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.
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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.
