“I was exhausted with the documentation process of Doña Concha and how exhaustive and rigorous it was to capture something biographical, almost essayistic. So I ventured into fantasy and lesbian love, a dyke relationship in the middle of the countryside”. This is how Berrocal defines La tierra yerma, which he cannot understand without the influence of manga: “My graphic synthesis is perhaps a more indie or Europeanized rereading. And for this comic shojo is fundamental: the sexual ambiguity that Ranma1/2 played with, for example. And my protagonist, Leonor, cannot be understood without Lady Oscar or Utena. That’s what I wanted to do: a manga bollo”. This reference is reinforced by the yellow base of the pages, “which refers to the cheap paper of popular manga magazines and also to the countryside in summer, the drought, the barrenness”.
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The overwhelming story of Leonor, a charra in a world of cattle ranchers, is an intense romance with the beautiful heiress of a large hacienda, Isabel Isla Perdida. Together they will be threatened in that wild place by The They, perhaps a transcript of The Others in Game of Thrones, much more linked to the male identity. “There is a lot of Leonor in me: her tenderness, her clumsiness, sometimes how beastly she is. I wanted her to live one of those very toxic romantic stories, but that I love in fiction.”
In her pages, the cartoonist perfectly captures the pulse and the composition of the classic western (“I swelled to see them, like the wonderful Johnny Guitar”), but wrapped in a resolutely Iberian aesthetic: “I also saw a lot of Spanish cinema: Duelo en la cañada and Orgullo, by Mur Oti. I was enthusiastic about his concept of westerns set in Spain. Furtivos fascinates me and understands the genre very well in a Spanish, even Castilian, setting.Or the Mexican cinema of strong and powerful women, like Doña Bárbara. But I also soaked up classic adventure comics: Breccia, Caniff, Tezuka”.
In the 20th century it used to be said that a comic book artist wasn’t a comic book artist until he didn’t know how to draw horses: “I agree with that phrase. It requires a lot of patience and technical knowledge. It became a mania to do them well because it takes a lot out of a western for me if a horse is badly drawn.I put emphasis on them to capture the western identity and the special relationship between Leonor and her mare Tara”.
