plans to become a prophet and returns to wearing the obligatory veil at school.

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The author of Persepolis, a cult comic book in which she tells her story and that of Iran, has won the Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities for being “an essential voice for the defense of human rights and freedom”.

In the 1990s, years after the Islamic revolution broke out in Iran, a young woman named Marjane Satrapi was leaving Tehran for Europe because her parents wanted her to be educated outside an increasingly oppressive country, where women were forced to wear the veil, freedoms were restricted and almost everything was forbidden. Almost everything was persecuted. Marji, as she was called at home, arrived in France in 1994. She left her parents and grandmother behind. She never returned.

Her exile, the hard beginnings in a foreign country while her own is cracking, was told in Persepolis, a cult comic book in which she tells her story, the story of Iran, and the work that made her known.

The writer, cartoonist and filmmaker Marjane Satrapi (Rasht , 1965) has won the Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities 2024 for being “an essential voice for the defense of human rights and freedom”, as announced by the jury on Tuesday in Oviedo.

“Marjane Satrapi is a symbol of civic engagement led by women,” says the Princess of Asturias jury. “For her audacity and artistic output, she is considered one of the most influential people in the dialogue between cultures and generations. The award wishes to highlight Marjane Satrapi’s talent for reinventing the relationship between art and communication, as in her graphic novel Persepolis, in which she exemplarily captures the quest for a more just and inclusive world.”

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The Madrid cartoonist publishes La tierra yerma, a graphic novel that proposes a Western fantasy set in a Spanish rural aesthetic universe inhabited only by women.

Carla Berrocal (Madrid, 1983) is one of the most relevant names in current Spanish comics: her debut graphic novel, El Brujo (2011, De Ponent), bet ahead of time on a neo-mestizaje that was not yet fashionable, with vignettes rooted in Chilean folklore. This was followed by Epigrafías (2016, Autor-Editor), a sensual exercise of style around the intimacy of the English poet Natalie Clifford Barney where she already established that sparse and exuberant graphics that has earned her a leading position as an illustrator in press and poster design. In 2021 she surprised by signing with Reservoir Books and launching Doña Concha: La rosa y la espina, a vital scenography of the tonadillera Concha Piquer and a postmodern tribute to the copla that would definitively set her on the reinterpretative path of a popular culture that obsesses her.

The result of this is also La tierra yerma, where Berrocal repeats for Jaume Bonfill’s label, a huge work available in bookstores since May 9. Between his busy obligations (illustrations for magazines like Eme21mag, collaborations for programs like A vivir que son dos días on La Ser and various feminist activism), Berrocal has had time to comment on his initial thoughts about this graphic novel that consolidates its thematic and aesthetic direction.

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