The Art of Pere Joan: Space, Landscape, and Comics Form [1 ed.] 1477318127, 9781477318126

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The A rt of Pere Joa n

WORLD COMICS & GRAPHIC NONFICTION SERIES Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher González, editors The World Comics and Graphic Nonfiction series includes monographs and edited volumes that focus on the analysis and interpretation of comic books and graphic nonfiction from around the world. The books published in the series use analytical approaches from literature, art history, cultural studies, communication studies, media studies, and film studies, among other fields, to help define the comic book studies field at a time of great vitality and growth.

The Art of B e n ja m i n F r a s e r

S p a c e ,

L a n d s c a p e ,

Pere Joan a n d

C o m i c s

F o r m

University of Texas Press 

 Au s t i n

Copyright © 2019 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2019 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-­7819 utpress​.utexas​.edu​/rp​-­­form The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper). c Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Fraser, Benjamin, author. Title: The art of Pere Joan : space, landscape, and comics form / Benjamin Fraser. Other titles: World comics and graphic nonfiction series. Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2019. | Series: World comics and graphic nonfiction series | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018031174 | ISBN 978-1-4773-1812-6 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-4773-1813-3 (library e-book) | ISBN 978-1-4773-1814-0 (nonlibrary e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Joan, Pere—Criticism and interpretation. | Comic books, strips, etc.—Spain—Majorca—History and criticism. | Majorca (Spain)—Comic books, strips, etc. Classification: LCC PN6777.J63 Z63 2019 | DDC 741.5/946—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018031174 doi:10.7560/318126

I dedic ate this book to Abby.

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Co n t e n t s

ix

L ist of I llu strations

xi

P reface

xv

S elected A rtist C hronolog y

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I mportant N ote on S pain for the G eneral R eader

1 I ntrod u ction Pere Joan’s Comics Geographies 31 C hapter 1 The Comics Landscape of Spain 59 C hapter 2 Topographies of the Image, Panel, and Page: Comics Narration Three Ways 93 Chapter 3 Rural Cartographies: Emotion, Ecology, and Subjectivity 135 C hapter 4 Urban Geographies: Cityscapes, Mobility, and Belonging 175 C hapter 5 Island Imaginaries: Mallorca’s Cultural Landscapes 201 Conclu sion 205

N otes

263

B ibliograph y

291

I nde x

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I l l u s t r at i o n s

9

F ig u re 0.1 .

Pere Joan, Mi cabeza bajo el mar

12

F ig u re 0.2 .

Pere Joan, “En el recuerdo” (p. 47)

18 F ig u re

0.3 .

Pere Joan, “La lluvia blanca” (p. 123)

21 F ig u re

0.4 .

Pere Joan, “Los mensajeros del cuerpo” (p. 85)

32 F ig u re

1.1 .

Pere Joan, “En soledad” (p. 6)

65 F ig u re

2.1 .

Pere Joan, “Untitled,” from Baladas Urbanas (p. 7)

76 F ig u re

2.2 .

Pere Joan, “Diana piensa . . .” (p. 126)

79

F ig u re 2.3 .

Pere Joan, Azul y ceniza (p. 3)

87

F ig u re 2.4 .

Pere Joan, 100 pictogramas para un siglo (XX) (p. 124)

88

F ig u re 2.5 .

Pere Joan, 100 pictogramas para un siglo (XX) (p. 83)

103

F ig u re 3.1 .

Pere Joan, El aprendizaje de la lentitud (pp. 14–15)

113

F ig u re 3.2 .

Pere Joan, El aprendizaje de la lentitud (p. 39)

115

F ig u re 3.3 .

Pere Joan, El aprendizaje de la lentitud (pp. 44–45)

119

F ig u re 3.4 .

Pere Joan, 16 novel·les amb hòmens blaus (p. 12)

123

F ig u re 3.5 .

Pere Joan, 16 novel·les amb hòmens blaus (pp. 24–25)

132

F ig u re 3.6 .

Pere Joan, Tingram (p. 102)

132

F ig u re 3.7 .

Pere Joan, 16 novel·les amb hòmens blaus (pp. 38–39)

152

F ig u re 4.1 .

Pere Joan and Emilio Manzano, “Un cocodril a l’Eixample” (p. 12)

x    I l l u s t r a t i o n s

159

F ig u re 4.2.

Pere Joan and Emilio Manzano, “Un cocodril a l’Eixample” (p. 15)

166

F ig u re 4.3.

171

F ig u re 4.4.

188

F ig u re 5.1.

190

F ig u re 5.2.

194

F ig u re 5.3.

195

F ig u re 5.4.

Pere Joan and Agustín Fernández Mallo, Nocilla Experience: La novela gráfica (p. 96) Pere Joan and Agustín Fernández Mallo, Nocilla Experience: La novela gráfica (p. 49) Pere Joan, “X,” from Cada dibuixant és una illa (p. 46)

Pere Joan and Felip Hernández, Història del turisme a les Illes Balears (p. 54) Pere Joan and Cristóbal Serra, “Los nimbos,” from Viaje a Cotiledonia: La novela gráfica (p. 79)

Pere Joan and Cristóbal Serra, Viaje a Cotiledonia: La novela gráfica (p. 83)

P r e fac e

This book functions, in

part, as a corrective. That is, it should not surprise any reader familiar with Pere Joan’s work and position in the world of comics that passing references to the artist are generally pervasive in scholarship on contemporary comics in Spain. But taking into account the artist’s output, his stature in the field, and his reputation more generally, it is curious that there are very few article-­length considerations of his work. To my knowledge, not a single monographic book has been devoted to the artist. Instead of adopting a chronological approach, I have organized this text to foreground the artist’s unique spatial refashioning of the comics medium. A close examination of the role of landscape in Pere Joan’s body of work suggests a topographical approach to comics form that might be applied in comics studies more generally. The first chapter provides a thorough history of comics in Spain, making sure to focus this history through the figure of Pere Joan, specifically. The second chapter engages with spatial narrative and comics theory through the lens of geographical landscape. From this perspective, the artist’s intriguing spatial innovation offers insights into how the panel’s topological qualities are crucial to the activity of reading comics. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the emotional, ecological, and artistic properties that link his drawn bodies with their rural and urban environments. The fifth and final chapter underscores the resonance between the cultural landscapes of the artist’s native Mallorca and the water themes and metaphors that populate his works. This is the first monograph in English on an Iberian comics artist. Pere Joan is a great choice of topic, as his notoriety in Spain would be roughly comparable to that enjoyed by comics artist Chris Ware in the United States. That is, while the two artists’ styles are quite different—Ware’s might be

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described as architectural, whereas Pere Joan’s is landscape driven—they both produce incredibly original works and have earned reputations for a unique approach to spatial innovation in the comics form. In each case, this unique approach to spatial representation locates them far away from the mainstream in an independent and, I would say, also intellectual comics tradition. The lack of international attention paid to Pere Joan parallels the similar widespread neglect of Iberian graphic artists. Not unlike scholarship in other humanities disciplines, English-­language academic work on comics has tended to privilege traditions in the United States, France, Belgium, and Japan, for example. These traditions have been better documented and circulated to an international public—of that there can be no doubt. Given that the scholarly study of Iberian comics is still in its relatively early stages, however—this is certainly the case in Anglophone circles—there remains a real need to explore these historical traditions and make them available to a range of international readers. The English translation of Spanish comics theorist Santiago García’s La novela gráfica (Astiberri, 2010) as On the Graphic Novel (University Press of Mississippi, 2015) is a step in the right direction. Readers of García’s valuable study will nonetheless note that any discussion of comics production in Spain largely takes a back­ seat to his discussion of those other traditions already mentioned. Note, too, that at present, English publications tend to explore Latin American cultural products rather than Iberian comics (by which I mean to reference not merely Portugal and Spain but also diverse traditions subsumed within the contemporary Spanish state, such as the Basque, Galician, and Catalan). In addition, those books that have been published in Spain on comics art (those in the Spanish and Catalan languages at least) tend to be overly broad in focus and relatively similar to one another in their historical approach. Moreover, one must keep in mind that the recognition and impact of Spanish comics in the United States goes back at least some twenty years. Ana Merino (2016) draws attention to the fact that comics by prominent Iberian authors such as Miguelanxo Prado and Max were already translated into English in the 1990s. The translation of Max’s El prolongado sueño del Sr. T. (The Extended Dream of Mr. D., 1997) won the 1999 Ignatz Award, and the translation of Miguelanxo Prado’s Trazo de tiza (Streak of Chalk, 1992) won the Eisner and Harvey Awards in 1995. The present book fits broadly within the existing interest in visual art and culture of the postdictatorial Transition of the 1970s and 1980s in Spain. It also appeals both to specialists of Iberian literature and culture,

P r e f a c e     x i i i

my home field, and to those interested in international comics art and theory more broadly. It contributes to growing interest in Iberian comics, as well as primary and secondary texts that have been published in English. Prominent examples of these texts include the aforementioned historical/theoretical work by Santiago García, comics by Pere Joan’s collaborator Max, the graphic novel Arrugas (Wrinkles; Paco Roca, 2008)—as well as Latin American works such as English translations of the late-­ 1950s Argentine graphic novel El eternauta/The Eternaut (Francisco Solano López and Héctor G. Oesterheld) and the 2012 Uruguayan comic Dengue (Rodolfo Santullo and Matías Bergara). In its interdisciplinary conception, accessible theme, and broader theoretical contribution, this book appeals to senior and junior scholars, graduate and undergraduate students, and general readers interested in the fields of Hispanic studies, comics studies, visual culture, and cultural geography. While some readers may prefer more engagement with theoretical sources from geography, spatial theory, or cultural studies in this book, I have kept these references to a minimum. The purpose of this is to prioritize Pere Joan’s images and topographical style themselves within the discourse of comics art. As with any interdisciplinary scholarship, it can prove difficult to synthesize multiple critical discourses and retain a focus on specific cultural products. In many cases, scholars who engage theoretical formations in great depth end up shifting their focus away from the very cultural texts that their studies propose to elucidate.Though I have avoided this tendency wherever possible, readers will note some discussion of spatial theory in the introduction, chapter 3, chapter 4, and chapter 5 of this book. Chapter 1 is historical in focus, and chapter 2 deals more heavily with the structure of Pere Joan’s page layouts and conception of artistic space. My two other publications on Pere Joan’s comics (articles in Romance Studies [2018b] and in the International Journal of Comic Art [2016]) are tangential to the content of this book, and I do not repeat those analyses here. The exception is an earlier version of part of chapter 4, titled “The Public Animal in Barcelona: Urban Form, the Natural World, and Socio-­Spatial Transgression in the Comic ‘Un cocodril a l’Eixample’ (1987) by Pere Joan and Emilio Manzano,” published in the Journal of Spanish Cultural ­Studies (2018). That material has been reorganized and largely rewritten here. Thanks go to Miquel Simonet for bringing my attention to the legend of the Drac de na Coca, which I did not include in that article but was able to integrate into chapter 4 of this book.

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I am greatly indebted to both Malcolm Alan Compitello and Susan Larson. I am grateful beyond measure to have enjoyed their strikingly original perspectives, urban scholarship, collaboration, mentorship, and support over the years. In addition, I thank those other researchers from Hispanic studies who showed through their work that comics are worthy of intellectual inquiry—among them are David William Foster, Howard Fraser, Ana Merino, Pedro Pérez del Solar, Charles Tatum, Steven Torres, and Teresa Vilarós. I thank Araceli Masterson-­Algar, Steven Spalding, and Stephen Vilaseca for their inspiring scholarship and our collaborations on all things urban cultural studies. In addition, Eugenia Afinoguénova, Agustín Cuadrado, Rebecca Haidt, Sheri Spaine Long, Mark Del Mastro, William Nichols, Randolph Pope, and Michael Ugarte, in ways great and small, have provided me with encouragement, support, and insights for which I am extremely grateful. My colleagues at East Carolina University—particularly Bob Edwards, Frederic Fladenmuller, Katherine Ford, Jeffrey Johnson, Lee Johnson, Dale Knickerbocker, Burrell Montz, Elena Murenina, Chris Oakley, and Karin Zipf—deserve special mention. I have been fortunate to enjoy the support of the World Comics and Graphic Nonfiction series editors Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher González, and acquiring editor Jim Burr, at the University of Texas Press. I also thank the two peer reviewers of this book for their valuable feedback, which has undoubtedly strengthened its arguments.The inclusion of the “Important Note on Spain for the General Reader”—its inspiration, wording, and source material— responds to a suggestion by one of these reviewers that it is still important to combat misperceptions about Spain among Anglophone readers. I believe, however, that sustaining a focus throughout this book on the complicated issues of multiculturalism, linguistic difference, and regional identity in Spain would have taken the project in another direction. Finally, I thank Max for putting me in touch with Pere Joan. And, in turn, I thank Pere Joan for his willingness to support the publication of his images in this book, and for confirming that he was the artist who drew the “Untitled” image from Baladas Urbanas discussed in chapter 2. All parenthetical English translations from Spanish and Catalan are my own.

S e l ect e d A r t i s t Chronology

Baladas Urbanas (with Max and R. M. Sánchez, multiauthored, self-­published zine)

“El jardín embozado” “Los mensajeros del cuerpo” “6 historias de un detective” “Promoción”

1977

1984

Muérdago (with Max and R. M. Sánchez, multiauthored, self-­ published zine)

“Cita a Jartum” “El gran motor Brown-­Pericord” “La lluvia blanca” (with Toni Rigo, album published by Complot in 1987) Passatger en trànsit (Norma album) “Passatger en trànsit” “Els secrets de la Dragonera” “Signos y fronteras” (postcard for Norma) “Sin rostro en el aeropuerto” (postcard for Norma)

1976

1980

“Una masacre anuncia el invierno como un alud sobre nuestras cabezas” (with O.Vasili) 1982

“El bestiario” “La conjura del pasado” “Pasajero en tránsito” (album published by Norma publishing house in 1984)

1986

“700 Cadillacs” (continued through 1991)

1983

“Cita en Jartum” (with Lluis Juncosa) “En el recuerdo” “La fórmula”

1987

“Un cocodril a l’Eixample” (in multiauthored 10 visions de Barcelona en historieta)

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1988

2003

“En soledad” (poster for 1000 Edicions) “Trade Mark Party” (silkscreen print for Mamá Graf)

NSLM, new series of Nosotros somos los muertos (with Max) Tingram: Pere Joan a lápiz (sketchbook)

1990

2004

Mi cabeza bajo el mar (anthology of Pere Joan’s work)

Azul y ceniza 2006

1991

Premio Mejor Obra (Mi cabeza bajo el mar), Salón Internacional del Cómic de Barcelona

Max: Conversación/sketchbook Pere Joan: 1992–2006 2008

“X,” in Cada dibuixant és una illa 1993

Nosotros somos los muertos (with Max, continued through 2000)

2009

Història del turisme a les Illes Balears (with Felip Hernández)

1995

“Huidas”

2010

1996

Duelo de caracoles (with Sonia Pulido)

“Desapego” 16 novel·les amb hòmens blaus/16 novelas con hombres azules

2011

“El hombre que se comió a sí mismo”

El aprendizaje de la lentitud: La expedición Paraná Ra’anga Nocilla Experience: La novela gráfica (with Agustín Fernández Mallo) Yes We Camp! (multiauthored)

1999

2014

El hombre que se comió a sí mismo (anthology of selected work, 1980–1996)

100 pictogramas para un siglo (XX)

1997

2015

Viaje a Cotiledonia: La novela gráfica (with Cristóbal Serra)

I m p o r ta n t N o t e o n Spa i n fo r t h e G e n e r a l R e a d e r

I ask readers to accept a premise that

is not fully fleshed out in the pages of this book: an incredible amount of linguistic and cultural diversity exists within Spain. The general English-­speaking readers may not comprehend this diversity very well, not because they are willfully ignorant, but because Spain has been systematically portrayed as culturally uniform in the global imagination. To fully understand contemporary life in Spain—whether over the course of the last forty years or the past one hundred years—readers must be able to disentangle hegemonic from marginalized histories. One can go back even further, to debates over linguistic and cultural diversity that inform earlier time periods (e.g., modern, early modern, medieval . . . ). The list of scholarly books written on these topics is extensive. Even so, the state of contemporary politics is prompting scholars to revisit and reformulate questions regarding historical visibility and representation. It is not expected that readers will have knowledge of these debates.Yet it is necessary, in this brief note, to provide a rudimentary baseline. As recently as 13 October 2017, in the Madrid-­based media outlet El País, the noted literary figure Antonio Muñoz Molina authored a brief article titled “En Francoland” (In Francoland). The piece was intended to call attention to continuing misperceptions of Spain and to some important general facts about its history. On 16 October 2017, El País published an English translation of that article titled “Foreign Perceptions of Spain: In Francoland.” Therein, Muñoz Molina stresses that misperceptions abound. “Sometimes outside Spain,” he writes, “one is forced to teach a history or geography lesson.” It must be stated that this book on Pere Joan’s comics is decidedly not a comprehensive cultural history of Spain. Nonetheless, I need to place my arguments about the comics artist’s oeuvre in a general context. In that spirit, I offer a brief primer.

x v i i i     I m p o r t a n t N o t e o n Sp a i n

Pere Joan is from the Balearic Islands, an autonomous community of Spain with its capital in the city of Palma de Mallorca. This autonomous community is bilingual—thus a basic introduction would state that Mallorcans speak both Spanish and Catalan. Both of these languages are also spoken in the autonomous community of Catalonia (of which Barcelona is the capital), the autonomous community of Valencia (of which Valencia is the capital), and the autonomous community of Aragon (of which Zaragoza is the capital). There are several autonomous communities in which Catalan is spoken—and they are very different from one another. Thus, I would prefer that readers of this book avoid two traps: that of thinking that Catalonia is the only region of Catalan language and culture, and likewise that of thinking that there are no important differences between and within these regions. One can extend this premise to other languages, autonomous communities, and regions of Spain. Another example is the Basque language, which is spoken not only in the Basque Country (capital,Vitoria-­Gasteiz), but also in Navarra (capital, Pamplona). Readers need to be aware that the Basque and Catalan languages are also spoken in some regions of France. The most comprehensive account of Spain’s linguistic and cultural diversity would also note, for example, the existence of Galician and Asturian in northwest Spain. Moreover, these and other rudimentary notes on linguistic and cultural diversity are necessarily simplifications. The more closely one looks into a given autonomous community in Spain, the more internal heterogeneity one will find. Numerous discursive and political appropriations of linguistic and cultural identities must also be considered. That is, contemporary researchers are asking trenchant questions about how a variety of hegemonic, minoritized, and politicized group identities mobilize language and culture toward practical or strategic ends. Not least of all, along with these debates there is the existence of the Castilian language. More commonly referred to as “Spanish” by those outside Spain, Castilian has been deeply intertwined with a hegemonic cultural history. Minoritized constellations of language and culture have necessarily had to define themselves against the centralized governance structures historically associated with Castilian Spanish and notions of “Spanishness.” Muñoz Molina reminds readers of such issues in his brief piece published in El País. Outside of Spain, he argues, it is common to hear discussion of the country’s “quaint backwardness” and its seeming lack of democratic ideals. As he makes clear, many people, including even

I m p o r t a n t N o t e o n Sp a i n     x i x

professional journalists, are unaware that “the Basque Country is among the most advanced territories in Europe, with one of the highest standards of living, and that it has a degree of self-­government and fiscal sovereignty considerably higher than any state or federal region in the world.” Even those holding what he calls “educated opinions,” a group that includes “academic and journalistic elites,” nevertheless demonstrate a tendency to embrace “the worst stereotypes, particularly about the legacy of the dictatorship [of Francisco Franco],” which came to an end in 1975. Muñoz Molina goes further: “They feel insulted if we explain to them how much we have changed in the last 40 years: we don’t attend Mass, women have an active presence in every social sphere, same-­sex marriage was accepted with astonishing speed and ease, and we have integrated several million immigrants in just a few years, without outbursts of xenophobia.” He also underscores that “the singularity of Catalonia was a priority for the new Spanish democracy” and that “the Generalitat, the Catalan regional government, was reestablished even before voting on the Constitution [of 1978],” facts that have gotten lost in recent debates concerning the relationship between Catalonia and the Spanish state. All this context is important. The way readers choose to see my exploration of Pere Joan’s work may, in the end, depend on the set of perceptions they embrace. It is thus worth emphasizing a series of points that are implicit in my approach. I refrain from defining Pere Joan in limiting ways. It is unfair to categorize him solely as a Mallorcan artist, an artist from the Balearic Islands, a Catalan artist, an artist connected to the Barcelona-­ based comics industry, or a Spanish artist. He could perhaps be described in any of these ways—depending of course, on which argument is being made and why. My own opinion, however, is that these definitions are limiting for such an innovative and commanding comics creator and for an editor with such a clear international resonance and reputation. This brief and admittedly rudimentary lesson on history and geography is merely the beginning of a long road when it comes to discussing Spain.Yet it is surely crucial for what follows.

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The A rt of Pere Joa n

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Introduction Pere Joan’s Comics Geogr aphies

In the following pages, I examine selected works of a celebrated graphic artist who continues to push the boundaries of the medium after forty years of activity. Exploring the unique style that has earned Pere Joan the reputation of a comics visionary, I devote careful attention to the role played by space and landscape in his artistic works. Close analyses of selected comics published over the course of the artist’s career simultaneously make the wider case for a topographical approach to the ninth art in general. This dual exercise requires a balancing act. That is, in focusing on a single artist, the scope of this book inevitably invites comparison to “major authors” or “major artists” traditions. This is not in itself an unworthy pursuit—particularly given the challenges comics artists commonly face. Practitioners of the ninth art may attract increasing attention in some circles of popular culture, but they still do not receive the levels of interest they deserve within broader sociocultural, artistic, academic, and publishing circuits. And though many English-­language translations of works by international comics artists make it to the market each year, Anglophone

2    T h e A r t o f P e r e J o a n

readers, critics, and presses seem to prefer books connected to Franco-­ Belgian bande dessinée or Japanese manga traditions over studies of Latin American or Iberian titles. This situation leads necessarily to an impoverished view of the medium’s history, breadth, and potential. As a member of the Modern Languages Association and a scholar of Hispanic studies trained in the humanities, I am committed to bringing cultural texts from the Iberian world into dialogue with English-­language discourse at the margins of aesthetic and cultural debate. It is significant, then, that this book on Pere Joan’s graphic art is the first monograph to be published in English on a comics artist working in Spain. As is the case with other “major figure” books, I spend substantial time and space exploring the artist’s most significant works through in-­depth close analyses of their aesthetic functions and cultural value. Readers will find, however, that these analyses are not constrained by the prosaic formulas of such single-­artist publications. Instead, I adopt a more innovative and theoretically grounded perspective. Along with what is admittedly an auteur-­centered approach, this book makes a concerted attempt to broaden the way in which we understand the spatiality of the comics medium as a whole.The spatial innovation Pere Joan brings to the art form—understood in tandem with his persistent focus on tropes of space and landscape—invites a new way of theorizing comics. That is, whereas the comics theorist Thierry Groensteen once wrote that “semiotics, history and sociology are . . . the three major academic disciplines brought into play by the study of comics,”1 I demonstrate here that geography, too, can be essential for understanding this visual-­ spatial art form. As a member of the American Association of Geographers and a scholar grounded in spatial and urban theory, I offer readings motivated by theoretical insights and methodological approaches borrowed from the subdisciplines of cultural, emotional, and urban geography.These intermingling traditions of thought have shared much common ground as they have developed over the course of the twentieth and into the twenty-­ first century. Ultimately, this common ground provides scholars of aesthetics and cultural critics alike with principles crucial for understanding the interactive nature of reading comics and for reading them spatially. Balancing these two goals, I explore specific works by Pere Joan in the light of his unique style at the same time that I foreground the spatial aspects of his comics form. These two endeavors are intimately linked. As we explore the thematic, structural, and aesthetic originality of the artist’s

I n t r o d u c t i o n     3

landscape-­driven work, we begin to understand the representational properties of the spatial medium of comics art in new ways. Likewise, as our appreciation of the Mallorcan artist’s contributions to a spatial innovation of the ninth art grows through these explorations, we reinforce his well-­ deserved reputation.This not only bolsters his status within the context of contemporary Iberian comics but also paves the way for increased recognition of non-­Anglophone work in international circuits. The next section of this introduction, “Pere Joan: Life, Work, and Style,” provides an overview of the artist’s comics production. It identifies the themes, trends, and twists and turns of his inimitable comics style. Beginning with some basic details, including his birth in and connection to the city of Palma de Mallorca, discussion turns toward his understated reputation and the aspects of his work that distinguish him from his peers. The third section, “Comics from the 1970s to 1990s,” highlights selected works published by Pere Joan during this period of intense stylistic and formal innovation. Because the chapters constituting the bulk of this book emphasize works that appeared in the 1990s–2010s, here it is important to set the stage by covering for readers the early reputation he earned from publications in comics magazines from the 1980s. The final section, “Toward a Geography of Comics,” concisely blends insights from cultural, emotional, and urban geography into a spatial approach to comics, situating this book and its approach within contemporary trends. It also underscores that insights made in other contexts—by comics scholars such as Barbara Postema, David Beronä, Joseph Witek, and Andrei Molotiu—can, in fact, help elucidate the unique value of Pere Joan’s topographical approach.

Pere Joan: Life, Work, and Style Pedro Juan Riera (Palma de Mallorca, 1956–) was born in Spain’s Balearic Islands. Comics scholar Jesús Cuadrado’s encyclopedic two-­volume treatise De la historieta y su uso, 1873–2000: Atlas español de la cultura popular (2000) offers a concise introduction to Pere Joan that—on account of its brevity, tone, and detail—is worthy of quoting in full here: Integrante de la generación rompedora de los años ochenta, autor indivisible e irreductible, dotado de una imposible y reflexiva impronta, avasallante en sus ritmos quebradizos, en su sabia manera para dejar deslizarse el tiempo, en su visión de la luz undosa. Creador con una

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lealtad muy especial para con sus guionistas y para con su público, al que retornó siempre, incluso en los momentos de dura crisis industrial (coimpulsó, junto a su compañero Max, la última rebelión autogestionaria, el tebeo Nosotros somos los muertos). [Pere Joan is] a member of the generation that broke through in the 1980s, a singular and inimitable artist, blessed with the unique and reflexive stamp of genius, unrelenting in his subtle rhythms, in his wise decision to allow time to flow, in his quivering light. [He is an] artist with a very special loyalty toward his writers and toward his public, to whom he always returned, even in the industry’s moments of difficult crisis (he co-­led, along with his collaborator Max, the most recent self-­ managed rebellion, the comics magazine Nosotros somos los muertos).2

Along with a host of other renowned graphic artists such as Francesc Capdevila Gisbert, known as just Max (Barcelona, 1956– ), Miguel Gallardo (Lérida, 1955– ), and Javier de Juan (Barcelona, 1958– ), Pere Joan enjoyed a wide readership in the pages of noted 1980s comics magazines. As discussed in chapter 1, publications such as El Víbora (1979), Cairo (1981), and Madriz (1984) tend to stand out in contemporary comics scholarship on the period, but numerous other magazines filled the kiosks and collectively impacted the visual culture of the time.The impressively broad list of venues in which the artist published over the course of his career includes the following: Agenda del Instituto de la Juventud (1987–1994), Bajo Cero, Blanco y Negro, BloKes, Cairo, Caja de Dibujo, Cavall Fort, Còmic Clips, Complot!, Cuadernos El Maquinista, Dinamo, El Cómic contra los militares, Diari de Mallorca, Diario de a bordo, El País Semanal, El Pequeño País, El Víbora, Flara, Injuve, Intermèdia, Jail, La Municipal, La Trilateral, La Vanguardia, L’Avui dels Supers, Lluch, ¡Más Madera!, Mercé 85, Metal Hurlant, Mono Gráfico, Nosotros somos los muertos, Palau Reial, Rodamón, Sado Maso, Star, Sur Exprés, Taka de Tinta, TBO, Viñetas, and Vol 502, as well as miscellaneous graphic items and ephemeras, such as posters, postcards, and publicity material.3 Understandably, Pere Joan figures centrally in discussions of comics art in Mallorca, as evidenced by Francesca Lladó Pol’s Trenta anys de cómic a Mallorca (1975–2005) (2009).What some critics call the Mallorcan comic can be traced to the end of the 1960s and the beginnings of the 1970s.4 The island, however, lacked a robust publishing infrastructure and a significant comics readership during these decades, so Pere Joan and other Mallorcan

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artists gravitated toward the Catalonian capital of Barcelona to develop their careers.5 Quite indicative of the way in which Barcelona has positioned itself as an urban comics center is the volume El còmic a Barcelona: 12 dibuixants per al segle XXI (1998), which foregrounds the work of artists from a variety of locations, including many whose origins lie outside the city, such as Pere Joan.6 The book was prompted by an exhibition held in the Catalonian capital and includes descriptions, interviews, and sample work of each artist. Brief essays in the volume assert a strong link between comics and Barcelona. As the title of an essay by Joan Navarro asserts, this city is “la ciutat dels tebeos” (the city of comics).7 A statement made at the beginning of the book by Joan Clos—Barcelona’s mayor at the time—presumes to leave no room for doubt: “Barcelona és la capital indiscutible de la indústria del còmic al nostre país. La gran tradició de dibuixants i la força del sector editorial van fer de la nostra ciutat el principal centre d’activitat creativa i industrial de la historieta” (Barcelona is the indisputable capital of the comics industry in our country. The grand tradition of artists and the strength of the editorial sector make our city the principal center of creative and industrial comics activity).8 Artists working at the margins of the mainstream comics market in Spain did not, however, historically enjoy the same levels of attention as their counterparts, and it was only in the 1980s—in the context of an increased legitimacy for the art form, as Lladó Pol notes—that such comics artists could begin to hope for wider recognition.9 Spain’s intensifying regional discourse in the late 1970s and 1980s makes it tempting to classify Pere Joan as a specifically Mallorcan comics artist. Across the Spanish state, long-­standing notions of regional difference that had been suppressed historically due to dictatorship and, prior to that, subjected to the centralizing forces of state formation and empire, were being newly rearticulated.10 To prioritize Pere Joan’s visual style over these nuanced and complex social shifts—and to do justice to the brute fact that much of the artist’s work was published in Spanish and made accessible to the wider public in the major urban centers of Barcelona, Madrid, and Valencia—I do not, in this book, seek to explain his comics from a Mallorcan perspective.11 Instead, I employ a frame of reference that acknowledges his broad geographic appeal. It cannot be denied that he has been instrumental in ensuring the success of the comics tradition in Mallorca, the Balearic Islands, and Catalonia,12 and I devote chapter 5 exclusively to his relationship to Mallorca. That said, his significance as an artist is hardly limited to those cultural spaces, for Pere Joan’s depiction of global

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spaces extends beyond Mallorca. The influence of his artistic work and his creation of innovative publishing venues has necessarily inspired younger generations of artists—whether from Palma de Mallorca, across the linguistic and cultural landscapes of Spain, or internationally.13 For this reason, as I explain in chapter 1, it is important to situate him within the broader context of comics in twentieth-­century Spain as a whole and, increasingly, within a broader European and international context that prioritizes the independent long-­form comics album. The graphic artist indeed occupies a curious place in the scholarship on comics in Spain as a whole—he is simultaneously omnipresent and somewhat underappreciated. Antonio Altarriba Ordóñez, one of the most noted scholars of comics in Spain and also a comics artist who won Spain’s Premio Nacional del Cómic (National Comics Award) in 2010, has classified Pere Joan as one of the most important artists of the 1970s and 1980s.14 But Pedro Pérez del Solar’s study Imágenes del desencanto: Nueva historieta española 1980–1986 (2013) mentions him only three times, and even then, quite briefly.15 In the section of the book El cómic underground español, 1970– 1980 (2005) where Pablo Dopico discusses comics artists from Palma de Mallorca specifically, there is no mention of Pere Joan,16 though his name does appear later on in passing. In this way, the artist is in fact regularly mentioned in comics histories, but recognition of his influence on the wider industry—at least in scholarly texts—tends to be somewhat muted. This curious situation may have resulted from the unique sociopolitical, historical, and industrial conditions comics faced throughout the twentieth century in Spain.17 Whatever the reason, Pere Joan has often escaped the eye of the seemingly attentive critic. Santiago García does mention the artist in passing in his expansive comics history La novela gráfica (2010).18 Yet when he makes the statement that comics artists in Spain have not, historically speaking, been interested in formal experimentation, a passing reference to Pere Joan’s oeuvre is curiously absent and, in my view, would by itself suffice to combat this misperception.19 There is also reason to believe that the Mallorcan’s notable collaborations with Max (one of which was prominently noted above in the brief description by Jesús Cuadrado that began this section) have perhaps led the wider scholarly and fan publics to focus on what the pair have accomplished together, rather than shine a light directly on Pere Joan’s own work and legacy.20 Another reason that Pere Joan’s topographical genius may have escaped serious scholarly attention may be related to his originality itself. I agree

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with the strains of criticism that laud his innovative style, and I believe he is one of the most unique comics artists of the last forty years in Spain, but it is hard to pigeonhole him into the traditional expectations of readers and critics. He largely eschewed one of the principles that led to the more mainstream success of other comics artists of his time: that readers preferred, and should receive, comics based on serially recurring characters and running narratives.21 Max’s recurring character Gustavo and Miguel Gallardo and Juanito Mediavilla’s Makoki jump to mind in this respect.22 Nor did Pere Joan fully embrace the stylistic and thematic legacy of the underground comic that became popular in Spain in the 1970s.23 This influence primed scholars and readers for a certain homogenization of the medium’s appeal and catapulted many of his contemporaries to ever-­g reater notoriety—once again, despite the undeniable value of their work, Max and Gallardo/Mediavilla are prime examples.24 Thus, rather than cater to patterns of readership or embrace the passing theme of the moment, Pere Joan always preferred to focus on stylistic innovation over these other concerns. It is this almost singular devotion to stylistic originality that has progressively set him apart from his peers. From the perspective gained by familiarity with four decades of Pere Joan’s published work, one can reflect upon its hallmark traits and observe an oeuvre wonderfully out of joint with both his contemporaries and younger artists in Spain. Critics have noted a tendency toward the surrealist or oneiric in his work, though that is not judged as disrupting his portrayal of the natural and social worlds.25 By his own admission, Pere Joan is less interested in plot elements than he is in stylistic and conceptual issues.26 In an interview published in 1998, he clearly stated his greater artistic aspirations: “Vull dir-­li que amb el llenguatge del còmics es poden expressar conceptes, explicar idees, encara que potser sembli altisonant i s’hagi fet poc” (I have to say that the language of comics is capable of expressing concepts, transmitting ideas, although perhaps that sounds a bit pompous, and has never been done to any great extent).27 It comes as no surprise that Ramón de España refers to Pere Joan as an “autor difícil” (difficult artist), noting “l’estranya visió del dibuixant” (the artist’s strange vision) and his preference for “una narrativa el·líptica i deliberadament confusa” (elliptical and deliberately confusing narrative).28 Lladó Pol underscores his striking originality and highly personal style, his preference to saturate the page with numerous images, and what she calls “un montaje analítico y detallado” (a detailed and analytical layout).29 In her view, the artist’s work overall tends to be marked

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by emotional content, a psychological structure, and what might be called metaphysical or self-­reflexive, even ontological concerns.30 In fact, one frequently finds these traits attributed to his work in comics scholarship,31 and in chapter 3 of this book, I explore the ties between emotional content, psychological structure, and space/landscape that he renders in visual form on the page. A poignant example of this also appears in chapter 4, which in part explores his collaboration with Emilio Manzano titled “Un cocodril a l’Eixample” (1987). In that brief but intimately spatial work, the artist visually synthesizes psychological themes of belonging and social/political transgression with iconic images of Barcelona’s urban space in an innovative format that culminates in an emotional and oneiric ending. The value and impact of the Mallorcan’s unique style and editorial vision is reflected in the publication of his award-­winning Mi cabeza bajo el mar (1990), which in 1991 earned him the Mejor Obra (Best Work) prize in the Salón Internacional del Cómic de Barcelona (fig. 0.1). Just as decisive in this regard is his formation, with Max, of the comics magazine Nosotros somos los muertos (1993–2000, revived in 2003), which was the first publication in Spain to print the work of noted American comics artist Chris Ware.32 His later works, from 16 novel·les amb hòmens blaus (1996) to Azul y ceniza (2004) to his commissioned adaptation of Cristóbal Serra Simó’s 1965 novel Viaje a Cotiledonia (2015), continue to showcase his strikingly original style, which is relatively consistent in both his solo and collaborative work—whether one considers, for example, his highly conceptual 100 pictogramas para un siglo (XX) (2014) or Nocilla Experience (2011), a graphic novel adaptation of Agustín Fernández Mallo’s segmentary novel from 2008.33 Overall, Pere Joan’s approach to comics lays bare the medium’s topographical properties. The graphic artist’s unique style can be characterized by the way different formal, aesthetic, and thematic elements interact on the space of the page. Formally, he opts for the frequent but targeted use of bold color and stark relief patterns, decisions that heighten the topographical qualities of his images. He has a penchant for incorporating, inverting, and transcending the hallmark geometrical logic of sequential art’s historical legacy. Using the waffle-­iron panel-­and-­gutter structure of traditional comics art sparingly, he demonstrates a commitment to preserving vast swaths of empty space in his work. This is true whether observed in a traditional panel or a more open page format. Aesthetically, his images tend to be emblematic, conceptual but iconic, always displaying a high degree of empathy in their very design. Thematically, he focuses on borders and

Figure 0.1. Pere Joan, Mi cabeza bajo el mar (1990); originally published by Editorial Complot

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boundaries; on embodiment or mind-­body connections; on the head and the face as the seat for thought; on experienced space, place, and landscapes; on dichotomies of distance and connection, reservation and zeal, and narratives of transformation and travel. His is a fluid style—one frequently matched in the content of his graphic art by a focus on water, rivers, or the sea, and reflected in the metaphorical power of his images to suggest the fluidity of the human experience itself. Retrospectively, Pere Joan’s accomplishments reveal a progressive concordance with a certain set of structural and compositional choices. For the purposes of this introduction, then, his productivity can be divided into two general periods. His early work showcases his thematic versatility, literary ambitions, and, perhaps to a lesser degree than his later work, a penchant for formal innovation. During this time, I argue, he was experimenting intensely with genre, content, and style. Remarking briefly on the 1970s, I concentrate mainly on introducing readers to the comics he published in the 1980s. Along with references to other selected texts, collected early works appearing in El hombre que se comió a sí mismo (1999) form the basis for this discussion, which in no way seeks to be exhaustive. Priority is given to work whose themes, contents, structure, and style increasingly point in a new formal direction. The comics published by Pere Joan in the 1990s-­2010s are a clear demonstration of the artist’s consistent and unique style. During this period, he produced projects that are among his most ambitiously conceived. In the bulk of this book’s analysis, I focus on those selected comics works for which he is best known, such as 16 novel·les amb hòmens blaus (1996), Azul y ceniza (2004), El aprendizaje de la lentitud (2011), Nocilla Experience: La novela gráfica (2011), and 100 pictogramas para un siglo (XX) (2014), with consideration also of “Un cocodril a l’Eixample” (1987), created with Emilio Manzano. In each of these creations, he synthesizes ambitious approaches to page layout and panel composition with his characteristic themes of emotion and space/place. Throughout, his style privileges topographies of the image over more traditional approaches to sequential narration.

Comics from the 1970s–1990s Because subsequent chapters of this book deal largely with works of Pere Joan’s later period, it is important here to introduce readers to his earlier comics from the 1970s to the 1990s. Significantly, among the artist’s earliest

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works are those that appeared in the self-­published collections Baladas Urbanas (1976) and Muérdago (1977).34 These fanzine collaborations with Rosa María Sánchez and Max were both composed and self-­published in Barcelona.35 At the time, all three artists were students in the Escola de Belles Arts de Sant Jordi. Zines such as theirs were printed cheaply in small batches and circulated informally as a series of stapled pages. The method of production influenced the graphical content to a large degree, as can be seen in the predominance of black-­and-­white pages, for example. The relative lack of a wider comics-­reading public led various artists to share pages of an individual publication, a trend that continued even with the advent of comics magazines with wider circulation in the 1980s. In Lladó Pol’s brief discussion of both of these fanzines, she notes their eclectic inclusion of various “gèneres, llenguatges i disciplines diverses” (genres, languages, and diverse disciplines), and their publication “al marge de circuits comercials” (at the margin of commercial circuits).36 While it is possible to see elements of the Mallorcan’s hallmark style even in these early publications—an exercise in which I indulge in the first section of chapter 2 of this book by analyzing a single image published in Baladas Urbanas—his 1980s oeuvre is arguably more important and certainly more substantial. It is easy for those readers who are familiar only with Pere Joan’s more recent work in the 1990s-­2010s to look back to his 1980s comics and wonder if they were the work of a different artist. Perhaps the most striking example of this is “En el recuerdo” (To be remembered, 1983), which recounts the planned and gruesome murder of a stranger by a cold-­blooded killer who seeks to go down in history for his crime.37 Relative to work of his more recent period, this comic deploys an excessive amount of dark lines and shadow.38 In the anthology El hombre que se comió a sí mismo (1999), the text included in the panels is even printed in white to be more easily read against the black background.The emotions conveyed by the dark panels are strong, and the images are haunting. The theme of murder is focalized through the figure of the criminal, thus appealing less to the detective tradition in Spain and more to the genre of the crime novel. This is a cruel, bloody, and visually shocking story. It is pushed along by a central character who embodies a pathological psychology. In the gruesome culminating sequence, the murderer drains all the blood from his victim and then uses it to paint the deceased’s house (fig. 0.2). Throughout the comic, the excessive use of landscape panels,

Figure 0.2. Pere Joan, “En el recuerdo” (1999 [originally published in 1983]: 47)

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which span the entire page from margin to margin, functions to convey the forward momentum of the protagonist’s violent impulses. Graphically, this also helps reinforce the fact that these impulses ultimately prove to be unstoppable. In content, tone, mood, and line, this comic departs strikingly from Pere Joan’s characteristic style.That said, however, its relative positioning at an extreme stylistic point of his oeuvre certainly illustrates for readers the artist’s compositional versatility during the 1980s. The range of themes, layouts, and visual styles with which he experimented was unusually extensive. Pere Joan himself comments on the stylistic eclecticism he employed in the 1980s and 1990s in the introduction to the anthology containing “En el recuerdo,” alongside other comics from those decades. Therein he quite candidly reflects on “el caos aparente de este álbum” (the apparent chaos of this collection): Al mirar hacia atrás, la mujer de Lot se convirtió en una estatua de sal. Al mirar hacia atrás, el autor de El hombre que se comió a sí mismo, se dio un buen susto. ¡Qué desbarajuste! Luego vio que no había para tanto. Al final, muchas cosas cuadran. Es cierto que hay un desorden de estilos, idas y venidas, un progreso en zig-­zag. (Upon looking back, Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt. Looking backward, the author of El hombre que se comió a sí mismo was shocked by what he saw. What a mess! Then later he realized it wasn’t that bad. In the end, many things fit together. It’s true that there is a confusion of styles, comings and goings, and a zigzagging trajectory.)39

The collection includes works published from 1980 to 1996, with a particular focus on the first half of the 1980s. Some are comics originally published in magazines such as El Víbora or Cairo. The very first comic in the volume—attributed to “O. Vasili (40%) & Pere Joan (60%)” and from El Víbora—is titled “Una masacre anuncia el invierno como un alud sobre nuestras cabezas” (A massacre announces winter like an avalanche over our heads, 1980). This comic is quite traditional in terms of comics form, especially when compared to the hallmark topographical style the artist has cultivated throughout the more recent decades of his career. It appears in black and white, with three to four rows of panels per page and panels of varying height and width. Text is mostly set off from image

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in demarcated textual zones. These zones predominate over the relatively infrequent appearance of word balloons and deliver a running narrative. The panel transitions here are easily explained through the terms advanced in Scott McCloud’s well-­known typology,40 a classification that proves to be much more difficult to apply to Pere Joan’s later work.That is, there are clearly identifiable “action-­to-­action” transitions on each page—a form of transition upon which the artist will rely less and less as he cultivates a more subtle, emotional, philosophical, and even contemplative style.41 Also on display in his earlier comics drawn in the 1980s are the artist’s ambitions to advance the tradition of the literary comic in Spain. “Indecisión” (Indecision, 1983), for example, credits F. Scott Fitzgerald’s original eponymous story as its inspiration. Likewise, one of the artist’s most acclaimed early works, “Pasajero en tránsito” (1982) is adapted from Alan Aumbry’s short story “Man in Transit.”42 In both of these comics, Pere Joan concerns himself with a careful exploration of the themes of solitude and existential reflection that become hallmarks of his later works. In the prologue to the Norma publishing house Catalan release of Passatger en trànsit (1984), which was the artist’s first album, Joan Bufill employs the phrase “contemplative geography” in characterizing Pere Joan’s comics art.43 As discussed in later chapters of this book, the artist easily adapts this focus on geography to both rural and urban settings, as seen in the Barcelona-­based story line of “Un cocodril a l’Eixample” (1987, with Emilio Manzano), the rural scenes of 16 novel·les amb hòmens blaus (1996), the opening airport sequence of Azul y ceniza (2004), the river experience of El aprendizaje de la lentitud (2011), and a graphic novel adaptation of the urban-­r ural masterpiece Nocilla Experience (2011, with Agustín Fernández Mallo).44 Lladó Pol explains the premise of “Pasajero en tránsito” by writing that it narrates “la historia de Untuan Murti, un personaje que nació a bordo de un avión del que no ha podido bajar nunca, de forma que su vida transcurre de un aeropuerto a otro, sin llegar a otro tipo de relaciones más profundas con otras personas que no sean las puramente ligadas al avión” (the story of Untuan Murti, a character who is born on board an airplane from which he can never disembark, such that his life is spent passing from one airport to another, without forging any type of deeper relationships with other people beyond those strictly linked to the airplane).45 In the critic’s estimation, this example falls under the category of comics that are expressions of mood.46 Echoing the traits she attributes to this category,

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Pere Joan’s comic necessarily also leaves aside actions and events, privileges a mode of intimate confession, and results in what Lladó Pol calls a more static comic in which personal expression predominates.47 According to the scholar, comics falling under this categorization tend toward nostalgic or melancholy expression and take on a symbolic or allegorical character.48 Rather than obey the logic of cause-­effect, these panels instead “administran un espacio” (oversee the construction of a space).49 The comic certainly exemplifies all of these generalized traits. The liminal aerial space inhabited by Untuan Murti proves to be a space of visual reflection, and the airplane trips themselves become an allegory for human existence. Those cause-­effect chains present in the comic tend to link thoughts or concepts rather than outline the coordinates of a physical movement. This concentration on mental states is combined, however, with a spatial movement across the globe, which provides the basis for the story line. Connections with the places mentioned, however, are fleeting (the protagonist’s repeated trips from London to Nairobi and Nairobi to London), and it is their resonance in the reader’s imagination that is more important. At times, the artist even blacks out the background of panel settings to bring readers more completely into the protagonist’s mental meditations on geographic place and space. One may observe a certain contrariness in Pere Joan’s stylistic approach: he leans toward the importance of careful emplotment and literary-­style narrative in his very early years—when the mainstream comics culture in Spain largely eschews it—and away from these traits when they become the norm—that is, after the initial explosion of interest in comics in late-­ twentieth-­century Spain.50 Whether emphasizing narrative story line or not, his creative vision is highly attuned to the image, which often achieves the status of an emblem. As Lladó Pol notes, the Mallorcan’s prominent use of characters inspired by “las corporativas de Michelín, Netol, Peter Pan, Tío Pepe” (the corporations of Michelin, Netol, Peter Pan, Tío Pepe) in the 1980s can also be linked to this prioritization of the image.51 In particular, his work is continually drawn to the visual traits associated with Bibendum—otherwise known in English as the Michelin Man, and in Spanish as el hombre de Michelín—one of the oldest corporate trademarks in the world. In “La conjura del pasado” (The conspiracy of the past, 1982), for example—published in Cairo 10, a special issue coinciding with the Spanish general elections of that year—Bibendum appears along with other

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marketing figures and well-­known comics characters.52 In his analysis, Pedro Pérez del Solar situates this comic within the overlapping contexts to which Pere Joan’s creation undoubtedly refers.53 On one hand is the broad legacy that explicitly linked culture, tourism, marketing images, and state-­endorsed slogans within the development culture of Spain’s dictatorship in the 1960s.54 On the other hand are the cautious and complex steps toward democracy taken during the Spanish Transition of the 1970s and early 1980s. In linking these dynamics—a move to which I return in chapter 1—the scholar argues convincingly that the comic critiques a Spanish politics doubly marked by the power and superficiality of the image.55 According to Pérez del Solar, the message of “La conjura del pasado” conveys that politics are undeniably a spectacle, and that citizens tend to be passive consumers of visual media representations. Ultimately, too, Pere Joan suggests that these dynamics have turned the elections into “un espacio más de consumo” (one more space of consumption).56 At the end of the comic, the absurd characters vanish—seemingly an indictment of the historical links between culture, image, and politics that have led to a vacuous state of affairs.57 Another comic from that same year deals with themes of social upheaval, disorder, and surprising transformation in the mode of a noir-­ influenced tale. “El bestiario” (Bestiary, 1982) takes place in a decidedly postmodern urban milieu inhabited by all manner of biological humanoid organisms. Here, the trope of disappearance is introduced gradually. Readers slowly become aware that many of the human and humanoid characters strolling the city’s streets and populating its many restaurants and bars are actually made out of straw. This all culminates in the final panel in which the protagonist arrives home. Tired and overwhelmed by what he has witnessed outside on the mean streets of the city, he is shocked to find even his beloved pet dog has turned into a pile of straw. The visual and tonal resonance of the comic with urban neo-­noir is clear. One can note a certain stylistic and thematic resonance with Dean Motter’s foundational comics series Mister X, an ensemble project on which other noted comics creators also worked (the Hernández brothers, Seth . . . ). Another point of reference would be Blade Runner (1982), a film of international appeal that quickly became a dystopic urban classic. In contrast to the aesthetics of such widely screened noir revivals, Pere Joan’s choice of an innocuous material such as straw as the vehicle for

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standard science fiction themes of defamiliarization and estrangement comes off as both disturbing and whimsical—a pairing that seemingly only he could accomplish. Even so, the theme of bodily transformation and mutation is one that must be understood within the context of the rapid changes Spanish society was experiencing at the time—as with Pérez del Solar’s attribution of a more explicit political commentary to “La conjura del pasado.” The interest Pere Joan displays in the theme of mutation in “El bestiario” and the fascination regarding the Michelin Man that appears in “La conjura del pasado” are combined in one of his most ambitious early works, “La lluvia blanca” (The white rain, 1984). The comic relies heavily on the fear and danger surrounding the process of mixelización—a spontaneous mutation of sorts that Lladó Pol describes as “un curioso fenómeno que puede convertir a los humanos en réplicas andantes de la famosa mascota de los neumáticos Michelín” (a curious phenomenon that can turn humans into walking copies of the famous mascot of the Michelin tire company).58 While we are told on the first page that this mutation arises simultaneously at all points on the globe, this particular story unfolds within the narrative of a film crew shooting footage for a bullfight-­themed movie on a cruise ship at sea. While the story line is nuanced and lengthy, the representation of this visual mutation in a graphic medium assures that the process of mixelización itself easily takes center stage.59 As they contract the mutation, human characters in the comic may have one or both arms or legs mixelized, turning them into puffy white resemblances of Bibendum’s appendages. Animals (birds and fish), other organic matter (food), and objects (airplanes) can also be affected. Against the backdrop of the restricted space of the cruise ship, the emblematic feature of Bibendum gradually shifts from being a mysterious inconvenience to becoming life threatening. Disaster sets in when the engine room of the ship becomes mixelized, and when the substance mixelín begins to fall from the sky like rain. Because the substance floats, the protagonist and others are able to survive on debris long enough to be rescued (fig. 0.3). Narrating this story by way of a surrealist aesthetic and within a cinematic plot frame underscores the potency of the image and serves as an implicit reflection on the representational power of art. While “La conjura del pasado” was more directly political in its use of the iconic image of the

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Figure 0.3. Pere Joan, “La lluvia blanca” (1999 [originally published in 1984]: 123)

Michelin Man, in “La lluvia blanca” the so-­called mascot has infiltrated his style to a large degree, subsuming the visual impact of the comic just as the process of mixelización has taken over its diegesis.60 Along the way, Pere Joan even takes a moment for a bit of self-­reflexive humor when he relates the televised story of an artist who has begun to gain notoriety for

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his incorporation of mixelization into his paintings.61 The comic thus harnesses the creative process of advertising and adapts it to a fantastical visual narrative in which the corporatized links between image and concept come to threaten even the human body itself.There is arguably something political in the appropriation of a familiar corporate icon for Pere Joan’s purpose: the artist’s style here tends toward the emblem as a way of underscoring this role of the image in mass media society and also because the only way to reclaim the image is the visual form of comics détournement in which he engages, separating Bibendum from his original market context and creatively turning him into a figure of art. Other works by the artist also underscore themes of great relevance for the social shifts of the last two decades of the twentieth century. The gas crises that have become such a palpable part of capitalist monopolistic practices are the foundation of “700 Cadillacs” (1986–1991). As the starting point for the comic underscores, “700 Cadillacs se reparten en todo el mundo el petróleo de los tres últimos pozos. La posesión de uno o más Cadillacs supone dirigir poderosos monopolios y ser del grupo más selecto” (700 Cadillacs distribute the petroleum of the three remaining wells over the entire world. The owner of one or more Cadillacs is presumed to control powerful monopolies and pertain to the most select of groups).62 The comic “Promoción” (Promotion, 1983) deals deftly with the somewhat vacuous desire for media visibility that gradually pervades pop culture in Spain during this time.63 Pérez del Solar suggests that Pere Joan uses the iconic 1980s space of the discotheque and its associated burgeoning youth culture to critique how “la publicidad en la pantalla gigante pasa de promocionar cosas a personas” (publicity on the big screen shifts from promoting things to people), and even hints at the way a star culture comes to be projected upon quite ordinary lives.64 As the scholar points out, this critique still resonated twenty-­five years later in the internet age of social media, blogs, and YouTube.65 In retrospect, what seems to be on display in many of these early selections from the 1970s-­1990s is a clear desire to master structural elements of the comics form. Many of the works included are more conventionally playful with the medium than readers of Pere Joan’s recent works might expect. Flipping through the volume, there are times when a text zone, word balloon, character, or what would normally be an inset image crosses the panel border and even the gutter.66 There are standard insets, unframed panels drawn in the white space of the page, extremely thin

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panels testifying to the artist’s use of the rhetorical page layout and accelerating the reader’s experience of narrative accordingly, and even an isolated example of the conventional page layout composed by panels of identical dimension.67 Similarly, some layouts are more geared toward rewarding readers’ expectations of action. Wide variations in the levels of iconicity employed in character representation also occur. These traits become somewhat more rare in the artist’s later works. Pere Joan’s comics during this time are daring in their drive to forge a rich visual aesthetics. He relies on the visual to compound narrative complexity, even in the most concise creations. A striking set of examples can be seen in the appearance of maps and visual formulas that are crucial to the story line, the diegetic perspective, and the graphic impact of such brief comics as “El jardín embozado” (The secret garden; 1983), “La fórmula” (The formula; 1983), and “Los mensajeros del cuerpo” (The body messengers; 1983).68 In the latter in particular, the ties between urban space, page layout, the detective theme, and formal innovation suggest a clear resemblance to the narrative complexity of Jorge Luis Borges’s highly praised and widely read short story “Death and the Compass”—in which the theme of murder also gains significance through the cartographic logic of urban space in Buenos Aires (fig. 0.4). Yet Pere Joan’s characteristic style is discernible in greater and greater doses as our chronology reaches the mid-­1990s. The reader observes elements that progressively become associated with his hallmark style: prominent wordless sequences; the full-­page panel composition; the full-­page panel with multiple insets; the full-­page, nonpaneled composition where text is not demarcated from image; and—throughout all included work— the increasing reliance on the “landscape” panel of page-­spanning width.69 For example, “El gran motor Brown-­ Pericord” (The grand Brown-­ Pericord motor, 1983) tends to employ a high number of wordless panels in sequence and boasts even a full page, with seven panels and three insets, over the course of which only two words are uttered.70 Though the style varies somewhat in the collection from comic to comic—regarding line thickness, light and shadow, panel composition, page layout, and levels of iconicity—there are hints of what is to come. Some of the panels in “700 Cadillacs” and “Cita en Jartum” (Meeting in Khartoum, 1983), for example, boast the wide frames, compositional and stylistic details, and a level of iconic facial features that would make them equally at home in the artist’s

Figure 0.4. Pere Joan, “Los mensajeros del cuerpo” (1999 [originally published in 1983]: 85)

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later re-­creation of Agustín Fernández Mallo’s prose text Nocilla Experience (2011).71 Similarly, the entire comic titled “Desapego” (Detachment, 1996) approaches the steady rhythm and contemplative use of space evident in more recent paneled work, with the possible exception of having slightly fewer landscape panels of page-­spanning width.72 What might be considered Pere Joan’s most characteristic page layout—the open hyperframe lacking panels of any sort—irrupts markedly, perhaps even traumatically, on the final pages of “La lluvia blanca” (see fig. 0.3). This occurs precisely when the narrative is reaching its climax, thus pairing the narrative break with a formal innovation for greater impact on the reader. Like the protagonist of that comic, who ends up adrift in the ocean on a large piece of mixelín, as readers we are also now adrift in the vast unpaneled space of the page.73 If the artist’s use of an open hyperframe was an aesthetic choice used to emphasize narrative effect, the same cannot be said of his decisive return to it in “Huidas” (Lines of flight; Pere Joan 1999, originally published in 1995). There, the use of unpaneled images is an unvarying structural choice that tends to push narrative itself off into the margins or even off the page—Scott McCloud would say into the comics gutter. Here Pere Joan employs this open hyperframe variant as he did in an early page from Baladas Urbanas—discussed extensively in chapter 2 of the present book—to cultivate a dialogic place of imagination. The reader is prompted to imbue his static images with their own artistic life. Although a text subtitle below the images suggests a glimpse into a narrative that has not yet unfolded, the real emphasis—as always in Pere Joan’s later work—is on the images. Figures mingle on the page, largely unfettered by a panel border. It is this comic that most closely anticipates the theme and stylistic innovation of 16 novel·les amb hòmens blaus (1996)—which Lladó Pol calls “un còmic intimista” (an intimate comic)74—and its more complex rural companion of sorts, El aprendizaje de la lentitud (2011)—both discussed further in chapter 3. As should be clear from this admittedly brief exploration of Pere Joan’s early work, he is a versatile and imaginative artist.The notion of space is key to his themes, style, and legacy. Spatiality is important in his work in two interrelated senses. There is space on the comics page, where the arrangement, presence, and absence of panels, as well as the layout and arrangement of nonpaneled images, for example, all require thinking through

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the various ways comics artists have of connecting images. The notion of space as theme and content must also be considered—space as a cultural representation. In this sense, it is important that his work frequently represents rural spaces, urban spaces, architectural spaces, and touristic spaces, as well as more interior spaces of emotional subjectivity and even spaces of philosophical contemplation. Approaching Pere Joan’s work through a topographical lens ultimately entails being able to synthesize these aspects of his work. It is thus important to acknowledge how research into cultural, emotional, and urban geography can elucidate what he accomplishes on the page.

Toward a Geography of Comics In the twenty-­first century, cultural geographers have turned more and more toward the incorporation of humanities texts as a way of exploring the necessarily cultural interactions between consciousness, human activity, and geographical landscape. The rising awareness of the importance of these interactions is evident in high-­profile publications promoted by the American Association of Geographers, such as GeoHumanities: Art, History, Text at the Edge of Place (2011, edited by Dear, Ketchum, Luria, and Richardson) and Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds: Geography and the Humanities (2011, edited by Daniels, DeLyser, Entrikin, and Richardson).75 In the same way, scholars in the textual humanities have been increasingly adopting spatial and geographical methods to inform their analyses of literature, poetry, film, and visual media texts. Volumes such as The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship (2010) and Deep Maps and Spatial Narratives (2015), both edited by Bodenhamer, Corrigan, and Harris, contribute to the intersections of geographical and humanistic work from the latter side.76 Journals created in the second decade of the twenty-­first century, such as the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies (2014-­) and GeoHumanities (2015-­), have provided new publication venues for this type of discipline-­crossing scholarship.77 Digital humanities methods have also led to increased interdisciplinary syntheses of geography and the humanities.78 What is quite evident is that comics have not enjoyed the same level of attention given to literature, film, and perhaps even videogames within the broader context of such geographical-­humanities connections.79 Studies

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that link geography with comics specifically are quite rare. Where they can even be found, such studies are doubly marginalized. They sit simultaneously at the cultural margins of geography and the comics margins of the humanities. Although the study of literature is predominantly still the center of humanities fields and academic departments, interest in film studies and visual media has been steadily growing.The ninth art, however, is still attached in the wider discipline to cinema, unfairly I might add, and enjoys far less interest. This is a nuanced and perhaps even unfortunate relationship whose strongest bond seems to be that both areas of study are similarly distanced from literary prose. Nevertheless, volumes such as Comic Book Geographies (2014, edited by Jason Dittmer) and Comics and the City (2010, edited by Jörn Ahrens and Arno Meteling) forge stronger connections between geography, comics, and spatial theory. Dittmer writes in his introduction to Comic Book Geographies that his edited volume is “an attempt to bring together two fields that have never properly been in dialogue before: the discipline of geography and the interdisciplinary and nascent field of comics studies.”80 He underscores that both areas share a mutual interest in space, and he distinguishes and connects both “space in comics” and “comics in space.”81 The collection of essays edited by Ahrens and Meteling takes a specifically urban approach. In their introduction, the editors draw important parallels between the way word and image structure both the act of reading comics and the experience of urban life itself, stating unequivocally that “there is undoubtedly a link between the medium of comics and the big city as a modern living space.”82 The scholars argue that characters in early-­twentieth-­century comics, for example, are influenced by the speed of life in the metropolis, and that comics as a consequence tend to devote more space to the representation of the city in their pages.83 Related to these urban and artistic exchanges and pushed on through superhero and detective traditions that “delved deep into the aesthetic, atmospheric and scenaristic possibilities of the city,” comics thus “demand the loose and moving gaze of the urban flâneur.”84 This is perhaps particularly true of work produced by Pere Joan, where open space and topographical layouts provide readers with multiple ways in which to make sense of the comics page. What both of these innovative and timely book projects have in common, however, is the tendency to equate comics with text-­image combinations. Readers need to keep in mind that this definition has not been

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unanimously embraced by comics theorists. Comics and the City clearly tends more toward discussion of word-­image associations and less toward a geographical focus on represented and aesthetic space. Comic Book Geographies also prioritizes this union, as revealed in Dittmer’s insistence that “images and text in comics are alchemically set in relation to one another” and his statement—drawing on Ahrens and Meteling’s book—that cities can be read as comics in terms of relational space.85 In this book, I insist that space in Pere Joan’s work must be observed at two levels—formal and geographic. My argument juxtaposes and connects space and landscape as represented content with space and landscape as formal innovation. I want to keep the reader’s attention on what the comics artist accomplishes on the page. My goal is thus to explore Pere Joan’s style closely and carefully, using specific examples from his later oeuvre. To do this, I prioritize themes of space, geography, and landscape and, like Pere Joan himself, place images themselves at the center of the aesthetic impact of comics. Insights from cultural geography motivate the analyses carried out in chapters 3, 4, and 5. The major methodological principles of cultural geography arguably date from the work of Carl Sauer (1889–1975) in the 1920s. Sauer’s work began to invert the traditional assumptions of the field; in his view, “It wasn’t nature that caused culture, but rather culture, working with and on nature, [that] created the contexts of life.”86 His early formulations hinged on a more nuanced understanding of the concept of landscape. Rather than adopt a naïve view wherein landscape was synonymous with the natural world, Sauer located it within a cultural framework.The result was a more complex view of the processes through which human populations collectively acted upon and were reciprocally influenced by their surrounding environments. Regarded as the founder of both “cultural ecology” and “cultural geography,” Sauer put culture at the center of geography, renewed the value of descriptive studies and ultimately pushed forward the development of a strong qualitative strain of the field.87 Over the twentieth century, qualitative geographers developed Sauer’s insights considerably. Today one can easily identify a range of cultural perspectives that admit the interconnections between human activity and such notions as natural landscape, rural landscape as the result of human work, and planned urban landscapes as the result of a modern bourgeois cartographic vision. In his groundbreaking 1925 paper, the cultural geography pioneer offered a statement of method that might very well be read for its enduring association with the process of artistic

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creation: “Culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium, the cultural landscape the result.”88 As my arguments in later chapters make clear, underscoring the role of landscape in Pere Joan’s comics art allows readers and critics to see his method from a topographical perspective.89 The notion of comics topographies thus applies to landscape as both content/ depiction and as form/page layout. It is a product of human work both off and on the comics page, where it becomes wrapped up in Pere Joan’s unique comics style. Researchers have also adapted cultural geography approaches to explore the spatiality of human emotion. Such connections are prominent, for example, in my analyses in chapter 3 of both El aprendizaje de la lentitud: La expedición Paraná Ra’anga (2011) and 16 novel·les amb hòmens blaus (1996). From about 2000 onward, scholars have identified and carried out an emotional turn in geography.90 This turn has entailed a double recalibration of the field—overcoming the Cartesian dualism between thinking and feeling, and also returning the resulting broad view of human consciousness to its concrete and culturally dependent embodiment in space/ place.91 It is of note that research into emotional geographies is becoming more closely intertwined with work on ecology and affect as the twenty-­ first century unfolds.92 Insights into the interconnectedness of emotions and space/place present us with a much richer account of how qualitative approaches can inform the study of geographic landscape. As articles from the inaugural issue of the journal Emotion, Space and Society (2008-­) showcase, emotions are constitutive of space in the city.93 Whether Pere Joan’s comics depict rural or urban locations, as explored in chapters 3, 4, and 5 of this book, his personal and intimate style foregrounds emotion as a way of linking content and formal innovation. In depicting landscapes, and in fashioning the space of the comics page in innovative ways, he blends emotion and topography in a way that underscores the same concerns that arise with emotional geography approaches. It is important to recognize that developments in urban geography over the course of the twentieth century have, to a large degree, recapitulated the distinction between qualitative and quantitative approaches in the discipline of geography as a whole. Generally speaking, rather than emphasize culture, the broader interdisciplinary area of urban studies has tended to focus on urban sociology and geography, governance and politics, housing and development, economics, planning and design,

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architecture, and environmental studies.94 Within this wider urban studies framework, urban geography also trends toward the quantitative and away from the cultural—focusing on the built environment and issues of governance and transportation, for example. That said, however, the entrenched preference for quantitative spatial research has had to contend with an increasingly potent subtradition that approaches the city and its spaces through the lens of cultural geography.95 The 1960s and 1970s in particular saw increased attention placed on the role of culture in the construction of the modern city, with a number of theorists advancing subtle arguments on the interconnectedness of culture, society, politics, architecture, design, and urban geography.96 The discourse of global urbanization is also particularly relevant for the exploration of mass tourism carried out in chapter 5 with reference to Pere Joan works such as Història del turisme a les Illes Balears (2009, with Hernández) and Viaje a Cotiledonia: La novela gráfica (2015, with Serra Simó). Intersections of rural space and urban space are an important focus of chapter 4’s analyses of “Un cocodril a l’Eixample” (1987, with Manzano) and Nocilla Experience: La novela gráfica (2011, with Fernández Mallo), wherein emotional connections with landscape are also a significant theme. Overall, this book highlights the graphic artist’s recognizable spatial and geographic tropes while also paying attention to matters of content, style, and the formal elements of comics (e.g., comics structure and narrative, panel composition and sequence, inset, page layout, and hyperframe). Importantly, these investigations simultaneously provide further opportunity to examine questions pertinent to comics theory today. One important illustration of this comes from applying the insights of Barbara Postema. The remarks on style she makes in her book Narrative Structure in Comics (2013) are quite instructive when analyzing the comics of a formally innovative master like Pere Joan. Postema writes that “in comics, style is so pervasive that it encompasses the entire experience of the comic—the characters, the story line, the look—often even down to the shapes of the letters. Style in effect ceases to be style, since it is no longer a superficial surface matter. Style becomes the substance of comics, through which each text speaks in a voice that is completely its own. Style signifies in comics.”97 The critic also effectively highlights what I argue is a core value of Pere Joan’s persistent search for innovation when she writes about the way artists tend to use panel format: “Comics usually

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establish one format of panel layout as their default. . . . Because most comics texts do have a default format, a variation in the format becomes a source of signification in itself.”98 As discussed above, one can observe in the artist’s work a gradual intensification of his innovations in panel format. While his earlier comics may have tended toward more standardized panel sizes and arrangements in the early to mid-­1980s, increasingly the artist takes the variation of panel format to an extreme. Rather than invest in a default panel format, as Postema asserts is frequent with comics artists, Pere Joan insists on the impermanence that arises with continual innovation in form and an increasingly clear move away from standard panels toward landscape panels and more toward the freedom of the open hyperframe layout. In the unstructured open hyperframe, individual comics elements enjoy a relative autonomy and are defined topographically in their holistic relation to one another, much in the same way that we might envision relationships between topographical elements of landscape. A particularly important example of this in Pere Joan’s work can be seen in “La lluvia blanca” (1984) in which the open hyperframe is important simultaneously at the levels of both narrative content and graphic form. But panel innovation is also essential in 100 pictogramas (2014), as explored in chapter 2. Theorists David Beronä (2012) and Joseph Witek (2012) have also made insights that can contribute to analysis of Pere Joan’s work. Beronä’s emphasis on the pictorial in comics, as well as his interest in the wordless comic, can inform our understanding of how the artist’s later works actualize the largely pictorial and often wordless comics tradition. In a comment that ties into Postema’s monograph on comics narrative, Beronä writes that “without dialogue, the images bear a heavier load for the understanding of context and narrative structure.”99 Similarly,Witek notes a tendency for the page to operate “as a textual field for the immediate enactment of overtly symbolic meaning” and the fact that images frequently “stand in for concepts rather than for physical bodies.”100 Pere Joan’s emphasis on the image itself, as well as on elements such as caricature, line, and iconic/emblematic stylistic choices, contributes to the symbolic, conceptual, and philosophical impact of his comics, as analyzed in depth in my discussion in chapter 2 of Pere Joan’s untitled contribution to the zine Baladas Urbanas, and as explored further in subsequent chapters. While I do not engage Beronä and Witek at great length, their insights play an implicit role in my discussion of the metaphorical, conceptual,

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and philosophical aspects of Pere Joan’s comics, particularly those analyzed in chapters 3 and 4. Andrei Molotiu (2012) develops the notion of iconostasis in a way that is quite relevant to the topographical and image-­centric approach employed here. By “iconostasis,” he means “the perception of the layout of a comics page as a unified composition; perception which prompts us not so much to scan the comic from panel to panel in the accepted direction of reading, but to take it in at a glance, the way we take in an abstract painting.”101 The scholar identifies specific comics artists—a list that, significantly, includes Chris Ware—in whose work the traditional linear or sequential act of reading a narrative becomes frustrated, or rather replaced, by a more holistic reading.This insight squares with a key property of what I propose as a topographical approach to comics—where reading is understood to be more self-­directed than in traditional narrative sequences. Instead of prioritizing the reading of a temporal narrative across panels, the tendency toward “iconostatization” can also be described as “the move of a comic toward the stasis of an icon.”102 This seems the most appropriate way to describe how the reader scans the page landscapes of comics produced during Pere Joan’s later period, and as such it figures explicitly into discussions in chapter 3. Theoretical insights into comics form such as those expressed by Postema, Beronä, Witek, and Molotiu are also what drive my analyses of Baladas Urbanas (1976), Azul y ceniza (2004), and 100 pictogramas (2014) in chapter 2. In preparing the road for the formal and theoretical approaches to Pere Joan’s work described above, in chapter 1 (“The Comics Landscape of Spain”) I situate the artist within his historical and geographic context. I move briskly through interconnected topics, addressing Spain’s sociopolitical landscape and the state of contemporary comics scholarship. Following these remarks is an expedient exploration of the history of the comic in Spain. Glossing over late-­nineteenth-­century and early-­twentieth-­century developments, I devote greater attention to subsequent decades of particular importance and emphasize the state of comics in the postdictatorship years (1975–)—these years being the most pertinent for understanding Pere Joan’s career.This account draws selectively from established scholarly accounts as a way of clarifying the cultural dynamics surrounding comics during this period and bringing them to Anglophone readers for the first time. Rather than attending exhaustively to what are—for readers familiar with the Spanish context, at least—quite familiar debates surrounding

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artistic categorizations distinguishing practitioners of the línea chunga (the crappy-­line) and the línea clara (the clear-­line) styles,103 I emphasize Pere Joan’s independent and unique vision throughout. This includes foregrounding significant aspects of his original artistic style as well as drawing attention to his highly visible role as an editor and publisher whose work has pushed the boundaries of comics in Spain.

Chap ter 1

The Comics Landscape of Spain It is important to situate Pere Joan’s creative activity within his historical and artistic contexts by retelling the story of comics in Spain for an Anglophone readership. In this chapter, I mention significant aspects of the artist’s works in passing and also draw attention to his significant role as an editor dedicated to pushing the boundaries of comics in Spain through innovative publications. In retrospect, the poster titled “En soledad” (1988; fig. 1.1) seems to represent these aspects of his legacy. While it perhaps does not do justice to the significance of his collaborations with others, it nonetheless offers viewers a look into Pere Joan’s creative identity and his connections with key considerations for the study of comics in Spain. Despite its solitary mood, this image might be understood as a variant on the comics tradition of representing the artistic workshop.1 Outside, one sees a landscape representation that evokes one of the artist’s preferred themes. The paneled window frame is partitioned into a form that evokes the regularized comics grid. In light of the window’s suggestion of a comics grid, the yellow propeller plane toward the top of the image

Figure 1.1. Pere Joan, “En soledad” (1990 [originally published in 1988 by 1.000 Edicions]: 6)

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might be read as moving from one panel to the next. This plane itself is a reminder of the adventure comic that surged in popularity during the twentieth century. Its visual echo in a televised image of the same plane and a small model plane positioned at the right margin of the frame suggests the theme of iconic representation, one crucial to the medium of comics. The print media visible in the room—books and newspapers— serve as another reminder of the paper legacy of comics art. In the shadows of the wall behind the seated figure one sees a mural depicting what seems to be conquistadors—perhaps a historical reference with which the artist needs to grapple (and to which he returns in El aprendizaje de la lentitud). As this image suggests, comics creators necessarily synthesize the artistic imagination, social history, and history of their chosen medium.

A Concise History of Contemporary Spain Pere Joan was born in 1956, and his earliest works date to around 1976, which means that he came of age as an artist in the subcultural tumult of Spain’s transition to democracy (“the Transition”) after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco in 1975. Readers who are relatively unfamiliar with this and other important aspects of Spain’s history may thus find the following summary helpful. Though critics and scholars disagree on the specific years that constitute the Transition—to start, it may be seen in strictly political terms or from a broader cultural perspective2—the initial postdictatorship years sparked an immense amount of widespread artistic creativity. To appreciate the sociocultural moment of the 1970s and 1980s, when Pere Joan and other contemporary comics artists first emerged onto the scene, one has to understand the drastic political, cultural, and economic shifts that marked twentieth-­century life in Spain. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Spain experienced recurring periods of political upheaval.3 Rule frequently oscillated between liberal and conservative periods, including also two short-­lived, and ultimately failed, experiments in establishing a republic (First Republic, 1873–1874; Second Republic, 1931–1936).4 The twentieth century saw increased political tensions over workers’ rights, land reform, monarchic traditions, democratic rule, and Spanish capitalism that led to massive strikes, state repression, and high-­profile executions.5 The dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera ruled from 1923 to 1930, and a number of groups

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increasingly pulled the country in different directions against the backdrop of an unstable Second Republic (1931–1936): prominent examples are the socialist Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT), the anarcho-­syndicalist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), the anarchist Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI), the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM), the Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (CEDA), and the Falange party (which would become synonymous with Spanish fascism).6 When July of 1936 arrived, it was General Francisco Franco who was carried to power. He was assisted by conservative social forces and by armed forces that broke away from the Second Republic to ignite the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939).7 On 1 April 1939, after nearly three full years of intense bloodshed that ended with mass exile, Franco took dictatorial control of the Spanish territories. His dictatorship spanned four decades, ending only with his death in 1975, and the regime left an indelible impact on the twentieth century.8 From its earliest days in the late 1930s, the Franco dictatorship dealt in starvation, violence, and the systematic oppression of such regional languages and cultures as Catalan, Basque, and Galician.9 The use of the Mallorquí language—spoken in Pere Joan’s Mallorca and considered a variation of Catalan—was also forbidden, and in general, conditions on the Balearic Islands tended to be as oppressive as those on the mainland. Across the territories of the Spanish state, women, sexualized and racialized minorities, those affiliated with religions other than Catholicism, and those expressing political dissent of any kind were systemically oppressed.10 Daily life in the 1940s, a decade referred to as the años del hambre (years of hunger), was characterized by stark conditions. Cultural life was suppressed through severe censorship.11 Fearing persecution and death, many not killed during the war or afterward by the dictatorship fled into exile—frequently to France or Latin America.12 As the comics theorist Pascal Lefèvre notes,“During the Franco regime various Spanish artists ([such] as José Cabrero Arnal, Julio Ribera) moved to France and worked for the French comics industry.”13 During the late 1950s, a growing technocratic presence in the government led to the development of somewhat paradoxical attitudes on modernization, and during the so-­called años de desarrollo (development years) of the 1960s, the Spanish state’s economic policy was officially linked to tourism.14 As millions of tourists flooded the country each year during the mid-­to late 1960s, Spain also saw mass internal migrations of populations who left rural areas for the promise offered by larger cities such as Madrid

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and Barcelona.15 These rural-­to-­urban migrations led to the creation of a new urban underclass living predominantly in highly policed and politicized shantytowns on the urban periphery.16 Urban planning, which had been sporadic and insufficient before the war, became increasingly necessary, but it was also increasingly co-­opted by both dictatorial ideology and the tendency toward capitalist speculation.17 While the apartments of more accommodated urbanites filled with consumer goods such as televisions and refrigerators, new literary forms broke with the staid realism of the 1940s and 1950s.18 Many of the period’s more ambitious novels—often compared to the nouveau roman (new novel) tradition in France—employed complex narrative structures while still commenting on persistent patterns of inequality visible across Spain’s diverse rural and urban landscapes.19 With the economic apertura (opening) of the state’s policies through the 1950s and 1960s, the waning of censorship due to official law enacted on 18 March 1966, and the naming of Prince Juan Carlos as Franco’s future successor in 1969, underground cultural movements began to position themselves for more prominent public expression and more explicit critique.20 The death of the dictator on 20 November 1975 was then followed by a period of cultural vitality generally referred to as the destape (literally, the “uncorking”). By the 1980s, social, political, cultural, and sexual identities that had been officially marked as transgressive under the dictatorship were gaining mass exposure through popular expressions of artistic culture in the realms of cinema, music, literature, visual art—and, of course, comics.21 This is the late-­twentieth-­century sociopolitical and historical context in which Pere Joan’s imaginative graphic art and comics were first circulated and published.

The Birth, Growth, and Terms of Comics Scholarship The story of comics in Spain is necessarily tied into the larger political and social shifts just described. Numerically speaking, historical studies of comics in Spain can hardly compare to the continuing output of scholarly interest in Spain’s twentieth-­century sociopolitical history. Nevertheless, historical approaches to the development of the ninth art in Spain have grown to be somewhat plentiful.This is due largely to the attention placed on comics in the 1960s by scholars seeking to legitimize the art form. Luis Gasca’s pioneering efforts included a number of books published in the late 1960s, for example: Historia y anécdota del tebeo en España (1965),

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Los cómics en la pantalla (1965), Tebeo y cultura de masas (1966), Los cómics en España (1969), and Los héroes de papel (1969). Later on, Gasca collaborated with Román Gubern and inspired a continuing tradition of comics scholarship leading to important texts such as El lenguaje de los cómics (Gubern 1972, with a prologue by Gasca) and El discurso del cómic (Gasca and Gubern 1988). Other pioneering works of the 1960s include Antonio Lara’s El apasionante mundo del tebeo (1968) and Terenci Moix’s Los “cómics,” arte para el consumo y formas “pop” (1968; republished in 2007 as Historia social del cómic). As Gubern mentions in the prologue to Viviane Alary’s Historietas, cómics y tebeos españoles (2002), the study of comics in Spain has been hindered by obstacles relating to issues of preservation, access, and coverage in the popular press—thus society would have to wait for “el despertar de la curiosidad intelectual hacia la cultura de masas en los años sesenta para que se iniciase su proceso de reivindicación cultural” (the awakening of its intellectual curiosity toward mass culture in the 1960s for its process of cultural recuperation to begin).22 Since the 1960s, the story of comics in Spain has been told again and again, almost becoming routinized in monographs featuring very similar observations.The vast majority of these book-­length studies, of course, still remain untranslated into English.23 Appropriately enough, the historical legacy of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship tends to partition comics scholarship into time periods. Still, there have certainly been attempts at creating a complete history of comics in Spain. Most notable in this respect, perhaps, are Jesús Cuadrado’s Diccionario de uso de la historieta (1873–1996) (1997) and his two-­volume De la historieta y su uso, 1873–2000: Atlas español de la cultura popular (2000). Santiago García’s La novela gráfica (2010) takes a much more international but equally comprehensive approach, leaning heavily on other traditions but incorporating remarks on Spain intermittently. More common, however, are studies concentrating on certain periods. For example, Antonio Martín Martínez is known for his books on early pre– Civil War comics such as Historia del cómic español: 1875–1939 (1978) and Los inventores del comic español, 1873–1900 (2000). Studies focusing on the postwar period include Juan Antonio Ramírez’s La historieta cómica de postguerra (1975), Salvador Vázquez de Parga’s Los cómics del franquismo (1980), and Antonio Altarriba’s La España del tebeo: La historieta española de 1940 a 2000 (2001).24 The postdictatorship years (1975-­) are the topic of books like Altarriba and Antonio Remesar’s Comicsarías: Ensayo sobre una década de historieta

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española (1977–1987) (1987), Francesca Lladó Pol’s Los cómics de la transición: El boom del cómic adulto 1975–1984 (2001), Pablo Dopico’s El cómic underground español, 1970–1980 (2005), and Pedro Pérez del Solar’s Imágenes del desencanto: Nueva historieta española 1980–1986 (2013). Óscar Palmer’s Cómic alternativo de los noventa: La herencia del underground (2000) is devoted solely to the 1990s. And increasingly, works of scholarship are devoted to specific regional traditions within the Spanish state, as in the cases of Viñetas a la luna de Valencia: La historia del tebeo valenciano 1965–2006 (2007), edited by Pons, Porcel, and Sorni, and Trenta anys de cómic a Mallorca (1975–2005) (2009), authored by Lladó Pol. As illustrated by the vast majority of these titles, existing comics scholarship prefers a broad historical approach over close explorations of specific artists and individual comics or graphic novels.25 That said, the market in Spain for comics anthologies promoting the recent work of multiple artists may be a sign of progress, as demonstrated by Panorama: La novela gráfica española hoy (García 2013) and Subterfuge Comix: 25 años más allá del underground (Alcázar et al. 2014). Just as notable is the English translation of the García work as Spanish Fever: Stories by the New Spanish Cartoonists (2016). Articles on Spanish comics are—slowly, to be sure, when compared to studies of their Franco-­Belgian counterparts— finding a foothold in the growing list of Anglophone journals dedicated to the medium: European Comic Art, the International Journal of Comic Art, and the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, for example. When approaching comics in Spain for the first time, readers should be advised that terminology is quite important. Pedro Pérez del Solar explains that “Los términos ‘historieta’, ‘cómic’ y ‘tebeo’ son sinónimos en el lenguaje común, pero cada uno lleva su propia marca de la historia del medio” (the terms “historieta,” “comic,” and “tebeo” are synonyms in common language, but each one is marked in its own way by the history of the medium).26 Significantly, these Spanish terms also attracted the attention of Thierry Groensteen in his essay “Definitions (2012),” included in The French Comics Theory Reader (2014).27 The word “tebeo” owes its enduring popularity to the title of an important comics magazine of the early twentieth century named TBO, first published in 1917. As Viviane Alary writes, “En poco tiempo, TBO pasó a ser término genérico: tebeo, para calificar un producto de gran popularidad en las que la historieta ocupa un lugar predominante” (In a short time, TBO became a generic term: “tebeo,” to denote a product of great popularity in which the historieta occupies a predominant place).28 The word “tebeo” was integrated into the

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official Spanish dictionary of the Real Academia Española (rae​.es) only in 1968—and it was defined there as specifically relating to children, sparking a controversy.29 The years that followed the late-­1960s incorporation of “tebeo” into the official Spanish lexicon saw continued public debate surrounding the supposed identification of comics with children as artists and readers sought to redefine comics as a medium intended for adults.30 As Pérez del Solar makes clear, the 1960s rejection of the connections between comics and lo infantil (childishness) was one way of situating the comic in the terrain of high culture.31 The reality is that the term “tebeo” may be objectionable for some today because in the popular imagination it calls up a period when comics were not afforded the respect they deserved. Terenci Moix’s 1968 monograph, which approached the social history of comics from a popular culture framework, dared to ask whether the comic constituted an art form; decades later, Santiago García’s La novela gráfica (2010) asserts the identification of comics with art as its implicit ground and accepted point of departure.32 In fact, one can approach much of the scholarship on comics in Spain as part of a wider effort to combat persistent and unfair popular perceptions and to legitimize comics as an art form for adults.Tied into this wider effort, the term “historieta” has gradually replaced “tebeo,” and the increased use of the term “comic”—sometimes with written accent (cómic) and sometimes without (comic)—undoubtedly reflects increasing international connections with Anglophone traditions and markets for comics/ graphic novels in the United States and the United Kingdom. It is also worth noting that the generation of graphic artists born in the 1950s—a generation to which Pere Joan belongs—has been extremely influential in terms of rebranding comics as a medium for adults. Altarriba underscores that this generation diversified the art form considerably and opened it up to new artistic possibilities. Notably, this was done without the promise of either a decent or reliable wage. Instead, shifting away from the understanding of the historieta as “un subproducto cultural” (a subcultural product), comics artists of Pere Joan’s generation were largely motivated by artistic aims rather than mere subsistence.33 The increased attention lavished on the ninth art since the 1960s by pioneers like Gasca tended to remain restricted to relatively marginalized cultural circles. Yet the diversification of the field sparked by the more ambitious aspirations of the artists born in the 1950s–1960s and producing comics in the 1970s–1980s has arguably also prompted a diversification of scholarly approaches to comics.34 Due to the

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formal innovation of artists of Pere Joan’s generation, the traditional study of comics—historically carried out within an implicit popular culture framework—can now be complemented by more intentionally theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches. It is to this second wave of scholarship concerning comics in Spain that this book contributes with its assertion of the topographical nature, promise, and potential of the form.

Locating Pere Joan in the Story of Comics To properly situate Pere Joan’s work in the context of comics in Spain, I track backward to the nineteenth-­century origins of the contemporary comic and work through significant decades of the twentieth century. While readers can access published histories that are much more comprehensive and detailed in the (more often than not Spanish-­language) monographs already cited, in this part of the chapter I retell the story of comics in Spain in a way that foregrounds questions relevant to analyses of Pere Joan’s oeuvre. Tracing the historical development of the historieta as I do here, highlighting important milestones and social dynamics along the way, provides an opportunity to contextualize the graphic artist’s unique vision. T h e Ni n e t e e n t h C e n t u ry

Since the beginnings of the history of modern comics, scholars have struggled to agree on a definition. Rather than rehearse these beginnings at length, I return to the early-­nineteenth-­century origins of the form merely to extract a provocative question for contemporary readers to consider. Many accounts of early comics stress the contributions of nineteenth-­century European cartoonists to the medium, artists such as Gustave Doré, Wilhelm Busch, Théophile-­Alexandre Steinlen, Adolphe Willette, Caran d’Ache (Emmanuel Poiré), and, especially, Rodolphe Töpffer.35 In Thierry Groensteen’s view, the most important of these was arguably Töpffer (1799–1846), who “propose[d] the foundations for a theory of comics” while living in Geneva in the 1830s, doing so in a series of French-­language essays that were published in book form in the 1840s.36 Groensteen emphasizes the prescient nature of the Swiss theorist’s 1830 definition, which establishes the “comics album as ‘a book that, addressed directly to the eyes, expresses itself through representation and not through narration.’”37 Reasserting this definition is particularly important in twenty-­first-­century comics scholarship, where questions of what

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constitutes a comic are at the forefront of debate.38 There still seems to be no clear consensus regarding whether comics are defined by form, representation, sequence, or narration.The question of what actually constitutes narration in a comic is also a matter of debate, as the question can be considered from perspectives emphasizing either the combinatory power of text and image or the narrative properties of the image itself.39 These matters of representation and narration in comics are particularly important to consider as we work through Pere Joan’s use of single images, unpaneled sequences, and complex page layouts in subsequent chapters of this book. I argue that his artistic preferences bolster an understanding of comics as primarily representational rather than traditionally narrative in orientation. Another way to put this is to say that comics produce a narrative that is topographical and spatial rather than always temporal and sequential in character. In the end, Pere Joan’s creations prompt us to push beyond narrow definitions of the ninth art to prioritize the breadth and depth of comics art variations as they have existed over time. Histories of comics in Spain, specifically, tend to begin in the 1870s, several decades after Töpffer’s death.40 Rather than mention other locales such as Pere Joan’s birth city of Palma de Mallorca, these accounts generally tend to concentrate on Madrid, Barcelona, and Valencia, cities that were historically the primary centers of comics production even through the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939.41 Antonio Martín Martínez— considered by some to be the most important scholar of the Spanish comic’s origins—dates this relatively late birth of the Spanish comic to the period of monarchic Restoration (1876–1902) following the First Republic (1873–1874).42 Indeed, it was only at the end of the nineteenth century that the Spanish press could fully support the art form. This was due to a number of factors, chief among them being that the general population suffered from an illiteracy rate of 80 percent (as of 1860), and that the popular press emerged only after the Glorious Revolution of 1868, in time becoming strengthened by the Press Act of 1883.43 From 1868 to 1874, many new artists entered publishing circuits, and in issue 22 of the publication El Mundo Cómico, dated 30 March 1873, the first Spanish comic arguably appeared.44 José Luis Pellicer served as artistic director of El Mundo Cómico, and his own “Por un coracero” (For a poor cigar; 1873) has been regarded by some as the first historieta española.45 This comic relies on pairings of both text and image arranged in sequence.The text consists purely of dialogue, which in the eyes of Martín assures that

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the “absolute relation between text and image is hereby established.”46 In this seventeen-­image unpaneled sequence, the artist criticizes the quality of cigars available in Madrid’s shops through depictions of one or more individuals captured in long shot.With this and other comics of the period, Viviane Alary notes, “pasamos de la caricatura política a la caricatura de costumbres y nos aproximamos, cada vez más, a un humor gráfico gratuito en pos de un público más amplio” (we pass from the political caricature to the caricature of customs and get ever closer to a superfluous graphic humor in pursuit of a wider public).47 As implied by this analysis, here and elsewhere Pellicer’s themes can be linked to nineteenth-­century costumbrista traditions, which encouraged typological observations of a local or regional character.48 Martín writes that the artist “drew accurately all sorts of street people, moments like Christmas Eve or places like the Puerta del Sol in Madrid in a traditional manner. He never alluded to the political events and the social convulsions which were taking place in Madrid and the rest of Spain.”49 Importantly, Pellicer was a contemporary of artists in the United States such as Richard Felton Outcault, who is associated with site-­specific representations of urban themes as published in Hogan’s Alley and The Yellow Kid in the 1890s.50 While elements of the costumbrista tradition survive one hundred years later in Pere Joan’s more contemporary work—as evidenced perhaps in his approach to the Mallorcan themes discussed in chapter 5—formally speaking, the visual current of his oeuvre remains somewhat autonomous from words overall.The style of representation that predominates in Viaje a Cotiledonia (2015), for example, represents the artist’s characteristic unhinging of image from text, thus contrasting with the push of Pellicer’s earliest comic and diverging from normative understandings of comics as text-­image combinations.51 While many of Pere Joan’s early comics may employ a conventional strip format and paneled page design—making use of the speech balloon, whose modern usage critics have traced to Outcault in the US context52—his career trajectory asserts the relative autonomy of the image. Relative to other artists, as already mentioned in the introduction and as discussed in subsequent chapters of this book, Pere Joan shows a clear predilection for strategies of visual representation that are frequently unmediated by text. Pellicer surely represents an important milestone for comics in Spain, but in Martín’s estimation, it was to be other new practitioners of the form, such as Apeles Mestres (1854–1936) in Barcelona and Mecáchis (Eduardo

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Sáenz Hermúa, 1859–1898) in Madrid, who, during the 1880s, ensured “la normalidad y la existencia de una historieta española” (the normalcy and existence of a Spanish historieta).53 Along with other understudied artists— Ramón Cilla, Pedro de Rojas, Ángel Pons, Joaquín Xaudaró, Atiza, Robert and José Robedano,54 among others—Apeles Mestres55 and Mecáchis56 became key figures in what was a period of prosperity for the humorous and graphic press. The principal causes of this prosperity were to be found in the legislative liberalization and the relaxation of censorship that accompanied the restoration of Spain’s monarchy after the turbulent political climate of 1868-­1874.57 It is worthwhile to note that graphic artists of the late nineteenth century were unlikely to specialize solely in comics. Instead, they were quite often active in multiple artistic fields—as Alary emphasizes in the case of Mecáchis, who was not merely an historietista but also a painter, writer, playwright, and photographer.58 In this respect, Mecáchis presents an archetype very familiar to the contemporary artists of Pere Joan’s generation, many of whom—like the artist himself, whether by choice, necessity, or some combination—often work not merely in comics but also in other fields such as illustration and graphic design. The social-­economic contexts of comics in the late nineteenth and early twenty-­first centuries are thus similar in two respects. Common to them both are the lack of economic opportunity stemming from comics’ relative social marginalization, and the high levels of respect reserved for the multitalented artistic professional. Critics have regarded Apeles Mestres’s early comic Estudios psicológicos (Psychological studies; 1880) as particularly important.59 Appearing in the fourth number of his publication Granizada, the comic portrays twelve unpaneled text-­image combinations in which the drawing of a snail varies according to its pairing with a corresponding weather condition (e.g.“Va a llover” [It is going to rain], “La primera gota” [The first raindrop], “Sale el sol” [The sun comes out], . . .). We see the snail on the move, seeking refuge, hidden in its shell as lightning strikes close, and seeking the sun’s rays after the storm has passed. It is significant in this case that although one can read the arrangement linearly—as four rows of three text-­image pairings that together depict the beginning and end of a storm—each of the pairings retains a relative autonomy.This is a much more loosely organized set of images than that encountered, for example, in Pellicer’s comic. Its meaning lies not in the sequential rhythm of the individual tira (strip) but rather in a more holistic assessment carried out predominantly at the level

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of the page. This assessment is in line with the exploration of iconostasis provided by Andrei Molotiu and the topographical approach to comics, both underscored in the introduction and discussed in chapter 3. Mestres’s formal innovation is also of note in this sample. In her essay, Alary praises the comic’s innovative contributions to the experimentation characteristic of modern art, citing its portrayal of subjective points of view, absence of dialogue, and diversity of figures and situations.60 These innovations that Alary documents in the layout and style of Estudios psicológicos can in a sense be seen as part of a nontraditional line of comics—privileging the image over the text and the page over the strip— that has exercised an implicit influence on Pere Joan. Apeles Mestres’s early comic underscores a view of the medium that, relative to the time, minimizes its potential to be read according to the rhythm and conventions of sequential narrative. Instead, the artist’s page layout from 1880 accentuates the simultaneity that joins objects interrelated in space. The point is that Pere Joan’s emphasis on topographical and spatial (rather than temporal and sequential) narrative is, in practice, an actualization of this much earlier approach to comics. He, too, shows a preference for the whole page layout where all images are to be contemplated holistically. In addition to choice of layout, the priority that Apeles Mestres gives to subjectivity over plot and event also offers parallels to Pere Joan’s later work—and resonates with the theme of animal subjectivity in chapter 4’s exploration of “Un cocodril a l’Eixample” (1987). As seen in chapter 3’s discussion of 16 novel·les amb hòmens blaus (1996) and El aprendizaje de la lentitud (2011) in particular, the artist prefers the representation of inner experience and subjectivity to the depiction of outward events and conventional plotlines.61 Each of these hallmark aspects of Pere Joan’s comics oeuvre is in a way prefigured by the approach showcased in this late-­nineteenth-­century comic published by Apeles Mestres in Granizida. T h e T w e n t i e t h C e n t u ry: B e fo r e t h e Spa n i s h Ci v i l Wa r t h r o u g h t h e F ra n c o Di c tato r s h ip

Broadly speaking, the twentieth century brought mass production and heightened levels of readership to comics. As Román Gubern reports, the daily strip came of age in the 1900s, and the serial comic came into being around 1910, based on models of publishing that were predominant in the dissemination of the French novel of the mid-­nineteenth century.62 As Spain approached the dawn of the twentieth century, the

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growing presence of children within nineteenth-­century liberalism’s circuits of consumption began to solidify an identification of comics with youth.63 Such an account—suggested by Terenci Moix in his pioneering 1968 study of comics as popular culture—clearly distinguishes the comics tradition in Spain from its counterpart in the United States, where comics were instead arguably directed to a heterogeneous market composed of both adults and children.64 The first juvenile comics magazines in Spain appeared in the early twentieth century. Publications like Dominguín (1915) and TBO (1917), for example, built a consumer culture around comics for children.65 On the heels of these magazines, Juan Bruguera created the children’s magazine Pulgarcito in 1921 with his publishing house El Gato Negro (which after the war became Editorial Bruguera).66 The success of these early publications notwithstanding, Moix insists that the Spanish comic proper did not exist until the middle class took over control of the publishing industry from the bourgeoisie after the Spanish Civil War, which ended in 1939.67 Spanish comics in the 1930s and 1940s were heavily influenced by trends in the United States, just as they were also limited by economic factors that required cheap production processes and offered the promise of a vast readership.68 In her account of this period, Alary singles out what she calls the “primordial” issue of cost. The machine logic of the burgeoning twentieth-­century comics industry had imposed space restrictions on the ninth art that continued even in the postwar years.69 In fact, until 1948— according to Moix—the aesthetic value of comics was judged to be very low.70 Genres such as the adventure comic, the sentimental comic, and the humor comic flooded Spain, and the historieta was known as the “cine de los pobres” (cinema of the poor) due to its entertainment value.71 It must be noted that the typical postwar comic was allegedly completely unknown outside of Spain until 1965, when Luis Gasca published an essay on the subject in an Italian mass communication journal.72 While superhero comics were explicitly prohibited under the Franco dictatorship, as they were in many European countries after World War II, nevertheless a number of prominent comics featuring male hero figures were produced.73 Pascal Lefèvre classifies the popular nonsuperhero comics of this time period in Spain—such as El Guerrero del Antifaz in the 1940s and Capitán Trueno in the 1950s—into a more broadly European tradition of cheap monochrome minibooks.74 Overall, the development of the “cómic del bolsillo” (small-­format “pocket” comic) in the 1940s and

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1950s helped ensure the wide popular appeal of the ninth art, and its association with entertainment continued to facilitate juvenile escapism and the daydreams of youth.75 A part of Pere Joan’s early work, as discussed below, inherits somewhat from the enduring equivalence between comics and entertainment that led gradually to submarkets devoted to genre comics—the adventure comic in particular, perhaps. Nevertheless, concentrating on this inheritance in his work has often come at the price of not acknowledging his subversion of these genres, his spatial innovation and thematic originality, his aspirations to the creation of high-­culture comics, and even his explicitly literary aims. Contrasted with the restrictions on page space that tended to characterize the industrial phase of twentieth-­century comics, leading to a de facto aesthetic norm for the art form, Pere Joan’s expansive pages and images seem to offer an immediate tactile and visual critique of the normative and impoverished comics style explored by Alary. This is particularly clear in the oversize page dimensions of the artist’s Azul y ceniza (2004) and also the generous empty panel space of 100 pictogramas para un siglo (XX) (2014), for example. Altarriba identifies three cycles or periods of importance in Spanish comics that are helpful in organizing a contemporary history of the art form in the second half of the twentieth century. The first of these periods lasted from the immediate postwar through the 1950s and waned as the 1970s approached. Characterized by the mercantilist aims of industrial production, this cycle relied on the work of anonymous authors and was largely directed toward children in weekly or biweekly releases.76 It must be remembered that comics readership during this period was vastly underreported, given that a single magazine might have traded hands some twenty times through informal circuits of exchange.77 The Spanish state’s official creation of the Ministry of Information and Tourism in 1951 led to increased censorship with consequences for the juvenile comics market, which continued to decline through the 1960s.78 Pérez del Solar writes that 1956—the year of Pere Joan’s birth—marked the end of the great children’s historietas released by Bruguera’s publishing house.79 That same year, the weekly comic El DDT contra las penas began to carry the subtitle “Seminario cómico para grandullones” (Weekly comic for big kids), an early precursor of other statements explicitly marking the comic “para adultos” (for adults).80 Soon afterward, in 1962, a special commission within the Ministry of Information and Tourism was created to oversee

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publications marketed to children and juveniles; this commission’s charge was to eliminate material the dictatorship judged to be objectionable.81 As a consequence, according to Altarriba, the 1970s bore witness to “la agonía de estas revistas . . . [que] . . . se habían convertido en auténticos mitos editoriales” (the agony of these magazines . . . [that] . . . had become authentic publishing myths).82 The second cycle identified by Altarriba began at the end of the 1960s, continued through the 1980s, and declined in the 1990s. This period was magazine driven and focused on both young and adult readers.83 As mentioned above, the 1960s saw a much more receptive attitude toward comics on the part of scholars and critics as popular culture in general began to be seen as a legitimate object of study.84 The shift away from myopic cultural associations that linked the comic to a market predominantly for children and toward acceptance of the idea of “comics for adults” undoubtedly helped bolster new attempts to theorize the historieta.85 In 1967, Luis Gasca launched the magazine Cuto—named after a popular character of Jesús Blasco’s creation, first appearing in Chicos—as “la primera revista especializada en el comentario y análisis de la historieta” (the first magazine specializing in the commentary and analysis of the historieta).86 Likewise, Antonio Martín and Antonio Lara edited the acclaimed publication Bang!—first, a fanzine, in 1968; then, a magazine, in 1969—as part of the wider effort to encourage serious study of the medium.87 These efforts may have been relatively short-­lived—Cuto disappeared in 1968 after only six numbers, and Bang! lasted from 1968 to 1977—but they inspired new ways of thinking critically about comics and influenced a new generation of readers and artists alike.88 On the heels of advances made during the previous decade—namely the 1960s rejection of the infantilized tebeo, the advent of scholarly work on the comic, and the rise of a fan culture that had begun to theorize the historieta—comics in the 1970s were poised to take on a privileged social position.89 Altarriba reflects on the social commitment of these newer comics, which provocatively sought links with socially marginalized subjects: “El mundo de la droga, de la prostitución, de la delincuencia, de la explotación laboral o de la represión policial es abordado no solo como fuente inagotable de historias sino con voluntad evidente de denuncia” (The world of drugs, prostitution, delinquency, labor exploitation, or police repression is dealt with not only as an inexhaustible font of stories but moreover with an evident intent to denounce).90 Significantly, the specific

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strain of stylized realism that tended to accompany these depictions—not discounting a number of efforts aimed at representing imaginary science fiction worlds—tended to gravitate toward the representation of recognizable neighborhoods, sites, and even people.91 In this environment of palpable innovation, comics artists of the 1970s sought out alternatives to the formulaic approaches of the 1940s and 1950s.92 With the arrival of the first countercultural and subversive comics in this decade, artists simultaneously took it upon themselves to refashion the very language of the medium.93 Enric Sió, for instance, emerged as one of the most original, influential, and socially committed comics artists of the late 1960s and 1970s, having worked with Emili Teixidor on the acclaimed series Lavinia 2016 o la guerra dels poetes (1967).94 Publications that pushed the boundaries of the field and exposed Spanish artists to international traditions of underground comics emerged one after another throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Santiago García underscores the importance of three high-­profile anthologies in particular that brought the work of Robert Crumb and other comics luminaries from abroad into the cultural movements of the Franco dictatorship’s waning years—Comix Underground USA volume 1 (1972), volume 2 (1973), and volume 3 (1976).95 Likewise, Gasca’s foundation of the company Buru Lan, active from 1970 to 1977, led to the publication of magazines that incorporated international strips such as Al Capp and artists from abroad like Alberto Breccia and even Will Eisner.96 Similarly, the highly influential magazine Star launched in 1974, giving “Spanish readers a look at American and European Underground Comics” and capturing the attention of Pere Joan’s generation of artists.97 Lladó Pol takes care in her book Trenta anys de cómic a Mallorca (1975–2005) (2009) to note the publication’s decisive influence on Pere Joan and his collaborator Max in particular, as well as the fact that they were readers of Star before later becoming contributors.98 The internationalization that became synonymous with the 1970s comic was predominantly one-­way, however, since Spanish artists were introduced to new traditions and approaches without necessarily having their own work exported abroad. Nevertheless, comics artists influenced by international underground traditions were publishing their own work in magazines that brought new life and a transgressive reputation to the ninth art in Spain. A near mythical status was achieved by magazines such as El Rrollo Enmascarado (1973), considered by some to mark the origin of the nueva historieta española, and El

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Papus (1973), a humorous publication including comics that was severely censored by the government even in the final years of the dictatorship.99 In an explosion of interest in comics that unfolded at the margins of traditional publishing circuits, the mid-­1970s saw the creation of a number of amateur fanzines and short-­lived magazines of irregular publication that launched names such as Nazario, Javier Mariscal, Max,Antonio Pamies, and Josep Farriol.100 Pere Joan’s first efforts in fact fell into this category of the self-­published and self-­circulated comics zine: his images were included in the multiauthored fanzine-­style titles Baladas Urbanas (1976) and Muérdago (1977). Both of these involved collaborations with Max—the pen name of Francesc Capdevila Gisbert—who, like Pere Joan, was also born in 1956.101 While a critique of the publishing industry was implicit in the unconstrained process and ephemeral format of these self-­produced publications of the mid-­1970s, a more explicit spirit of denunciation found its way into the content of other works. One renowned example was Carlos Giménez’s Paracuellos (1976), which famously represented the experiences of orphaned children living under the dictatorship and arguably demonstrated comics’ capacity for denunciation as a way of working through Spain’s dark past.102 As Altarriba notes about this time, “El país se encamina hacia nuevos horizontes y, siguiendo esa misma trayectoria, contribuyendo a acelerarla, la historieta también empieza a encontrar un nuevo lugar en el imaginario de los españoles” (The country was heading toward a new horizon and, following this same trajectory, contributing to its acceleration, the historieta also began to find a new place in the Spanish imaginary).103 T h e T w e n t i e t h C e n t u ry: T h e P o st d i c tato r i a l Co m i c

Although censorship in Spain officially came to an end on 1 April 1977, comics had nevertheless become part of countercultural movements and were linked to progressive neighborhood associations. The result of these connections meant, unfortunately for the medium, that comics were vulnerable to repressive actions that continued even after the death of Francisco Franco and through the Transition.104 As Román Gubern notes, everything happened fast after the dictator’s death.105 Persisting (unofficial) patterns of censorship, forms of protest suppressed under the dictatorship, and newer frustrations inextricable from Spain’s fitful moves toward democracy constituted the precarious ground from which a new comics aesthetic was to emerge.

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Particularly between 1975 and 1984, as Lladó Pol notes, artists overwhelmingly had “una posición débil dentro del sector” (a weak position in the industry).106 Additionally, their output was conditioned by both the spatial limitations and the freedom from staid graphic conventions that now arose with a shared system of publication. Almost as a requirement of irregular production processes inspired by the fanzine, comics in the 1980s tended toward the fast and the furious. Altarriba notes that getting lengthy stories and long-­term projects published was next to impossible: “En estos años y ante estas circunstancias, los historietistas españoles no tuvieron otro remedio que convertirse en campeones de la distancia corta” (In these years and under these circumstances, Spanish historietistas had no other choice than to become champions of the short-­distance sprint).107 These restrictions of space recalled earlier industrial pressures—those that had impacted comics before and during the Spanish postwar years as mentioned above—but were instead now the result of newer self-­managed or small-­scale approaches to production. As Altarriba asserts, artists working under such limitations opted to concentrate less on story and more on the development of plastic/graphic elements of the medium such as color, line, palette, and style.108 Important figures from the previous decade now shared a collaborative space with a newer generation, and both groups benefited from a growing understanding of comics artists as auteurs defined by their unique graphic style.109 Pere Joan is one of a number of important artists from this period who continued to produce comics into the twenty-­first century—a list in which Altarriba also includes Miguel Gallardo, Max, Daniel Torres, Miguelanxo Prado, Rubén Pellejero, Fernando de Felipe, Alfonso Azpiri, Micharmut (Juan Enrique Bosch Quevedo), and Carlos Giménez.110 The success of this generation of artists undoubtedly contributed to the increased social visibility and status of comics in the postdictatorship years: “Llevar bajo el brazo El Víbora, Cairo, Madriz, El Jueves o 1984 equivale a mostrar una insignia, casi a anunciar una forma de ser” (Carrying El Víbora, Cairo, Madriz, El Jueves, or 1984 under one’s arm was equivalent to flashing a badge, almost announcing a form of being).111 El Víbora debuted in 1979, arguably reactualizing the provocations and the innovative spirit of its forerunner El Rrollo Enmascarado.112 Considered by some to be the “official” magazine of the Spanish underground, if not also the inauguration of the nueva historieta española of the 1980s, El Víbora

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broke out from the publishing traditions established in the 1970s.113 It was the first underground magazine to be sold in the kiosks—terrain usually reserved for humorous, satirical, and graphic narrative magazines—and it was one of the few publications in the kiosks to prioritize unknown artists and domestic material from Spain.114 Pérez del Solar comments that the key to the magazine’s success was that it “encontró un amplio público lector por medio de una presentación cruda de temas callejeros, la creación de un conjunto de personajes reconocibles que volvían en historias de ‘continuará’, y un humor negro que lo atravesaba todo, incluso la violencia y el sexo” (found a wide reading public through a crude presentation of street themes, the creation of a group of recognizable characters who reappeared in stories that were “to be continued,” and a dark humor that ran through it all, including violence and sex).115 El Víbora soon became synonymous with a comics aesthetic that was transgressive in both form and content and could be referred to by many different names. Pablo Dopico explains that synonyms for the generalized legacy of the underground comic in Spain included “cómic alternativo, contracultural, subterráneo, línea «chunga» o comix, terminado en x” (alternative comic, countercultural comic, underground comic, crappy line, or comix, ending in x).116 The notion of the línea chunga, translated in one instance as “crappy line,” deserves further attention.117 As Lladó Pol notes, stylistically, this label denotes comics whose graphic force was grounded in the absurd, the illegal, the irreverent, the hedonistic, and the aggressive; the classification itself can be seen as expressing an ironic conceptualization of these comics as an antidote to the lofty ambitions and overintellectualization of the art form.118 More accurately, however, the term “línea chunga” arises as a direct response to the línea clara, or clear-­line style, which was associated overwhelmingly with a tradition of comics dating to Hergé’s famous comic Tintín and identified with another new magazine in Spain titled Cairo, created in 1981, just a pair of years after El Víbora.119 While the terms for these two distinct stylistic lines are still in use in twenty-­first-­century comics discourse and comics scholarship, the controversy surrounding them tends to reach levels that seem somewhat polarized if not a bit contrived. Nonetheless, because Pere Joan’s connection with the clear-­line style is often overemphasized at the expense of a more profound understanding of his artistic contributions, it is important to discuss the general coordinates of the línea chunga versus línea clara debate in some degree of depth.

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It was the Dutch cartoonist Joost Swarte who first coined the term “ligne claire,” reportedly in Rotterdam in 1976 during an exposition dedicated to Tintín.120 Given the origins of Tintín’s creator Hergé, this style is also commonly known as an expression of the Franco-­Belgian school of comics. In a canonical formulation, as published by Salvador Vázquez de Parga in 1984, the clear line is characterized by “el realismo de los escenarios, el detalle y la minuciosidad, la documentación y el rigor .  .  . la linealización del trazo, continuo y acabado, la tendencia a la geometrización, la eliminación de lo superfluo, la escasez de negros y ausencia de tonos intermedios y la falta de relieve en las figuras, lo que originaba la fácil inteligibilidad del dibujo” (the realism of settings, the detail and the meticulousness, the documentation and the rigor . . . the straightening of the line, continuous and completed, the tendency toward geometrization, the elimination of the superfluous, the scarcity of shadows and the absence of intermediary tones and the lack of relief in the figures, which led to the image’s easy intelligibility).121 Written decades later in 2001, the terms in Lladó Pol’s definition of the clear-­line style match these almost exactly, and she also comments on its thematic content, citing its preference for linear adventure and more traditional narrative elements.122 In the sociocultural context specific to postdictatorial Spain, a certain friction can be observed in the reception of this clear-­line style. This friction concerns the connection of clear-­line pioneer Hergé’s work with the Francophone juvenile comics market on one hand, and the clear line’s stylistic pretension to an avant-­garde renovation of comics form on the other.123 While these two aspects may have coexisted more naturally in Franco-­Belgian contexts, the links with juvenile comics would prove too great of an obstacle for many comics artists and readers in Spain to overlook. The historical tensions surrounding the tebeo and its connection to a purely juvenile market in Spain, combined with the raucous cultural explosion (destape) during the Transition from dictatorial rule to democracy, led to a somewhat simplistic perception of the línea clara. As a consequence, it was associated with a vanguard comics tradition less frequently. Instead, many charged the clear line with effecting a retrograde infantilization of the ninth art. Even Javier Coma and Román Gubern—undoubtedly two of the most high-­profile pioneers of the move to legitimate comics as an object of serious study—effectively called for a boycott of the clear-­line style and wrote manifestos and articles against it.124

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The línea chunga versus línea clara debate indeed took an accurate pulse of wider attitudes regarding how comics should look in the turbulent years of the postdictatorship. The regularization of this polarized dichotomy in discourse, however, also hid the more nuanced points of connection between the two flag-­bearing magazines El Víbora and Cairo.To start, Cairo was not a magazine for children—despite the fact that, as a widely repeated anecdote had asserted, it was once displayed in the children’s section of a certain kiosk.125 As Pérez del Solar makes clear, both magazines featured sex, violence, and drugs—it was only that their appearance tended to be descontrolado (uninhibited) in El Víbora.126 In addition, it is difficult to argue that each magazine occupied its own distinct cultural sphere of influence. Overlap frequently occurred among the sets of artists who authored work in both publications. For example, Miguel Gallardo, known for his creation of the character Makoki, so popular that it led to an El Víbora spin-­off, also published in Cairo; and Pere Joan, whose work more frequently appeared in Cairo, also published in El Víbora. While Pérez del Solar identifies both complacent and critical threads in Cairo, he also suggests quite astutely that the effort to forge a comic for adults may initially have required creating a distance from the juvenile comic that proved unnecessary in later years.127 Significantly, Altarriba’s account is dismissive of the clear-­line controversy. He asserts that Cairo’s links with Hergé’s school were quite debatable and praises its artists—specifically mentioning Sento (Vicente Josep Llobell Bisbal), Micharmut, Pere Joan, Miquel Beltrán, Javier Montesol, and Daniel Torres—for “la originalidad de sus propuestas gráficas y en ocasiones también con sus aciertos narrativos” (the originality of their graphic offerings and on occasion also their skill in narrative).128 Similarly, Lladó Pol remarks that, along with Roger (Roger Subirachs i Burgaya), Montesol (Javier Ballester), Daniel Torres, Miquel Beltrán, and Gallardo, Pere Joan was one of many 1980s authors whose links with the clear line were based more on aesthetics than content.129 Launched in 1980, the Norma publishing house had aspirations to discover artists of the highest quality and charge readers a top-­shelf price for Cairo.130 It was understood by many that Norma’s flagship publication was the destination for sophisticated readers in search of the “cómic de autor” (auteur comic) and the historieta literaria (literary comic). From the beginning, it devoted several sections to comics criticism at a time when other magazines avoided it completely.131 It should not surprise, however, that terminology—so important in the history of comics in Spain—may

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have played a role in the controversy. The choice by Cairo’s director Joan Navarro and collaborator Ramón de España to brand the magazine’s contents as the neotebeo was clearly intended to call upon readers’ childhood memories of reading comics (and Tintín). Nonetheless, it may also have inflamed the resentment of those who had worked hard to establish a viable tradition of comics for adults in Spain.132 While Pere Joan and others may have been associated with the clear line through their connections with Cairo, as well as explicit classifications made in comics criticism,133 I believe that the larger controversy has, many times, overshadowed the value of their graphic innovations and original styles. In Pere Joan’s case in particular—with the distance that a holistic assessment of his work over four decades provides—it seems to me quite clear that he was forging a sophisticated comics tradition for adults. His gradual insistence on color, line, iconic representation, and an intimate style were all harnessed to comment on emotional feeling, the enigmas of experience, and the subtleties of contemplative thought. In its drive for aesthetic innovation and originality, Cairo may have been out of joint with its time, but the same might be said of Pere Joan, whose singular drive for originality, emotional tone, and intellectual impact has, in retrospect, made him the important artist he is today. His clear preference for focusing so deeply on the qualities of the image itself—perhaps even over notions of story or textual narrative—is best understood, I believe, as a welcome reaction to an entire period in the history of Spanish comics when, according to Terenci Moix, the image just simply did not matter.134 Varieties of genre comics experienced a significant rise in popularity during the 1980s as artists and readers turned increasingly toward what Lladó Pol calls “ciencia ficción” (science fiction), “relato negro” (hard-­ boiled story), “fantasía heroica” (heroic fantasy), “ambientación histórica” (historical orientation),“aventuras en segundo grado” (higher-­level adventures),“temática política” (political subject matter),“temática social” (social subject matter), “difícil integración social” (difficulties of social integration),“expresión de estados de ánimo” (expression of moods),“fábulas fantásticas” (fantastic stories), and “el cómic en el cómic” (the comic within the comic).135 A focus on what Alary calls “sexo, droga, comportamientos tribales, bajos fondos, violencia, humor negro gratuito” (sex, drugs, tribal behaviors, the slums, violence, gratuitous dark humor) persisted as the inheritance of underground comix continued to encourage depictions of rock-­and-­roll lifestyles in particular.136 The overemphasis on these themes,

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however, combined with an absurdist framework, arguably worked to neutralize the sociopolitical radicalism on which magazines such as El Víbora thrived.137 As Gema Pérez-­Sánchez explores in the fifth chapter of Queer Transitions in Contemporary Spanish Culture (2007), a book with a much broader scope, representations of women and LGBTQ people in 1980s comics were often ambivalent. In some cases, she argues, using the example of Nazario’s famous character Anarcoma, these representations were far less favorable than might be imagined, and must be seen in light of a normative 1980s culture that expresses a somewhat superficial fascination for otherness and sexual transgression.138 Overall, quantity had begun to displace quality and even critique as postdictatorship years saw Spain’s comics markets flood with magazines “que presentan como elemento unificador un retraso de la herencia recibida respecto a dibujantes americanos y europeos, que hará que los españoles tengan que actualizarse respecto a contenidos, autores, formas de expresión y mercado” (that presented as a unifying element a delay of the inheritance received through American and European artists, which prompted people in Spain to feel the need to get up to date regarding content, authors, forms of expression, and market).139 All of the creative energies implicit in the diversification of comics themes and styles during the 1980s could not ensure a particularly vibrant editorial landscape. As Alary notes, this period’s editorial market was impoverished, and publishing houses insisted on short-­form, one-­off stories that ultimately proved alienating to existing fans and did little to attract new readers. Lacking, in her estimation, was an alternative tradition of comics publishing willing to diversify individual publication lines and to think more expansively and innovatively about the future of the art form.140 It has also been suggested that artists seeking the forms of stability that might support a career encountered conditions that were hardly favorable.141 It is significant, then, that Pere Joan actually contributed to delivering, as discussed below, an editorial antidote to the very problem diagnosed by Alary. He did this through his creation of both a cutting-­edge comics magazine and an independent comics publishing house. App r oac h i n g t h e T w e n t y - ­Fi r st C e n t u ry

In Altarriba’s assessment, the last decade of the twentieth century marks the start of a third cycle of comics in Spain.142 While the comic had clearly lost the reputation it had enjoyed during the postdictatorship years

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as a sign of countercultural distinction,143 there was also cause for hope. Throughout the 1980s, there had been promises of increased legitimacy for the ninth art.144 The first Salón Internacional del Cómic de Barcelona was held in 1981,145 and comics artists were beginning to receive greater recognition. In 1986, for example, Mallorca launched an exposition devoted to Pere Joan and Max in anticipation of the II Setmana del Còmic.146 This rising legitimacy may have been a primary factor that prompted artists and publishers to think more seriously about the future. Above all else, then, the 1990s were a time of rebuilding for the art form and the comics industry in Spain. The last decade of the twentieth century introduced new challenges to comics publishing as magazines found it difficult to stay current, dealt with the rise of the internet, faced increased competition with other art forms, and witnessed a new influx of comics from abroad. Japanese comics flooded into Spain, as they did into other European markets.147 That said, there was also a renewed intellectual commitment to the ninth art, as new critics took the reins from the old and new magazines reactivated critical traditions originally established during the 1960s.148 In responding to these continuing energies and new challenges, the historieta of the 1990s was, according to Altarriba, resituated socially, culturally, and economically.149 While the 1980s privileged fast production cycles, encouraged fanzine-­ inspired publications, and purposely cultivated amateur approaches, the 1990s arguably saw a decisive shift toward increased emphasis on generating careful reflection on the medium, nurturing a steady advance toward more sustainable forms of production, and, ultimately, dwelling on questions of style that had long shaped the discourse of comics in Spain.150 Significantly, Pere Joan’s activities during these years demonstrate a deep commitment to developing both his unique artistic style and also the potential of the wider comics industry as a whole. Along with Max, Pere Joan founded Nosotros somos los muertos, which Altarriba refers to as “excepcional” (exceptional) and Pérez del Solar has called “una de las mejores revistas de cómic del cambio de siglo” (one of the best comics magazines of the turn of the century).151 Though started as a self-­published fanzine in 1993, it became a full-­fledged magazine in 1995.152 The venue’s characteristic experimentation and social commitment was on display from the first issue, which the editors put together during the 1993 Salón del Cómic de Barcelona. Pablo Dopico underscores this issue’s social commitment and its critique of the comics industry, noting that it included “una cruda

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historieta que denunciaba la guerra de Bosnia, un texto de Emilio Manzano y unas notas de Pere Joan sobre la violencia machista y fascistoide de algunos tebeos.Todo era una crítica a una industria del cómic falta de ideas y sin iniciativas interesantes” (a rushed historieta that denounced the war in Bosnia, a text by Emilio Manzano and some notes by Pere Joan about the machista and fascistic violence of some tebeos. It was all a critique of a comics industry that was lacking in ideas and interesting possibilities).153 Dopico refers here to the appearance in its pages of the essay “La mirada no es inocente” (The gaze is not innocent), a piece of writing by Pere Joan that Alary has referred to as “un verdadero manifiesto” (a true manifesto) and that Lladó Pol has characterized as “un text entre indignat i analític” (a text with indignant and analytical qualities).154 Pere Joan’s brief but incisive piece took comics artists and readers in Spain to task for their ongoing role in sustaining a hero-­oriented comics tradition rooted in fachista and machista attitudes.155 In this way, Nosotros somos los muertos appealed to seasoned intellectual comics readers interested in auteur traditions and high-­ quality work at a time when the popularity of manga was pulling readers away from the historieta.156 In selecting the title for their publication, Pere Joan and Max acknowledged widespread feelings lamenting the state of comics in Spain. Simultaneously, however, they also implicitly took responsibility for turning the tide and sparking new perceptions of the ninth art.157 Through both the first run of Nosotros somos los muertos and its subsequent renewal as NSLM, the publication gained an esteemed reputation as a “cómic de vanguardia” (avant-­garde comic) that contrasted with the more mainstream and market-­driven comics tradition.158 Pere Joan and Max’s publications not only published new artists from Spain (Francisco Torres Linhart, Paco Alcázar, Miguel Núñez, Gabi Beltrán, Javier Olivares, Santiago Sequeiros, Carlos Portela/Fernando Iglesias) but also veterans from the 1980s (Keko, Josep Martí, Gallardo, Federico Del Barrio), all of whom shared issues with veritable international stars, including Chris Ware, David B., Art Spiegelman, David Mazzucchelli, and Julie Doucet.159 Not content with the mere co-­creation of an acclaimed magazine, in 2000 Pere Joan founded his own publishing house, Inrevés, as a way of continuing to support the creative freedom of comics artists working outside the privileged market traditions of masculinist hero comics and Japanese manga.160 At his company Inrevés, he established two parallel publication lines, Nosotros somos los muertos/ Bueno&Raro and Los Medio Muertos, in the process responding to the

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need to correct for the shortsighted editorial visions of publishers in the 1980s as outlined by Alary.161 The creation of Inrevés followed on the heels of other 1990s publishing ventures that had grappled with changes to the publication and production process demanded by the rise of the internet.162 While web comics did not replace paper comics as some might have expected, technological advances aided in the composition, editing, and production of print comics and allowed the release of more modest runs.163 The lower production costs that resulted helped some publishing houses to stay in business. This was particularly true with regard to those such as Edicions de Ponent (1995) that were modeled on the “planteamiento editorial del fanzine” (fanzine approach to publishing) of the 1980s and sought to cultivate an independent comics reputation grounded in the auteur tradition.164 Meanwhile, larger publishing houses, such as Glénat (a Spanish branch of the eponymous French publisher) and Norma, kept afloat and even seemingly released a high number of titles per month due to reliance on the republication of foreign titles.165 And yet, the circuits of commercialization that kept comics viable as a popular art form in the 1990s were sometimes seen as suspect when contrasted with the frenetic energies of the postdictatorial comics counterculture. Alary explains Miguel Gallardo’s decision to kill off Makoki by citing the artist’s wish to prevent his popular character’s commercial recuperation.166 Attitudes of the time toward the future of comics were not necessarily optimistic. Altarriba, for example, made a prediction in 2002 suggesting that interest in the historieta would diminish considerably and that it would be pushed aside by newer media technologies, specifically the video game.167 In retrospect, comics in the twenty-­first century have seemingly survived this dour expectation. An emphasis on serialized comics reactualizing the narrative pacing and publication format of the folletín tradition has continued from the 1990s and may even have displaced the album as the more popular comics form in many stores.168 But as the enduring case of Pere Joan’s ambitious album work and publishing initiatives demonstrate, an independent comics market exists outside of these more mainstream circuits. In the 2000s, newer publishing houses focusing on the album format such as Inrevés and Edicions de Ponent steadily increased their market position. As García underscores toward the end of La novela gráfica, artists in Spain are increasingly in a position to export their talents internationally.169

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Astiberri in Bilbao is a leading publisher of both domestic comics produced in Spain and also foreign work. Perhaps marking a milestone, it published a Spanish translation of Scott McCloud’s Understanding the Comic as Entender el cómic in 2005. The creation of the Premio Nacional del Cómic (National Comics Award) in 2007 by the Ministerio de Cultura de España is also a further step in the legitimization of the vanguard comic and the auteur comic in Spain. It is reasonable to presume that those who have won the prize—including, for example, Max (2007), Paco Roca (2008), Kim and Antonio Altarriba (both in 2010), and Santiago García (2015)— have seen increased sales and even translations of their titles, contributing to the strength of the ninth art within Spain and internationally.170 Thus, although the next four chapters focus on close readings of Pere Joan’s work, they also contribute to a wider story. Influenced by the push toward legitimacy of the art form over the course of the twentieth century, Pere Joan’s generation of artists arguably cultivated the stylistic innovation and created the publishing structures that have assured the viability of comics in Spain in the twenty-­first century.

Chap ter 2

Topographies of the Image, Panel, and Page Comics Narr ation Three Ways

Careful analysis of Pere Joan’s oeuvre yields the formal and thematic coordinates for a topographical approach to comics. His graphic creations emphasize spatiality in their form and content, and the qualities of his images themselves predominate over his subdued and relatively infrequent uses of linear arrangements. In subsequent chapters I explore selected major works by the Mallorcan artist at length, but here I consider three brief but representative examples of his topographical thinking. Each of these examples foregrounds various connections between Pere Joan’s spatial approach to composition and a capacious formulation of comics that pushes beyond staid definitions that reduce it to being a strictly “sequential art.” Together, considerations of the artist’s innovative approach to the single image (Baladas Urbanas, 1976), the panel (Azul y ceniza, 2004), and the page (100 pictogramas para un siglo (XX), 2014), all deepen our understanding of the topographical dimensions of comics narrative. To appreciate the spatial or topographical qualities of Pere Joan’s work, it is important to move beyond limiting definitions of comics form

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that, unfortunately, still remain at the heart of study of the ninth art in the twenty-­first century. Widely read and sometimes undervalued, Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics (1994) defines comics somewhat reductively as “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in a deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.”1 Drawing on Will Eisner’s use of the term “sequential art,” McCloud excludes single images from his comics definition, noting that “when part of a sequence, even a sequence of only two, the art of the image is transformed into something more: the art of comics!”2 I dispute this claim, as do other scholars. In “Redefining Comics” (2012), for example, John Holbo returns to McCloud’s definition in order to question whether or not comics are obliged to be sequential. He also challenges the exclusion of single-­ panel work from a comics definition, noting the arbitrariness involved in concluding that multiple panels can narrate while single panels cannot.3 Provisionally, then, Holbo asks whether “any image in which it can be seen what is happening is narrative art, ergo . . . comics?”4 Aligning with Holbo’s questioning—and with a growing push within comics theory that challenges the simplistic reduction of comics to “sequential art”—Pere Joan’s art decisively locates the image itself at the center of the medium. Chapter 1 of this book has already mentioned both theoretical and historical challenges to the simplistic identification of comics with sequential art. It is crucial to return to those challenges here in passing. The first was theorist Thierry Groensteen’s recuperation of remarks made by one of the giants of modern comics—that is, that in the 1830s to 1840s Swiss artist Rodolphe Töpffer defined the comics album as “a book that, addressed directly to the eyes, expresses itself through representation and not through narration.”5 The second challenge appeared implicitly in the distinction made between two pioneers of the comics form in late-­ nineteenth-­century Spain. While José Luis Pellicer’s publication of “Por un coracero” (For a poor cigar; 1873) in El Mundo Cómico represents the sequential strain of comics in the rhythmic three-­panel push of its row/ strip format, Apeles Mestres’s publication of “Estudios psicológicos” (Psychological studies; 1880) in Granizada foregrounds the holistic impact of page design. Both of these diverging traditions of comics are valuable in their own right. Note that when it suits him to do so, Pere Joan himself is clearly comfortable working in both sequential and nonsequential modes. Nonetheless, contrary to the widespread acceptance of comics as a “sequential art” in both popular and scholarly realms, it is important to

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recognize the representational, image-­driven, and ultimately topographical tradition of comics to which the artist contributes with particular verve. Important in this regard are existing theoretical accounts underscoring the potential of comics images to narrate without sequence and even without words. In The Aesthetics of Comics (2000), David Carrier explores the immediate relationship between caricature and narrative, asking,“How is it that from one isolated image we envisage earlier and later moments of an ongoing visual narrative?”6 He also applies notions of high art to comics in ways that would allow for images to “narrate highly complex scenes without any appeal to words.”7 More recently, in Narrative Structure in Comics (2013)—a book with a very clear focus on what Groensteen would call the arthrological properties of comics in sequence—Barbara Postema takes pains to assert the “narrativity of the single image.”8 It is certainly true, as David Beronä has written, that “without dialogue, the images bear a heavier load for the understanding of context and narrative structure.”9 Nevertheless, as discussed in the first section below, a master of the art form such as Pere Joan can craft a compelling single-­image scene exploiting the graphic qualities of the image and rudimentary formal structures of comics, such as the word balloon, to convey highly complex narrative. While much of the work on narration in the ninth art has identified the medium with sequentiality, there is thus accumulating evidence that comics should be freed from the paradigmatic emphasis on sequence over image. Under such a new paradigm, word-­image combinations in sequence cease to be the primary standard-­bearer of comics. It thus becomes possible to explore the many ways in which the spatial and graphic dimensions of comics contribute to nonsequential or more-­than-­sequential forms of narration. The sections that follow foreground the alternative spatial elements of narration in comics by exploring specific examples of Pere Joan’s particularly innovative graphic work. These considerations reveal, first, the nonsequential narrative potential of the single image; next, the use of panel insets to create contrapuntal harmonies of narrative simultaneity; and finally, the planar flattening of the full-­page layout to place individual graphic elements in a topographical relationship to one another.10 The individual works selected here have the additional advantage of introducing readers to work produced over various stages in Pere Joan’s career— from his first images, through his development of a hallmark topographical style, and even his more recent and highly conceptual work. Discussion of each chosen example accomplishes two interrelated goals: it suggests a

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way of reading the panel/page topographically as a landscape, and it also emphasizes the spatial and topographical aspects of visual narratives that prioritize the image. The first example below uses a single untitled page-­spanning image from Baladas Urbanas (“Untitled,” 1976) to link Pere Joan’s thematic focus on landscape with a topographical approach to reading comics.11 This approach acknowledges the narrative potential of individual graphic elements on the page.Their story is told as readers scan the page at their own pace and in their own fashion. Such a nonsequential form of reading comics relies on contours, relief, and features on the page, much in the same way that geographical contours, relief, and features structure the embodied experience of “reading” landscape itself. Also on display in “Untitled” is Pere Joan’s uncanny ability to play intellectually with seemingly standard elements of comics form such as the word balloon.12 In substituting the word balloon’s traditional content with an image, he effectively turns this text zone into another feature of the graphic landscape of comics. The complex and perhaps even metaphysical visual reflection established between the word-­balloon image and the “primary” image on the page itself produces a narrative. Here the representation of geographic features combines with topographical elements of page composition to draw attention to the way in which emotion is experienced in and conditioned by place—a hallmark theme of Pere Joan’s overall oeuvre. In line with the artist’s emotional and intimate style, this narrative ties emotions and consciousness to space, place, and landscape. The initial sequence included in the oversized album Azul y ceniza (Blue and ash; 2004) is the second example chosen for analysis.13 Discussion of what might be considered Pere Joan’s midcareer masterpiece turns on the intriguing use of the panel inset in its first scene. Recalling earlier works such as “Diana piensa,” he uses either a single inset or, at times, multiple insets to blend the emotional and spatial components of an advancing sequential narrative. While this example does unfold in the context of an empaneled sequential narrative, closer examination reveals that the artist’s innovative use of these insets problematizes a simple or unitary view of sequential narration. He juxtaposes seemingly non-­sequitur images contained within the panel insets to the primary narrative of the larger panel sequence, creating a secondary, parallel narrative. This analysis thus calls attention to the potential for simultaneous (and relatively autonomous) narratives to coexist and interact in comics. Moreover, these panel insets

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specifically work to establish a tension between inner emotions and outer experience, one that is key to understanding the artist’s topographical style. Here, elements of comics arthrology become the mediator of dualistic reconciliations between space/place and feeling. Creating a comics border within the frame of the panel—through the inset—itself becomes a formal anchor for the interaction between the qualitative/intensive and the quantitative/extensive properties of experience in Pere Joan’s art more broadly. The third example is taken from the format of 100 pictogramas para un siglo (XX) (2014). Here, the flattened planar logic of Pere Joan’s expansive panels opens up a discursive space for the contemplation of social and historical relationships. The use of page-­spanning landscape panels allows for relatively autonomous figures and images to mutually condition and define one another through their spatial arrangement. The use of space in these panels expands upon the linear logic that tends to predominate in serial and sequential images and asserts the topographical potential of the medium. While one can see this stylistic emphasis—here and elsewhere— in terms of what Charles Hatfield calls the “page-­as-­object,”14 100 pictogramas is perhaps most unusual in terms of how it does not use page space. That is, in his essay “The Construction of Space in Comics” (2009), Pascal Lefèvre has explored a fundamental conundrum for comics art: “Every flat image has to deal with its fundamental two-­dimensional aspect: the picture can try to deny the flatness by suggesting an illusionary depth or, on the contrary, can accentuate this flatness.”15 Instead of manipulating perspective to achieve an “illusory depth,” Pere Joan pointedly decides to “accentuate this flatness.” In this specific case, the artist’s intentional sacrifice of depth—his decision to maximize and call attention to the two-­ dimensionality of the page—functions as a visual prompt. Responding to this prompt, viewers are encouraged to compensate for the lack of depth on the page by using their imaginations to extend the social and historical dimensions of his art into the world outside of the comic. Page space thus blends into historical space, connecting the relatively autonomous realms of art and society. All three of these examples anticipate the analyses of Pere Joan’s comics topographies carried out in subsequent chapters of this book. Baladas Urbanas introduces the depiction of rural space and its connection with the spatial extension of emotion explored further in chapter 3.The central depiction of Mallorca’s airport in the example from Azul y ceniza introduces the tropes of urban life, mobility, and belonging that constitute the

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core of chapter 4. Finally, the highly conceptual design of 100 pictogramas highlights the artist’s more metaphorical and historical mode of comics discourse that informs my discussion in chapter 5 of themes connected to his native Mallorca.

Example 1: “Untitled,” Baladas Urbanas (Urban ballads; 1976) The best way to introduce readers to the significance of landscape for understanding both Pere Joan’s drawn content and the spatial form of his art is to begin with an example whose formal arrangement seems straightforward (fig. 2.1).The simple appearance of this arrangement, however, proves deceptive. Selected for this purpose is a single image from the 1976 collection Baladas Urbanas, a multiauthored, self-­published fanzine that alternates between images drawn by Pere Joan, Rosa María Sánchez, and Max (Francesc Capdevila Gisbert). This is a stand-­alone page, unconnected to others in the collection. Nevertheless, it foregrounds hallmark aspects of the preferred content and formal style that can be observed throughout Pere Joan’s career. Because the discussion that follows concerning its formal properties is somewhat complex, a thorough description of the iconic and formal properties of this image is first necessary.This description highlights those compositional symmetries within the image important for its subsequent analysis. Pere Joan’s untitled and wordless image depicts a rural scene and takes up an entire unpaneled page.16 A human man and a small creature sit together inside a small ring of rocks on a wide expanse of seemingly unpopulated land.17 A few thin lines in the background convey the distant hills and valleys of a varied terrain. Other than the existence of these few hills and valleys, the landscape is seemingly barren. Behind the figure of the seated man, a bit more than half of the vertical dimension of the page is entirely devoid of detail. That is, there are no sky conditions in the background to speak of—no visible sun, no clouds. Against this background—or rather, against this relative absence of background—the small ring of rocks distinguishes itself in two senses, both geographically and graphically. In terms of landscape denotation, readers immediately see that it is a raised portion of terrain—topographically elevated over other points on the depicted landscape. Moreover, the privileged geographic positioning of the pair of beings reinforces the privileged attention given to them by the artist, who places them in the foreground of the image. As readers,

Figure 2.1. Pere Joan, “Untitled,” from Baladas Urbanas (1976:7)

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we seem to be a few feet away from them on the same raised portion of ground. In terms of stylistic connotation, the geographic placement and graphic positioning of the small ring of rocks, combined with the relative absence of background detail and the excessive use of white space, suggest self-­containment or a relative intimacy. In this way, the image takes on the qualities of a concise parable in prose, a vignette in photographic exposure, or a philosophical principle.18 The human actor’s posture and countenance reinforce this self-­ containment conveyed through the composition of the image. He is relaxed, calm, and quiet, with an expressionless face.Though he is depicted in the close foreground of the image, cropping out the view to his immediate left and right, his emotional state demonstrates that there is no hint of threat from either side of the page. Because the two figures sit at roughly a ninety-­degree angle to one another, it seems they are involved in a conversation of sorts, even despite the man’s physical and emotional stillness. This stillness is in marked contrast to the state of the creature with whom the man shares the intimate space of the small rock circle enclosure. Tears spring from the creature’s eyes. Its open mouth and upward gaze indicate a vocalization of strong emotion—perhaps sadness, pain, fear, regret, or some combination thereof. A word balloon—not a thought balloon—emanates from the creature and extends up into the top third of the image’s blank background. This carries it well above the man’s figure, taking up space that presumably might have otherwise been used for the depiction of sky conditions. The balloon trail leading from the creature’s mouth is quite long and narrow. The balloon itself is sizable, perhaps even larger than the figure of the man himself. In place of words, the balloon houses only the iconic depiction of a creature whose features recall the creature seated in the rock circle. Visible in the balloon are only the head, arms, and upper torso of the creature, whose image is pushed down to the bottom of the balloon’s predominantly empty space. In this way, the composition of the balloon also recapitulates the composition of the larger page—a wide expanse of white space located at the top and an image concentrated in the foreground at the bottom of the page. With the above description completed, a more thorough exploration of “Untitled” complicates our understanding of how narrative is defined in comics. In chapter 2 of Comics and Narration, Groensteen asks and then explores a question very pertinent to our understanding of the monoframe under consideration: “Can an isolated image narrate? Can it, on its

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own, tell a story?”19 His initial conclusion underscores that while “the narrative potential [of the still image] is not intrinsic, it can only arise, where it does arise, out of certain internal relationships between the objects, motifs and characters represented.”20 In tracing how narrative potential arises out of Pere Joan’s still image, it is important to link the topographical relationships between elements visible (and nonvisible) on the page with the primary theme of landscape. Landscape geography both reveals and actively shapes the relationship between the man and the creature represented in the image.The drawn terrain puts them in a relationship with one another and distinguishes them from their environment. The viewer’s perusal of “Untitled” then necessarily unfolds along two visual axes and—however it is carried out—must be constructed from: (1) the visual juxtaposition of the two figures, man and creature, and (2) from the copresence of the two iconically similar creature figures, who are separated by the formal construct of the word balloon. Space enters decisively into both of these concerns. The positioning of the two beings within the small circle of rocks marks them as fundamentally similar, despite their differing appearance. The distance between them preserves a sense of autonomy, such that the relationship between the two remains undetermined. The use of iconic representation in the word balloon emanating from the creature leads to a similarly indeterminate meaning. As a narrative marker, the balloon itself may be seen to connote a distinct space (referencing the same or another creature in the present moment) or a distinct time (the same or another creature in a past or future moment).The one thing that is common to these interpretations is the emotional force conveyed by the balloon image. Numerous aspects of the image accumulate to indicate a low, depressive, sad, fearful, or otherwise fraught emotional state: the shading on the creature, the blotch on its forehead, the large volume of empty space that envelops it, its positioning at the bottom of the balloon, and the visual hint of its shading partially down the long narrow tube of the balloon trail, for instance. Considered along these two axes (man-­creature juxtaposition, and relationship of one creature image to the other via the balloon), the image stands alone as what Groensteen might describe as an exercise de style.21 At the level of representation,“Untitled” explores the mutually conditioning effect of artistic choices regarding space and the portrayal of emotion. Given that this is one of the artist’s first (self-­)published images, and given the seemingly spontaneous nature of the zine publication Baladas Urbanas, it

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may be tempting for viewers to see the overreliance on blank space as amateurish. Instead, it signals the preference for a characteristically sparing style that can be observed throughout his career. For instance, in early work such as “La lluvia blanca” (1984) and in much later work such as 100 pictogramas (2014) and especially Viaje a Cotiledonia (2015), blank space is crucial to the artist’s insistence on the division between foreground and background. In “Untitled,” just as in these other comics albums from his early and later periods, Pere Joan’s style conjures into being a visual-­topographical structure of sharp relief. The effect is that figures and images appear to reveal themselves from beneath the surface of the monocolor page as so many interconnected geographic features might, over time, reveal themselves geologically from beneath the surface of water. In these instances of sharp relief, we might consider the figures and images on the page as topographical features, shifting our orientation and imagining the page not as what one might see when looking horizontally out a window, but instead as what one might see when looking down vertically from a bird’s-­eye view or the extreme vantage point offered by a natural cliff formation. As in other work by Pere Joan—particularly evident in chapter 3’s exploration of emotional cartographies (e.g., 16 novel·les amb hòmens blaus and El aprendizaje de la lentitud)—the reader’s reception of this monoframe is very much influenced by the development of spatial-­geographic context along emotional coordinates. Here, the enigmatic, nonrational qualities of feeling and subjectivity triumph over the concreteness that tends to be delivered by other comics artists who rely on more conventional narrative and action-­based plots. What is so powerful in this case is how the artist drastically repurposes the concreteness of both geographic representation and comics art for his stylistically enigmatic and emotional ends. Indeed, the spatial context of depicted landscape and the spatial form of the page composition resemble one another. This compositional resemblance is orchestrated to fuse formal and visual qualities. The artist thus imbues emotion with extensive spatial properties that emanate beyond the self. He simultaneously reaffirms the potential of geographic space and landscape to signify emotion. Even if the precise nature of the narrative produced by the image is still somewhat unclear (more on this below), for the moment we can continue to explore the visual elements that contribute to the narrative potential of this single unpaneled page. Groensteen’s further remarks on single-­panel narration in Comics and Narration are somewhat nuanced but ultimately also quite relevant to the

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present analysis of “Untitled.” Introducing what he calls the “radical position” adopted by Harry Morgan in Principes de littératures dessinées (Principles of drawn literatures; 2003), Groensteen reflects on what the author called the “narrative potential of the single image.”22 Morgan had argued that a single image “can narrate if it contains relationships of causality and consecutiveness” or in cases “where events before or after (the cause or the effect) can be deduced from the scene that is shown.”23 To this, Groensteen contrasts his own thought that narrative is defined as including “a beginning and an end, or, to put it another way, an element of development of the action, of evolution of the initial situation, from state A to state B.”24 He then quickly adds his conclusion that single images can evoke a story but not tell a story, and marks an important exception: “the exception to the rule occurs when the single image encompasses several different scenes, that is to say that it plays on juxtaposition within its own space.”25 With this comment, Groensteen in effect agrees with an insight he has already quoted from Morgan’s work—that nineteenth-­century readers took for granted that a single image (painting) could be narrative.26 He also asks readers to consider two further points of interest: François Garnier’s definition of the “narrative image” in medieval iconography as “a set of elements and relationships that present an incident or tell a story” and Wendy Steiner’s insistence that the repetition of the subject figure can itself be a sufficient indicator of visual narrative.27 Significantly, in the introductory material for Tingram (2003), Pere Joan himself has written, “Mi situación personal, como narrador en tanto dibujante de tebeos, y recreador, maquillador en tanto ilustrador, me fuerza a exigir la independencia del dibujo como ente autónomo. Al mismo tiempo, es evidente que a menudo juego con la aparente contradicción de intentar contar historias en un solo dibujo o bien construir atmósferas con el medio de la historieta” (My own situation, as a narrator and drawer of comics, and a reproducer, colorist, and illustrator, forces me to demand the independence of the image as an autonomous entity. At the same time, it is clear that I sometimes play with the apparent contradiction of intending to tell stories in a single image or else constructing atmospheres in the comics medium).28 While, understandably, the artist’s own statement of his intention to create narrative in a single-­image may not be enough for some critics, here it is mentioned merely to strengthen the insights from theoretical sources already highlighted. It should be quite clear that “Untitled” boasts a number of the qualities just outlined in relation to narrative

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potential by Groensteen, Morgan, Garnier, and Steiner (also Postema and Holbo).These are: causality and/or consecutiveness, the reader’s deduction of before and after/cause and effect, the relating of an incident, the visual repetition of the subject figure, and juxtaposition internal to the image. All of these qualities are informed by the graphic and spatial relationships established between the two actors in the image. In the end, they hinge on the artist’s innovative use of the text balloon turned image balloon, as explored below. I reserve for consideration at the end of this section the question of whether or not there should be a specificity threshold for defining comics narrative. This question is quite relevant not only to analysis of this image but also to the broader question of what constitutes narrative in Pere Joan’s oeuvre as a whole. Although prefigured in comics by the earlier use of its forerunner, phylactera, the balloon only became popular in comics in the twentieth century.29 Critics disagree, however, about its role in definitions of the comics medium. While David Kunzle insists that the speech balloon is not “a definitive ingredient of the comic strip,” David Carrier defines the strip precisely as “a narrative sequence with speech balloons.”30 He writes that “the speech balloon is a defining element of the comic because it establishes a word/image unity that distinguishes comics from pictures illustrating a text.”31 Read against these comments, “Untitled” is unconventional, to say the least. It is the artist’s intriguing use of the word balloon that provides the decisive graphic and hermeneutic force that ends by producing narrative.32 It makes possible the reader’s deduction of cause and effect/before and after, and it introduces temporality graphically into the image through comics form. This should not be surprising, given Román Gubern’s classification of the balloon as an “elemento de metalenguaje” (element of metalanguage) in comics.33 As the Spanish comics scholar notes, it can serve as host to all manner of thoughts, fantasies, memories, and dreams.34 It may even contain what he calls a visual metaphor, “una de las más curiosas convenciones lingüísticas de los comics” (one of the most curious linguistic conventions in comics).35 While visual representations of thought have been studied in both the Anglophone and Spanish contexts,36 this comic introduces an innovative use of the balloon that has not been sufficiently theorized. Critics have explored both blank thought balloons and stylized stereotypical or conventional uses of images in balloons.37 Examples would be images of paper money to indicate dreams of success or the image of a log being sawed to

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indicate snoring. Yet this particular use cannot be explained in the same way. It relies on no preestablished conventional or colloquial cultural codes in circulation outside of its own visual presentation.38 Instead, it acquires meaning solely from the way it duplicates this presentation within the image itself. Our considerations must push beyond Hatfield’s observation that “in comics word and image approach each other” to acknowledge how word is substituted by image in this instance.39 If balloons themselves are typically examples of “the word made image,” then Pere Joan’s image balloon demonstrates a reterritorialization of the word by the image.40 This reterritorialization can be understood through one or both of the tools identified by Groensteen himself: either “excessive monstration” or, alternately, the “iconization of speech.”41 In cases of excessive monstration, the image zone has invaded—or to substitute this war metaphor for a water metaphor that I believe is better adapted to the water themes of Pere Joan’s graphic art—spilled into the textual zone. In cases of the “iconization of speech,” the traditional disconnection between levels of recitation and monstration in comics is dissolved. The effect is to render the entire page as more of a single fluid spatial dimension. Narrative—in the sense of written or spoken language, recitation/récit—is collapsed into the image plane, or what Groensteen calls the image zone.42 It is significant that Pere Joan’s word balloon carries no words, but instead an image that would be equally at home in the image zone—and which in fact mirrors, or rather replicates, a specific image from that zone. In “Untitled,” the word balloon ceases to function in relative autonomy from the image at the level of recitation, and instead acquires what I call a topographical function. The word balloon is a topographical marker in that it merely marks a distinction internal to the image zone rather than a shift from the level of monstration to the level of recitation. Tied in with these considerations, Pere Joan’s use of an image in place of words in the balloon also marks a temporal shift internal to the single panel’s narrative.While “words in a balloon usually are in the present tense, like dialogue in a novel,”43 here the visual repetition of a character from the primary panel space implies the past or future, rather than the present. This is accentuated by the visual orientation of the image low within the balloon and by the blotch on the creature’s forehead, which together contribute to signaling either a past lament or a future fear. Here there is evidence to support the assertion made by Postema that “even single images . . . contain codes that allow them to imply narrative and the passage of

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time, even if the image does not create a complete narrative, because it cannot actually show change over time.”44 “Untitled,” in my view, indisputably implies narrative and temporality in a single image.45 Pere Joan’s image is doubly complex—not only because it substitutes images for words in the speech balloon but more fundamentally because it completely lacks words. No words appear in any of what Jan Baetens and Pascal Lefèvre call the “three major zones where writing may occur” in this comics image.46 As Will Eisner reminds us in Comics and Sequential Art (2008), this is a strategy that asks much of readers: “Images without words, while they seem to represent a more primitive form of graphic narrative, really require some sophistication on the part of the reader (or viewer). Common experience and a history of observation are necessary to interpret the inner feelings of the actor.”47 While Pere Joan’s comics art from the 1980s—as explored in this book’s introduction—is much more conventional by comparison, the development of his hallmark style from the mid-­1990s onward gravitates toward wordless images and asserts the narrative potential of images themselves. This is particularly true in the long-­form comics analyzed in the next chapter. Finally, I return to the matter of a specificity threshold regarding narrative in comics. I do not rush to explain comics through recourse to prose literature, but I believe that in the present case such a comparison can be quite helpful. It is next to impossible to define narrative in literature by the specificity of “what happens.” This is particularly true when considering the high-­profile prose literature published in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s in Spain. Novelists of the time purposely developed an opaque approach to artistic production within innovative forms that evolved within the specific sociohistorical context of the Franco dictatorship. One can only hope to answer questions of “what happens” with great difficulty, if at all, when considering masterpieces of prose literature such as Luis Martín-­Santos’s Tiempo de silencio (1961), Juan Benet’s Volverás a Región (1967), Carmen Martín Gaite’s El cuarto de atrás (1978), and Luis Goytisolo’s La cólera de Aquiles (1983), for example. Why should this particular aspect of artistic production be any different in the case of comics? In broadly artistic terms, Pere Joan’s comics production is contextually linked to the narrative imprecision and blurred-­event aesthetics of the literary cultures implied through these works. Moreover, to require high levels of precision of comics narrative seems to me to be anathema to the innovative literary style of comics that Pere Joan and others tried to forge in Cairo in the 1980s and 1990s.48

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Suggesting that “Untitled” creates a visual narrative should not be equivalent to requiring of it, as Groensteen might, a “precise and predetermined script.”49 David Carrier adopts a narrow view similar to Groensteen’s, observing that when “the artist’s image is visually ambiguous—capable of more than one plausible interpretation—then he or she has failed to communicate.”50 I am tempted to see the ambiguity of Pere Joan’s comics narrative as a sign of sophistication rather than agree with Carrier that comics need to be “absolutely unambiguous.”51 It is thus also a sign of distinction, and not an impoverishment of the medium, that “Untitled” invites us to linger on its single image.52 It is precisely by lingering—by scanning the topography established through its figures and formal details—that viewers may dwell on the intimate connections between space, place, landscape, and emotion that inform its multiple and mysterious narrative connotations. Furthermore, to suggest this way of reading comics is to align it with the hallmark insight of cultural geography referenced in the introduction. Like geographical landscapes, comics topographies enjoy a high level of polysemy.53 Their meanings are neither preestablished nor innate but instead constructed through the active participation of the individual reader.54 As discussed through the next example from Pere Joan’s oeuvre, comics artists can play with space on the page and within the panel itself to suggest nuanced relationships between mental/emotional consciousness and physical/geographical place. This topic is further discussed in chapter 3, where I focus on the representation of rural spaces.

Example 2: Azul y ceniza (Blue and ash; 2004) The publication of Pere Joan’s ambitiously conceived and oversized work Azul y ceniza is an important milestone in his comics production. Printed in 2004 by Inrevés, the publishing house the artist formed in 2000—and released in the Bueno & Raro collection edited by the artist and his collaborator Max—the work exemplifies his reputation for innovation as both a comics artist and an editor. At 42 cm high by 30 cm wide, its dimensions alone assert a challenge to the regularity implied through the history of the industrialized comic in Spain. As Viviane Alary has noted, the industry had long been obsessively driven by cheap production costs that could only end by cultivating an aesthetic norm that relied on the artist’s economic use of space.55 In truth, the album’s size is defiantly at odds with not only mainstream but also independent publishing traditions—whether in Spain

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or in Francophone and Anglophone traditions. If Pascal Lefèvre is right to assert the primary importance of publication format, it should be of interest that he does not include anything similar to the format of Azul y ceniza in his musings.56 Here Pere Joan mixes together the traits of various publication formats—from the regular tiers of strip formats to the oversized full-­page panel and quite a bit in between. Though it corresponds loosely to the critic’s category of “one-­shot graphic novel non-­mainstream,” it is neither hardcover nor limited in size to 22.5 × 30 cm.57 In addition, due to the extreme dimensions of each page, the variance of panel size, the use of gallery formats in ungridded panel space, and of course Pere Joan’s characteristic style, reading speed tends to be slower here than in other graphic novels.The integration of social and historical content into a sophisticated graphic style and literary approach also requires quite a bit of readers. In terms of artistic content, the work is an intriguing amalgam of interconnected stories.This innovative approach to storytelling further encourages the artist to play with different panel sizes and arrangements as he works through different story lines.58 Francesca Lladó Pol remarks that the work is a “conjunt d’històries encadenades per un tema comú, a la vegada que intimista, en què reflexiona sobre aquell sector de la societat que es continua sacrificant per uns interessos no sempre aconseguits” (group of stories linked by a common and at the same time intimist theme, in which he reflects on that sector of society who continually sacrifice themselves in the name of goals that may not always be attainable).59 While its themes and interdependent narrative might also be analyzed at the more global level of the multiframe in a future study, the comments included here are restricted in scope to one of Azul y ceniza’s relatively autonomous episodes. This analysis exhibits potential for insets to evidence a form of contrapuntal narrative simultaneity. Readers should be aware that Pere Joan had used the inset device in a number of earlier works. In “Pasajero en tránsito” (Pere Joan 1999, originally published in 1982), for example, we find the more traditional one-­off usage of the inset described by Groensteen.60 The use of a thought balloon containing an abstract image appears quite frequently in “Los secretos de la Dragonera” (Pere Joan 1999, originally published in 1982).61 The end of “Cita en Jartum” (Pere Joan 1999, originally published in 1983) incorporates oneiric thought balloon images, carrying them to the level of the page in a semisubjective panel at the conclusion in a way that anticipates elements of the discussion carried out in this section.62 The spatial

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distribution of insets paired with severed body parts is quite imaginative in “Los mensajeros del cuerpo” (Pere Joan 1999, originally published in 1983; see fig. 0.4), and the insets on the penultimate and last pages of “El gran motor Brown-­Pericord” (Pere Joan 1999, originally published in 1983) are also equally striking.63 Perhaps most intriguingly, the one-­page comic “Diana piensa . . .” (Diana thinks . . . ; 1984) includes a four-­panel sequence of insets in the center-­top area of its single large panel (fig. 2.2).64 The example of panel insets appearing in the first pages of Azul y ceniza, however, speaks most clearly to this book’s larger theme of space, landscape, and comics form. Pere Joan’s usage in Azul y ceniza is far from conventional. Given the expansive panel space of the oversize format as well as the careful panel composition, there are no real issues of concealment that, in Groensteen’s estimation, can so often occur.65 Panel structure differs greatly from the functions highlighted by Postema in Narrative Structure in Comics, where she writes:“Inset panels can also be used to establish an atmosphere, to create a sense of time passing in relation to the main panel, or both.”66 Here in Azul y ceniza the artist does not use the panel inset to “fragment time” but rather to multiply it, showing the relatively autonomous interplay of inner time and exterior time/experience.67 Readers should also take note that, as both Postema and Groensteen have underscored, insets carry the potential to signify effects of time quite broadly.68 Analysis of this chosen example thus focuses on a somewhat unique instance of narrative simultaneity as a way of connecting inner thought and extensive space through abstract graphic representation. As revealed later in this brief analysis, the possible meaning of the inset’s abstract graphic representation is reinforced through retroactive determination. That is, its meaning becomes more clear later, once Pere Joan shifts from wordless panels to a section of textual dialogue. Although I use the terms primary and secondary narrative for the sake of clarity—to refer to the larger panel sequence and the inset panel sequence in Azul y ceniza, respectively—it is important to keep in mind Postema’s writings on “Inserts/Insets.” She suggests that “while the larger or ‘host’ panel may have the primacy from a visual point of view, it may not come first in terms of the reading order of the panels and thus in the formation of action and narration.”69 Groensteen’s comments in The System of Comics (2007) also underscore the variability of meaning resulting from the use of the inset.70 In line with Pere Joan’s topographical tendency to give readers some degree of freedom in terms of how they approach

Figure 2.2. Pere Joan, “Diana piensa . . .” (1999 [originally published in 1984]: 126)

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many of his page layouts, the spatial location of insets in this case does not definitively suggest the priority of either narrative. That is, these insets do not appear at the extreme upper left or top borders of the panel, locations that might encourage their priority in the reading.71 Instead, their locations shift and appear to float around within a certain zone of the panel space—toward the top, but not at the border, and oscillating from the left, toward the center-­left and even toward the center-­right of panels. Their dynamism presents a challenge to the habitual priority given to the larger panel sequence in which the insets are enmeshed. As Postema also observes, “The application of inset panels instead of regular panels in a layout signifies largely on a connotative level rather than signifying anything specifically. Inset panels are more likely to suggest simultaneity or parallelism of certain moments, as well as focusing more attention on both the inserted and the host panel, compared to a layout that does not involve insets.”72 Azul y ceniza thus provides compelling evidence of this claim to simultaneity. It is Groensteen who explains this claim most concisely: “To put it very simply, the inset translates a relationship of the type meanwhile, when the traditional intericonic void is generally equivalent to a then.”73 One notes a tendency for this meanwhile to be read in terms of actions, rather than thoughts. In the Spanish context, for example, Luis Gasca and Román Gubern have also theorized the simultaneity offered by insets, writing of the use of “viñetas-­detalle” (detail ­panels/insets) to “representar acciones simultáneas, o inmediatamente anteriores o posteriores a la de la viñeta principal” (represent actions that are simultaneous, or immediately prior or posterior to that of the principal panel).74 That said, it is important to note that the form of simultaneity evident in this work by Pere Joan is not one of action, but rather one of feeling and inner experience. This understanding aligns more with Postema’s comments on the connotative level of inset representation and with the hallmark characteristics of an intimate and emotional style. The first sequence of Azul y ceniza runs from page 2 to page 11 and centers on a travel narrative unfolding in an airport.75 This analysis focuses on the appearance of two interconnected subnarratives that interact throughout this sequence. One is carried out through transitions that are typical of McCloud’s formulation: large landscape panels where action-­to-­action and, increasingly, moment-­to-­moment transitions predominate.76 At this level of this sequential narrative, viewers participate in the construction of an action plot hinging on a climactic and explosive moment. A central

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actor—let us call him Blue—arrives at a midsize airport in a somewhat urban area, and an establishing panel sets the location.77 The next four margin-­spanning panels capture him from the side, front, side, and rear as he enters the terminal. In each of these instances, Blue occupies a minor slice of the total panel space, and his figure is cleanly distanced from other objects and persons represented in the scene. Given the use of landscape panels here, the sequence is read vertically, while the horizontal axis of the page expanse is undivided within any given panel. It is only at the end of the second full page that the artist creates a panel break within what becomes the sequence’s first horizontal row of panels (fig. 2.3).78 The next two pages each display a more traditional four-­row layout of panels; while the verso includes two page-­spanning landscape panels as two of those rows, the recto page contains no such panels.79 The resulting effect over the first four pages is thus a gradual transition from the openness and expanse of landscape panels of significant height toward a more narrow, squat, and ultimately claustrophobic logic. The arc of this shift approaches but never fully achieves the traditional grid-­iron panel structure some readers and critics have come to equate with the medium. This gradual formal transition is reflected in the content of the primary panel narrative itself. In brief, Blue navigates the crowd, is bumped by a seemingly unremarkable stranger carrying a green bag, passes through a group of travelers blocking his way, checks the clock, and passes the Duty Free store. The last panel of the fourth page displays a close-­up of the green bag, which—resonating with panels in the first and second rows on the page through retroactive determination—has been left intentionally on the blue airport bench by the unremarkable traveler. This panel is the most narrow readers have seen so far. It thus capitalizes on the sequence’s progressive spatial restriction and maximizes an effect of pent-­up energy. In a splendid flourish connecting formal innovation and narrative content at the level of the multiframe—that is, the comics text considered as material book—readers “activate the bomb” in the green bag merely by turning from one page to the next. The following two-­page spread depicts the ensuing terminal disaster in a markedly gray color palette to highlight the ceniza (ash) of the comic’s title.80 Landscape panels mingle with more traditional rows of panels as Blue regains consciousness and emergency crews arrive to help the injured. That the reader, to a degree, has been complicit in this event by turning the page serves to prompt an immediate sympathy with the victims.

Figure 2.3. Pere Joan, Azul y ceniza (2004:3)

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In the denouement that follows, we learn that Blue is an author under pressure from his editor to complete his next book. As narrated through both large and small panels with occasional oneiric and subjective effects, he entertains articles on a series of provocative news items while on another plane flight: on the thirty-­nine members of the Heaven’s Gate cult who committed suicide in 1997, on a practice widespread in Ibiza whereby schoolchildren committed self-­harm and bloodletting in the hopes of having their deepest wishes fulfilled, and on a group of Cubans who injected themselves with HIV as a form of protest in the 1990s.81 Most important, he also engages in visual flights of fancy while his consciousness drifts during the airplane flight. Importantly, these flights of fancy, as discussed below, recall defining elements of the contrapuntal (secondary) narrative established through metaphorical insets—to which discussion now turns. To the primary action plot of this first segment of Azul y ceniza is added a secondary narrative that is crafted entirely through inset panels. These begin on page 2 in the first landscape image after the establishing panel, and continue until the moment when the unremarkable stranger bumps into Blue in the airport terminal at the bottom of page 4.82 Pere Joan often uses more than one inset per panel, so the total count of insets is sixteen, spread over only eleven sequential panels. Bundling the insets together in groups of two or four allows a secondary narrative sequence to unfold not merely across larger panel transitions but also within the individual panels themselves.83 The result is a harmonic narrative of inner experience complementing the melodic narrative of the airport/bomb sequence at the level of the main panel. Significantly, too, the artist’s insets are unusual in terms of what Groensteen calls the hyperframe. They occupy a curious positioning on the page, partway between the word balloon and the panel inset. Strictly speaking, they are neither fully one nor the other. Their square shape with rounded corners and thin black outlines suggests an inset panel, but readers immediately also notice a trail of thought bubbles connecting the inset to the central actor, Blue.This mixture of formal elements that tend to be discrete (inset and thought balloon) is a particularly striking example of Pere Joan’s penchant for innovation on the comics page. Several aspects of the secondary narrative fashioned through the insets are worth mentioning, including its content and color palette, as well as its compositional relationship to the primary panel narrative and the overall effect of these simultaneous narratives on readers. At the level of content, what appears is a series of views evoking a microscopic slide and displaying

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a creature that progressively emerges from a viscous fluid. A restricted four-­color palette (red, orange, green, white, with black outlines for definition) evolves over the course of the inset sequence. Reading from one inset to the next, within and across panels, produces a narrative. Readers first see an orange fluid with two floating white objects. A globular red creature slowly emerges from the fluid and fastens the white objects on its head as horns. As it pulls itself upward onto two legs, what seem to be green leaves begin to whirl around it, above the level of the orange fluid. Further white horns are drawn to the red creature with great force, as indicated by black motion lines, and begin to puncture its body along varying axes.The whirling green leaves also increase in number and achieve greater and greater density. By the final inset, these have obscured any view of the creature and its horns. The evolution of this narrative unfolds over a number of pages, paralleling the airport narrative of the larger panels already described above. Consistent with Pere Joan’s overall emotional and personal style, and contrasting with the action story line from which he gradually distances himself in his career, the insets can be described as somewhat abstract, conceptual, or metaphorical. Although it is possible to suggest that the inset sequence itself relies on moment-­to-­moment or, occasionally, action-­to-­ action transitions, the depiction of the red creature is not meant to be taken literally, as it might be in a science fiction narrative, for example. Instead, it may be interpreted as a wordless and visual representation of Blue’s inner state of consciousness. As such, it is a complement to the physical state of his body’s movement through an extensive spatial environment. Just as in “Untitled,” here the insets display a characteristically stark relief pattern that emphasizes a great distance between foreground and background and minimizes other details in the scene. Juxtaposed with the cool color palette of the airport environment through which Blue walks in the primary narrative, the red and orange palette insets display a warmth or frenetic heat, even as they suggest metaphorical representations of varied emotional states such as determination, agency, confusion, pain, powerlessness, and perhaps resignation.84 Readers are given no particular assistance regarding how to interpret these images. The insets are consistently connected to Blue via thought bubbles and thus emphasize his relative inner dissociation from the surrounding environment. This is made clear in the moment when the stranger bumps into him and the orange thought bubble inset dissolves, drawing the protagonist fully back

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into his embodied present in the architectural space of the airport in Palma de Mallorca.85 Even from this brief treatment it should be clear that Pere Joan uses the simultaneity of the primary and the secondary narratives in this sequence to distinguish two aspects of the human experience. On the one hand is the qualitative, intensive inner realm of consciousness and thought (insets), and on the other is the quantitative, extensive outer realm of action and movement (larger panels).This first scene of Azul y ceniza uses visual space on the comics page to suggest an analytical distinction between these two aspects of experience, but it is equally important that Pere Joan also shows their reciprocal definition.86 He does this through the compelling use of rhythmic parallels across both narratives. For instance, the gradual deployment of color in the secondary inset narrative parallels the gradual erosion of Blue’s spatial and social distance in the primary narrative. The correspondence between these simultaneous narratives suggests a fundamental ecological premise: the potential for concordance between individuals and their social environments.87 In this way, Pere Joan thus represents the tension between outer landscape/inner consciousness, human activity/ thought, and external events/inner emotions in a way that is faithful to the dialectical insights of cultural and emotional geographies. Also of interest here is how Pere Joan uses a catastrophic event in the story line to modulate the spatial dimensions of his page layout. Here the relationship between form and content is not merely established outside of the comics text by the author or narrator but also conditioned by the comics text itself in an elastic fashion. The example of “La lluvia blanca” (1984), already mentioned in the introduction to this book (see fig. 0.3), featured an artistic metaphor (mixelización) that disrupts the engine of a cruise ship, causing it to sink. As the ship sinks, the page layout is also flooded with white space, shifting from a structure that relies on rows of sequential panels to one that allows individual elements to interact on the page.88 A full twenty years later, Pere Joan produces a very similar effect in Azul y ceniza. The airport bomb explosion also opens up the page layout, not merely restoring the regular appearance of margin-­spanning landscape panels but also allowing for panels of extreme height.The effect here links the internal architecture of the airport and the architectural layout of the page and thus underscores the relationship between space, landscape, and comics form.

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As Blue drifts into abstract contemplation on a plane flight, a thin landscape panel at the top of a recto page transitions vertically to a panel below that nearly takes up the entire oversized page. On this page, the depiction of a single orange-­red creature is multiplied to fill out an ungridded 6 × 7–image gallery layout that is more than sequential.89 In line with comments made by Andrei Molotiu, readers can scan the creature figures as they choose, exploring yet another characteristically Pere Joan–like metaphor for the plastic nature of experience, the self-­directed nature of human consciousness, and the realities of ongoing temporal change. Most important, this panel forgoes the relegation of such abstract reflections to a panel inset and locates the dreamer and his thoughts within the same panel space. There is no need whatsoever for either the black outlines of panel insets or thought balloons.90 The appearance of the orange-­red figure with wings, along with Blue’s subsequent conversations with his editor, function through a form of retroactive determination.91 Looking backward after having read the author-­editor sequence, one can reread the initial inset narrative of the first pages of the comic as a metaphor specifically demonstrating the emotions related to the central actor’s writer’s block.92 Overall then, Azul y ceniza displays two interconnected and unusually dynamic correspondences: between physical landscape and inner emotions on one hand, and between comics form and the content of story line on the other. Most interesting is the cohabitation of inner thought and extensive space within a single panel, including a gallery layout just described. This artistic decision is indicative of Pere Joan’s intention to highlight the reciprocal tension in such dichotomies and unify seemingly disparate aspects of human experience within a geographically variegated visual field. This same intention can be seen—in a different way and with distinct results—in the final example explored below.

Example 3: 100 pictogramas para un siglo (XX) (100 pictograms for a century [XX)]; 2014) The publication of 100 pictogramas para un siglo (XX) with Edicions de Ponent is another crucial milestone for Pere Joan. Juan Manuel Díaz de Guereñu (2011) notes the publisher’s small runs, highlights its emphasis on quality over quantity, and includes the Mallorcan artist specifically in a list

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of its high-­profile authors, arguing that Ponent has been instrumental in forging an alternative method of comics publication in Spain.93 These traits are, of course, largely synonymous with Pere Joan himself. Readers should keep in mind his reputation for producing “un buen número de obras radicalmente innovadoras en formas y contenidos” (a good number of works [that were] radically innovative in their form and content) during the 1980s, and his leadership in cocreating Nosotros somos los muertos/NSLM in the 1990s/2000s.94 Over time, then, from his self-­published images in the 1970s through his foundation of the independent publishing house Inrevés in 2000, the artist has preferred and even created independent modes of publishing. These opportunities have allowed comics artists to explore topics, themes, and styles that are considered too daring, too cerebral, or too avant-­ garde for mainstream markets.95 The work under discussion here is a case in point: the topics, theme, and style of 100 pictogramas are all consistent with the qualities of independent rather than mainstream comics. Exploiting the conceptual potential of the ninth art, this album’s 121 numbered pages require of the reader both historical-­intellectual and formal-­ aesthetic forms of sophistication. The volume is an ambitious attempt to catalogue the intellectual, historical, sociopolitical, scientific, and cultural milestones of the twentieth century. It is somewhat loosely organized into sections whose titles provide evidence of the artistic project’s massive scope: “1. Individualismo” (Individualism), “2. Distancia y conocimiento” (Distance and knowledge) “3. La imagen amplificada” (The amplified image), “4. La religión desplazada” (Religion displaced), “5. Ser joven” (Being young), “6. Sentidos, ocio, huidas, conocimiento” (The senses, leisure, flights of fancy, knowledge), “7. Lo social” (The social), “8. Familia, sexo, cuerpo” (Family, sex, the body), “9. Bla, bla, bla” (Blah, blah, blah), “10. Más, más” (More, more), and the final section, labeled merely “Y . . . ” (And . . .). Pere Joan’s motives for the comic are clear from the preface he includes in its first pages, wherein he emphasizes that we are all the product of our historical circumstances.96 Y por qué 100? Y por qué pictogramas? A finales de 1999 se sucedían interminables discusiones sobre si el nuevo siglo empezaba el año 2000 o el 2001. También proliferaban los resúmenes de lo que el siglo XX había sido. . . . Pero a mí me llamaba la atención que esos resúmenes se basaran principalmente en hechos históricos. En acontecimientos, obsesivamente. En las cosas que pasan. No en lo que las cosas son. En

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las ideas, en las actitudes, en los comportamientos. . . . Que son los que finalmente nos conforman. Entonces . . . por qué no hacer un inventario de . . . , por ejemplo, 100 ideas-­fuerza que definieran el mundo contemporáneo. De las actitudes más características que difícilmente se encuentran en épocas anteriores. La fama fungible. El inconsciente y el surrealismo. La píldora. La relatividad. Lo tóxico. La cruz gamada. Dios es negra. Y traducirlos a un lenguaje dominante hoy en día. Un lenguaje dominante y en expansión: los pictogramas, los iconos, los ideogramas o logogramas. Es ya un elemento imprescindible que acompaña cualquier forma de comunicación y expresión. La señalética, los pictogramas, que nos hacen más fácil e inmediata la identificación de objetos, funciones e ideas. Se ha ampliado incluso a un uso lúdico que está presente en imágenes impresas sobre la ropa, en innumerables usos de la red, de forma recreativa y crítica. (And why 100? And why pictograms? Toward the end of 1999 there were endless discussions about whether the new century would begin in the year 2000 or 2001. Summaries of what the twentieth century had been also proliferated. . . . But what captured my attention was that those summaries were based principally on historical facts. Obsessively, on events. On the things that happen. Not on what things are. On ideas, on attitudes, on behaviors . . . Which are what shape us in the end.Therefore . . . why not make an inventory of . . . , for example, 100 leading ideas that might define the contemporary world. Of the most characteristic attitudes that are difficult to attribute to previous eras. Disposable fame. The unconscious and surrealism. The pill. Relativity. The toxic. The swastika. God is a black woman. And translate them to today’s dominant language. A language that is both ascendant and in expansion: pictograms, icons, ideograms, or logograms. These are an essential element accompanying any forms of communication and expression whatsoever. A system of visual signs, pictograms, that makes the identification of objects, functions, and ideas easier and more immediate. It has even been broadened to include a ludic use seen in images printed on clothing, innumerable uses of the internet, and both recreational and critical applications.)97

As the last line of this description begins to suggest, one of the most clear associations upon which 100 pictogramas turns is its link with digital cultures.

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In particular, the one hundred thumbnail-­sized iconic images at the core of this comics project seem to be artistically rendered analog emoticons.98 Appearing on a single page at the beginning of the album’s index and also on the back cover, these icons are grouped together in a ten-­by-­ten inventory that can easily be scanned by readers (fig. 2.4). In particular, iconicity—a property inherent to all comics art and a crucial part of internet communications from the start99—helps readers interpret them. This 2014 work is far from being a traditional narrative. Instead, it recalls the daring formal innovation already evident in the previous two examples discussed in this chapter. Pere Joan’s text is an expansive critical essay composed in the visual form of a comic. Ana Merino’s significant study El cómic hispánico (2002) “propone una interpretación de los cómics como factor cultural capaz de representar la modernidad masiva y popular del siglo XX” (proposes an interpretation of comics as a cultural factor capable of representing the massive and popular modernity of the twentieth century), and here in 100 pictogramas Pere Joan intriguingly uses the medium of the comic as a vehicle to reinterpret twentieth-­century modernity as a whole.100 Rather than delve into the historical dimensions of the artist’s critical text here, however, I focus on the way in which the artist’s spatial innovation conditions the album’s unusual and innovative representation. That is, this discussion is less interested in which icons are chosen as representative of the twentieth century—a list that also includes artistic-­themed selections such as the mustached Mona Lisa, Dali’s melting clock, and Robert Capa’s famous photograph of a falling soldier, for example—than it is in the spatial conventions that govern the artist’s approach to page design.101 There is no doubt that this album in particular eschews the popular forms of narrative that readers both in and outside of Spain have traditionally come to identify with the medium—namely linear action and adventure stories.102 Nevertheless, narrative is indeed present throughout the catalog’s elaboration of the leading events that have marked the twentieth century. These events are conveyed to readers through numbered, relatively autonomous, and necessarily brief visual mininarratives.Through a concise exploration of the spatial dimensions with which these mininarratives are imbued at the level of the page, readers gain an appreciation for Pere Joan’s uniquely topographical form of storytelling. Attending to this page level of comics reading is itself a relatively new enterprise, as Jesse Cohn has remarked.103 Most important, the meaning of these mininarratives is shaped not by the panel structure itself but by the artist’s decision

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Figure 2.4. Pere Joan, 100 pictogramas para un siglo (XX) (2014:124)

to foreground the free interplay of images (and sometimes, but not always, of text) against a primarily visual field. A typical page in 100 pictogramas includes one iconic pictogram, situated toward the upper-­left margin of the page and accompanied by a word or phrase that serves as its textual translation. The remaining expanse of the page—which is aligned in landscape format—offers an explanation or elaboration of the pictogram (see, for example, fig. 2.5). At first glance, then, the comic relies on and distinguishes two types of space: the space of the icon, and the space of its explanation; condensed aesthetic representation on the left, and extended background on the right. The graphic and spatial distinction of these two areas on the page can be seen as an adaptation of Pere Joan’s stylistic preference for stark relief, already discussed in reference to “Untitled” as well as the insets of Azul y ceniza, and evident also in the analyses of subsequent chapters. Within the space of the icon’s explanation, individual elements interact with one another in the flattened two-­dimensional space of a large monochrome panel. These interactions

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Figure 2.5. Pere Joan, 100 pictogramas para un siglo (XX) (2014:83)

are at times structured, quite loosely, through the form of a rudimentary diagram. The panels are sufficiently large, and the elements of the diagrams sufficiently reduced in size, so as to preserve vast swaths of empty page space. The effect is one that runs contrary to the general graphic approach of comics artists, who by and large tend to be interested in “how a flat medium can suggest a three-­dimensional space.”104 Mentioned earlier, Pascal Lefèvre’s comment that the comics artist can either seek to achieve an “illusory depth” graphically or instead “accentuate [the] flatness” of the page is quite relevant here.105 Pere Joan once again clearly chooses the latter. The artist purposely evacuates the diegetic potential of comics space to personalize or characterize an actor, to “express a certain mood or be a symbol for an underlying concept or a scene or even a complete story.”106 The result is an abstract space in which nothing is hidden from view inside the panel and nothing exists outside its frame; everything that is represented is visible, and nothing nonvisible is suggested.107 The choice of a flattened two-­dimensional logic thus opens the panel’s diegetic space completely to the reader’s gaze. The abstract character of this space is crucial to Pere Joan’s expression, through his drawing, of what Lefèvre refers to as “a philosophy, a vision .  .  . a visual ontology.”108 In this case, the

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accentuation of graphical flatness in the panels has the added effect of accentuating the comics’ extradiegetic space, and thus drawing attention back to “the real space in which the reader is located.”109 It is important to recognize the variety of layouts used by Pere Joan within the abstract space of these landscape pages. He does sometimes even use a linear sequence of panels with traditional gutter structure, as in #12 “Antiantropocentrismo” (Antianthropocentrism), #48 “Turismo” (Tourism), #61 “Cruz gamada” (Swastika), #62 “El hongo atómico” (Atomic mushroom cloud), and #66 “África” (Africa).110 Such examples are, however, relatively infrequent within the comics album as a whole, and it must be added that their sequential qualities are quite limited due to the form of transitions used by the artist. That is, the panel transitions used in these examples tend to be aspect-­to-­aspect, in McCloud’s typology, rather than moment-­to-­moment or action-­to-­action. This form, in which nothing “happens,” is arguably quite rare in the West.111 As McCloud’s typology notes, the aspect-­to-­aspect transition “bypasses time for the most part and sets a wandering eye on different aspects of a place, idea or mood.”112 Given the graphic sophistication evident in the first two examples discussed in this chapter, it should not be surprising that Pere Joan would prefer a transition that requires more of readers and that evokes a wandering eye movement. As McCloud writes, “Most often used to establish a mood or a sense of place, time seems to stand still in these quiet contemplative combinations. Even sequence, while still an issue, seems far less important here than in other transitions. Rather than acting as a bridge between separate moments, the reader here must assemble a single moment using scattered fragments.”113 These transitions are thus absolutely necessary to support the historical-­analytical mode of his larger project. Pere Joan purposely removes comics panels from the more immediate relations of conventional narrative. The overall spatial and graphic effect of this decision encourages readers to adopt a more topographical and even contemplative mode of reading. In a sense, the act of visual reading, here, is best seen as an act of visual thinking. The album does indeed both begin and end with linear narratives told through sequential panels as a form of prologue and epilogue.114 Outside of these two instances, however, the artist employs the page-­spanning single-­ panel structure described above. Each of these may come in one of two general formats: either wordless variants or text-­image combinations. Here the artist notably does away with the gutter of comics’ characteristically

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sequential structure. As Postema notes, “With the absence of formal frames and gutters the draw from panel to panel is reduced. The weakened gutter function slows down narrative pacing and makes the look of the page more organic.”115 The result is that Pere Joan’s readers are encouraged to read more slowly and also more carefully.This pace of reading is reinforced by the free interplay of images within the open panel space. Many times, but not always, Pere Joan continues the left-­to-­r ight movement governing Western reading traditions. Other times, however, he uses rudimentary visual narrative structures within the panels, for example, tree structures. Elsewhere, he uses directional arrows to link images or word-­image combinations and direct the reading process, as in #1 “Encontrarse a sí mismo” (Finding oneself).116 Some panels, including #35 “Lenguajes de síntesis” (Languages of synthesis), #79 “La política como opio del pueblo” (Politics as the opiate of the masses), and #84 “Curar por hablar” (Talking cure), take advantage of slow reading paces to encourage extensive reflection and interpretation.117 Here readers must keep in mind the observation made by Jan Baetens and Pascal Lefèvre (2014) that even wordless stories still rely heavily on words for their meaning.118 In this way, Pere Joan exploits the signifying capacity of iconic representations themselves, without needing to offer textual definition or accompaniment.119 Pere Joan’s whole-­page layouts are a prime example of how readers scan the page topographically in 100 pictogramas. In these cases, the artist sometimes uses relatively linear arrangements: in #99 “Menos, menos” (Less, less), he explores the “vuelta a lo rural” (return to rural life) and its possible permutations; in #53 “Superpoblación” (Superpopulation), he underscores advances that extend the duration of human life; and in #87 “El supermercado” (The supermarket), he documents and critiques (in both form and content) the patterns of consumption and illusion of abundance that characterize contemporary capitalism.120 In other numbered entries, however, he moves beyond linear arrangements to more fully exploit the open space of the panel.This occurs in #29 “Terrorista” (Terrorist), #39 “Hedonismo” (Hedonism), #43 “El valor joven” (The valuing of youth), #45 “Rock, Pop,” #47 “Omnipresencia de la música” (The ubiquity of music), #54 “Electrificación” (Electrification), and #69 “Ascenso de la clase media y euforia en el vestir” (Ascendance of the middle class and the euphoria of fashion).121 These examples still assert a somewhat conventional reading pattern (left to right and top to bottom), but the reader’s eye has been somewhat freed from the strict order of panel-­to-­panel succession.

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In addition to dovetailing with Roland Barthes’s classic semiotic analysis of fashion, Pere Joan’s “Ascenso de la clase media y euforia en el vestir” (see fig. 2.5) also proves a good example for discussing the various options readers have in scanning the page. Overall, the graphic artist’s critical reflection on fashion emphasizes the progressively disappearing distinction between the clothing worn by the upper class, middle class, and working class as a hallmark aspect of twentieth-­century culture. For example, he highlights the socially leveling power of certain trends, including: “El pantalón para la mujer / La camiseta / Los tejanos / El pantalón corto veraniego / El chándal” (Women’s pants / The T-­shirt / Jeans / Summer shorts / Sportswear).122 The most dense concentration of images is situated toward the central vertical axis of the panel. In addition, however, written descriptors grouped into textual zones toward the far-­left and far-­r ight margins of the frame function as relatively autonomous critical reflections and produce a visually expansive effect. Overall, text-­image combinations predominate and are grouped into layers of the open panel’s space that suggest a top-­ to-­bottom reading motion. The arrangement of these combinations in any given row, however, is nonlinear and can be scanned in any way. In many cases, a high level of semiotic redundancy occurs whereby the image and the words of pairings are intended to overlap, if they are not in fact entirely equivalent. In the case of the row labeled “Lo sport lo invade todo” (Sporty style goes mainstream), the iconic details of the images themselves are what is most important. Here, in particular, the order in which readers scan the row of sport clothing images is irrelevant.They can move left to right, right to left, or they can jump randomly from image to image at a whim, pulled by pictorial details that might catch their eye. Throughout 100 pictogramas, Pere Joan dispenses with various hallmark aspects of sequential art to a great degree, if not almost entirely. He not only plays with the conventional structure of the comic, pushing beyond traditional gutter and panel layouts, he also forges an intellectual, analytical, and historical strain of comics art. On the whole, the artist demonstrates that from a compact iconic image—even from the seemingly narrow format of digital emoticons, for example—one can reach a chain of social, political, historical, and technological considerations. Conscious of the value of organized knowledge, as inherited from the eighteenth-­century form of the encyclopedia, Pere Joan affirms that in the twenty-­first century it continues to be necessary to think deeply about the technological world we inhabit.123 Similarly, it is just as necessary to reaffirm the critical

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value of knowledge—not merely for the individual but more importantly as a collective resource and social good shared by the members of a common analog-­digital culture that remembers its past. Now that this chapter has introduced readers to the ways in which Pere Joan tends to exploit the spatiality of his comics at the level of the image, the panel, and the page, it is time to move on to analyze the artist’s major works in depth. In each subsequent chapter, insights from cultural, emotional, and urban geographies reveal how space plays a role in the Mallorcan’s major comics simultaneously at the levels of content and form.

Chap ter 3

Rural Cartographies E m o t i o n , Ec o l o g y , a n d S u b j e c t i v i t y

In this chapter I explore Pere Joan’s topographical approach by analyzing two of his comics albums in depth. El aprendizaje de la lentitud: La expedición Paraná Ra’anga (An apprenticeship in slowness: The Paraná Ra’anga expedition; 2011) and 16 novel·les amb hòmens blaus (16 novels with blue men; 1996) are both decidedly rural in orientation. The rural landscapes in these two works express qualities at the core of cultural geography as the artist explores the dynamic relationships between human activity and landscape. Simultaneously, they demonstrate the intimate style and subjective expression for which he is known,1 connecting individual and collective constellations of subjectivity. These representations of the rural rely implicitly, in one case, and explicitly, in the other, on a certain discourse of the natural world. By affirming the dialectical relationship between human activity and the landscape, this discourse asserts the intimate connection between humankind and our geographical surroundings. Pere Joan’s approach is neither ideologically triumphant nor urgently alarmist. In subtle and patient ways, his comics acknowledge how humans have harmed

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the natural environment and avoid suggesting that human landscape is a triumph of culture over nature. Instead, his images cover a much more intimate and contemplative ground. These works communicate visually that rural terrain is both shaped by and constitutive of human forces. To achieve this, they harness the power visual art holds to reorient perception. Close consideration of the theme of rural landscape throughout Pere Joan’s albums reveals the impact of his characteristic topographical contributions to comics form. As with the concise examples discussed in chapter 2—“Untitled,” Azul y ceniza, and 100 pictogramas—the contributions here are also notable for how they operate at the level of page layout. Specifically, the artist relies on a uniquely open and fluid invocation of what Thierry Groensteen, in The System of Comics, calls the hyperframe. This decision allows a variety of spatial interactions to unfold between relatively autonomous objects on the page. Full-­page images, paneled or not, predominate in both works. In these instances, the relative and sometimes complete lack of words illustrates Pere Joan’s tendency to subdue or even evacuate textual zones on the page.2 He frequently also turns toward nonnarrative sequences of full-­page panels, where this tendency to prioritize the image once again asserts itself. At times, the gallery format appears and restructures the hyperframe, inducing viewers to scan the page at their own pace and in an irregular path subject to their whims, as suggested by comics scholar Andrei Molotiu.3 These characteristic innovations, however, do not prevent Pere Joan from turning, on occasion, toward a more traditionally sequential use of the panel. Even though he uses the panel sequence infrequently, these instances are nonetheless essential deviations that reaffirm his more innovative style through their exceptionality. Moreover, as discussed below, even in traditional panel sequences, Pere Joan eschews a traditional action-­oriented mode of storytelling in favor of a topographical aesthetic composition and the development of a contemplative mood. Ultimately, these and other artistic choices reinforce his hallmark geographical themes in the two comics albums under study. Pere Joan’s varied uses of the comics hyperframe assert not that things are in space, but instead that space is in things.4 The result is a more ambiguous condensation of image and text than one routinely encounters in the comics medium. Pere Joan’s oeuvre can thus be contrasted sharply with more traditional works demonstrating the sequential character and the semiotic clarity of the ninth art—thus also contrasting with David Carrier’s statement that comics need

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to be “absolutely unambiguous.”5 As the examples in this chapter bear out, ambiguity is central, in Pere Joan’s case, not just to questions of plot and meaning but also to the formal composition of his pages. Text and image are thus not separate terms forced into an artistic relationship or even a symbolic system. To say that word and text are put into a relationship in Pere Joan’s work would imply a distance between the two that frequently does not exist in the first place, but to use the word “system” would imply a complete and immersive symmetry that is similarly lacking. Instead, one can observe instances when image approximates text, and inversely, instances when text approximates image. Thus a general tendency in the artist’s work, already explored in chapter 2, is for image and text to become ambiguously condensed into a single zone of contact. At the extreme, the image does away with and substitutes for the word, expressing complex concepts that link consciousness with extensive space. This ambiguity is at the heart of his visual style. It informs how readers interact with his texts at the level of both the panel and the page. In the end, it frees viewers from a predetermined format for engaging with Pere Joan’s comics. The result is a topographical and contemplative mode of reading that requires more of readers and pushes them to do the dialectical work of synthesizing his rural landscape images and mental/emotional cartographies. The first section below takes a broad view of the driving premise and overall aesthetics of El aprendizaje de la lentitud: La expedición Paraná Ra’anga (2011), before moving on to explore two distinctly innovative ways in which space, landscape, and comics form inform Pere Joan’s page layouts. Other intriguing hyperframes used throughout the volume receive some attention, including the gallery format (discussed further in the section on 16 novel·les), but the focus here is on two limit points that chart the breadth of his eclectic formal page styles. His marked use of the sequential panel format in a two-­page layout titled “Grupaje” (Grouping) early in the book proves to be more complex than it may at first seem to be. A conventional understanding of sequence itself is challenged by a contemplative narrative mode that departs significantly from the action-­oriented logic of traditional panel transitions. In addition, the simple linearity of sequence in this example is challenged by the relationships established between nonadjacent panels. Though in terms of form it may be seen as a traditional panel sequence, the way Pere Joan structures ambiguity into the narrative and the panel transitions is decisive. The formal dimensions of these decisions thus reinforce the theme of open, evolving, and mutually conditioning

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relationships between human travelers and their rural river environment. This is also paralleled in the open and topographical style of the comic, which encourages contemplative and self-­directed reflection on important social ideas and more-philosophical concepts. An intriguing series of pages titled “Esculturas de grandes cabezas visitables” (Sculptures of giant visitable heads) appears late in El aprendizaje de la lentitud and serves as a productive point of contrast with “Grupaje.” The “Esculturas” section is more true to the artist’s hallmark style in that he forgoes panel sequence in favor of an approach to the page as an open compositional frame to be traversed topographically. Evoking a concordance between natural landscape and human activity, the shapes and dimensions of Pere Joan’s head-­sculpture compositions serve two interconnected functions. In formal terms, they serve as an iconic form of panel outline internal to the page frame. These head-­sculpture outlines serve as containers for artistic detail, much as a panel would. In this sense, the hyperframe thus merges with the image itself, particularly in a climactic page from the sequence discussed in depth below. In addition, each of the giant head pages is a visual reminder of Pere Joan’s dialectical premise regarding the relationship of human activity and geographical landscape. The comics artist plays with connections between spatial extension and inner experience on the page, a strategy that uses empty space to dissolve the border between the comics reader and the wider extradiegetic world.6 The second section of this chapter analyzes 16 novel·les amb hòmens blaus (1996), which was a defining early-­career work for Pere Joan. Although Mi cabeza bajo el mar (1990) was an award-­winning album, it was nevertheless limited in scope and ambition due to the fact that it was essentially an anthology of previously published works. Despite boasting what may seem to be a title more appropriate for an anthologized collection, 16 novel·les nonetheless showcases Pere Joan’s ability to weave a coherent set of visual narratives in a long-­form product. Put concisely, it “works” as an album. In addition to connecting with Pere Joan’s themes of emotion, interiority, and rural space, it also includes several innovations in artistic form and content. It introduces, for the first time, the figure of the Blue Man that will reappear later as a binding narrative force in Azul y ceniza (2004).7 It eschews the panel tradition upon which the artist relied in much of his earlier work from the 1980s and 1990s—as collected in El hombre que se comió a sí mismo (1999), for example—and instead emphasizes the tendency toward page-­ spanning images evident from “Untitled” (1976) through El aprendizaje de

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la lentitud (2011).8 His sparing use of blue ink in this work surely worked to keep production costs low, as compared with more colorful comics later published with Alfaguara and Ponent.9 Yet this bitonal (black-­white and blue) approach is also a strong aesthetic choice that works to cultivate a subdued contemplation of embodied subjectivity. In theme, content, and form, 16 novel·les amb hòmens blaus portrays emotion as a tangible and material force connecting inner consciousness with spatial landscapes.This premise is traced through the volume as a whole before focusing in depth on a particularly revealing gallery layout. The section titled “Seres con corona” (Beings with halos) is noteworthy for its formal innovation that encourages a topographical way of reading comics. In addition, however, it contributes to a larger dialectical premise by centering on the most immediate scale of the individual. In portraying embodied psychic experience in personalized visible and artistically rendered halos, the artist graphically constructs links between inner consciousness and an external spatial field in which the individual is embedded. Most importantly, the tendency of the compositions explored in this chapter to express what Andrei Molotiu calls iconostasis is crucial in forging Pere Joan’s hallmark topographical comics aesthetic.

El aprendizaje de la lentitud (An apprenticeship in slowness; 2011) A few contextualizing remarks are in order regarding the motivation, content, and multiframe of El aprendizaje de la lentitud. Overall, the album boasts an eclectic composition. Pere Joan eschews panel sequences—with a few important exceptions noted below—preferring a broad range of page-­level arrangements that evoke the form of a scrapbook.10 That said, there are no markings or indications that this is intended to be a scrapbook in any conventional sense.There are no instances of photographs with visible corner tape, for example. The page arrangements are far from orderly or consistent. On the whole, the multiframe resists the mode of organized scrapbooking through its alternation of more direct reflections on the trip and narrative sequences with an oneiric and contemplative quality in line with Pere Joan’s intimist style. It may be best to consider El aprendizaje as a comics travelogue. The work was commissioned in the sense that it was prompted by the inclusion of Pere Joan as a member of an intriguing and explicitly interdisciplinary river trip. The general objective was to “sentar las bases para

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la construcción de un corredor cultural entre Asunción del Paraguay y Buenos Aires, siguiendo la línea de los ríos Paraguay, Paraná y de la Plata” (lay the foundations for the construction of a cultural corridor between Asunción, Paraguay, and Buenos Aires, following the line of the Paraguay, Paraná, and De la Plata Rivers).11 Pere Joan notes the idea for the cultural corridor explicitly in the album and adds that “la idea partió de la Casa de España en Rosario y fue apoyada por la Agencia Española de Cooperación” (the idea came from the Casa de España in Rosario and was supported by the Agencia Española de Cooperación).12 Members of the interdisciplinary team included artists, architects, astrophysicists, musicians, geographers, and anthropologists from Argentina, Paraguay, Peru, and Spain, who were all asked to travel together and collectively aid in the construction of a new image of the river. The list of travelers appears in the back matter of the album, but is also incorporated visually through an intercalated hand-­ drawn passenger manifest in the sequence titled “Paranaraangaland.”13 Pere Joan’s comics travelogue is thus his contribution to this wider effort. The artist has described its key message as “la reivindicación del privilegio y la excepcionalidad de la lentitud” (the vindication of the privilege and the exceptionality of slowness), a social idea and philosophical concept explored further below.14 The album consists of relatively autonomous sections of varying length, most frequently three to five pages at a time, each of which is introduced by a thematic title. As one would expect in a scrapbook or travelogue, there are intermittent depictions of people, places, and items related to the trip. These representations are conveyed within a relatively transparent narratological frame. That is, what readers see on the page seems to reflect the experiences of Pere Joan the participant-­traveler. Tending toward the comics companion of what Roland Barthes referred to as the ontological assertion of the photograph, the titled section “Niveles” (Levels) provides a drawn image blending elements of diagram and sketch to orient readers to the interior space of the boat.15 Readers note that an actual photograph of the boat can be seen at the beginning of the album, taking up the whole page on which it appears.16 It is significant that despite being quite distant from each other in terms of the comic’s pagination, both the photograph and the drawing are situated on verso pages, thus suggesting a relationship of correspondence and also evoking a transition from extradiegetic event to the narrative space of comics storytelling. This can be seen as an attempt to remediate the observable physical world of spatial extension

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through a corresponding comics representation. Pere Joan uses the comics multiframe to highlight the significance of the aesthetic and artistic realm in constructing and reflecting on the experience of the rural environment. Also relatively early in the book, a multipage denotative section structured by various subtitles introduces readers to “Algunos expedicionistas” (Some expeditionists), “2 elementos muy presentes” (2 ubiquitous elements) during the duration of the trip (i.e., the popular drink mate, and gin and tonics), “El barco” (The boat), and “Algunos tripulantes” (Some crew members).17 The use of an open hyperframe with much empty white space evokes the style appearing at the end of Pere Joan’s earlier “La lluvia blanca” (Pere Joan 1999, originally published in 1984; see fig. 0.3) and anticipates its continued use through Viaje a Cotiledonia (2015), as will be evident in chapter 5. In particular, this choice of open layout discourages any linear or hierarchical understanding of the individual people or elements presented. In addition, it minimizes sequential temporality in its presentation of relatively autonomous images and of text objects whose relationships endure over an unspecified period. At times, however, images unmediated by text stand alone. This occurs, for example, in a subsection titled “Expedicionistas” (Travelers). While brief, this subsection is nevertheless stylistically significant. Five images are arranged in a “clothesline” format that can be read left to right, right to left, or by jumping less linearly from item to item. Each image represents a distinct kind of hat—an expeditioner hat, a conquistador helmet, a scarf used as headwear and tied under the chin, a brimmed women’s hat, and a baseball cap. Here Pere Joan privileges the denotative function of iconicity to construct a visual vocabulary of headgear possibly worn by river travelers. In a sense, “Expedicionistas” connects with Pere Joan’s thoughtful critique of fashion carried out in the section from 100 pictogramas (2014) titled “Ascenso de la clase media y euforia en el vestir” (Ascendance of the middle class and the euphoria of fashion; see fig. 2.5), already discussed in chapter 2.The visual vocabulary of images also functions, however, to convey the heterogeneity and diversity among the traveling group at a generalized level. The images thus boast two distinguishable functions: they are a representative typology on one hand, and on the other they are a visual metaphor for cultural variation that can be extended beyond clothing alone.18 Further distinguishing another function of the visual string of hats is the marked inclusion of the conquistador’s helmet. Since it is reasonable to presume that this is the only item not worn by any of the present-­day

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river travelers, this image carries particular weight. It delivers the clothesline of hat images into a historical and critical narrative mode.The result is an understated commentary suggesting Pere Joan’s own enduring reflections on the complex postcolonial context in which the trip must be understood—that is, the organizational collaboration between Spain, Argentina, Paraguay, and Peru. This somewhat understated nature of Pere Joan’s critical mode of visual storytelling continues to assert itself throughout the album with increasing directness. In “Pueblos aleatorios” (Accidental towns), the accompanying text states, in part, “Como parece imposible parar el crecimiento humano y se hace necesario preservar lugares de la degradación, al tiempo que es justo que la población recupere el río, hay que buscar nuevas fórmulas no degradantes y cuya huella ecológica sea la mínima” (As it seems impossible to stop population growth and it is necessary to preserve places from degradation, at the same time that it is just that the population recuperate the river, new nondegrading approaches must be sought whose ecological footprint is minimal).19 In “Una costa de casinos” (A casino coast), Pere Joan’s treatment of the idea to construct casinos along the river is brief and ultimately dismissive, as he bemoans “un futuro con proliferación de casinos y de barcas motoras que llegan y solamente visitan las salas de juego. Llegan y se van. Que no viven el río más que para los casinos” (a future of proliferating casinos and motorized boats that arrive and [whose passengers] visit only the game rooms. They arrive and then leave. Of the river they experience only the casinos).20 In “Paranaraangaland,” the artist dreams visual trappings of the newly created fictitious territory: a hinged, folding coin called the convivio, a paper money bill called the power-­point, a flag (in both analog solid brown and fluctuating digital forms), hymns, and a coat of arms. Along the way, the written text makes observations about the travelers’ fondness for modems and lengthy PowerPoint presentations. It actively resists the ideological stability that characterizes national identity formations, drawing attention to a variety of visual and conceptual tropes that prioritize movement and flow rather than static poses. Throughout, the playful tone of both his words and images works to undermine any serious claims to a static or normative group identity. A looser definition of collective identity is made visible in Pere Joan’s decidedly unspectacular drawing of Paranaraangaland’s all-­ brown flag. It purposely contains no additional details: “el marrón funciona en este caso como el lienzo en blanco donde todos escriben su propia

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versión” (brown functions in this case as the blank canvas upon which each person inscribes their own version).21 Most important, this section moves beyond the travelogue’s more rudimentary denotative focus on people, places, and items to show more directly the process by which the creative imagination connects with broader notions of landscape and territory. The function of comics as a connective tissue revealing the mutual definition of mental cartography and rural landscape is a fundamental aspect of El aprendizaje de la lentitud. A number of the album’s sections engage the dialectical spatial imagination directly. From the beginning through the end of the album, the connections between consciousness and place are visually emphasized. In addition to the two sections explored in depth below (“Grupaje” and “Esculturas”), several of these multipage compositions deserve attention for the way in which they foreground the dialectical premise of cultural landscape studies through primarily visual, rather than textual, means. For instance, in “Lo orgánico y la cuadrícula” (The organic and the grid), Pere Joan reflects explicitly on his experience during the group’s visit to the Museo de Historia Natural de La Plata.22 The form and content of the first page of the sequence plays into the travelogue structure already mentioned, but the second and third pages mark a drastic shift toward Pere Joan’s hallmark contemplative mode of storytelling. In a two-­page unpaneled spread with teal background and much open space, he includes three images composed only with brown and peach. On the verso page is a square map of the planned grid pattern of urban La Plata; on the recto page is the outline of an upright human figure with the vascular system exposed. To the right of this is a bird’s-­eye depiction of the river system. The text links these three images together in two concise sentences that draw together urban form, the flow of human blood, and the organic formation of the river.23 This double-­page spread thus serves as a concise visual inventory of the basic premise of city planning. Modern urban planners, as Richard Sennett points out in The Craftsman (2008), drew inspiration from the discovery of the circulation of blood in the human body and conceived of the city in terms that sought to maximize circulation.24 Also importantly, Barcelonan planner Ildefons Cerdà fashioned quite extensive organic metaphors for the city in his influential treatise Teoría general de la urbanización (1867).25 In the next chapter, I return to Cerdà to discuss Pere Joan’s urban comic “Un cocodril a l’Eixample (1987), wherein the planner’s rectilinear expansion of Barcelona’s medieval urban core is

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specifically referenced (see figs. 4.1 and 4.2 in the next chapter). Here in “Lo orgánico y la cuadrícula,” however, the comics artist inserts a third term into this historical correspondence between the organic body and the planned city in urban theory.26 The final image of the river swiftly returns the metaphor connecting human activity and liquid flows to the rural landscape at the heart of his comic while simultaneously preserving a dialectical understanding of human landscape change. The contemplative and even oneiric mode of Pere Joan’s comics narration is perhaps most predominant in sections such as “Hundimiento y emergencia del Cosme Damián” (The sinking and resurgence of the Cosme Damián) and “El piano peludo” (The hairy piano).27 The former section occupies four pages, ending with a two-­page spread of six paneled images—read vertically three on each page—that together wordlessly convey the intimate connection between human activity and natural landscape. As the second page of the sequence informs readers, the Cosme Damián was a steam-­engine ship that sank in the river in 1943 while carrying a shipment of cotton. As silt and sand accumulated on and around the sunken ship, an island came into being that had never existed before. Though the second page’s textual zone explains this quite clearly, the third and fourth pages render this connection between human activity and landscape in visual terms with no need for words. In this vertical sequence, the boat is progressively covered with white sand, leaving the mast and then only a window still visible. A ring of green vegetation slowly emerges as the island forms. In the last panel, Pere Joan’s depiction of a small boat beached on the sand drives home the point that human activity is intimately wrapped up in the cyclical time of nature.28 The page-­spanning width of the landscape panels used here help craft an enduring, elastic, and indefinite temporality. The absence of human figures throughout all six panels reaffirms the slow pace of this geological time. This absence also prompts consideration of the way in which the residue of human activity is linked to the natural landscape. For its part, “El piano peludo” marks a shift from the historical to the oneiric mode. Only two of its seven pages feature text. Collectively, the pages craft an imaginative metaphor for the combinations of human creativity (the piano standing in for music), organicity (Pere Joan states that the piano’s hair links it with the human), and the significance of movement, or what the artist refers to concisely as “las mutaciones que crean lenguaje, que nos llevan a otro sitio. Sentimiento y transformación juntos. Un piano peludo que navega” (those mutations that

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Figure 3.1. Pere Joan, El aprendizaje de la lentitud (2011:14–15)

create language, that carry us away. Feeling and transformation together. A hairy piano that navigates).29 The section titled “Grupaje” (fig. 3.1) provides striking evidence of how Pere Joan’s contemplative aesthetics finds a way into even more traditional panel sequences.30 This two-­page sequence is representative of a number of the aspects discussed above. It demonstrates the thought-­ to-­thought transitions characteristic of Pere Joan’s contemplative narrative mode. It also provides evidence of the linguistic function of color, minimalist composition, expansive panel width, a steady pace, and an easy rhythm of reading. The tendency toward abstraction and above all else the intangible product of aesthetics, structure, and intention together help forge an original comics style. Moreover, the amount of text here also permits readers unfamiliar with Pere Joan’s style a few insights regarding his preference for contemplative content.The relations he establishes between nonadjacent panels through background color and visual arrangements are also compelling.31 The title of the two-­page sequence appears within the border of the first panel at the upper-­left corner of the verso page. Here Pere Joan demonstrates his ability to move readers intentionally from panel to panel, steadily left to right, row by row, and top to bottom on each page. The page layout is not conventional in the sense described by Benoît Peeters, as the panel shapes and sizes are not uniform.32 Instead, they vary in width quite frequently but have a consistent height. Neither is it fully true that the page layout here is rhetorical, as there is no clear relationship between

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what is depicted and the size of the individual panel. The layout is, however, rhetorical in another sense—regarding the mood or weight of the images. That is, it is important to consider the amount of time Pere Joan asks readers to contemplate the words and images on the page and, additionally, to contemplate the thoughts these words and images represent. In discussing the “Grupaje” sequence, it is important to attend to its location in the album, theme, text and image content, transitions, and use of color and abstraction. At its most basic formulation, and as announced in the title, the content of the sequence focuses on the generalized theme of groupings: how groups form, how they move, comparisons of different kinds of groups, and the relationships and the communication between members of a single group. The prioritized group, unsurprisingly given the artistic-­ documentary nature of the book project as a whole, is that of the members of the interdisciplinary team who traveled together on a boat down the Paraná River. It is important to note that the instance under discussion is the first use of a paneled sequence in El aprendizaje de la lentitud, coming after an introduction and several multipage sequences that each feature the open hyperframe variant. As such, in consideration of the book’s overall multiframe, the presence of a paneled sequence acts as a focusing mechanism for readers. The use of a panel structure prompts an awareness of linear concentration and induces in the reader a deliberateness of pace that until this moment has not appeared in the comics album. The text in the first panel is characteristically undemarcated. It is situated in Pere Joan’s ambiguously condensed textual and image zone, but spaced sufficiently apart from both the image and the margins of the panel. The panel width is excessive for the object represented. Although this may tend to be more common in title panels, it is notable and predictable that Pere Joan continues this excessive width (relative to the images depicted) throughout the two-­page panel sequence in accordance with his usual style. The content of the text compactly condenses a number of distinct points into a single introductory sentence: “Remontar el río fue descubrir que es posible construir un espacio de comunicación horizontal sin más canibalismo que el de la curiosidad humana y el hambre intelectual” (To traverse the river was to discover that it is possible to construct a space of horizontal communication with little more cannibalism than that of human curiosity and an intellectual hunger).33 Here Pere Joan folds together the physical act of traversing the river (“Remontar el río”), the

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mental experience of this journey (“construir un espacio”), the geometrical vector of this travel (“comunicación horizontal”), and even a certain poetic assessment of the human condition (“curiosidad humana y el hambre intelectual”). An additional value of the geometrical vector is that it brings to mind the way in which the artist replicates this horizontality in his communication with the reader through an uncharacteristically linear panel sequence. In its evolution over the course of the two-­page sequence of panels, the text follows an interesting rhythm that might be described in dialectical terms. Pere Joan introduces a theme—group travel on the river—and follows that introduction (panel 1) with a physical description of the general activity (panel 2), a sustained reflection on the weight and significance of the general activity (panels 3–5), a physical description of a concrete aspect of the activity (panel 6), delivery of this concrete detail to a metaphorical mode where it receives sustained consideration (panels 7–9), and a return from this metaphor to a concrete circumstance that manifests a distilled everyday image of groupness (panel 10). In this general pattern one can observe a move from the general to the specific, from the specific to the metaphorical, and from the metaphorical to the concrete. This very progression of the text exemplifies the metaphorical value and thus also the contemplative impact of Pere Joan’s style. The images in this sequence undergo a parallel development.They pass from abstract generality to specific detail; next through the decontextualized, uprooted, and autonomous space of metaphor; to close with a concrete manifestation of embodied human experience. Focusing now not on the text but rather on the presence of images, the consideration of the totality of the two-­page spread at a glance reveals a number of abstract shapes, marks, and lines; some defined lines evoking the horizon and connoting the movement of abstract objects; and finally an explosion of iconic specificity in the representation of identifiable human forms at the close of the sequence. More closely considered, the abstract shape appearing in the first four panels is interesting in and of itself. Initially, the abstractness of this object conveys an ambiguity—it may seem to denote either the group of people on the boat or the boat itself.Through the contrast of seeing the more iconic shape of a boat itself appear in panel 5 (seen from the bird’s-­eye view), readers may reach the conclusion, through the property of comics aesthetics known as retroactive determination, that the abstract shape in the previous four panels actually represents not the people or

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passengers themselves in an iconic fashion but instead, perhaps, and noniconically, their experience. In this sense, it can be said that Pere Joan uses abstract representation to render the shared experience of a group as a metaphorical object. It is of note that in either case he might have drawn a more iconic representation of the boat, as he does, for example, on other pages of El aprendizaje de la lentitud.34 But what is on display in this specific sequence is Pere Joan’s intention to forge an innovative visual language capable of expressing human experience itself in abstract and metaphorical terms.The implication of the use of this strategy at this particular moment in the album, in this contemplative panel sequence, is that these abstract visual terms are those most capable of representing interiority, both its emotive force and its potential to induce contemplation. The word and image connections in this sequence are subtle but no less significant. It might be assumed from the consistent top-­center placement of text within each panel that text-­image relationships would be relatively unremarkable.Yet there are indications to the contrary. For example, the consistency throughout of the top-­center placement of text within the panel can be linked to two simultaneous causes. The first is an effort merely to standardize expectations and make it easy for the reader to move from one panel to the next. Here the text provides an anchor, one that is not always present in Pere Joan’s panel sequences, giving the visual impression of a steady and consistent horizontal flow from one panel to the next, one row to the next. But this placement of the text also represents an attempt to carve out as much space as possible for the image—maximizing the expanse of empty space in the panel frames. This choice of placement is thus not so much about establishing the priority of the text as it is about retaining a privileged space for the images. Second, the inversion of the color of the printed text—in panels 6 and 10 where it changes from black to white against a reddish-­brown background—marks the clear subordination of the text to the visual requirements of the individual panel and the overall page design. And third, the marked use of words toward the bottom margin of panel 2 provides further evidence of how Pere Joan sees text items themselves as assimilating to the logic of the image. In this case, the inclusion of the words “un momento elevado” (airborne, for a moment) in a different script draws attention to the bumpy experience of traveling on the river. The use of color in “Grupaje,” despite seeming thoroughly banal at first glance, is decidedly disruptive upon further reflection. Or perhaps a

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better term is “defamiliarizing.” We might say that it contributes to the estrangement of readers from the page, making it difficult to carry out the suspension of disbelief required of narrative. Instead of being immersed completely in the world Pere Joan presents, readers are continually being made conscious of their interaction with the panels. This is accomplished through the elements of Pere Joan’s sparing emblematic style and preference for stark relief, but also through the use of a shifting monochromatic background and, particularly, its variation throughout the sequence. In the last panels on both the left and right pages (panels 6 and 10), the use of a dark reddish-­brown color (on the original printed page) acts as the punctuation in an evolving stream of thought. Its placement interrupts the rhythm of the sequence and induces a pause in the reader’s breathing equivalent to the comma or the period in written prose. Here we thus see an example of the linguistic (syntactical) application of color in Pere Joan’s work. Moreover, the panel at the close of the verso page marks a transition in content. As we move from the verso to the recto page of this spread, we transition from discussion of concrete content (the boat, the travelers, and the river) to the more abstract and metaphorical considerations appearing in the first panel of the recto page. The final panel of the sequence can also be taken as marking a transition in content, since flipping to the next page introduces a new sequence of the album unconnected to this one. The use of a monochromatic reddish-­brown background color as punctuation/transition is important in itself. And yet, the fact that this color appears also directly across the page boundary, in the adjacent bottom panel on the recto page, creates a false horizontal match that conflicts with the top-­to-­bottom panel organization of each page.This is a detail that has a somewhat disruptive or defamiliarizing function vis-­à-­vis our reading of the sequence. The nature of this compositional choice has two effects. First, this false horizontal match, carried out through background coloring, is a further example of how Pere Joan cultivates a careful, exploratory, and intentional pace in his readers. Despite the continuity of background color, readers must not assume that the page boundary can be traversed here from the bottom right-­hand corner of the first page to the bottom left-­hand corner of the second page. If they do entertain this mistaken assumption, readers will have to recalibrate their reading and continue at the top of the recto page. This kind of error creates a lure that ends by having an instructional value for readers, reinforcing the steady left-­ to-­right and top-­to-­bottom progression of the sequences that Pere Joan

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encodes in this linear and horizontal use of panels. Second, this choice also effectively destroys any notion of a “strip” that readers might apply to the three images in the bottom row of the left-­hand page. This effect is felt even before readers reach the bottom of the verso page of the sequence. It is significant enough to make the last row appear as if it consists of a pair of panels with beige background color and another stand-­alone panel of reddish-­brown background. A third effect of this color choice—to which we will return at the end of this analysis in discussion of panel 10—is that once the reader reaches the end of the two-­page spread, the monochromatic background shared by these two panels serves as a reminder to use the panel 6 content to understand the full impact of panel 10. The compositional and structural choices outlined above work with the content of this panel sequence to establish the primacy of the image zone, induce careful reading strategies in readers, and encourage metaphorical considerations and a contemplative mode. The abstract nature of the images, the lack of a central character, and the lack of action-­to-­action transitions allow Pere Joan to involve readers in a movement of thought propelled step-­by-­step through an ordered and linear panel structure, conditioned by the syntactical meaning of color and focused on a reduced set of images in relief against a monochromatic background. These aspects together create a cumulative effect. Again and again, the content of the text on the left-­hand page reaffirms the slow pace and deliberateness already established in the visual impact of the panel sequence: see, for example, in panel 2, “Remontar el río a la velocidad de un hombre que anda fue realmente el aprendizaje de la lentitud” (Traversing the river at the speed of a person who walks was really an apprenticeship in slowness); in panel 3, “Y esto es un logro importante, un contrapoder necesario para combatir la fugacidad. Lento y seguro” (And this is an important accomplishment, a counterbalance necessary to combat fugacity. Slowly and surely); in panel 4, “El río pasa y parece siempre diferente y nos fascina por su casi monotonía, su cambiar lento” (The river goes past and always seems different and it fascinates us due to what is almost its monotony, its slow change); and in panel 5, “El barco es el juguete y un espacio de pisos donde moverse y encontrar grupos que se forman y deshacen de forma natural” (The ship is the object of play and a space of many floors where one can move about and find groups that form and disperse in a natural way). The thought itself to which Pere Joan’s sequence invites readers is a nuanced meditation on the nature of groups from a cross-­species

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perspective. The relatively descriptive depiction, in panel 6 on the verso page, of insects attracted to lights on the boat during the river trip— “Algunas noches los insectos, los saltamontes preferentemente, invaden la cubierta y las estancias abiertas atraídos por la luz” (Some nights the insects, most often grasshoppers, invade the covered deck and the open spaces attracted by the light)—simultaneously functions as the introduction to this contemplative mode.The location of the panel on the page, the transition in text and background color—all contrast with the seemingly ordinary content of the words and the image. The image is an emblem distinguishing a white-­filled shape and black squiggled lines that are clustered around it. There is a certain degree of iconic ambiguity in this visual depiction. Read in tandem with the text, the image can be taken as a point of illumination or an open space to which insects are moving. But it can also be considered apart from the panel text—as informed by a reading of the previous panel, which depicts an iconic boat shape and rectangular white-­filled objects connoting the movement of people with a high degree of abstraction. If the objects in panel 5 are people—and note that they are not cleanly confined within the border of the boat object—then why not see the lines in panel 6 as people?35 If panel 5 is a bird’s-­eye view of the boat, then the ambiguity in panel 6 can thus be read visually as a more extreme bird’s-­eye view of the same, a zoom-­out that increases the height between our perspective and the object. The dark squiggle lines in panel 6 can thus be read as a spatial expansion of the swarm of rectangles in panel 5. In a sense, then, the story communicated by the panel’s images here differs from, and gains depth through contrast with, the story told by the panel’s text. This interrelationship gains force from the characteristic overlap of the textual and image zones in Pere Joan’s panel sequence. It is significant that this ambiguity crafted about the visual representation of people or insects through the comparative density of crowd or swarm is at the center of the metaphor explored on the recto page. In panel 7, Pere Joan exploits the privileged position of the first panel to delve into this metaphor directly: “Si miramos el grupo humano en abstracto, su movimiento grupal, y mentalmente hacemos desaparecer el barco, nos veríamos a nosotros mismos como una nube de insectos que se juntan y separan, subiendo y bajando por las 5 cubiertas de la nave y formando grupos y relaciones” (If we look at the human group in the abstract, its movement as a group, and mentally we allow the boat to disappear, we will see ourselves as a cloud of insects that come together and separate,

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going up and down through the five decks of the ship and forming groups and relationships). Here the artist’s characteristic use of a page-­spanning panel width is excessive relative to the images depicted. On the far left is a group of four to five insects whose irregular movements have been traced through time, each with a single unbroken line. On the far right is a cluster of fifty-­plus abstract and largely rectangular filled shapes. The space between them is itself wide enough to have been a panel of its own. Again, though perhaps not rhetorical in the sense described by Peeters, the panel width here does suggest that the reader spend more time with each image. The empty space between the two invites comparison, contemplation, and extended consideration in an immediate way that a panel break/ gutter would not.The minimal text in panel 8, “Relaciones algunas azarosas y otras buscadas” (Relationships that are at times random and at others sought out), similarly encourages this movement of thought in the reader. Its abstract shapes are now more in tune with the style, size, shape, and color employed for the images in panels 1–4 on the verso page. Moreover, the images are arranged to evoke a progression from left to right within the panel itself that mimics the left-­to-­r ight linearity of text and panel reading. The brevity of the text here enhances the ability of the images to “take over” the function of words within his frames. The left-­to-­right reading of the images is a clear rendering of agglomerative group building. Various individuals add themselves one by one to a forming cluster. In panel 9, on the same row as panel 8, a fully formed agglomeration is depicted at the far right of the panel. The use of empty space in panel 9 here implies the existence of a previous agglomeration process and the position of the image at the right denotes its completion. The text keeps the cross-­species metaphor at the forefront of the reader’s mind: “Es como el juego del tetris pero sin cuadrícula prefijada y sin dirección, en donde las piezas encajan si quieren. Como un baile de humanos-­insectos, la música de las relaciones humanas” (It is like the game of Tetris but without a preestablished grid and without direction, in which the pieces fit together if they want to. Like a human-­insect dance, the music of human relationships). Just as it was with the final panel on the verso page (panel 6), the final panel on the recto page is another deceptively simple example of a descriptive depiction. Along with a concrete example, the text draws attention to a routine gathering of humans that was customary during the river trip: “Sistemática, pero no obligatoriamente, teníamos puestas en común diarias, los convivios. Y charlas donde quien quería explicaba su actividad,

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relacionada o no con el río, con el apoyo del imprescindible power point, esa herramienta de comunicación tan en boga” (Systematically, but not obligatorily, we had daily get-­togethers, convivial gatherings. And informal talks where anyone who wanted could explain their activity, related or unrelated to the river, with the support of the absolutely necessary PowerPoint, this communication tool so much in fashion; panel 10).The impact of this final scene’s iconic representation of human beings is heightened through the abstract design and the complete lack of human figures throughout the first nine panels of the two-­page sequence.The reddish-­brown monochromatic background color shared by panels 6 and 10 that resulted in a false match for readers transitioning between the first and second pages of the panel sequence is now a reminder of the comparison explored in panels 7–9.The coloring encourages readers to connect the human grouping represented in panel 10 with the insect grouping depicted in panel 6.The metaphorical content and the contemplative mode established in this sequence can be taken as an ecological assertion. In this way, Pere Joan contextualizes human activity as one form of grouping within a wider natural world.The fact that he does this with a slow and steady pace (i.e., “Lento y seguro” [Slowly and surely]) and at the speed of the pedestrian (i.e., “a la velocidad de un hombre que anda” [at the speed of a person who walks]) is inseparable from this ecological assertion. In the end, “Grupaje” communicates a powerful idea that might be summed up concisely: Pere Joan induces in readers a sense of responsibility for acting in harmony with the environment, and he promotes—in both the content and the form of the sequence—an equanimity of the mind and an intentionality of the act. Even in this sequence, wordy as it is, one can still see the space that Pere Joan reserves for images and for empty space as a meaningful representation itself. The “flattened” linear nature of his contemplative panel sequence and its characteristic formal qualities (wide frame, syntactical color . . .) are calibrated to induce in readers the careful movements of a forward-­advancing thought, one that is conscious of itself and perhaps of its consequences as well. In formal terms, the ambiguity of textual and image zones, the assimilation of one by the other, and their mutual reinforcement of a single idea allows this thought to arise more intentionally in readers. As stated above, however, this choice of hyperframe is just as important for what it demonstrates as for what it does not.That is, the lack of word balloons, the consistency of panel height and transitions, the lack of traditional character or action—all also forge the contemplative space

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he seeks. Even in these contemplative paneled sequences we see a characteristic openness of design and of perspective, an expansiveness that can be equated with his artistic style more generally. The contrast of the section labeled “Esculturas de grandes cabezas visitables”36 with the example of “Grupaje” is particularly notable. In “Esculturas,” Pere Joan reaffirms the tendency—so clear throughout his oeuvre—to eschew panel sequence altogether. As in the early example of “Untitled” (see fig. 2.1), he also accommodates his images to the unmarked border of the page itself. Each page is to be considered carefully by readers. A description on the first page of the sequence orients readers to Pere Joan’s thought experiment. What would it be like, he asks, to construct a massive project along the river consisting of visitable head sculptures made out of completely natural materials like organic animal and vegetable material and clay? Pere Joan puts his unique stamp on this form of homage when he emphasizes that these would be “cabezas realistas a gran escala, retratos de humanos, retratos de gente que podría estar viviendo a lo largo del río y cuyo interior se puede visitar” (realistic heads on a large scale, portraits of humans, portraits of people who might be living along the river and whose interior could be visited).37 Beyond this initial description, however, readers must rely purely on visual information, as there are no textual zones to aid in interpreting this instance of Pere Joan’s storytelling. Each page depicts a rural landscape but also functions as a landscape— in terms of how the page is scanned by the reader topographically with no narrative mediation other than the natural contours of the images represented. Roughly in the center of each page is an individual head with distinct and personalized facial features (fig. 3.2).The sculptures are all located along the river, and each page offers a view of both water and land. Boats of varying shapes arrive or depart from the scenes, and sometimes are parked at wooden docks.True to his style, the artist preserves vast expanses of empty space on the pages. Pere Joan fashions wooden staircases leading up into the interior of these large sculptures and shows visitors in the act of entering and exiting these head spaces, most frequently through the ear. In one image, visitors stand on the top of the head sculpture and survey the surrounding landscape, having presumably scaled another set of stairs inside the head itself.38 The heads face different directions: looking down at the earth or, in one instance, lying facedown on the shore.39 The last two images of the sequence represent heads in a future state of decay, owing to the fact that each has been constructed with natural materials.40

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Figure 3.2. Pere Joan, El aprendizaje de la lentitud (2011:39)

The turn of the page throughout the sequence replicates for readers the slowness of a geological time to which participants on the river journey had to adapt. The construction and erosion of the statues function as a comics metaphor for the ongoing reciprocal impact of landscape on human activity and of human activity on landscape. These pages are interior landscapes in two senses. Drawn in the visual language of comics, they are already subjective treatments that naturally lend themselves to metaphorical readings. As they witness visitors enter one headspace or another, Pere Joan’s readers participate in the construction of a visual metaphor for mutual human understanding. This visual metaphor draws strength from the comic’s persistent reinforcement of the theme of human symbiosis with the natural environment. In another sense, this sequence hinges on the mystery surrounding the interior of the head sculptures themselves. While the depicted visitors are able to experience these interior spaces, they are hidden from the reader’s view. This is an intriguing and more conceptual use of the formal phenomenon that Pascal Lefèvre calls nonvisualized space.41 More specifically what Pere Joan accomplishes is a certain interiorization of the hors champ interne, or “the supposed ‘hidden’ space within the borders of the panel itself.”42 While in the hors champ interne “figures can overlap one another and hide parts from the eye of

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the viewer,” the giant heads present an example not of overlapping or obscured view, but of an interior space that would require much more than a minor shift in visual perspective to be rendered visible.This nurtures the reader’s curiosity to explore this internal but hidden page space. Similarly, this choice induces the reader’s curiosity about the specific people whose portraits have been constructed along the river and thus also the desire to learn more about their material realities and landscapes. Pere Joan’s awareness that he has been intentionally obscuring the interior of these heads is made clear when he finally reveals the inner space of three sculptures on a penultimate and climactic two-­page color spread (fig. 3.3).43 Contrasting sharply with the other black-­and-­white pages in the sequence, here he modulates the color of the river from white to brown, uses vibrant green for the vegetation and a warm yellow-­orange for the dock ramp, and depicts the internal space of each head in a rich palette against the persistently white background. The two smaller headspaces on the page depict a mule in the river against a beautifully blue sky with white clouds in one, and two unusually large conquistador helmets wedged up against what appears to be a natural rock formation in the other. Here the enduring everyday experience of the rural river landscape unfolds in a way that is neither romanticized nor freed from a history of conflict. The largest head on the two-­page spread is situated at the far left so as to capture the reader’s attention first. In it, an adult man, an adult woman, and a small child walk slowly up the river scene’s ramp into the drawn headspace, which paradoxically depicts another river scene. The interior scene employs an extension of the same green-­brown color palette used on the exterior, but contrasts with it by showing a boat, which is visible off in the distance through the rain that falls only on the inside. The three figures walking up to enter the head sculpture are drawn only in white with black outline. In marked contrast to these figures, the use of vibrant color on the interior suggests an immediacy that can be interpreted as the reader’s full integration into the inner space of the sculptures. This positioning—assured through color, iconic depiction, and perspective, all in the context of the trope of the head sculptures—is crucial for bringing readers to contemplate the page as Pere Joan has contemplated the imaginative river art project itself. The recapitulation of exterior content in this headspace in particular pays homage to the connection of rural populations with the river area. It thus has a localizing effect for the reader’s consciousness, without resorting

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Figure 3.3. Pere Joan, El aprendizaje de la lentitud (2011:44–45)

to the sort of specificity that could be read as stereotypical or inaccurate. The conquistador helmets—which recall a similar helmet from an earlier sequence of the album discussed above—are an iconic reminder of a difficult and enduring past and serve to diffuse any hint of (post)colonial erasure of history. Multiple levels of thought are depicted here: the contemplation of the trip by Pere Joan and his colleagues (the sequence), the contemplation of the river region by local inhabitants (the head sculptures), the contemplation of local inhabitants and their experience (including the depiction of visitors), and the contemplation of all of these levels together by readers. A basic detail provides this sequence with significant meaning. The fact that Pere Joan depicts heads in landscape, and inversely, landscape inside of heads, once again serves as a visual reminder of the dialectical imagination that blends rural space with mental cartographies. As we will see in the next section’s exploration of 16 novel·les amb hòmens blaus, Pere Joan’s interest in representing inner experience and its connections with extensive space in El aprendizaje de la lentitud has grown out of earlier work.

16 novel·les amb hòmens blaus (16 Novels with Blue Men; 1996) It is useful to review 16 novel·les amb hòmens blaus as a whole before shifting our attention to the scale of an important if isolated sequence within it. Appropriately enough, this important comics album contains sixteen unnumbered sections consisting of some combination of images and/or

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text. All sections contain an introductory page with the section title, a full-­page image, and no further words. Beyond this initial consistency, it must be noted that some degree of variety occurs regarding text-­image combinations.That is, the subsequent pages of a significant number of sections contain only images,44 some contain only words,45 and some contain a combination of pages with only words and pages with only images.46 In addition, one section contains groups of individual text-­image combinations, the penultimate section contains paragraph-­form text separated by margin-­spanning images, and the final section contains full-­page images with captions at the bottom of the pages.47 These variations are important, as they communicate the degree to which Pere Joan’s characteristic formal innovation is on display throughout the entire volume. Given the heterogeneity of formats and themes implied in the book’s structure, it can be difficult to summarize a graphic novel of such eclectic composition. Nevertheless, some basic continuities make such a summary possible. As the title conveys, the album’s thematic center is the existence of blue humanlike beings.48 What appears to be a single blue man either appears iconically represented in the album’s individual section-­title or content pages or else is present implicitly in those numerous pages that have a black, white, and blue coloring. In many of the section-­title pages, the blue figure appears almost as an impassive observer or solitary being— looking upon and often distinguished from humans. In one scene, we merely catch a glimpse of the blue skin on his face and his white hair as he is immersed in a crowd.49 Other times the hair on the blue figure is black or even blue, suggesting that there are a number of blue men crawling the pages of Pere Joan’s graphic novel.50 On the other hand, late in the book, a white-­haired blue man and a black-­haired blue man intersect, forming the shape of an X as underscored in the single-­letter caption below and suggesting that they may be individual manifestations of a more metaphysical quality.51 Further problematizing this question surrounding the album’s central character or characters, readers are also introduced to another blue being with a more spherical (globe-­like), even surreal head and face.52 It seems a clear and obvious point that the choice of the color blue is significant for the many connections with modern art that it raises. The French author Victor Hugo famously considered azure to be the color of art. Echoing Hugo, the Nicaraguan poet and prose author Rubén Darío— who lived in Spain and became a primary figure of Hispanic modernismo— titled his influential masterwork Azul (1888). And, of course, the renowned

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painter Pablo Picasso immortalized the color during his widely studied “blue period.”53 In effect, the work of Pere Joan unavoidably communicates with such traditions, rereading them through the medium of comics. In this light, it is tempting to see the use of blue coloring as a prompt for readers to consider how abstraction, metaphor, qualities, concepts, and even thought itself intersect with tangible or visible form. It suggests a mood of retreat, tranquility, inner contemplation, melancholy, and even isolation that the artist connects with tropes of physical embodiment and extensive space. More often than not, Pere Joan’s blue being is depicted alone: alone in a room, alone in an empty movie theater, alone gazing into a pool of black liquid, alone behind an opaque inverted-­color (black) spotlight, and alone contemplating a disembodied blue-­and-­black heart.54 Alternately, we see the back of his head as he looks upon images that are simultaneously the object of our own gaze.55 Readers witness the blue figure in contemplation of various landscapes, whether these are interior, exterior, or even abstract and metaphorical.56 Other times, the being himself is absent, but the color blue nonetheless appears in an aspect of the images, or of those very landscapes, for example (e.g., an outdoor scene approximating a tangled jungle of objects, water, a cloud, reeds).57 This itself calls attention to how human consciousness externalizes itself in nature or cannot be distinguished entirely from the natural world. At a certain level, 16 novel·les amb hòmens blaus calls attention to the gaze and to the act of seeing things differently. One might say that it brings feeling and perception together. It is an instruction to imbue seeing with the power of sensation. The result is an empathetic form of sight that installs us in the feelings of others— other beings and other places. Evident even in this initially brief and necessarily incomplete presentation is how the color blue is used to evoke an emotional state and an ecological relationship. Pere Joan uses color as the representational vehicle that links being with place and thus also situates consciousness within its surrounding material environment. These connections—a cultural geography or a human geography translated into visual terms—are in fact made explicit in the text of the work and are evident throughout. For example, in the very first paragraph of the first section of the book that includes text, titled “Immediat exterior físic” (Immediate physical surroundings), the textual zone directs the reader’s attention to the character Azul and more specifically to the relationship between his consciousness and his immediate physical environment:

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A ese Azul el estar situado en un sitio u otro de una habitación le parecía que influía en su actitud mental. Como si al mover una silla, un brazo, estar parado o iniciar un movimiento se cambiara la estructura molecular de un conjunto vivo, el aire se meciera y, con él, el sentido de las cosas que allí veía, tocaba y sentía. Parecía que su percepción sobre aquel momento mutara decisivamente el hilo de sus sensaciones, siempre alerta, como una membrana frágil; radar abierto hacia lo más próximo, siempre sensible a lo inmediato exterior físico. (To this Azul, locating himself in one or another spot of a room seemed to influence his mental activity. It was as if moving a chair, an arm, standing up, or initiating a movement would change the molecular structure of a living totality, the air shifted and, with it, his sense of the things he saw, touched, and felt also changed. It seemed that his perception of that moment would change decisively the thread of his sensations, always alert, like a delicate membrane; a radar open toward what was most near, always sensitive to his immediate physical surroundings.)58

Facing this text on the verso section-­title page is the image of the blue being sitting in an armchair and staring at stacks of books, papers, shoes, and objects, which are lined up against the opposing wall (fig. 3.4). This image and the text facing it on the recto page function as a philosophical postulate. The interplay between self and world, and between the immaterial activity of the mind and the material reality of things is clearly highlighted, and might be read in terms of the general insights from any number of phenomenological philosophers.59 Elsewhere the text explores the notion of a “membrana” (membrane): “imperceptible a la vista” (imperceptible to the eye) that “le unía al lugar en donde nació, que él situaba en su casa, de forma imprecisa—y errónea—en algún lugar de su habitación” (united him to the place in which he was born, that he located in his house, imprecisely—and erroneously—in one spot of his room). This emphasis on the membrane makes mention of the distinctions and similarities between interior space and exterior space and explores quantitative journeys through place that imply qualitative transformations in consciousness.60 A number of compelling images even blend beings and landscape. Heads seem to sprout from the ground, and landscapes unite with the blue being.61 Given Pere Joan’s aversion to plot in the

Figure 3.4. Pere Joan, 16 novel·les amb hòmens blaus (1996:12)

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traditional sense, this is thus not a story about the trials and tribulations of blue beings or of a specific blue being. Instead, it is a story in which various nondualistic relationships acquire a striking visual presence on the page. Tropes of idea and practice, thought and movement, interior emotion and the exterior word, the individual and the crowd, connections and dissociations, intimacy and distance, consciousness and space/place acquire a contemplative weight through the artist’s use and personalization of the color blue.The particular story of the blue being (i.e., his history and identity) is of decidedly less interest than the way readers see him act in the landscape from an intuitive and empathetic positioning. The membrane mentioned above is a significant motif used throughout the work, usually appearing as an extended blue-­colored aspect of the blue being’s body. This is not a membrane in the sense of a static barrier between inner and outer, but instead a border that operationalizes the connection between these worlds.62 It is a representation of the active capacity of consciousness to extend into the material world, something akin to the movement of the cytoplasmic extension of an amoeba. To wit, there are times in the album when a blue finger or foot of the being is visibly extended through space in the form of a long blue cord.63 While the use of this motif emphasizes a probing connection with the exterior world defined first and foremost by interior feeling, at other times visual evidence is provided of blue cords that have been tied off into knots, metaphorically restricting the flow of energy, losing their color, and protruding like dead roots out of the ground.64 In the final sequence of pages titled “Azul” (Blue), a blue-­liquid force splashes from a city onto the face of the blue being, and four pages later his head is drained, releasing blue liquid that pours out and spills onto the ground.65 In one image in the center of a blank page of empty white space, a white cord, a black cord, and what is either a spiraling vine or a stream of smoke all enter the blue being’s body at the top of the head, the left shoulder, and the base of the neck.66 In visual terms, the blue being, a tragic isolated figure seeking connection with the world, is himself the site of embodiment for essential contradictions, just as he is a metaphor for the broader human experience. The full-­page layout format of the open hyperframe Pere Joan employs throughout this comics album is a compositional choice that allows him to present the ontological fact of the contradictory, nondualistic relationships sketched above. While the presence of panel sequences is appropriate for the forms of material action represented in work from the 1980s

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and 1990s collected in El hombre que se comió a sí mismo—or for that matter the sequential movements of contemplative thought induced in the “Grupaje” example from El aprendizaje de la lentitud analyzed above in this chapter—their relative absence in this specific work denotes an intention to represent qualities and not events. The open hyperframe, in its various manifestations, promises a wide view not on changing states of discrete people, places, and things but rather on their continuing interrelationships. It represents—or makes it possible to understand visually—relations of coexistence, cohabitation, union, and simultaneity between these interconnected people, places, and things. In 16 novel·les amb hòmens blaus, these relations are rendered visible through varying full-­page layouts. The full-­ page single-­image layout emphasizes the enduring temporal dimension of what is represented. This takes into account not only the continuous and fluid relationship between various items represented in a unified space but also their continued coexistence through a fluid time. The lack of internal structure or differentiation reinforces the notion of a shared spatiotemporal totality—intimacy and connection, not distance or dissociation. Likewise, the full-­page survey, gallery, or variation format similarly allows the copresentation of seemingly disparate people, places, or things. In this example, though they are not contextualized in a single space or time, the simultaneous visual consideration of individual items by both composing artist and contemplating readers reinforces the notion of a shared quality or qualities. A four-­page sequence that is of particular interest to a discussion of Pere Joan’s formal innovation is titled “Seres con corona” (Beings with halos).67 The first page is a title panel of sorts displaying Azul and a number of other beings from head to toe in what would be a long shot in the cinema. We see only the back of the blue being’s head and shoulders in the lower-­left area of the page, and with him we look upon four individuals with halos. Each of the halos seems to be an idiosyncratic representation of the individual’s personality, interests, or life experience, and each includes some amalgam of iconic or abstract representation. The implication, set up by our identification with the visual perspective of the blue being—on this page but also throughout the graphic novel—seems to be that these halos are visible to the blue being due to some quality of his own, some intuitive level of feeling. A band of blue appearing on the face of the woman on the right, who sits minimally but noticeably apart from the other three, implies an empathetic connection with the blue being

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himself. The other three persons stare at the blue being directly, and thus also at the readers of Pere Joan’s comic, seemingly aware that they are being contemplated, perhaps even posing. The contrast between this title page and the next three pages is immediately evident, as each makes use of the survey or gallery page layout with individuated images of beings with halos depicted at the level of what would be the close-­up in the language of cinema.68 Each page features nine close-­ups of the heads and faces of various beings, arranged in three rows and three columns (fig. 3.5).69 In these images, Pere Joan’s ability to communicate the specificity of inner experience not merely through iconic representation but also through line, texture, and shading is remarkable. The use of the halos in general allows readers a window into a specific emotional range more so than a specific event. They manifest an inner psychic experience and an enduring embodied human personality in a visual object projected to the exterior. One such image (R3) boasts a concordance between a head and a face obscured totally by long hair and a halo that features a long-­haired figure disappearing behind some tall reeds, the two working together to communicate shyness, reserve, or privateness. The final image of the gallery (R9) features a half-­drawn, wizened, or even fading halo above a skull, surely indicating death, near-­death, or more metaphorically a lack of interior life. Another image (V9) is of a man with a pained expression and a rising swath of fabric or pillar of smoke that hangs over his halo, evoking either a noose or some degree of hospital traction. The effect of the halos is seldom conventional or stereotypical, but is most often enigmatic, tending toward a constellation of emotional responses that are only vaguely defined. Hints of abstract thought patterns are represented externally in a halo through geometrical shapes (V8), memories or fears of bodily deterioration (V3), visual metaphors of strenuous effort (R8), and even a halo representing total perplexity (V5). Yet even as we ponder the meaning of the scenes represented in the halos, and as we map those scenes to our own impressions of the heads and faces represented on the page, the specificity of each individual is less important than the fact that they are identified by a certain emotional constellation that is represented not verbally but pictorially. Even though they may be communicated by an image and not by words, these emotional constellations can still be seen, witnessed, documented, and, above all else, felt.

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Figure 3.5. Pere Joan, 16 novel·les amb hòmens blaus (1996:24–25)

After all, in the larger context of the graphic novel, these are not characters that have previously been introduced to us or with whom we are familiar.The images ultimately function merely as brief metaphorical windows into the interior life of individuals. It is not the specificity of an individual’s life experience that matters here, but the depth of feeling that Pere Joan so deftly represents in each case.We must remember that this perspective is being staged for us as readers at the same time that it is being staged for Azul. Our view of the pages is simultaneously a view that brings us closer to the protagonist’s own sensitive perspective and empathic, intuitive consciousness. We coincide with his gaze, which is that of a disconnected but empathic and silent witness as it drifts over a range of felt human experiences. The consistency of the pattern established visually through the repeated depiction of a single being with its own idiosyncratic halo has a cumulative effect. In this gallery manifestation of the open hyperframe layout, the individuals function together as a metaphor for the diversity of inner psychic experiences that shape human beings. With this and other examples in Pere Joan, if we are interested in applying the typology of Peeters, who distinguished between conventional,

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decorative, rhetorical, and productive page layouts,70 we are forced to recognize an overlap between the decorative and the productive layouts.That is, “Peeters distinguished four conceptions of the page, respectively designated as conventional (where the panels are ‘of a strictly constant format’), decorative (where ‘the aesthetic organization prizes every other consideration’), rhetorical (where ‘the dimensions of the panel submit to the action that is described’) and, finally, productive (where ‘it is the organization of the page that appears to dictate the story).”71 On these pages by Pere Joan, one might determine that the layout is merely decorative according to this terminology. That is, the aesthetic organization of the pages can be described as a gallery of sorts.We are invited to appreciate the nuances of each of the individual heads and faces presented to us. At the same time, we are also invited to appreciate their evenly spaced arrangement. The totality of this arrangement can thus be appreciated aesthetically in and of itself. But it is possible to see, too, that the arrangement of the gallery has a productive as well as a decorative function. The graphic novel may not have a story in the conventional sense, but its consistent theme and philosophical core message of nondualistic reconciliation is quite relevant to this page layout. Pere Joan’s choice of the gallery arrangement implies and induces our adoption of a particular narrative focalization. This formal choice is productive in the sense that it provides characterization, perspective, empathy, feeling, and mood. In its mobilization of an incremental depiction of individuals, the gallery represents the accumulation of knowledge about the total range of human experiences. The hyperframe as used here is, moreover, a page layout that foregrounds its relationship to the multiframe of the overall comics album. That is, juxtaposed to the paneled sequence that encourages readers to focus on a component of meaning smaller than the page, this choice of hyperframe expands and enlarges the focal zone of readers. The lack of internal divisions allows the page itself to become more visible as a unit of meaning. Rather than emphasize the page’s division into smaller panels, Pere Joan’s open hyperframe encourages its connection, through page-­to-­ page transitions, to images located both backward and forward through the book. In this respect, because it lacks a gutter structure, the page-­level hyperframe takes on the polysyntactic function otherwise played by the gutter within a more traditional panel sequence.72 Of course, this polysyntactic function is exercised in a noticeably greater scale.Thus it can be said that while the arthrological function of the gutter in paneled sequences

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serves as a “site of reciprocal determination,” focusing our attention on what can be known, surmised, or reasonably pieced together from the gap between successive panels, the displacement of this gap to the level of the page may have the effect of prompting us to acknowledge the concept of what is unrepresented or unknown. Note that these considerations include a material element. The page barrier does not disrupt reciprocal determination entirely, but it does influence which images stay most immediately present in the reader’s mind. Any previous image gradually fades from our minds when not continually in front of us. Pere Joan’s work in particular uses the open hyperframe to prompt readers to actively engage with his art not by supplying action, consequence, or characterization at the smaller scale of the entr’image or gutter but by inducing mystery, imagination, and wonder at the greater scale of the page. It is a layout strategy designed to install us within a time that is not sequenced, ordered, predictable, or routinized, but rather extended, ongoing, complex, multiple, and enduring. It simultaneously recognizes the active role of the reader in reading the page topographically, as explored further in the next section.

The Iconostatization of the Image in Pere Joan’s Topographical Aesthetics The concept of iconostasis developed by Andrei Molotiu is crucial to understanding Pere Joan’s style in these works. I have avoided the use of this term in this chapter until now in order to prioritize the interactions between landscape and subjectivity in El aprendizaje de la lentitud and 16 novel·les amb hòmens blaus. Nevertheless, it is implicit in the analyses of both albums as carried out above. In these texts, iconostasis develops in a way that is quite relevant to the topographical and image-­centric approach employed here. The gallery format of 16 novel·les just mentioned is a paradigmatic example of how the artist encourages readers to view the page layout as a “unified composition”—or, in Molotiu’s words, “to take it in at a glance, the way we take in an abstract painting.”73 Yet even where Pere Joan uses more complex forms of page layouts than the gallery, the tendency toward iconostatization can still be observed.This “move of a comic toward the stasis of an icon” is implicit in the strategies, already discussed above, whereby the artist slows down the pace of reading, challenging or disrupting a linear/sequential engagement with page items.74

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Adding to this effect is the fact that the characteristic iconic redundancy of comics art is generally lacking in these albums. It is worth repeating two relevant points made earlier in this book. Pere Joan has never been interested in creating a continuing series or a marketable protagonist character. In addition, in the 1990s and 2000s, he shifts decisively away from the visual composition and mechanical advance of the traditional panel sequence toward more oneiric themes in developing a more intimate and surrealist style. Keeping in mind the discussions of specific pages already carried out in this chapter, we can now outline the generalized impact of these strategies in both the panel layout and the full-­page layout between which the artist oscillates in his work. By reflecting on how Pere Joan moves away from sequence toward a topographical aesthetics, we reinforce the theme of interactive landscapes in the artist’s oeuvre. It is valuable to return first to the artist’s general approach to the panel sequence, which of course has a marked infrequency in his later work. The above reading of the “Grupaje” sequence from El aprendizaje de la lentitud established the artist’s ability to subdue the traditionally sequential character of panel narrative in favor of contemplative, abstract, metaphorical, and even philosophical meanings. That sequence boasts what are general properties of Pere Joan’s characteristic panel sequences. For instance, there and elsewhere where he uses such panels, these tend to vary in width, but not so often in height, from row to row. Usually the vertical dimension of rows is uniform. Although there is a row structure evident on the page, one nevertheless struggles to find strong evidence of the strip as an organizing principle in Pere Joan’s panel layouts.That is, there is quite often little cause to define an individual row of panels as a unit constitutive of meaning in and of itself. However, one can identify—more frequently than a logic corresponding to any notion of “strip”—a subtle awareness of page borders. In particular, the beginning or ending panels of a page are at times marked as such in one way or another, often by a shift in monochromatic background color if nothing else. This has the effect of elongating and flattening the comics panel sequence, which trends toward an exaggerated horizontality. Pere Joan does away with smaller groups of panels that might display elements of syntactic punctuation or visual rhyme in traditional ways—vertical correspondences between beginning and final images in strips, for example. Instead, he subdues the vertical dimension of the page and extends the horizontal linearity of the sequence. This is significant, as it has the effect of evoking a landscape horizon through the nuances of comics form.

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It is important to insist upon this point. Because of Pere Joan’s tendency to vary the width of panels, the number of panels in his page composition tends to differ from row to row.75 The result is that no true grid structure is established on the page, which thus tends to be deemphasized as a unit of meaning in this traditional sense. It is as a consequence of this lack of grid structure that the horizontal dimension of the paneled sequence triumphs over the vertical dimension of the page. As a result, the sequence acquires a rather flattened and linear logic. This is especially true when compared to panel sequences by other oft-­studied artists where the horizontal and vertical axes cannot be considered in isolation from one another.76 This logic steadily—slowly, carefully—pushes attention left to right, row by row, with little connection to any of the images that are visible to readers up or down the page.77 This itself is evidence of iconostatization. The lack of a grid and the steady linear logic of Pere Joan’s panels assert, in practice, a minimalist and highly focused structure. This largely eschews the complexity of some page organizations, such as the use of isomorphic relations that would span or bridge the horizontal and vertical axes of the page.78 Because of Pere Joan’s tendency to use empty space as a cushion around images and to some degree even around words in the panel, there is relatively little chance that images, word balloons, or other structural nuances at the margins of the panel will create a pull for the reader’s eyes.79 This reliance on empty space, the central placement of images within the panel, the concomitant lack of visual clutter at or across the panel margins, and the lack of a clear differentiation between the textual zone and the image zone all flatten the effect of retroactive determination for readers.80 Where such structural nuances would accelerate the reader’s attention and interlink panels, however, Pere Joan’s style takes a different route. His contrary strategy has the effect of deceleration. This deceleration of reading is important: it not only signals a departure from the commercial style of action comics, it also announces the presence of a visual landscape that must be traversed carefully, steadily, and slowly.This presence invites a calm pace of reading. One thinks of the “traffic-­calming areas” in suburban neighborhoods where vehicles must slow down to move over the intentional placement of speed bumps. Pere Joan’s style in such sequences— similar to vehicles moving through traffic-­calming areas—encourages the reader to adopt a consistent, steady pace.Yet if one has already adopted the measured pace of the pedestrian—remember the slowness of “el hombre que anda” (the person who walks) from El aprendizaje de la lentitud—there

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will be no need to slow down. As readers, we can thus become “lost” in interior thoughts suggested by casual consideration of our surroundings but tethered to those surroundings only in the loosest fashion. Pere Joan’s work does not tax the reader’s concentration visually in the way that the sequences of other comics artists might due to their baroque composition (excessive line, shadow, detail, and object clutter) or structural complexity.81 Rather, this quality of deceleration, strengthened by a turn away from direct action, central characters, and plot in the traditional sense, opens up a mental space for the reader’s contemplation of his panels. These, as we have seen above, often contain metaphorical, philosophical, or phenomenological content or prompts. The reader who contemplates the page in this fashion engages with the intrinsically iconostatic character of the artist’s images. The basic quality of each of Pere Joan’s characteristic panels can be described by using the word “containment.” I hesitate to use a word such as “isolated” or “hermetic” to describe the qualities demonstrated in this hyperframe variant of Pere Joan’s work, since the comics form itself— the mere fact that page layouts permit the simultaneous presentation of images—can never be mitigated entirely. And yet, because of the nuances outlined above, readers have very little visual incentive or enticement to skip ahead or to oscillate back and forth between panels for that matter. The fact that there is little to no iconic redundancy from panel to panel reinforces this property of the artist’s use of sequence. While “containment” is a word that reflects on the space of the panel alone, it would perhaps be better to use the word “weight”: each panel has a weight or a gravity that pulls the reader’s attention to its center, or even anchors it during the moment of consideration. As a way of explaining the effect this can have on the reader I suggest an image: readers can think of each panel in this standard sequence as a stepping-­stone leading a traveler across a river. Considered moment by moment, the traveler focuses intently on each stone to the exclusion of the others in order to maintain balance. Only once this focus and attention has resulted in a secure landing does the traveler begin to contemplate the next stone. So, too, does the reader contemplate the next panel only after having securely and exhaustively explored the space of the existing panel. To reduce this specific reading experience to the generalized mechanics of reading any panel sequence in comics art whatsoever is to miss these iconostatic nuances. Instead, because of structural and compositional factors present in Pere Joan’s particular use of the

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panel sequence, the reader’s attention successively becomes grounded, balanced, secured, tethered to each single panel in a way that speaks to the artist’s larger aesthetic of landscape.82 One does not read his panels so much as traverse them. They are a landscape or terrain in which readers are to immerse themselves. As such, the property of iconostatization is notable even in Pere Joan’s more traditional, if infrequently used, panel sequences. In understanding the specific dimensions of Pere Joan’s use of the paneled sequence, it is necessary to attend to another aspect of his preferred hyperframe—one in which image is allowed to take precedence over text. This aspect is the use of the word balloon, or rather the lack thereof. Thierry Groensteen designates the word balloon as a constitutive element of the hyperframe, noting, “Indeed, the form, the number, and the location of the word balloons (bulles), in sum, the network that they create within the hyperframe, also regulate the management of space, and contribute in a determining fashion to directing the gaze of the reader.”83 Pere Joan’s unique stamp can be seen in the lack of balloons or, more specifically, in a peculiar superimposition of what Groensteen refers to as the textual zone and the image zone. Regarding the work of other comics artists who at times opt out of including a word balloon, the comics theorist notes that “it appears on occasion that the text is not to be crimped, and the words are welcomed within the representational space without the iconic element and the field of writing being explicitly disassociated.”84 It is necessary to note that in Pere Joan’s panel sequence, this lack of disassociation of the words from the representational space is systematic and regularized. That is, the words appear in balloons relatively rarely and are infrequently situated below or above the panel border. Instead, they are routinely and almost always placed inside the frame along with the representational space and the iconic elements present therein. The frame thus becomes a holder for both word and image—where words are present, for they are, in fact, absent with relative frequency—which interact with each other and compete for the reader’s attention. In fact, the words in Pere Joan’s panels frequently assimilate to the image, coming to seem almost as merely another iconic element inside the frame. This is yet another aspect of iconostatization, or a tendency toward the unified composition in his work. The word balloon could not in fact become customary without distracting from the panel and thus from the priority of the image. In Pere Joan’s particular case, an excessive or structural use of word balloons would assert a competing layer of page relief and would, in

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the end, obscure his intentional style and his emblematic approach, that is, his precise presentation of an item for consideration against a monochrome background. In addition, because the words in this variant are not located above or below the panel, nor even linked structurally with the top or bottom borders within the panel, this lack of balloons once again purposely flattens the hyperframe.To use Groensteen’s terms, at the scale of the hyperframe itself in Pere Joan’s work we have a flattened depth, a collapse of two forms, two condensed areas, and a centralized positioning.85 These are all ways of saying that textual zone and image zone combine and tend to become one and the same in Pere Joan’s work.86 An effect of aligning the textual zone with the image zone is that the text becomes less intrusive and is less dominant in the reading experience. The image is thus freed somewhat from a dependence on the presence of the text. In opposition to Pere Joan’s nontraditional use of the panel sequence, however, the artist’s hallmark style, as we have seen, is defined by a total lack of either panels or sequence. This hallmark hyperframe may use a single panel constructed at the level of the page, but never a sequence of multiple panels. It may employ a sequence of unpaneled images, but never a paneled sequence. Its primary organizational principle is the more-­or-­less free interplay of items at the level of the page. These items present themselves simultaneously to the reader, as per Molotiu’s notion of a unified composition. Their formal arrangement, at first glance, implies no linear structure. Even where linear sequences do in fact appear, they are never self-­evident from the page layout, which seems to present relatively autonomous text and/or image items. Instead, such an underlying linear logic is visible only through more careful consideration of the page content.87 Due to the loose structure and open nature of this hyperframe, its significance must be sussed out through the act of reading. In its extreme form, relatively autonomous images are organized into what might be called, in line with Groensteen’s taxonomy, a survey or variation.88 This gallery form of presentation—evident, for example, in the face-­mask gallery included in El aprendizaje de la lentitud as well as the aforementioned “Beings with halos” section of 16 novel·les amb hòmens blaus,89 and a page of Azul y ceniza (2004) discussed in chapter 2 of this book—allows the reader to start with any image whatsoever and cover the page carefully in a fashion of their choosing. Alternatively, readers may drift over the page at a whim without carefully engaging with any given image in particular, in accordance with the paradigmatic example of Molotiu’s iconostasis. Many

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of Pere Joan’s more innovative layouts, however, are much less structured than the aligned rows and columns suggested by the gallery layout. As evident in the discussion in chapter 2 of “Untitled,” the origin of the artist’s preferred open hyperframe variant lies with his earliest work in zines such as Baladas Urbanas (1976) and Muérdago (1977). Another example from Pere Joan’s early work Baladas Urbanas is relevant here. The image in question is a chaotic mélange of human figures, birds, rocks, words, and sounds spread throughout the page. Here the organization and interrelationship of images and words is not entirely clear either upon first, second, or even third glance.90 Importantly, this chaotic arrangement on the page resonates with the more informal sketchbooks from the 1980s and 1990s that the artist later published as Tingram: Pere Joan a lápiz (2003). Glancing through Tingram, the emphasis on landscape forms and figures that share the page is pronounced (fig. 3.6). Specific sequences in El aprendizaje de la lentitud and 16 novel·les amb hòmens blaus (see the “Paisatges” two-­page spread, fig. 3.7), for example, recall this graphic style of the sketchbook through what seem to be doodles evoking the aesthetic relationship between intimate subjectivity and experienced landscape.91 I believe this aspect of the artist’s production can be traced back to a nineteenth-­century European tradition of “macédoines” (medleys)—as Groensteen has pointed out, this “practice of juxtaposing on the same page figurative drawings with no logical or semantic continuity has a long history.”92 It is this lack of logical or semantic continuity in Pere Joan’s full-­page layouts that provides readers with the freedom to take each page in “at a glance.” As these remarks illustrate, the unpaneled, full-­page hyperframe variant of Pere Joan’s work has been present from the beginning. His hallmark open page style allows the various contents of the page to float in space and thus also in time. The words or images become stepping stones in an expanse of water that readers are relatively free to traverse in the manner and direction they feel is most appropriate.93 One noticeable absence in this open hyperframe is the use of the intericonic gutter, or entr’image. A prevalent commonplace in the work of some comics theorists is that the gutter produces meaning just as much as the images do. On this notion it is appropriate to be reminded of what Groensteen has commented, “In reality, the gutter in and of itself (that is to say, an empty space) does not merit fetishization.”94 We might gain some insight by invoking Groensteen’s more metaphorical understanding of the gutter: as “a virtual . . . that is not abandoned to the fantasy of each reader: it is a forced virtual, an

Figure 3.6. Pere Joan, Tingram (2003:102)

Figure 3.7. Pere Joan, 16 novel·les amb hòmens blaus (1996:38–39)

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identifiable absence. The gutter is simply the symbolic site of this absence. More than a zone on the paper, it is the interior screen on which every reader projects the missing image (or images).”95 Alternatively, Groensteen asserts the arthrological function of the gutter and its role in sequence and narrative as a “site of reciprocal determination” whereby “meaning is constructed, not without the active participation of the reader.”96 These two distinct understandings of the gutter are applicable to Pere Joan’s work and can help us understand the significance of his open hyperframe. First and foremost, the absence of the gutter, in full-­page paneled or unpaneled scene layouts, for example, needs to be read in terms of Pere Joan’s intention to immerse the reader in precisely what is represented. This implies an act of attention. The reader is not invited to imagine or project “the missing image (or images)” but is instead asked to focus on what is there. If space and other elements of comics form were used in the contemplative panel sequence to encourage and even induce movements of the reader’s thought, here the lack of a gutter stimulates concentration—a relatively depthless concentration on what is present, no more and no less. In page layouts boasting relatively autonomous text and/or image items, such as the survey or variation (gallery) arrangement, for example, there is a formal exaggeration of this quality of presentness. In these cases, the page itself becomes a space of appearance.The use of stark relief allows Pere Joan to convey a still surface—and thus the ontological fact of being. Second, although this term itself was not used, the arthrological function of the gutter in Pere Joan’s contemplative panel sequence “Grupaje” was discussed in the earlier section in the example chosen from El aprendizaje de la lentitud. In that sequence, this function made nuances of meaning possible through syntagmatic relationships and retroactive determination, including the more banal forward progression that can be described as sequence or narrative. Here in the more pervasive example of Pere Joan’s use of the open hyperframe, however, the lack of a proper gutter is synonymous with the lack of mediation and distance, and thus also a lack of traditional sequential narrative. This complements the discussion of stark relief in my exploration in chapter 2 of 100 pictogramas: his approach connotes immediacy, closeness, and full presence in a single moment of time. Unmediated by gutter structures, the time represented in these instances becomes complex or extended. The proliferation of text or image items within a more fluid arrangement on a single page asserts an image of multiplicity in temporal duration. Multiple objects and multiple experiences

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cohabit and endure within an expanding temporality.The reader now participates directly in this expanded time. In Pere Joan’s formal and spatial aesthetics, the lack of gutter structure in the open hyperframe thus moves us beyond the differentiation of past and future toward an ongoing present and traversable landscape that requires our full attention.This aesthetic quality of page construction, combined with his thematic emphasis on landscapes, is a crucial component of Pere Joan’s topographical approach to comics art.

Chap ter 4

Urban Geographies Cit ysc apes, Mobilit y, and Belonging

Whether one considers comics in comparative and historical contexts or in terms of postdictatorial Spain specifically, the representation of the urban environment is one of the medium’s privileged themes. To demonstrate that scholarly interest in this theme is on the rise, I mentioned in the introduction to this book two important theoretical works that investigate the numerous ties between city geographies and comics.1 Rather than engage this premise at length, a few examples given in the first section below should suffice to set the scene for the investigation of selected milestones from Pere Joan’s comics art that follows. It is important, however, to state that this chapter follows the previous one for a very important reason.The exploration in chapter 3 of natural discourse and rural landscapes continues to be quite relevant in the present move toward the artist’s representation of urban spaces. Readers should keep in mind that brief example of a two-­page spread from El aprendizaje de la lentitud titled “Lo orgánico y la cuadrícula” (The organic and the grid), in which Pere Joan fused images of rural space, urban

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planning, and the human body.2 The discourse of modern urban planning, as concisely indicated in visual terms through the aforementioned image, makes use of organic and natural metaphors in its structuring of cityspace.3 Nineteenth-­century planners across Europe were very interested in how to integrate nature into urban space, a theme that this chapter revisits below in the specific case of Barcelona. Moreover, it is significant that a broad view of the urban phenomenon does not fully differentiate between rural and urban life. That is, reifying the rural-­urban distinction obscures the way in which the urban and the rural have evolved according to a set of mutually defining relationships. From Louis Wirth of the Chicago School of Urban Sociology, who noted that the city draws “the most remote parts of the world into its orbit,” to 1960s anti-­urban activist Jane Jacobs, who suggested that the agglomeration characteristic of cities made agriculture possible—and many other examples still—the urban and the rural are each implied in the other.4 Joan Ramon Resina and William R. Viestenz, in The New Ruralism, put this particularly well when they note that “binary concepts such as the urban and the rural perform as alternatives but also as complements.”5 It is important to recognize that two important critical traditions are changing how scholars approach intersections of the rural and the urban. Scholars from political ecology and those associated with New Ruralism are working to expose the ideological separations established between the discourse of nature and the whole of political, social, cultural, and economic life.6 In the myopia of somewhat self-­congratulatory strains of green movements—as urban geographer David Harvey has remarked— nature has frequently been seen as separate from human activity.7 Erik Swyngedouw and Maria Kaika in particular have contributed to—and, importantly, have politicized—a tradition of thought that has critiqued “dominant twentieth-­century perspectives on the city that ignored nature . . . without falling into the trap of nature fetishism or ecological determinism.”8 Moreover, in the broader humanities field of Iberian studies, two volumes of note have underscored the value of considering and critiquing the rural-­urban distinction more carefully: Ethics of Life: Contemporary Iberian Debates (2016), edited by Katarzyna Beilin and William R.Viestenz, and The New Ruralism: An Epistemology of Transformed Space (2012), edited by Joan Ramon Resina and William R.Viestenz. As the contribution to Ethics of Life by Luis Prádanos-­García makes clear, it is important to recognize that “ecological rationality is only

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practiced in some small circles and is still far from the norm in Europe in general and Spain in particular . . . the hegemonic discourse that confuses progress and quality of life with economic growth and neoliberal development is still very ingrained in the mentality of many Spaniards.”9 In addition, as suggested in the introduction to The New Ruralism, a consequence of the instrumentalized approach characteristic of capitalistic neoliberal thought is that “the landscape ends up losing its contemplative value and is now intertwined in promotional schemes that place the traditional exploitation of the rural on an altogether different footing.”10 My view is that it is precisely this contemplative value that Pere Joan asserted through El aprendizaje de la lentitud in contrast to the capitalist vision for the Paraná River. Similar insights are of particular importance for considering how the artist’s topographical aesthetics deals with depictions of the urban. In Pere Joan’s work, the comics page boasts a contemplative value that serves as a way of critiquing and correcting for exploitation of the rural. I have argued in previous chapters that selected formal aspects of Pere Joan’s oeuvre tend to disrupt the forward push of the traditional panel sequence, opening up the comics hyperframe to allow individual image elements to interact on the page. Broadly speaking, the comics page becomes a space of contemplation in which readers are freed to consider dialectical insights. These insights involve recognition of those connections between human activity and the simultaneously historical, cultural, social, political, and economic worlds that are continually reshaped in our collective image. Building from chapter 3, this chapter is concerned not with contemporary debates surrounding political ecology, but with a specific tradition of urban thought that foregrounds the (in)visibility of the individual urbanite. In the first brief section, I explore some important landmarks for any history of the urban comic, mentioning selected works from Spain before introducing an urban cultural studies perspective. The theoretical contributions of Henri Lefebvre and Barcelona-­based thinker Manuel Delgado Ruiz serve as important points of reference. In particular, I emphasize Delgado Ruiz’s notion of the city as a space of conflict and Lefebvre’s work on “the right to the city.” In the second section below, I analyze “Un cocodril a l’Eixample” (1987) by Pere Joan and Emilio Manzano within the urban context and modern history of Barcelona. Interestingly, the story of an animal loose in the city is actually borrowed from the Drac de na Coca legend that circulated in Palma de Mallorca. Around 1776, so the story goes, there were tales of a dragon devouring the city’s children at night.

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When the beast was finally killed by one Bartomeu Coc, it was revealed to be a crocodile, and its cadaver was conserved in a local museum.11 The comic’s creators effectively transpose this legend onto the iconic built environment of Barcelona.Two specific sites are instrumental to my urban cultural studies reading of the comic: Ildefons Cerdà’s nineteenth-­century design of the Eixample district, an expansion of the city’s medieval core, and the Parc de la Ciutadella, Barcelona’s first public park. The final section of this chapter explores connections between the urban and the rural in Pere Joan’s comics adaptation of Nocilla Experience (2011).While the original prose literary text published by Agustín Fernández Mallo in 2008 already boasted an urban resonance in both the content and form of the work, I suggest that it was itself anticipated by and likely indebted to Pere Joan’s Azul y ceniza (2004) in terms of its structure, themes, form, and content. Both texts employ a mode of storytelling that blends fiction and reality, as well as metaphorical and philosophical considerations. On the basis of these fundamental similarities, the present analysis of the 2011 graphic novel is focused on the additive value of Pere Joan’s approach.12 Here the artist uses what Thierry Groensteen calls braiding (relationships between nonadjacent panels) to reinforce what I call a spatial and temporal simultaneity uniting the most disparate rural and urban locations on the globe.13

Urban Comics, Visibility, and the Right to the City An early and important example of the urban comics tradition is Flemish artist Frans Masereel’s wordless series of woodcut panels The City: A Vision in Woodcuts (2006).14 Another milestone is Will Eisner’s A Contract with God (2006), considered by some to be the first graphic novel, which portrays urban life on a single avenue the artist situates in the Bronx, New York City. While it is not germane to the present topic to trace the tradition of urban themes in comics art over the twentieth century, what is certain is that this trend in comics/graphic novels has continued into the twenty-­first century.15 Significantly, then, the diegesis of the serial graphic novels Berlin: City of Stones (2001) and Berlin: City of Smoke (2008—both by Jason Lutes16—masterfully captures the intertwined cultural, social, and political aspects of urban everyday life under a Weimar government more or less contemporary to Masereel’s earlier text. Among other important examples of the last twenty years, works by Julie Doucet (My New York

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Diary, 1999) and Glenn Head (Chicago, 2015) immerse readers in extensive graphic treatments of the American metropolis.17 The long-­running Palookaville series, the acclaimed comic It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken (1996), and the more recent George Sprott (1894–1975) (2009)—all by Canadian artist Seth (Gregory Gallant)—foreground themes of urban life.18 Perhaps the most ambitious instance of this urban comics tradition is Chris Ware’s Building Stories (2012), which integrates the spatial and architectural aspects of the urban into its content and form in ways that have been gaining increasing attention from scholars in both the humanities and the qualitative geographic sciences.19 In Spain, specifically, the transgressive comics of the post-­Franco period in which Pere Joan came of age as an artist were implicitly grounded in urban realities and frequently represented the urban phenomenon directly.20 One iconic example is Makoki: Fuga en la Modelo (1981) by Miguel Gallardo and Juan Mediavilla, where the city is not merely a background context but also a central aspect of the comic’s story line.21 Escaping from the Modelo prison in the middle of Barcelona, the characters Emo, Cuco, and el Niñato visit Marruecos in search of drugs and end up on a bender in central Madrid, where iconic spaces and buildings of the Plaza de España feature prominently.22 It is important to keep in mind that cities such as Madrid, Barcelona, and Valencia were the hubs of comics production and readership in the early twentieth century and through the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939.23 Throughout the century, then, they continued to serve in this role, such that the urban must be seen not merely as artistic representation but also as a space of production influencing comics work in numerous respects. A particularly interesting case in point is explored by scholar Gema Pérez-­Sánchez. She uses the iconic 1980s comics magazine Madriz to shed light on how the published image functioned as a nexus for seemingly autonomous discourses: of aesthetics in architecture and urbanism on one hand, and of the ideological urban, cultural, and political project of Madrid’s Socialist government on the other. Published by the Concejalía de la Juventud del Ayuntamiento de Madrid (Madrid’s Municipal Government’s Youth Council), Madriz was in part “a vehicle to carry through to youth its micronationalistic message,” linking “Madrid’s Socialists and Enlightenment ideals,”24 as Pérez-­Sánchez asserts. Representations of the urban took heterogeneous, diverse, and even contradictory forms in the magazine.25 As she notes, however, there was a persistent tension between

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the desire to forge a high-­quality visual aesthetics and the ideological underpinnings of the magazine’s support from City Hall.26 Serving in particular as a “feminist intervention in the medium,” the magazine “followed the postmodern concern with representing the voices of commonly marginalized groups, especially women and sexual minorities.”27 In a sense, Madriz paved the way for high-­impact comics by Rafael Martínez Castellanos (Chuecatown, 2003; later turned into a 2007 feature-­length film), by Raquel Córcoles Moncusí (Los capullos no regalan flores, 2013), and by Córcoles Moncusí and Marta Rabadán (Soy de pueblo: Manual para sobrevivir en la ciudad, 2012), which continued to represent experiences of the urban focalized through themes of gender and sexuality. Considered against this background, Pere Joan’s connections with the urban are no less important.The urban environment undoubtedly plays an important role in some of Pere Joan’s historietas from the 1980s mentioned in the introduction (e.g., “El bestiario,” “Los mensajeros del cuerpo,” “En el recuerdo”), and it serves as an implicit backdrop for others (e.g., “Promoción,”“700 Cadillacs,”“La conjura del pasado,”“Pasajero en tránsito”).28 Foregrounding the general spectacle of urban consumption and its integration into sociocultural and political totalities, these earlier works derive from (and depart from) what may be considered somewhat canonical representational tropes of urban noir. More recently, the artist showcased his commitment to linking art with sociocultural and political critique in a contribution to the multiauthored volume Yes We Camp! (2011), a comics tribute to the widespread protests held in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol in 2011. As explored in this chapter, specific urban locations are also incredibly important to some of Pere Joan’s later and more ambitious comics. “Un cocodril a l’Eixample,” Azul y ceniza, and Nocilla Experience all share this trait of an emphasis on urban specificity. To understand how the artist connects themes of urban space and marginalized subjectivity in these works, it is important to consider the forces and drives that structure the individual urbanite’s everyday experience in the city.These frameworks are particularly important, as they can help us understand what Pere Joan and Manzano accomplish in “Un cocodril a l’Eixample.” Barcelona-­based Lefebvrian urban thinker Manuel Delgado Ruiz has theorized extensively that being he refers to as El animal público (1999): “El ser de las calles ostenta su invisibilidad y, justamente por ello, se convierte en fuente de inquietud para todo poder instituido: es visto porque se visibiliza, pero no puede ser controlado, porque es invisible” (on the streets, beings

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showcase their invisibility, and precisely because of this, they become a font of anxiety for power structures: they are seen because they are rendered visible, but they cannot be controlled, because they are invisible).29 Investigation of the human being in urban contexts, he asserts, requires a much more nimble urban anthropology than has been previously developed. What is needed is a process-­oriented method capable of addressing “configuraciones sociales escasamente orgánicas, poco o nada solidificadas, sometidas a oscilación constante y destinadas a desvanecerse enseguida” (subtly organic social configurations, barely or not at all solidified, subjected to constant oscillation and destined to vanish in the blink of an eye).30 At the core of this method is an insight directly borrowed and sustained from Henri Lefebvre’s urban thought. Delgado Ruiz opposes the city to the urban in this Lefebvrian sense: the city is a relatively fixed built environment that can be planned over time, but the urban has a less tangible quality and is synonymous with ephemeral presence, anonymity, spontaneity, movement, change, and resistance.31 Connecting with a long tradition of urban investigations that focus on shifts, movements, changes, and all-­encompassing ties as experienced at both the large scale and that of the everyday (e.g., not only Henri Lefebvre but also Lewis Mumford, Louis Wirth, Jane Jacobs, George Simmel, Isaac Joseph . . .), Delgado thus approaches the urban environment as a social space in movement.32 This is a space necessarily produced, and continually refashioned, through social conflict.33 It is at the experiential level of the everyday that immaterial and material power structures clash with the desires of those in the street. Capitalist speculation and the bourgeois science of urban design produce the city guided by certain interests, and momentarily—and potentially even more sustainably under the right conditions—urbanites can resist. They do so, in part, Lefebvre suggests, by claiming their “right to the city.”34 Following Delgado’s Lefebvrian spatial theory, we must reject the point of view that sees the city merely as an empty container for experience. Instead, as an increasingly vast tradition of urban theory asserts, the production of space is a necessary social activity, a dynamic relationship that blends together conceived space, perceived space, and spatial practices.35 In this context it makes sense to employ the notion of an urban imaginary as a way of recognizing the dialectical relationship between the built environment, which à la Delgado might be synonymous with the term “city,” and the social processes that inform and are impacted by that built

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environment, which we might understand as a less tangible manifestation of the “urban.” This model accounts for material and immaterial components involved in shaping the urban experience.36 From this perspective, there is unlikely to be any discourse unfolding in urban contexts that cannot be meaningfully tied to the uneven geographical development of the city form. Inflecting the cultural studies method described by Raymond Williams with urban concerns yields an urban cultural studies method that “gives equal weight to the [urban] project and the [urban] formation.”37 Though following this method can lead to a range of outcomes, the close reading strategies that have been the hallmark of the humanities in particular can elucidate how individual artistic texts (novels, films, popular music, and comics) reveal the relationship between the concrete built environment of the city and the more diffuse power structures that impact its continual social reproduction. Through their nuanced artistic properties and their representational ties to urban sites and concerns, such texts reveal the representational space of the city as a social and necessarily contested space. They may even prompt readers to reconsider how the dynamic interplay between space as conceived, as perceived, and as actually lived is conditioned by specific historical and geographical circumstances.38 The discussion of “Un cocodril a l’Eixample” below undertakes an urban cultural studies approach in that it gives equal weight to both Pere Joan’s visual representation of Barcelona in the comic and the extra-­artistic representation of Barcelona’s urban space as given by planned historical sites. Here the themes of nature and culture play directly into the representation of the city as a site of conflict, as per Delgado Ruiz. In addition, the comic’s animal-­pedestrian protagonist draws attention to the Lefebvrian contrast between the city’s use-­value and its exchange-­value and ultimately illustrates the potential consequences of asserting the right to the city.39 Nocilla Experience, while quite distinct from “Un cocodril,” is nevertheless also a fundamentally urban comics project. Like its arguable precursor, Pere Joan’s Azul y ceniza, the long-­form comic links together material urban/ rural locations and nonfictional, sociohistorical references in a complex artistic structure. Its sophisticated braiding technique, grounded in the use of color, functions as a way of breaking down perceived distinctions between urban and rural places. Throughout, Pere Joan maintains a focus on characters at the margins of the circuits of exchange that sustain global urbanized capitalism.

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“Un cocodril a l’Eixample” (Pere Joan and Emilio Manzano, 1987) My exploration of Pere Joan and Emilio Manzano’s four-­page comic “Un cocodril a l’Eixample” (1987) in this section contributes to the monumental quantity of work on Barcelona’s urban form.40 More specifically, it builds on existing analyses of the cultivation of nature and the presence of natural science within Barcelona’s urban planning. It also attends to the way in which the presence of exotic animals in the Catalonian capital participates in these urban discourses. Accounting for both the planned and spontaneous appearance of exotic animals in cityspace, along with their artistic representation, involves a form of explanation that is both site-­specific and informed by interdisciplinary discourses of urban cultural history. As discussed below, the production and representation of cityspace in this example draws from quite a granular scale of urban relations. The concise comic was published by Editorial Complot in a slim volume of forty-­eight numbered pages. Edited by Victoria Bermejo, the collection 10 visions de Barcelona en historieta (1987) also includes brief visual texts by a number of important artists and writers whose work would have been found in popular comics magazines of the 1980s such as Cimoc, Cairo, and El Víbora. The contributions by Roger, Rubén Pellejero, Laura i Mercedes Abad, Juan Linares, Garcés i Molina, Alfons Font i Molina, Josep M. Beá, Mariscal, Tha i T. P. Bigart, and Miguel Gallardo vary greatly in style and content. They are unified, however, by the fact that all are written in Catalan, and many boast images of some of the most iconic sites and buildings in the capital city of Catalonia. Readers cannot miss the fact that this publication was made possible by both the Ajuntament de Barcelona and the Caixa de Barcelona, whose names and logos feature prominently on the front cover and in the front matter. Moreover, a prologue to the volume was penned by a well-­known Catalan literary figure who was active in the Ajuntament’s cultural programming, and who served as a member of the Diputació de Barcelona from 1983 until her death in 1991. Maria Aurèlia Capmany’s brief text begins with the affirmation that “ja és prou sabut de tothom que la nostra ciutat aporta a l’art de dibuixar historietes un gran contingent d’artistes reconeguts arreu” (it is already very well known that our city contributes to the art of drawing historietas a great contingent of artists who are recognized everywhere). A palpable tendency here toward urban boosterism cannot be ignored.

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Capmany’s prologue, the prominent display of the Ajuntament and Caixa names and logos, the title of the work itself, the language of publication, and the collective impact of the volume’s iconic representations of Barcelona’s urban space all contribute to the forging of a contemporary Catalan urban identity. It is quite notable that this move is carried out in the realm of comics. Commenting generally, Josep-­Anton Fernández emphasizes the slow reemergence of a Catalan cultural market under the Franco dictatorship—the ban on Catalan language, the virtual absence of the language in press and audiovisual media, the suppression of publications in Catalan, the constant reality of censorship, and then the eventual return of Catalan theater representations, slow increases in readership, new associations, new publishing houses, and the important Nova Cançó movement.41 While there was some significant movement forward in the later years of the dictatorship, Fernández writes that “it was not till 1976 that the number of books published in Catalan per year reached the same figures as in 1936 (around 800 titles), and that the first newspaper in Catalan since the end of the war, Avui, appeared.”42 Well into the postdictatorial 1980s, then, the Catalan publishing industry continued to correct for the damage done under Francoism. Significantly, this decade was also an important time for the increased legitimacy of the ninth art as covered in chapter 1 of this book (e.g., the first Salón Internacional del Cómic de Barcelona in 1981 and the exposition devoted to Pere Joan and Max in anticipation of the II Setmana del Còmic). Published in 1987, 10 visions de Barcelona en historieta is thus positioned at the intersection of two vectors that are analytically distinct but intimately connected within the broader circuits of urban cultural production. First, the volume asserts the relevance of comics artists to the continued expansion of Catalan-­language publishing markets. In doing so, 10 visions functions to legitimize the ninth art, placing it on par with other artistic representations connected with the project of forging a postdictatorial Catalan identity. Second, it urbanizes this project of Catalan identity formation. The iconic depiction of cityspaces throughout the volume, together with the prominent backing of local government and banking institutions, in turn leverages comics art to legitimize the city of Barcelona itself. In the process, it places the city (and the planned integration of rural nature into the urban fabric), rather than the community or region, at the center of a wave of cultural regeneration. Importantly, the explicit link between comics, Catalan language publishing, and urban identity heralded

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in 10 visions is in fact recapitulated a decade later in El còmic a Barcelona: 12 dibuixants per al segle XXI (1998)—a volume introduced by Barcelona mayor Joan Clos.43 Given that Pere Joan and Emilio Manzano’s comic was published in a volume clearly tied to forms of urban boosterism, one might be tempted to dismiss it as being co-­opted by city branding. One is obliged to take into account not merely the prominent support of the book by the Ajuntament de Barcelona and the Caixa de Barcelona but also the selection in 1986— one year prior to the publication of 10 visions in 1987—of Barcelona as the site for the 1992 Summer Olympic Games. In this context, a potential interpretation of the comic might be to see the crocodile actor as a playful representation that embodies the ideological underpinnings of a postmodern city devoted to the accumulative logic of marketing.44 Yet rather than promote the superficial image-­driven campaigns and erasure of difference that accompanied preparation for the Olympic Games in Barcelona, I argue that “Un cocodril a l’Eixample” showcases the power of comics to prompt intellectual reflection and social critique. In the end, it exposes and renders visible—rather than obscures—the exploitation, conflict, violence, and death that are implicit in the stories of all spectacular cities. Pere Joan and Manzano’s brief comics text is a deeply urban story. Geometrical planning images that echo Ildefons Cerdà’s 1859 design of the Eixample figure prominently on the first and last pages of the story. Urban images characteristic of the Catalan capital are present throughout—street-­ corner cafés, open cityspaces, the tram, ornate outdoor illumination, signs for products manufactured in the city (Zig-­Zag and Anís), and a piano shop whose storefront signage boasts an address on the city’s well-­known Aribau Street.45 The story’s contrast of Barcelona’s urban space with rural space from Cuba—the land of the crocodile’s origin in the narrative— only strengthens an understanding, à la Louis Wirth, that the modern city pulls the most remote areas of the globe into its orbit. Second, the crocodile’s mere presence in the urban environment progressively becomes a challenge to the spatial logic and social order of contemporary Barcelona. As if striking up a productive conversation with Delgado Ruiz’s theorizations, the story of the comic charts the crocodile’s gradual passage from invisibility to visibility. At first, the animal enjoys a relative anonymity, whereby the city is a place it can traverse at a whim from early morning through the night. Over time, however, the crocodile’s presence ceases to be ignored, and it passes from initial invisibility to visible threat. Put to

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death by triple gunshot, the crocodile undergoes taxidermic preparation and is eventually put on public display. In this way, it serves as a clear metaphor for the symbolic and material violence inflicted upon the flâneur by the spatial logic of urban design. The animal protagonist simultaneously connects with the Lefebvrian notion of the “right to the city” while also illustrating the potential consequences reserved for all those who make such a claim to the urban as a use-­value. In a more immediate sense,“Un cocodril a l’Eixample” recapitulates the historical display of animals as subject to city planning and thus also exposes the way in which the intended publicness of Barcelona’s spaces was contradicted by normative spatial codes calling for greater control over movement through the city. One general and two specific historical examples serve as points of comparison and ostensibly as intertexts for this work of comics art. The public display of animals in modern Barcelona intersected with the spatializing logic of urban design in a general sense in the nineteenth-­ century planning of the Parc de la Ciutadella, which sought to make natural science accessible at the level of urbanites’ everyday experiences. Discussed below, the permanent display of a statue of a mammoth in the Parc and the ephemeral appearance of a taxidermy whale in the city’s Eixample district both reveal how the visible presence of exotic animals in the city resonated with existing spatial debates over urban citizenship. One cannot understand Pere Joan and Manzano’s comic without a basic knowledge of how the Parc de la Ciutadella and the Eixample district that borders it both figure within Barcelona’s larger urban history. Investigating these two expansive and storied sites in the city necessarily connects with an enduring spatial discourse on animals in Barcelona.What we today identify as the Parc evolved from historically fraught relations between the Catalonian capital and the imperial Spanish state and the later assertion of Catalan identity against that state. The site was initially not a Parc at all but instead the site of a Spanish military citadel. The construction of this Ciutadella by the Spanish state in the Catalonian capital city just after the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) has been seen as a clear, monumental sign of the state power mobilized by Bourbon King Felipe V over Catalonia as a whole. Yet Barcelona’s citizens rejected the Bourbons just as they had the Hapsburgs.46 Structurally, as Robert Davidson points out, the Citadel also functioned to reinforce the city’s medieval walls, preventing expansion and working to hold back subsequent industrialization.47 Designed by the Flemish architect

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George Prosper Verboom, the Ciutadella was constructed between 1715 and 1720, dislocating residents of the Born and Ribera neighborhoods in the process.48 Interestingly, this displacement led to the creation of the Barceloneta neighborhood, built to house those residents and seen as a kind of precursor for the more massive displacements brought about by nineteenth-­century urban restructuring.49 The eradication of the city’s medieval walls allowed for a new form of large-­scale and ornately geometrical urban planning to take hold during the nineteenth century. Ildefons Cerdà famously designed the new bourgeois district of the Eixample on a grid pattern in 1859. Expanding beyond Barcelona’s medieval core of narrow and winding streets, his plan imprinted the city with wide avenues and regularized blocks featuring a characteristic truncated corner (xamfrà) designed to facilitate the movement of various accumulating modes of urban traffic.50 Understood in light of Cerdà’s extensive urban writings, the plan for the Eixample demonstrates the significant weight its creator placed on what he saw as interconnected matters of urban poverty, miasmic theories of health, an original and evolutionary understanding of transportation and city form, and the importance of integrating nature into urban design.51 It is this last matter that is most immediately relevant: the strategic and planned integration of nature is one of the hallmark elements of eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century European (and North American) city design. Cerdà was intent that nature be integrated on every block.52 To wit, one of his oft-­repeated quotations is his desire to “urbanizar lo rural y ruralizar lo urbano” (urbanize the rural and ruralize the urban).53 The widespread organic metaphor that envisioned the city as a human body— which Cerdà himself used throughout his later two-­volume theoretical treatise Teoría general de la urbanización (1867)—suggested that green spaces could serve as the “lungs” of the city.54 Seen to improve air quality, trees and vegetation were thus both metonymic and symbolic of a wider concept of nature. In tandem with the improved circulation patterns offered by the nineteenth-­century construction of wide urban avenues in cities like Cerdà’s Barcelona and Georges-­Eugène Haussmann’s Paris, the increased presence of nature in the city arguably contributed to the health of urban residents. At the same time, its subjugation to the conceived space of the planner testified to the rationalizing logic of culture by the bourgeois science of urban design.55 As elements of the planned city, trees were as functional as they were aesthetic.

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The same was true of the extensive green space in the city known as the Parc de la Ciutadella, whose plan was approved in 1872.56 Bordering the still ongoing construction of the Eixample district, the Parc was designed by Josep Fontserè i Mestre as part of a larger plan to convert the former Spanish military Citadel and surrounding space, totaling 30 hectares, into a public park for “civilian use.”57 In a sense, this shift reversed the historical connection that forged the Citadel as a symbol of Bourbon subjugation of Catalonia.58 It showcased the newly created space as a triumph of Barcelona over the Spanish state and claimed the Parc as a Catalanist symbol.59 As Robert Hughes writes, “It seems that Fontserè and his team thought they should create the park as a symbol of renascent Catalanism—a garden extended, as it were, over the buried bones of the Citadel, the corpse of imperial Bourbonism. The outline of the park would not ‘respect,’ ‘defer to,’ or even mention Verboom’s Citadel plan.”60 In line with the wider legacy of the parks movements that swept Europe and North America during the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, Barcelona’s public Parc was driven by an explicitly social vision. Its designers sought to link key improvements in education, health, and productive activities for the urban underclass with the production of a determined space in the city. It is significant that in their book chapter titled “Civic Nature: The Transformation of the Parc de la Ciutadella into a Space for Popular Science,” Oliver Hochadel and Laura Valls use the concept of “civic nature” to analyze the Parc through a lens that focuses on connections between educational, patriotic, and economic concerns.61 The development of this green space was seen as a “social remedy” for problems associated with the city’s urban underclass and also as a “medical remedy” for health problems resulting from the transmission of tuberculosis and cholera.62 Yet Hochadel and Valls add to these concerns a discussion of the way in which natural science was prominent in the creation of the park, noting such important details as its Museo Zootécnico, the Zoological Garden, and its Fish Laboratory.63 The Parc also boasted a Hivernacle, or greenhouse; an Umbracle, or “shade-­house”; and several other museums. Significantly, the Parc was later selected as the site for the Universal Exposition of 1888.64 At the intersection of the medieval city, the newer Eixample neighborhood, and La Barceloneta, the Parc de la Ciutadella promised relatively easy access to a wide range of social classes. The planners envisioned that visitors to the Parc could become educated about and immersed in the

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natural world. Interestingly, this design process revealed an intention to restrict the behavior of the working classes and structure their presence in certain spaces of the city. Moreover, this intention in a sense mirrored the treatment of exotic animals, who were not allowed to transgress the well-­ defined space they were afforded in Barcelona. The extensive planning and implementation of Barcelona’s first public Parc as an urban location for exotic animal species captivated the imagination of the city’s residents. “In the late 1880s the city already used the Parc as a ‘parking space’ for exotic animals. Live gifts from foreign politicians and businessmen such as caimans, crocodiles and pheasants were deposited there.”65 The live zoo opened in 1892 under the direction of Francesc Darder, but preserved animals were also an attraction, dating from 1883 when Darder took on the role of taxidermist in the Parc’s Museu Martorell.66 Whether dead, alive, or merely representations, all of the Parc’s animals must be seen as a key part of a larger strategy to bring significant public attention to the role of the natural world in constructing a modern Catalan urban identity.67 The way this strategy unfolded ultimately reveals persisting class distinctions in Barcelonan society that link the city’s underclass with animals, just as it maps animals to certain spaces in the city and not others. Perhaps the most striking evidence of this dynamic is the Parc’s mammoth statue constructed of armored concrete and dating from 12 December 1907. Hochadel and Valls’s analysis of the animal statue emphasizes its positioning at the nexus of both a Catholic natural science and a Catalan identity, while also exposing the contradictions of visibility and control to which the public themselves were subjected. “For its makers, conservative Catholic naturalists, the creature with the enormous tusks represented a species that was lost through the biblical flood and could thus be read as an anti-­evolutionary statement. At the same time the naturalists emphasized that it was a ‘Catalan’ mammoth, representing all the fragmentary mammoth fossils found in Catalonia since 1883.”68 Yet the animal’s positioning within this central urban park also spoke to the tensions surrounding the role of the public in urban design more generally. That is, the central contradiction of the plan that unfolded for the Parc was that “the public was to be educated but also to be kept on a short leash.”69 The Junta responsible for the Parc elected to put a fence around the mammoth statue, citing as reasons the public’s ignorance and lack of culture.70 While the attitude of the Junta toward visitors may be appropriately judged as patronizing, some members of the public did indeed feed and even mistreat the live animals, prompting

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action by the zoo.71 The perception that the city’s working classes were in need of instruction, education, and socialization had been a driving force in the creation and sustained operation of the Parc, but it also spoke to the divide between the working class and the privileged bourgeois class who held disproportionate power to plan the space of the city. The example of a taxidermy whale put on display in the city similarly showcases how fears of spatial transgression animated Barcelona’s literate public.This occurred in the context of increasing emphasis on pisciculture at the Parc. To wit, an aquarium was inaugurated in 1908; a fish laboratory dates from 1909; and a number of repopulation programs, exhibitions, and festivals were organized or prompted by the Junta.72 In 1912, the whale was exhibited on the Avenida del Paralelo, and the magazine L’Esquella de la Torratxa printed a humorous image that envisioned the animal thrashing about through the streets of the city, causing chaos and sending residents tumbling as they anxiously tried to get away from the beast.73 This image—along with the discourse that inspired it and in which it subsequently played a role—prompted organizers of a 1913 exhibit to incorporate the whale, putting it on display outside the Parc’s Castell dels Tres Dragons building. The humor of the magazine image lies both in the improbable reanimation of a dead whale and in laughter’s socially conservative function.74 It is humorous in part because the whale has transgressed a boundary.This boundary can be seen from the viewpoints of natural terrain (water/land) or social geography (rural/urban), but it also has to do with the proscribed place for animal life in Barcelona.75 In this sense, it is significant that the artistic image functions as a point of flexion that mobilizes popular discourse, effecting a “return” of the animal to the Parc de la Ciutadella, which is deemed by the bourgeois science of urban design to be the socially appropriate space for such exotic animal life.76 It should not be too much to suggest that the public’s intense curiosity about the natural world led in extreme cases to a constellation of fear, contempt, and violence. Seemingly authentic stories of the violence carried out by exotic animals appeared in popular media of the time, heightening the public’s emotions. One example is a story of a traveler to Africa who witnessed the death of a man in a crocodile’s teeth that was published in the “L’Aperitiv” section of the popular magazine Mirador (1933).77 Even those representations of exotic animals that were intended to be entertaining and even humorous could be infused with a sort of human violence toward the animal world. In a one-­page comic titled “Cocodril

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improvitzat” published in the magazine Virolet (1924), for example, a down-­and-­out circus performer and a strong man physically stretch a dog out into the shape of a crocodile and apply paint to its back to keep their act fresh.78 Crocodiles in particular were regarded with humanizing language that attributed to them malicious qualities—as demonstrated in the usage of the phrase “més oportunista que un cocodril” (more opportunistic than a crocodile) that appears out of context in an article from Revista Nova (1914).79 As these examples testify, the popular discourse surrounding exotic species expressed contradictory sentiments. Stories of such animals satisfied the public’s curiosity, sold magazines, and simultaneously reaffirmed the cosmopolitan identity of Barcelona’s residents. Bourgeois narratives of leisure travel exoticized foreign lands and perpetuated oppositions between rural and urban life that had continually figured into planning discourse that shaped the Catalonian capital since at least Cerdà’s 1859 plan. Exotic species were spectacularized, monetized for economic gain, and also feared. Linked with ideas of danger, physical harm, and death, as well as undesirable human attributes, they served to reassert the literate Barcelonan public as a cultured and privileged group presiding over an urban working class seen as needing not only education but also socialization. Most important, these connections between class, animal life, and cityspace are at the center of Pere Joan and Manzano’s comic centered on a crocodile. The story line of Pere Joan and Manzano’s crocodile comic is relatively simple. The animal’s initial freedom to do what it likes in the city gradually erodes, and it is eventually hunted, killed, and stuffed. The end of the comic is striking in this regard: “Un mestre taxidermista trobà el seu cos al carrer, i amb paciència el dissecà; quan acabà considerà que havia fet la gran obra de la seva vida” (A master taxidermist found its body in the street, and with patience he dissected it; upon finishing he considered it had been the great work of his life).80 The graphic way in which this story ends—by which I mean to reference both its culminating image and its explicit violence—is perhaps its most important aspect. To appreciate “Un cocodril a l’Eixample” as a story of spatial and social transgression in which urban history is paramount, it is necessary to trace the structuring presence of Barcelona in the comic from its beginning. The first page of “Un cocodril a l’Eixample” (fig. 4.1) carries the title and author names, introduces the story within an explicitly urban frame both visually and discursively, and uses the formal aspects of comics art to

Figure 4.1. Pere Joan and Emilio Manzano, “Un cocodril a l’Eixample” (1987:12)

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foreground the theme of transgression. It consists of both a single page-­ spanning image and a smaller inset bordered in black, each of which deserves attention.The inset features a street-­corner conversation between two bourgeois gentlemen seated at an outdoor café. This is clearly a charged urban location, given the role of the café in fostering a cosmopolitan urban culture.81 The clothes of the two men, the architectural ornamentation of the café building and windows, the electric lamppost, and other stylistic details function to situate the action in the early twentieth century.Their conversation in word balloons works as a frame story: “Doncs no fa molt temps que corria per aquí, l’animalot! Un bon exemplar, sí senyor; almenys sis o set metres de llarg” (Not so long ago there was an animal running around here! A good specimen, yes sir; at least six or seven meters long).82 The narration below the image at the page-­inset border is perhaps more crucial: Hi ha històries que semblen increïbles, i molt més quan han passat els anys i la gent sa les té mig oblidades. Aquesta història és com totes les que succeixen en una gran ciutat, tan creïble com fictícia i tan real com impossible. Algú no creurà que un cocodril visqués a l’Eixample Barceloní, i n’hi haurà que demà mateix començaran a cercar les petjades pel Carrer Provença. (There are stories that seem incredible, and many more that people will have forgotten half of once the years have passed.This story is like all those that happen in a great city, as believable as it is fictitious, and as real as it is impossible. No one will believe that a crocodile lived in Barcelona’s Eixample, nor that the next day a search would commence tracing its steps on Carrer Provença.)83

Most important, this passage fuses reference to specific spaces of the Catalan capital (Eixample/Carrer Provença) with a spectacular narrative of an exotic animal sighting (“Algú no creurà que un cocodril . . .”) in a congratulatory tone that lauds Barcelona’s status as a cosmopolitan modern city (“com totes les que succeixen en una gran ciutat”). The implied reader’s reaction is sure to be as incredulous as that of the gentleman represented in the inset who listens attentively to the tale, replying “Mmm!”84 The page-­spanning image is a clear reference to the octagonal and equidistant blocks of the Eixample, geometrically encoded as in Cerdà’s original drafts and thus representing the conceived space of the urban

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planner. Toward the bottom of the page, the last two rows of the Eixample’s represented city blocks are somewhat distorted. The visual effect is as if they had been printed on a tablecloth (one that still needs to be spread out and patted down); the artistic value of this choice is plural. In narrative terms, the fact that this irregularity occurs only at the bottom of the page in a left-­to-­r ight, top-­to-­bottom comics-­reading culture implies a discursive entry into an unbelievable and fictional story. In this respect, the irregularity is perhaps akin to a cinematic dissolve marking the beginning of a frame story or dream sequence. Interpreted within an urban paradigm, however, the visual effect of distortion questions the regularity of city planning, thus also challenging its aim of standardization, suggesting the tension between space as conceived by planners and space as actually lived by urbanites. Trotting across the upper rows of city blocks is a gigantic crocodile: it has not been drawn to the same scale as the city. Its tail is wagging and its footprints appear in relief according to where they fall on the block pattern—white when falling in the black city blocks and black when falling in the white streets. Put simply, it is larger than life— a visual rendering that prepares readers for the animal to gain an ever-­ greater reputation in the city and perhaps even heroic status. As we will see by the end of the tale, the crocodile will have become a metaphor for all of Barcelona’s urban residents. It is at once an inspiring urban flâneur, a local folk hero who avoids the brutal force of the police, and ultimately also a sacrifice to Barcelona’s vocation of modernity85 and the political, business, and capital interests that have historically sustained it.The formal presentation of the animal—its size and the sharp contrast of its disorderly behavior with the ordered urban design—underscores its contrary position relative to the structures of urban power referenced in the historieta. From this first page alone, the crocodile is a clear dynamic symbol, a threat to the static ideals of urban design in two senses. It is a rural, exotic, and thus perhaps unwelcome visitor to an accommodated neighborhood of Barcelona. More symbolically, its movement eschews the linear requirements imposed by the city’s built environment. The animal has left eight footprints in the white space between the title and the city grid pattern, thus emphasizing this notion of free, unrestricted movement at the level of comics panel structure/page layout as well as in the content of the image itself. Similarly significant in this regard is that the frame of the inset is open along the bottom of the page, an effect that reinforces the irregularity of the transition suggested by the blurred city grid at the page bottom.

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In addition, the left frame border of the inset features a brief vulnerability of sorts where one of the distorted streets of the last row of blocks opens up into the white space of the inset. Following with the theme of spatial transgression introduced in the top half of the page through the crocodile’s movement, this opening makes it appear as if the crocodile could potentially find its way into the scene of the two men conversing below in the inset—an effect that plays into the dramatic potential of that discussion, which itself plays upon popular fears of exotic animals rooted in the urban history of Barcelona. Summing up the impact of this first and most important page at the level of page layout, it is important to reconcile the inset with the larger page in a global sense. Significantly, comics theorist Thierry Groensteen calls attention to the disruptive role exercised by the inset, or incrustation, in the ninth art: “This apparatus, which I will designate as the inset (incrustation), gives evidence of the extreme suppleness that characterizes the management of space within comics. It opens up a large range of procedures in which the repartition of frames, escaping from the relative autonomy of tabular compartmentalization (or, anticipating a notion that will be defined later on, gridding), is more directly dictated by the semantic articulations of the story and fully participates in the mise en scène.”86 In other terms, Groensteen stresses the fact that the inset breaks with the monotony of panel sequence, the regularity of comics form, that is so frequently associated with the art. The point here is that the comics disruption of panel gridding, effected via the inset, runs parallel to the urban disruption of Cerdà’s city gridding, effected through the oversized crocodile’s off-­g rid movements, and the formal disruption, effected through visual distortion, of the page-­bottom section of the iconic grid. These correspondences between multiple disruptive formal and visual effects on a single page highlight what Groensteen emphasizes as the potential for the inset to create a sense of dialogic interaction between images. More specifically, this dialogic interaction between inset and full-­page image separates the two but also brings the animal story into dialogue with the human story. As “Un cocodril a l’Eixample” progresses, however, the animal story resonates more and more with the broader struggle of human urbanites. On the second page of the comic, Pere Joan and Manzano make an effort to ruralize this urban story, not merely through the presence of the crocodile itself, but through an exploration of its past. As the narration of this frame story explains, “L’animal havia fugit del vaixel que el portava

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de Cuba / i considerà que el barri de l’Eixample era un lloc agradable per viure” (The animal had fled from the ship that brought it from Cuba / and it considered the Eixample district a pleasant place to live).87 These two statements are split across two sequential images whose formal aspects create a meaningful juxtaposition. The first conditions readers through its text to see the scene of a crocodile in the foreground against a background of ship outlines and masts as an implied connection with a rural Cuban landscape of its origin.88 The tone is overwhelmingly black, with white used merely for details such as clouds and implied illumination.The animal lies low in the frame, barely distinguishable from the ground, with its eyes open and facing toward readers. The next scene shows only the tail of the creature sticking out into a deserted area of what the text leads readers to see as the Eixample. This is not the completed bourgeois neighborhood that became solidified in popular memory but rather the unfinished urban project whose state likely corresponds to that of a decade of the latter part of the nineteenth century. As Robert Hughes writes, the implementation of the Cerdà plan was slow to develop:“By 1870 the only grand thing about the Eixample was its street names. . . . However these names looked on the map at the end of the 1860s, the streets themselves were a different matter: strips of dust and rubble, unlighted, undrained, and mostly without buildings to which name plaques could be fixed.”89 The comics image of the Eixample here is not the geometrical plan of the urban designer but the place as it was experienced at the time. A number of buildings are visible in the far background of the panel, but empty space predominates. Dust, stones, and a few pockets of weeds are visible, but light fixtures are not.The composition is the inverse of the previous image. The white sky and white objects outlined in black ink work with the darkness of the previous image to maximize the reader’s feeling of emptiness. A few sad and impoverished trees arranged in a linear formation stand as a betrayal of Cerdà’s intention to thoroughly and harmoniously ruralize the urban. The crocodile’s level of comfort in this dusty and unfinished Eixample reinforces it as a place of wilderness in the cosmopolitan city of Barcelona. Written in an empty space running atop a series of three panels at the bottom of the page, the text spoken by the character-­narrator of the frame story charts the movement of rumors running through the town: “Doncs diuen que té més de deu metres” (They say it is more than 10 meters), “No m’ho crec!” (I don’t believe it!); “És cert que ahir descarrilà un tramvia?” (Is it true that it derailed a tram?), “Es menjà tres vaques i un cavall de la

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policia!” (It ate three cows and a police horse!); “S’ha menjat un infant al Passeig de Gràcia, amb dida i tot!” (It has eaten an infant on the Passeig de Gràcia, with nurse and all!), “Diuen que és cosa dels anarquistes!” (They say it belongs to the anarchists).90 This continues the spectacularized discourse introduced from the comic’s first page and recapitulates the historical amazement of Barcelona’s residents as they grappled with animal encounters in public spaces and popular magazines of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The remarks unfold in three separate scenes that present somewhat representative details of the city’s urban fabric: an extremely ornate outdoor lamppost drawing the reader’s eye to monumental architecture, the depiction of a tram seen through a framing window from inside a café, and an outdoor plaza where the piano store on Aribau Street can clearly be seen. All three scenes feature the requisite hustle and bustle of a bourgeois city characterized by patterns of increased mobility, consumption, and exchange, but the last one explicitly introduces the topic of politics and class struggle in its mention of anarchists. The next page continues this theme and features a large panel depicting a working-­class manifestation outside of a large building whose signs for “Anís del Mono” and “Fumao Papel Zig-­Zag” clearly imbue it as a synecdoche for Barcelona’s historical identification as an industrial city. A large crowd has assembled outside the building and is carrying flags, ready to face the police, who stand facing them across a large square. The narration mentions that “la policia estava massa ocupada amb els disturbis i agitacions obreres com per prestar-­li atenció a un animal que no sabien cert si era real” (the police were too busy with the labor unrest of the workers to care about an animal that they weren’t even sure was real).91 This text-­ image combination has the effect of situating the police in opposition to both the workers and the exotic animal, drawing a parallel between the two that reinforces a shared social position. It must be kept in mind that the modern police force arose to protect bourgeois interests in the city. The contemporary urban form itself—the development of wide avenues that would facilitate the march of a modern police force in Barcelona as in Paris—was arguably designed as a tool of modern capital and state partnerships.92 Note that the comic simultaneously represents the crocodile as an enemy of the merchants, who—upset by the fact that the crocodile has eaten a good part of their inventories—organize an initial and unsuccessful attempt to kill the animal.93 In the end, it is a group of gunmen “al servei d’un poderós empresari de la ciutat” (in the service of a powerful magnate

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in the city) who successfully hunt down and kill the animal, thus exposing the links between economic interests and violence that characterize contemporary capitalism in urban areas. The easily identifiable, iconic, and geometrical images of Cerdà’s Eixample plan appear twice on the last page of the comics text (fig. 4.2). At the top of the page, a margin-­spanning panel represents a number of octagonal city blocks marked by Cerdà’s characteristic xamfrà/truncated corner, with the images of a bourgeois couple and a crocodile superimposed in the left half. In the right half of the image is a representation of a newspaper report whose text reads: “Científics, naturalistes i públic en general especulaven fortament sobre l’animal i el que devia fer l’ajuntament o el govern. Mentrestant l’animal circulava lliurement per la ciutat, aliè a la polèmica que despertava la seva exòtica presència” (Scientists, naturalists, and the general public speculated heavily about the animal and what the council or the government should do. Meanwhile the animal moved freely around the city, oblivious to the controversy aroused by its exotic presence).94 The language in this report conspicuously recalls the extensive debates over animals that roused the attention of natural scientists, government figures, and the general public during the creation and ongoing development of the Parc de la Ciutadella during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Importantly, it also expresses in textual form that message that was represented on the comic’s very first page in visual form. Now encoded in written language and articulated in public discourse as a problem to be solved, the animal’s free movement through the city and its exotic and unwelcome presence in residential areas of the city must be put to an end.The crocodile is stuffed and put on display in a museum,95 “amb els seus ulls de vidre que li fan semblar una nina de cartró” (with its eyes of glass that give it the appearance of a rag doll).96 Its fate is a clear metaphor for the violence enacted toward those who transgress the space afforded them in the modern city. In this sense, the fate of the animal is linked to the fate of the urban worker proletariat, all of whom struggle with their physical and visible presence in the streets for what Henri Lefebvre called the “right to the city.”97 At the bottom of the last page, the geometrical image of the Eixample as conceived by city planning once again appears. Throughout the story, its persistent appearance has become a symbol for the distance between space as conceived from above by planners, exploited by capitalists, and regulated by states and space as lived and experienced on the ground by residents of

Figure 4.2. Pere Joan and Emilio Manzano, “Un cocodril a l’Eixample” (1987:15)

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the city. This time the geometrical pattern is relegated to a mere corner of the panel and must share the space with the image of an open crocodile jaw, a natural scene with grass and leaves, and an object that looks much like the ornate and artistic outdoor streetlamp from a previous page.98 This is a curious fusion of urban and rural imagery as the text reinforces: “I als seu somnis de palla i cotó confon, alguna nit de malsons, els aiguamolls on va néixer i les faroles d’en Gaudí; la terra salvatge d’on sortí un dia i els carrers de la imperfecta quadrícula on acabà sa vida” (And in its straw and cotton dreams, one nightmarish night, it confuses the wetlands and the lanterns of a Gaudí; the wilderness it left one day and the streets of the imperfect grid where its life was ended).99 This reference to “la imperfecta quadrícula” (the imperfect grid) is particularly important, as this wording recalls a visual element of the first page of the comic—specifically the bottom two rows of the geometrical Cerdà-­like city grid that were distorted and irregular. From start to finish, this grid—and by extension the planner’s conception of cityspace—serves as a symbol for those dehumanizing forces that all of Barcelona’s residents must face as they seek to move freely, to use the urban as a space of possibility—a use-­value and not an exchange-­value. The crocodile agonist of Pere Joan and Manzano’s comic is a metaphor for the predicament of that other public animal studied by Manuel Delgado—the human being. He is at first an invisible flâneur, avoiding the restrictions of urban power structures and free to enjoy the street as a site of spontaneity. Step-­by-­step, however, he becomes visible to those power structures, and ultimately he is subjected to violence for disrupting the spatialized logic of the city. The crocodile is simultaneously a reminder of the contradictions that structure public discourse in the city, a reminder that the public ultimately must be “kept on a short leash.”100 “Un cocodril a l’Eixample” is in a sense a cautionary tale about the end of the city’s use-­ value and the consequences of resisting the structuring role of spatialized power. In this sense, the crocodile’s “somnis de palla i cotó” (straw and cotton dreams), chaotically represented in the comic’s punctuating last panel through a markedly saturated image plane, are not solely the improbable dreams of a taxidermy animal. By extension, they are the dreams of all of Barcelona’s urbanites, who struggle against the problematic legacy of urban design. The city’s planning has been driven by concepts of regularization, order, and symmetry and has been subjected to a stale program that has integrated green space inconsistently and insufficiently. As revealed equally by both the Catalonian capital’s urban history and the comic’s graphic

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representation of a fictional story, this mode of planning has harnessed the natural world as a vehicle for the “triumphant and triumphalist” discourse of urban modernity.101 The crocodile’s straw and cotton dreams represent the triumph of concept over lived experience, the death of spontaneity, and thus the sacrifice of what Delgado Ruiz calls the urban to the static form of the planned city.102 Yet even in this dream there may still be room to rekindle the form of urban resistance embodied by an animal who traversed the city as it saw fit and who made a life in Barcelona, however ephemeral that life may have been.

From Azul y ceniza (2004) to Nocilla Experience: La novela gráfica (Pere Joan and Agustín Fernández Mallo, 2011) This section explores a graphic novel whose degree of visual experimentation goes well beyond its mere adaptation from a prose narrative context. With his comics version of Nocilla Experience (2011), Pere Joan has reinterpreted and revitalized the key insights of Agustín Fernández Mallo’s segmentary novel of the same name, Nocilla Experience (2008). This literary text was originally published as the second text in a trilogy that included Nocilla Dream (2006) and Nocilla Lab (2009), and that directly incorporated Pere Joan’s drawings in the third volume. For many reasons, it is important that readers not view the 2011 graphic novel as an adaptation in the simple sense. Factors that enhance the adaptation include the traditionally collaborative nature of comics art, the history of collaborations between the two artists (including the possibility of a reciprocal influence, as explored below), and the additive value of Pere Joan’s art.The present approach does not consider Pere Joan’s visual narrative as distinct from its prose narrative precursor and counterpart, but neither does it attend to the adaptation process systematically.103 Instead, it merely seeks to privilege the graphic novel: its visual forms of representation and those aspects and moments where the graphic artist’s unique “eye” or perspective can be discerned. I prioritize Pere Joan’s work as itself an original creation, one that possesses its own artistic and interpretive value and that exploits the visual medium of comics art to assert the interconnection of urban and rural spaces across the globe.104 Based on what was arguably the more fragmented of those three books, Pere Joan’s Nocilla Experience (2011) still expresses Fernández Mallo’s original “postpoetic” vision, which can be traced throughout his entire oeuvre. Born

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in 1967 in A Coruña, Fernández Mallo earned a degree in physics from the Universidad de Santiago Compostela and became a practicing physicist. In 2000, he coined the term “poesía postpoética” (postpoetic poetry) as a way of reconfiguring literary aesthetics writ large. One way of understanding this term is to recalibrate the notion of poetics as an area of human experience whose productive energy and transformative force extend beyond the limits of artistic discourse alone. Fernández Mallo has himself stated the impetus for this project in interdisciplinary terms, focusing on connections between art and science.105 Nonetheless, while a broad view of physics is undoubtedly important for understanding Nocilla Experience,106 the text is also a profoundly urban project. Putting aside, then, the larger methodological debates that inform the postpoetic project as a whole,107 my discussion emphasizes this urban aspect of Pere Joan’s comics version. While “Un cocodril a l’Eixample” was focused on a specific area of Barcelona with historical resonance in the collective urban imaginary, Pere Joan’s visual art in Nocilla Experience represents a slightly different scale of the urban experience. What both of these collaborative works share, however, is an emphasis on the inextricable relationship between urban and rural geographies. In the earlier comic, the push by the Barcelonan planner Cerdà to “ruralize the urban and urbanize the rural” was not only represented in depictions of the planned city that adhered to the comics page but also embodied as a contradictory tension within its animal protagonist’s everyday urban experience. In the later graphic novel, the rural and the urban are connected through the movements of individual characters and at the level of structure through the juxtaposition and connection—the simultaneity—of artistically represented space. In moving from one work to the other, we thus shift from a single character to multiple characters, and from a single location to multiple locations. Common to both Fernández Mallo’s text and Pere Joan’s graphic novel is the representation of an almost disorienting number of urban and rural locations. The original prose narrative consists of 112 numbered segments (of one to three pages each) in which characters, places, and quotations recur in the articulation of a highly segmented structure.108 In both cases, characters are connected to each other via social relationships that take many forms. Whether these relationships are represented as taking place in person, over email, or through shared spaces, the lives of characters are parallel, or perpendicular, to one another. Their stories express principles of connectedness through the tropes of hybridity, mobility, difference, and

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ephemerality that define the urban experience. Both versions of the text are equally concerned with simultaneity and encounters, with the traversal of both physical and emotional distances. As readers share in the experiences of these characters—their global movements, departures, crossings, collisions—they also travel concrete locations of Western and Eastern Europe, North America, and the Middle East. The segmented structure of the prose narrative—which is apparent visually in the comics text— encourages us to perceive time spatially, as Scott McCloud puts it.109 Yet simultaneously it also allows us to visually see connections between disparate events. In this way, the separation of various characters and subplots from one another is revealed to be illusory, or at least a simplification: a consequence of temporarily inhabiting a given location or of ephemerally identifying with a specific state of being. Not surprisingly, the characters in the graphic novel are the same as in the original prose text. Sandra flies from Palma de Mallorca to work as a biologist at the Natural History Museum in London; she writes to Marc, who lives in a shack on top of a building in Palma de Mallorca, that she has met Jodorkovky (nicknamed Jota), originally from Ulan Erge, Russia. Mihály works as a soft tissue surgeon in Ulan Erge;Vartan Oskanyan runs a pig factory in Armenia near Azerbaijan; Antón lives amongst the rocky cliffs of Corcubión, La Coruña, Spain. Mohammed Smith is born to an Iraqi mother and US father in Basra; Harold moves from Boston to Miami before literally walking across North America; Josecho lives in Madrid atop the Torre Windsor, prior to its burning down in 2005. Vladimir and Rush, traveling from Ukraine to Kazakhstan, stop to rest in Ulan Erge; Steve and Polly meet in Brooklyn; Chico, originally from Cancún, moves from El Paso to Palm Beach, later to search for his daughter in Los Angeles. Ernesto, originally from Puerto Rico, works at the docks in Manhattan, where he meets Kazjana, recently arrived from Los Angeles and originally from Alaska. Demonstrating a principle of perpetual motion, these characters are always in movement, both toward and away from one another. It is easy to see why Pere Joan would be attracted to this work, as the characters’ intimate and emotional lives are just as fluid as their outward movements in global space. In a sense, these global crossings recall the state of mobile liminality exemplified in the comics artist’s earlier “Pasajero en tránsito” (Pere Joan 1999, originally published in 1982).110 Reaffirming that story’s contradiction between perpetual global movement and the feeling of being

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emotionally stuck in a liminal space, Sandra’s flight between London and Palma de Mallorca repeats the exact same images (the exact same page of images, in fact) at the beginning and the end of the graphic novel—despite the fact that Fernández Mallo’s corresponding texts are different.111 So that readers do not overvalue the originality of Nocilla Experience in prose, or for that matter undervalue what Pere Joan brings to this graphic novel re-­creation of Fernández Mallo’s text, it must be understood how the comics artist’s previous work informs his reimagining of Nocilla Experience: La novela gráfica. Pere Joan’s graphic art in this instance pulls stylistically from the wide frames, open spaces, and iconic facial features that appear in earlier works such as “Cita en Jartum” (Pere Joan 1999, originally published in 1983) and “700 Cadillacs” (Pere Joan 1999, originally published in 1986–1991). The use of landscape panels—increasingly frequent in his 1980s–1990s work (see fig. 0.2)—is particularly persistent in this graphic novel as he visually emphasizes the spatial dimension of the original work. Moreover, his preference for images that fill the page and span multiple pages is a further testament to his move beyond the restrictive dimensions of traditional grid patterns and panel sequences.112 One of the most decisive examples of this move can be seen in a series of three images—appearing at the beginning, in the middle, and toward the end of the graphic novel—that take up progressively more and more space in a very carefully calibrated choice on the artist’s part.113 What is also significant is how Pere Joan employs iconic representation to emphasize city form, urban structures, and specific buildings and sites in ways that heighten the reader’s experience of the original text’s spatial dimensions. Part of this is merely a property of comics art in general. That is, where the prose text references urban, suburban, or rural areas in words, the corresponding segments of the graphic novel depict these landscape varieties visually.Yet the artist leaves his own stamp on landscape representations in a variety of ways.Where possible, he depicts two-­dimensional maps, Google map pins, and even a combination of both that evokes a Google Earth view.114 Urban skylines are quite frequent, as are rural scenes featuring rivers, and vary along a spectrum of representation that moves either toward iconic or poetic ends of a sliding scale.115 Perhaps more importantly, in two disconnected segments of a sequence involving Josecho and taking place in Madrid, for example, the additive value of Pere Joan’s images depicts the ornate cupola of the Metropolis building, and later, the iconic Callao cinema just down the street from it on the Gran Vía, despite the fact that

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neither location is mentioned in Fernández Mallo’s original.116 The artist also represents dynamic thought sequences by manipulating less spectacular buildings on the page against a white background of his characteristic open hyperframe.117 Cases in point involve a nondescript domestic building moved by helicopter in the early Basra sequence and the representation of the fictitious “El Museo de la Ruina” (The Museum of Ruin; fig. 4.3) in the aforementioned Madrid sequence.118 In both of these instances, architecture itself is imaginatively represented as being constantly in flux, subject to human activity and social relationships. In this way, Pere Joan brings Fernández Mallo’s insights into the mobile character of the human experience to bear specifically on the built environment and the urban and spatial imaginary. He renders the characteristics of that built environment more visible specifically as a way of asserting the reciprocal role of space/place regarding human experiences. That is, we are influenced by our surrounding spaces just as we engage in a necessarily social process of reproducing those same spaces. Perhaps the single most curious image contributing to this pattern is introduced by Pere Joan’s graphic-­novel reworking of Nocilla Experience early on in the text. In depicting a region outside of Ulan Erge, one that Fernández Mallo describes in his prose version merely as “un círculo de borde irregular” (a circle with an irregular border), Pere Joan visually imbues this irregular circle with what resembles the outline of a human brain.119 This should be no surprise, given the persistent focus throughout his oeuvre on relating inner consciousness to extensive space. Beyond the representation of the built environment of various cities and the landscapes of suburban and rural spaces, however, there are remarkable points of contact between the form, content, and themes of Pere Joan’s collaborative work on Nocilla Experience and his earlier solo masterpiece Azul y ceniza.120 It cannot be denied that it would have been impossible for Pere Joan to re-­create Nocilla Experience the graphic novel if the original literary text had not already been composed by Fernández Mallo. Nevertheless, in many ways Azul y ceniza (2004) strikingly anticipates the Nocilla Project trilogy (2006, 2008, 2009) in both content and form. I believe that these correspondences are strong enough that readers must consider Pere Joan’s work itself as an influence on Fernández Mallo. Understood relative to the medium of comics, Azul y ceniza is just as ambitious, lengthy, complex, and fragmented as is Nocilla Experience in the realm of literary production. The comic mixes fiction and social realities

Figure 4.3. Pere Joan and Agustín Fernández Mallo, Nocilla Experience: La novela gráfica

(2011:96)

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in much the same way as the later prose literature text—incorporating real social events (e.g., Cubans who self-­injected themselves with HIV . . .), as well as real historical and literary figures (e.g., Sylvia Plath . . .).121 The stories in Azul y ceniza likewise focus on marginalized people and experiences, or on those who choose to live at the periphery of normative social expectations.122 The comics artist delves into these stories of individual people as a way of drawing attention to representative examples of the human condition. Just as it is with the prose text version of Nocilla Experience, Azul y ceniza also engages philosophical ideas implicitly and explicitly (e.g., in one instance quoting from the work of Paul Virilio).123 Indeed, in his earlier comics text, Pere Joan alternates between representative human stories and sequences crafted in a much more directly metaphorical mode of storytelling. This mode is more pronounced in sequences that evidence highly allegorical qualities. The section titled “Diálogos entre columnas” (Dialogues between columns), for example, uses sentient architectural pillars as a way of posing abstract questions regarding the risks and rewards of collective action, the sacrifice of the individual for the group, social devotion and almost-­religious worship, as well as injury, destruction, and immortality. Later, in an unnamed seven-­page sequence, the character Blue observes a group of ten small forest beings, all of whom suffer death or disappearance under quite emotionally fraught and even violent circumstances.124 Each of these segments of Azul y ceniza turns on what has been called Pere Joan’s characteristically original “intimist” style as the artist probes the nature of inner experience and our connections with others in a variety of urban and rural landscapes.125 Significantly, the themes of Azul y ceniza are just as centered on chance and coincidence as those in Nocilla Experience. At one particularly interesting if brief moment in the earlier work, Blue plays a game of pick-­up sticks by himself, tossing the sticks onto the floor of his living room. The fact that the moment is introduced in a panel inset as Blue walks through the airport (an abrupt and seemingly “non-­sequitur transition”126) and that this sequence appears out of context between two unrelated segments of the comic heightens its metaphorical qualities. Given its context within the structure of the larger volume, the appearance of these brightly colored yellow, green, red, and blue sticks is significant. From the first superimposed panel inset through a series of images that ends with a close-­up on Blue’s face, these multicolored sticks function as a metaphor for the way

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in which our emotional lives and human stories are subject to chance and coincidence. Below, the analysis of the braiding technique that Pere Joan employs in Nocilla Experience: La novela gráfica returns to the metaphorical impact of these color combinations. Perhaps most significant, however, Azul y ceniza—like Nocilla Experience, which it arguably anticipates—stitches together stories that take place in named real urban (and rural) locations: London, Paris, Berlin, Bangkok, the Chao Phraya River, Tokyo, Palma, and the north coast of Mallorca. It is a work that renders key tropes of city life visible in artistic form and structure. Urban theory over the course of the twentieth century and into the twenty-­first has continually asserted some variation on the statement that “the city is the place where difference lives.”127 While this sentence appears in cultural geographer Don Mitchell’s work The Right to the City (2003), one can find any number of similar assertions in the work of Jane Jacobs, Iris Marion Young, David Harvey, and others.128 By stitching together these global cities and rural spaces, Nocilla Experience implicitly echoes the premise of the urban and rural fields of political ecology as noted at the beginning of this chapter. A prioritized effect—if not the primary effect—of Pere Joan’s visual re-­rendering of Fernández Mallo’s text is that the graphic-­ novel version brings more unity to the urban-­rural connections in the original Nocilla Experience through visual strategies of mataxis. Said another way, it is by seeing Nocilla Experience in graphic-­novel form that readers may better grasp the coherence and interconnectedness of its seemingly discrete segments, characters, subplots, and urban-­rural locations. The 2008 prose narrative original of Nocilla Experience was more likely to be seen as fragmented, with some touting its connections to postmodern narrative style, citing as evidence elements such as its self-­ referentiality.129 Engaging with the 2011 graphic-­novel version, however, one realizes that Fernández Mallo’s narrative original, too, is constructed as much through mataxis as it is through stitching together fragments.Yet actually seeing characters, places, themes, and images repeat visually in the narrative heightens the reader’s sense of continuity across page borders through the comics principle of iconic redundancy. Moreover, departing from the organization of the prose narrative version, Nocilla Experience: La novela gráfica does not paginate each structured segment, but instead breaks from one segment to another in midpage.130 Given that the simultaneity of images is a central property of comics representation—and not of literary representation—Nocilla Experience: La novela gráfica reinforces the work’s

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primary theme of visual, structural, and artistic interconnectedness in a way that was impossible for Fernández Mallo to carry out in prose. Exploiting the properties of comics art, Pere Joan brings much more than this basic formal simultaneity to his re-­creation of the text. Quite important, in this respect, is his mobilization of the Parchís game. While Parchís appears in Fernández Mallo’s literary text as a metaphor for the chance and infinite variation that connects scientific investigation of particles with the interior lives of his globally mobile characters, it acquires a much more strongly spatial resonance in Pere Joan’s graphic novel. The Parchís game reveals the way that life—human life, biological life, molecular life, and more important for the present purposes, urban life—is built on seemingly insignificant events. Small happenings accumulate as repeated recombinations of identifiable building blocks that influence larger patterns and are in some way never completely predictable. Chance—el azar in the texts—is not a concept but a reality, one that unifies scales of experience. Julio Gutiérrez García Huidobro has written on the metaphorical value of Parchís in the graphic novel, saying, “La propuesta del escritor busca espejear al juego del parchís, el gran referente que engloba todas las líneas narrativas que transcurren en un entramado paralelo que, sin embargo, da lugar a ciertos cruces orquestados por el azar y la coincidencia” (The author’s aim seeks to cast a light on the game of Parchís, the great reference that encapsulates all of the unfolding narrative lines in a parallel framework that, nevertheless, poses certain questions orchestrated by chance and coincidence).131 I here follow his thesis that “Para una obra como Nocilla experience, su traslación al medio gráfico le aporta un valor agregado” (For a work like Nocilla Experience, its shift to a graphic medium provides it with an additive value).132 Yet I assert that Parchís is not as omnipresent in the original as the scholar claims. Instead, it is elevated to a uniting metanarrative or grand metaphor precisely because it is used pervasively by Pere Joan in the graphic-­novel version to link disparate spaces on the globe. One of the most important appearances of Parchís and its additive value occurs during a discussion between two characters immersed in an intriguing restaurant conversation. Jota states to Sandra that el parchís y la evolución de las especias que ahí estudiáis tienen mucho que ver. Ambos están basados en 3 o 4 reglas muy simples. Y sin embargo, son complejos ejercicios de supervivencia. Y es que . . . ¿Sabes una cosa?, el ajedrez, por ejemplo, es un deporte muy sencillo.

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Porque en algún sitio todas las partidas están ya escritas. Sólo hay que analizarlas con una computadora. Pero el parchís se fundamenta en la tirada de un dado.Y esa emersión del azar a lo real es lo más complejo que una persona pueda llegar a imaginar. (Parchís and the evolution of species that you are studying there have much in common. Both are based on three or four very basic rules. And yet, they are complex exercises in survival. And it’s that . . . You know something?, chess, for example, is a very simple game. Because somewhere all the [possible] games are already established. It only remains to analyze them with a computer. But Parchís is based on the roll of a die. And this appearance of chance in the real is the most complex thing that a person can come to imagine.)133

Exhibiting the principle of comics form that McCloud has identified as employing backgrounds to illustrate “invisible ideas” such as emotions, inner states, internal matters, and mental landscapes,134 this single page of Pere Joan’s text exhibits ten panels whose backgrounds all emphasize one or more of the four colors of the Parchís board (yellow, green, red, blue; fig. 4.4). Readers should note that these are the same colors used in the pick-­up sticks game from Azul y ceniza described above. These Parchís colors, of course, also reappear in other segments of the graphic novel where the metaphorical value of the game is foreshadowed prior to Jota’s explanation or where it continues to resonate visually without any textual explanation.135 Here, however, Pere Joan’s reliance on this four-­tone background coloring obscures other objects and people in the restaurant space where Sandra and Jota are speaking. This choice conveys the intensity of their human interaction and evolving relationship and represents them in a kind of abstract, conceptual space of contemplation. In terms of the graphic novel’s story, here the two characters are drawn together by the artistic-­scientific web of human sociability that is the motivating principle of Nocilla Experience and symbolized by Parchís. Yet the prioritization of the game’s four-­color scheme at the level of an abstract panel background also suggests to the reader that the metaphor serves as an intangible unifying principle whose significance goes beyond the specific place where the characters may currently find themselves.136 One can consider the use of this background color pattern as an intriguing form of what Groensteen refers to as braiding.The four Parchís

Figure 4.4. Pere Joan and Agustín Fernández Mallo, Nocilla Experience: La novela gráfica

(2011:49)

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colors take on an elemental resonance and recur through the graphic novel in a way that visually actualizes a principle of simultaneity and connectedness, one that is merely intimated verbally through sequential narrative in Fernández Mallo’s version. In the sequence that introduces the Parchís Palace toward the beginning of the text, for example, Pere Joan exploits the comics property of iconic redundancy through a four-­color scheme used to represent details corresponding to each of the original prose sentences.137 Leading up to the dialogue cited above, Jota relates the existence of the Parchís Palace to Sandra, and he uses “la simplicidad de 4 colores” (the simplicity of four colors) to explain the world’s wondrous complexity.138 The Parchís colors appear again in the detail of a story line involving Marc and another story line involving Vladimir and Rush.139 The iconic redundancy implicit in this coloring of objects and backgrounds throughout the graphic novel, however, allows this principle of simultaneity and connectedness associated with the metaphor of Parchís to reach a level of visual saturation that prose narrative alone would not allow. And, of course, all of these instances draw strength from Pere Joan’s representation of the four-­color Parchís board on the first page of the graphic novel that carries a quotation by Albert Einstein—a visual reference not appearing on the first page of Fernández Mallo’s prose version.140 In Nocilla Experience: La novela gráfica, just as in the works explored in previous chapters, Pere Joan’s comics art is focused on landscape as both a theme and as the basis for a topographical approach prioritizing the image. The relative consistency of Fernández Mallo’s fragmented prose structure is brought to life in the graphic novel not just through an emphasis on the story line’s spatial dimensions but also through a variety of page layouts. As mentioned above briefly, the white-­background open hyperframe is used intermittently by Pere Joan in the cultivation of a contemplative space. Frequently paired with the collage-­style use of cultural and intellectual quotations that pepper the original work, Pere Joan shifts toward this layout in sections where he wants to engage an explicitly metaphorical or philosophical consideration.141 He uses the grid sparingly, but always innovatively—not necessarily to indicate moment-­to-­moment or action-­ to-­action transitions but rather in pursuit of the same contemplative style outlined in the discussion in chapter 3 of the “Grupaje” sequence from El aprendizaje de la lentitud (see fig. 3.1).142 Moreover, there are a number of sequences whose layout anticipates the unusual topographical arrangements that fill 100 pictogramas para un siglo (XX), as discussed in chapter

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2 (see fig. 2.5). In these sequences, individual visual items are scattered throughout an area of the page, encouraging a nonlinear reading.143 Where he leaves large amounts of text from the original together, as in the case of quotations from artists, authors, and scientists, his characteristic peritextual drawings dot the surrounding white landscape.144 Insets bring further spatial complexity to the act of visual narration, and panel width and height vary continuously—when Pere Joan does not opt instead for the extremely large panel or the ever-­present landscape panel.145 Each of the works discussed in this chapter—“Un cocodril a l’Eixample,” Azul y ceniza, and Nocilla Experience—provides a slightly different window into understanding Pere Joan’s topographical approach to comics as combined with urban themes. Nevertheless, there are compelling similarities among these works. In each case, landscape is a trope that influences both content and form, and in each case, the artist shows a penchant for the theme of the reciprocal influence of human activity and consciousness on one side, and landscape formations and spatial production on the other. Pere Joan persistently focuses on beings whose lives unfold at the margins of the urban project. In doing so, he poses a question of belonging while avoiding the static positions of identity politics. In portraying urbanites in movement, and in embracing a structure that moves across numerous samples of an urban experience, he manages to convey a sense of the city as “the place where difference lives.” “Un cocodril a l’Eixample” visually represents the interconnectedness of rural nature and the urban built environment through its story, its protagonist’s movements, and its spatial context. The comic’s visual references to the planning legacy of Ildefons Cerdà illustrate how the city’s built environment and its corresponding forms of social control act as a socially conditioning force. Here Pere Joan highlights the city as a site of conflict and lauds the ephemeral freedom from social control exercised by the urban stroller. Through the crocodile’s dilemma—and through its entanglement within the comic’s wider sociopolitical dimensions—Pere Joan and Emilio Manzano ask whether Barcelona’s historicized urban project can accommodate the forms of difference upon which vibrant cities thrive. Lefebvre’s “right to the city” is ultimately elusive for the animal protagonist, just as it proves to be for so many of the city’s urban underclass. In the cases of both Azul y ceniza and Nocilla Experience, Pere Joan emphasizes a wide range of experiences as a way of attending to the stories of marginalized urbanites. His artistic decisions, images, and innovative

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page layouts bring into clear focus themes of uneven geographical development and the increasing reality of global (urban-­rural) movements. The city is both a background and also a central stage for the experiences of these characters, who feel alienated from and drawn to one another in various urban crossings and disjunctures. Pere Joan invests heavily in the material and spatial landscapes navigated by these characters. At the same time, he uses his characteristically metaphorical and contemplative style as well as an innovative braiding technique to suggest connections—elements of a common human experience—across great distances (in terms of both content and comics form). Contradictions—those between urban and rural life, between social class, between different spatial formations— do not disappear but are instead incorporated into a dynamic model. Shifting from the individual problematic of “Un cocodril a l’Eixample” to the scale of the collective urban project in these two works, Pere Joan always provides a sense of the way in which human activity and landscape are mutually constitutive.

Chap ter 5

Island Imaginaries M a ll o r c a ’ s C u l t u r a l L a n d s c a p e s

The graphic art of Pere Joan (Pedro Juan Riera), from his earliest works to his most recent publications, is heavily invested in the representation of water. Intriguingly, the artist’s patronymic, Riera, is a word that in Catalan means stream. Historically speaking, it is also the name used to refer to the Torrent de Sa Riera that runs from the mountains to the Bay of Palma at the island’s urban center.1 Perhaps more importantly, however, water, rain, streams, rivers, oceans, and island formations appear throughout Pere Joan’s comics, anthologies, and sketchbooks—as can easily be confirmed by leafing through “La lluvia blanca” (Pere Joan 1999, originally published in 1984), Mi cabeza bajo el mar (1990), and Tingram: Pere Joan a lápiz (2003). As discussed in chapter 3, his rural comic album El aprendizaje de la lentitud (2011) focused extensively on contemplation of a river trip, bringing up ecological and sociopolitical issues surrounding fluvial human geographies. Though not specifically explored in chapter 4, the representation of the sea and its shorelines—including those of Mallorca—are an important part of both Azul y ceniza (2004) and Nocilla Experience: La novela

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gráfica (2011). And, of course, the central protagonist of “Un cocodril a l’Eixample” (1987) is a water-­dwelling animal. All of this supports the assertion made by Joan Bufill in 1984 that the “contemplative geographies” of Pere Joan’s comics art are concerned with “les figures i el paisatge. Figures humanes voltades d’un paisatge que és preferiblement marí” (figures and landscape. Human figures across a landscape that is preferably marine).2 In 1998, Ramón de España highlighted “la presència constant del mar a les seves pàgines” (the constant presence of the sea in his pages) and noted that “assaborir les pàgines de Pere Joan és com viure en un aquari o al fons del mar” (savoring Pere Joan’s pages is like living in an aquarium or at the bottom of the sea).3 In line with these observations, the appearance of the phrase “island imaginaries” in this chapter’s title purposely expresses a naïf view. Supporting key insights drawn from the niche field of island studies, I avoid in this chapter the overhanded association of Mallorca with “rural, peripheral, and isolated landscapes and communities.”4 At the same time, however, I refuse to focus explicitly on how “island realities differ from island tropes.”5 In this case in particular, the city of Palma (known by Mallorcans as merely Ciutat) has played a key role in the island’s uneven geographical development. Rather than explore the island’s representation from a rural framework, an urban framework, or some combination thereof, in this final chapter I approach Mallorca from a distinct vantage point. Situated at the intersection of a critical strain of spatial theory and a cultural studies approach to landscape representation, my approach considers how space and place shape and are shaped by processes that are at once cultural, social, political, and economic. Additionally, this move functions as a contribution to the wider twenty-­first-­century interest in bringing greater visibility to issues of landscape in Spain.6 Ultimately, this chapter marks a partial return to the larger scope that characterized the investigation in chapter 1 of “The Comics Landscape in Spain.” Specifically, a cultural studies lens informed by spatial theory is better able to explore the comics representation of Mallorca’s cultural landscape against a background of larger sociopolitical shifts. This brings the spirit of observations by Bufill and España to bear on much more recent comics collaborations by Pere Joan from the late 2000s and 2010s. The first section below, titled “Mallorca’s Geomorphology, Tourism, and Cultural Representations,” concisely outlines important aspects of the

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island’s material landscape and recent history. The explicit context for this outline is the increasing mass tourism experienced by Mallorca throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-­first centuries.This account underscores the relationship between water issues and tourism practices and also takes on Mallorca’s connection with hallmark aspects of the global neoliberal turn. Chief among the latter, the service economy (or the so-­ called tertiary circuit of capital) has become increasingly important for capital accumulation strategies. Global capitalism’s reliance on what the geographer David Harvey describes as a “spatial fix” has been echoed by the increasing importance of space/place within cultural and literary discourse. Against this background, cultural, literary, and comics representations of Mallorcan landscapes occupy a curious social positioning. In the end, Pere Joan’s landscape-­oriented visual art provides the opportunity to contemplate the proliferation of neoliberal tourist geographies. Locating Pere Joan’s comics art within this context thus complements the way spatial representations in prose literature, poetry, film, and visual art are increasingly being framed from the perspective of literary geographies. Succinct discussions of a variety of comics figure into the second section of this chapter, titled “Pere Joan’s Comics Geographies and the Question of a Mallorcan Comics Art.” Because some of his more recent works turn on themes of local culture, or have even been commissioned by local agencies in the Balearic Islands, they prompt new sets of questions about the role of the ninth art in social processes of resistance to and contestation of the spatial dynamics of capitalism. It is important to consider the degree to which comics are becoming part of the drive toward authentic and autochthonous culture industries. Such works as Cada dibuixant és una illa (2008), Història del turisme a les Illes Balears (2009), and Viaje a Cotiledonia (2015) are quite relevant to understanding how the comics form becomes necessarily entangled with the larger sociopolitical discourses in which cultural, literary, and artistic geographies participate. This is not an approach grounded in art history. That is, I do not advance an argument on the Mallorcan comic, understood as a term denoting a relatively coherent style or a historical industry.7 Yet the decision to use a cultural studies method in making sense of these comics texts foregrounds Pere Joan’s relationship to Mallorca and the relevance of broader issues concerning the transformation and representation of cultural landscapes across the globe.

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Mallorca’s Geomorphology, Tourism, and Cultural Representations Cultural representations of Mallorca are necessarily informed by the island’s location, history, and participation in the crosscurrents of global tourism. Thus it is important to convey some fairly basic information as a point of entry. The Balearic Islands are located about 90 km east of the Spanish mainland. Mallorca is the largest of the islands, boasting 75 percent of their total land area and 80 percent of the total population.8 One of the most comprehensive treatments of the island’s geomorphology is the geographer Richard J. Buswell’s Mallorca: The Making of the Landscape (2013), a text I reference throughout this chapter. Buswell, who wrote his book after “visiting and living in Mallorca on and off for more than twenty years,” conducted “fieldwork and some more extensive research into the tourist industry” and made “contact with Mallorcan geographers.”9 While historians may be interested in the book’s somewhat exhaustive scope— that is, its attempt “to cover at least four and a half thousand years”—its methodological premise is what is most relevant to the present discussion of cultural landscapes.10 Early on, Buswell defines landscape as “a product of social and economic processes and the cultural values of a particular time; it is, to use a dated phrase, above all ‘man-­made.’”11 Importantly for our exploration of visual art, he later insists that “landscape, whatever its origins as a word, is to do with ‘seeing’ the material, real world translated into an image via our perceptual mechanisms, themselves fashioned by culture and experience.”12 This is a perspective that owes implicitly to the innovative view of landscape as a product of culture, which can be traced back to Carl Sauer in the 1920s.13 Within the framework of cultural studies,14 to consider landscape as terrain refashioned by a social group over time is simultaneously to foreground the interaction between social representations of space and the social reproduction of material places. It should be mentioned that certain aspects of Mallorca’s characteristic geography are perhaps well suited to visual representation.15 For example, Buswell details the poverty of much of the soil on the island and draws attention to the circular stone structures that still remain from Bronze Age houses. These two aspects of Mallorca’s persisting cultural landscape arguably figure into Pere Joan’s early image from Baladas Urbanas (“Untitled,” 1976).16 Importantly, this characteristic poverty of the island’s soil persisted into the nineteenth century, even despite “increases in fertiliser application,” and was exacerbated by acute water shortages and drought.17 In addition,

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the cliff coasts that “are characteristic of a large part of the Majorcan littoral” figure prominently in visual representations such as “La lluvia blanca” (Pere Joan 1999, originally published in 1984), the illustration Pere Joan created for the Agenda del Instituto de la Juventud titled “Junio” (1989), the percebero story line of Nocilla Experience (2011), and also Viaje a Cotiledonia (2015).18 Images of islands themselves figure in sequences already referenced in analysis of El aprendizaje de la lentitud (2011), but are also key to many of the artist’s early works.19 The action of the comic “Los secretos de la Dragonera” (Pere Joan 1999, originally published in 1982)—wherein steep cliffs pepper a number of the historieta’s landscape panels—takes place between the town of San Telmo on the southwest coast of Mallorca and Dragonera, an island located just off of its west coast. Another early example is “El gran motor Brown-­Pericord” (Pere Joan 1999, originally published in 1983)—an adventure story recalling aspects of the visual art of Hergé, which features a crash landing on water and a number of coastline images. If readers are to understand the history of tourism in Mallorca, as well as its connection to themes of art and representation broadly considered, it is necessary to begin with a somewhat obvious point. In his comprehensive “Història del turisme a Mallorca” (History of tourism in Mallorca), Bartomeu Barceló i Pons writes that “el turisme començà essent un privilegi de persones ocioses i riques. Ara constitueix un dels fenòmens socioeconòmics més importants de la nostra civilització, que ha transformat les estructures econòmiques i socials de vastes regions del nostre món: Mallorca n’és una” (tourism begins as a privilege of the leisurely and the rich. Now it constitutes one of the most important socioeconomic phenomena of our civilization, [one] that has transformed the social and economic structures of vast regions of our world: Mallorca is one).20 It is perhaps easy to imagine the reasons why the leisure class and the rich— whether from Spain or abroad—may have sought out the island as a travel destination. Nevertheless, imagination is not needed in this case, as Buswell’s account elucidates these reasons quite thoroughly. His observations on Mallorca’s twentieth-­century tourist industry mention the “island’s suitability for tourists in terms of environment and infrastructure and its accessibility via improved transport,” highlighting “safe, sandy beaches, the historic city,” and the fact that “tourists were already falling in love with mountains for the holidays.”21 As Buswell also notes, further supporting the observation by Barceló i Pons, this tourism developed from preexisting patterns of travel to the

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island. A particular fascination for Mallorca was held among privileged classes and renowned literary figures. Buswell mentions specifically that “the historical and cultural resources [of the island] ranged from architecture and archaeology to the anthropological ‘quaintness’ of the local inhabitants, all of which had proved interesting to Archduke Luis Salvador and his followers in the nineteenth century.”22 Other notable visitors who contributed to sustained fascination with the island include George Sand, Frédéric Chopin, Robert Graves, the Hemingways, Gertrude Stein, Miguel de Unamuno, and Rubén Darío.23 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this existing interest encouraged the production and dissemination of a number of publications in support of the broader tourist imagination, and these necessarily contributed to the popular representation of the island. Perhaps most notable among them were Charles Toll Bidwell’s The Balearic Islands (1876), and three particular travel guides: the Pocket Guide of Majorca (1897), Miquel Capó’s Guia General de Baleares (1900), and Joan B. Ensenyat’s Guide illustré des Iles Baléares (1901).24 Significantly, in the midst of this international attention, an early tourist board was created on the island in 1903. The Fomento del Turismo de Mallorca, as it was known, officially declared that tourism was to play an important role as “an instrument for stimulating cultural and intellectual activity.”25 Wider trends toward urbanization unfolding during the 1920s and 1930s led to increased development of infrastructure for tourism on Mallorca.This was the start of a pattern that would have massive geomorphological impact on the island over the course of the twentieth century. Tourism infrastructure developments took the form of hotels in Palma and across the island’s bays and beaches, led to the expansion of suburban living, and ensured the development of tourist settlements in the north and east.26 In the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939),“the Franco government was insistent that the industrial developments begun in the 1930s should be expanded,” although “tourism was not to be encouraged as a serious economic activity [in the 1940s].”27 The economy opened up in the 1950s, however, and the development years of the 1960s saw tourism adopted as an economic strategy by the new technocratic Francoist government.28 Echoing broader trends in sociocultural histories of Spain, research specifically focusing on Mallorca also routinely affirms that tourism increased dramatically during the 1960s.29 One also notes, in Buswell’s account for example, a clear tendency to portray the effects of this mass tourism in terms of “ruin” and “degradation.”30 As the twenty-­first century

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approached, industries related to tourism accounted for 70 percent of the employed population, with the sectors of agriculture and horticulture increasing this percentage.31 The island’s continued reliance on tourism ultimately contributed to severe challenges for the water supply.32 Tourism in Mallorca stagnated in the 1980s but was revitalized in the 1990s, which had the effect of further exacerbating water-­supply problems.33 Interestingly, the city of Palma has often been “cast as a monster threatening the ‘authentic’ culture” of Mallorca.34 As Mercè Picornell explores, this trend finds expression in popular discourse but also in cultural products, including those of a literary bent.35 The collection of poems titled Ciutat (2006), published by Miquel Flaquer, for instance, includes this metaphor explicitly and reinforces it with imagery that bemoans the urbanization of the island.36 As Picornell suggests, the contemporary effort to define the city’s identity has been carried out in tandem with an appeal to “memories of an imagined pre-­touristic stage” when Palma was seen as “a quiet and provincial place.”37 The effects of the rapid landscape changes experienced on the island during the 1960s and 1970s have certainly been drastic.38 The impact of these geomorphological elements is so notable that a new verb has been coined to refer to the model of massive waterfront construction carried out in the Balearic Islands: “balearitzar.”39 The clear impact of tourism on the islands can thus also be measured in economic terms.40 That is, the Balearics remain one of the “most important tourism islands globally,” and in the twenty-­first century tourism has risen from 60 percent to 85 percent of Mallorca’s GDP.41 And yet, equating landscape shift with the effects of urbanization alone in the simple sense—detached from larger global shifts and opposed to the idealized notion of a rural past—is all too easy. Doing so hides the changing material conditions that involve both urban and rural areas in the twenty-­first century.42 For example, farms across neighboring Catalonia disappeared at a rapid pace over 1999–2007 for reasons that can be explained not only by increased urban tourism development in Spain but also by more global dynamics.43 A double articulation is involved in capitalism’s global production of space. At a global scale, post-­Fordist flexible accumulation strategies are encouraging the divergence of certain kinds of landscapes for production from leisure landscapes.Yet at the local scale of specific tourist sites, landscapes for production and consumption are being increasingly combined under the sustained growth of the tertiary sectors of the economy.44 To that effect, Sònia

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Vives Miró writes: “With the integration of the Balearic Islands into the global capitalist economy, Palma—the archipelago’s capital—has become one of the main tourist cities of the Mediterranean and a European semiperiphery of pleasure.”45 Interestingly, the critic also refers to Marxist geographers Neil Smith, David Harvey, and Henri Lefebvre in describing the urban gentrification of the island’s Ciutat. Referenced implicitly in her article is Lefebvre’s insight that capitalism has survived through the twentieth century—and, by extension, into the twenty-­first—“by producing space, by occupying a space.”46 This is what Harvey in turn refers to as capitalism’s “spatial fix”—the need to construct a built environment for accumulation in a given space and time only to shift focus to another location when conditions become more favorable.47 While Vives Miró remains specifically interested in urban gentrification in contemporary Palma, however, her mention of both Harvey and Lefebvre is fortuitous.These thinkers are crucial to understanding the contributions of a critical tradition of spatial theory to study of the cultural representations of space/place. Since his earlier work in the 1970s, David Harvey has drawn explicitly and extensively on the work of Henri Lefebvre for his motivation.48 In works such as Spaces of Capital (2001) and Rebel Cities (2012), Harvey discusses cultural homogenization, the global commodification of culture and its links with specific spatial locations, and the dynamic tension between the uniqueness and the marketability of culture.49 His viewpoint consistently admits a fundamental tension between wider social imaginaries and concrete representations such as maps.Yet he is not always as nuanced when it comes to the significant relationship of literature and artistic representations with these social imaginaries.50 Overall, Harvey frames the potential complicity of art with capital in negative terms, but he does not sufficiently assert the more positive power of artistic production to—in Lefebvre’s words—“metamorphose the real.”51 While frequently cited comments on film from Harvey’s book The Condition of Postmodernity (1990) quite glaringly dismissed the cinema as mere spectacle, it is in an underappreciated essay on the novels of Balzac where he comes much closer to admitting the complex/doubled role of artistic production under contemporary capitalism. Therein, he states squarely that cultural products are potentially both commodity and means of resistance.52 Still, when compared with Harvey’s body of work, Lefebvre’s extensive reflections on spatial reproduction provide a much more capacious view of

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culture. In particular, his approach emphasizes the interactions between literary, cultural, and artistic texts and those broader strategies of contemporary capital accumulation that tend to be implicit in discussions of global tourism. Aesthetics thus becomes intimately intertwined with sociopolitical forces. As Marc James Léger writes, “Lefebvre’s concern with aesthetics is thus embedded within a broad conception of Marxism which does not conceive of art as an epiphenomenal concern; aesthetics is not separate from revolutionary politics.”53 In a significant essay titled “Toward a Leftist Cultural Politics: Remarks Occasioned by the Centenary of Marx’s Death” (1988), Lefebvre himself insists that art is not “only a distraction, a form of entertainment, at best a superstructural form.”54 He writes of the need to “put art at the service of the urban” in his oft-­cited work The Right to the City (1996), and in an important book on representations that still remains untranslated into English, Lefebvre advances a nuanced aesthetic theory of the “work (of art).”55 As I explore extensively in Toward an Urban Cultural Studies: Henri Lefebvre and the Humanities (2015),56 this theory explicitly acknowledges the connections between everyday spatial practices and textual works of art. Lefebvre specifically mentions such examples as “poetry, music, theater, the novel” and implies the participation of other artistic forms.57 These observations by the French theorist are crucial because they push us to understand the role of humanities texts—I would include comics as one variant of such texts—in the collective construction of cultural landscapes. In the end, the thought of Lefebvre—and that of Harvey to a somewhat lesser degree—allows for representations of space to play a role in contestation and resistance. While he does not deal with Harvey or Lefebvre directly, Xavier Pla’s “Leaving the City on Foot: Four Observations on Walking, Thinking and Writing in Contemporary Catalan Culture” has specific relevance and can push us back from theoretical considerations toward the Mallorcan context specifically. Pla’s book chapter, included in the edited volume The New Ruralism that was mentioned in chapter 4, addresses the interrelationship between space/place, cultural landscapes, and literary geographies and leaves room for spatial representations to be counterhegemonic. In methodological terms, his comments relate productively to approaches foregrounded by the essays collected in GeoHumanities: Art, History,Text at the Edge of Place (2011) and Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds: Geography and the Humanities (2011).58 Pla writes:

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The Catalan literary landscape, so closely related to subjectivity, perspectives and journeys, is just as important as the visual. Catalonia’s varied landscape and geography has meant that it has been subject to multiple interpretations, from the mountains of the Pyrenees of modernist authors with their particular interpretation of Catalan culture, to civilized nature and the artificial and ordered landscapes of the nineteenth-­century gardens. The classic twentieth-­century Catalan authors, poets and narrators have created a kind of human geography where the landscape, the world, opens up as a horizontal panorama where every detail is revelatory.59

While Pla’s praise for the power of literary landscape representations is important, his juxtaposition of prose and poetic literary geographies to a broad notion of the visual is somewhat problematic. An implicit distrust of the visual is quite understandable, of course, given how the visually spectacular character of contemporary capitalism has tended to be regarded as suspect since the rise of mass tourism and urban capitalism in the 1960s.60 Nevertheless, since our subject is the visual medium of comics art, this simplistic opposition is insufficient. It hides the ways in which differing cultural products all participate in the discourse of art. Comics, like other forms of artistic representation, is equally capable of performing what Lefebvre calls “the work (of art).” Specifically, it is important to keep in mind Buswell’s comment on landscape, already noted above. He used the visual as a point of entry into connections between embodied experience of the material world and a more broadly social and cultural imaginary. (Remember his assertion that “landscape, whatever its origins as a word, is to do with ‘seeing’ the material, real world translated into an image via our perceptual mechanisms, themselves fashioned by culture and experience.”) The recognition of comics as a distinct and distinguishable visual art form prompts a different understanding of the visual than the one expressed in Pla’s essay. Contemporary comics, while they are certainly not literature in the same way as verbal texts constructed in prose or poetic verse, nonetheless possess an artistic quality that would have been called “literariness” in the first half of the twentieth century.61 The artistic quality or “literariness” of comics resides precisely in a set of visual formal dimensions that are drastically distinct from those pertaining to prose and poetic literature. This is

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particularly true in the case of Pere Joan, whose vanguardist style boasts significant intellectual, historical, and emotional dimensions. The general question posed in the following section does not, however, concern the perceived or actual difference between how verbal literary texts and visual comics texts represent landscape. On this question, I tend toward a point of view that refuses to essentialize the function, meaning, and significance of an individual artistic text—whether that is a text of prose/poetic literature or comics art—instead preferring to understand its shifting role within wider cultural patterns. Thus rather than engage in a debate on the “specificity thesis,” which would assign particular functions to each artistic medium, for the moment I take the artistic qualities of comics at face value.62 In line with a cultural studies approach, however, it is more important to explore Pere Joan’s art within the broader context of the social construction of a Mallorcan cultural landscape. The social positioning and social use of art is perhaps what is most significant in Pere Joan’s case. It must be acknowledged that, historically speaking, Mallorca has tended to be written about by foreign travelers rather than by the island’s own inhabitants. Although not decisive, this consideration may prompt some readers to reconsider Pere Joan’s Mallorca-­ inspired and -­commissioned visual creations. In the end, I prefer to see his comics as part of the decidedly intellectual tradition of Mallorcan tourism begun a century earlier in 1903, and not in connection with the “ruin” and “degradation” that characterized new forms of mass tourism developed in the 1960s. I believe this is particularly true in the case of his graphic-­novel adaptation of Viaje a Cotiledonia (2015), analyzed below in this chapter’s final pages.The stylistic connection of Pere Joan’s images with a vanguardist and intellectual comics tradition may not prevent their co-­optation by promotional actors, but it is important to underscore that any possible appropriation by larger forces does not evacuate the potentially counterhegemonic aspects of artistic representation.

Pere Joan’s Comics Geographies and the Question of a Mallorcan Comics Art In this section, I am interested in exploring the question of a Mallorcan comics art—not in the sense of a coherent style or industry, as perhaps posed by Francesca Lladó Pol, but instead in terms of the visual

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representation of themes directly or indirectly related to the island’s culture. Echoing the title of the introduction to this book, the use of the term “comics geographies” merely conveys that we need to better understand the role of comics in sustaining, contributing to, contradicting, and/or critiquing larger social and spatial trends. Three of Pere Joan’s comics texts are central to this endeavor: Cada dibuixant és una illa (2008), Història del turisme a les Illes Balears (2009), and Viaje a Cotiledonia (2015). I explore the first two very briefly and spend a bit more time with the third. All three, however, are related to discussion of the role of cultural landscape representations in constructing a Mallorcan identity. The first text, Cada dibuixant és una illa (2008), is a coauthored anthology whose comics link explicitly with themes of cultural landscapes and island imaginaries. Released by Pere Joan’s publishing house Inrevés in collaboration with the Institute of Balearic Studies, the volume’s pages present the work of seven different artists, including Pere Joan himself.The page immediately before each comic foregrounds the artist’s island connection. Thus there is Tomeu (Bartolomé) Seguí (born in Palma, living in Santa Maria on Mallorca) with “Tot home és una illa, i un dibuixant de comics un illot” (Every person is an island, and every comics artist, an islet); Max (born in Barcelona, living in Sineu on Mallorca) with “Aïllat al centre del món” (Insulated at the center of the world); Guillem March (born and living in Palma) with “Mentides d’una dibuixant” (Lies of a comics artist); Pere Joan (born and living in Palma) with “X”; Canizales (born in Colombia, living in Palma) with an untitled contribution; Gabi Beltrán (born in Palma, living in Bunyola on Mallorca) with “La serp i l’equació” (The snake and the equation); and Alex Fito (born in Mexico, living in Palma) with “Tot dibuixant és una illa” (Every comics artist is an island). Each of the contributions features explicit textual or iconic references to Mallorca specifically (most feature both), if not also to specific locations and people on the island. Most important, as the introduction to the volume makes clear, is the need to break away from the long-­standing identification of islands in the cultural imaginary with insular, isolated, and stagnating environments.63 Instead, the book illustrates that comics artists are involved in centripetal and centrifugal movements, and that the island is an important point of connectivity with a more expansive global geography.64 Pere Joan’s contribution “X” (2008) is intriguing for two reasons. First, it marks a transition from his midcareer work to his more recent comics. In formal and stylistic terms, the artist employs small unframed panels

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of differing background color and a notably condensed, expressive iconic style. This recalls the inset panel drawings and peritextual elements of Azul y ceniza (2004) and anticipates El aprendizaje de la lentitud (2011). The conceptual meaning he embeds in these small iconic images is most powerfully condensed in the historieta’s one-­letter title, “X,” which he glosses with text as “La cruïlla de camins, la contradicció” (The crossroads, contradiction).65 The first and last pages of the comic correspond exactly with the large-­ panel whole-­page layout that will appear later in 100 pictogramas para un siglo (XX) (2014).66 The textual and the image zones on these pages intermingle, and nonlinear forms of reading appear, such as the “clothesline” arrangement of images mentioned in my analysis in chapter 3 of El aprendizaje de la lentitud. In addition, the incorporation of photographs and the variation of style and levels of iconicity match the work Pere Joan would integrate into his graphic-­novel re-­creation of Nocilla Experience (2011). Second, it is a self-­reflexive meditation on his own career. Moving from a pictorially isolating representation of childhood, Pere Joan illustrates his move to Barcelona, where he formed the group El Claro del Bosque with other artists.67 He describes how “els meus còmics tendirien a l’atmosfèric, el discursiu o el conceptual” (my comics would tend toward the atmospheric, the discursive, or the conceptual), and he also covers his early collaborations with Max and Rosa María Sánchez on Baladas Urbanas and Muérdago.68 During this time, the artist notes, he carried out his work in isolation: “A mi no em disgustava ser una illa” (I did not like being an island).69 His work on El Víbora and Cairo brought him attention and opportunity: to work for La Vanguardia and to establish Nosotros somos los muertos.70 Ultimately, the comic’s theme of the “X” visually demonstrates Pere Joan’s successful integration of a number of contradictory or, rather, intersecting aesthetic expectations while working at the crossroads of Mallorca and the wider world.These aesthetic expectations are represented on the comic’s last page through repetition of the “X” figure and include such oppositions as narrative versus autonomous imagery, action versus passive characters, and conceptual comics versus colorism (fig. 5.1).71 The second text, Història del turisme a les Illes Balears (2009) is authored by Pere Joan and Felip Hernández and published by Inrevés in collaboration with the Balearic Island Government’s Tourism Council. Interestingly, the first page uses rural scenery and a map of the larger Mediterranean to embed the island within global migrations and exchanges that predate the rise of mass tourism: “Per molt estrany que ara ens sembli, la pobresa

Figure 5.1. Pere Joan, “X,” from Cada dibuixant és una illa (2008:46)

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va obligar molts d’illencs a emigrar a altres països, a la recerca de noves oportunitats personals i familiars” (As strange as it may seem to us, poverty forced many islanders to emigrate to other countries, in search of new individual and family opportunities).72 A frame story about four youngsters—Andrea, Marga, Álex, and Xisco—allows the book to work in basic information about the history of tourism to the islands for readers who may be unfamiliar with it.The narrative recounts Marga’s discovery of visits to the islands made in the nineteenth century by Archduke Luis Salvador, George Sand and Frédéric Chopin, Rubén Darío, and Jules Verne, and documents a touristic brochure made by Gustave Doré.73 Marga and Álex learn of hotel development on the island in the 1920s, the promotion of Mallorcan tourism in Paris, and the visits by Joan Miró’s parents, Rodolfo Valentino, and Robert Graves.74 As they learn more about the connection of the islands with Hollywood and international politics and culture, Andrea and Marga progressively become enthralled.75 Significantly, Pere Joan conveys the scale of the tourist boom of the 1960s in two full-­page panels that are as visually busy as they are historically informative.76 The frame narrative is a clear attempt to use culture— both the comics medium as culture and the use of popular culture within the comics medium—as a way to pull readers into connecting with tourism more intellectually. The young protagonists become more intellectually engaged with their surroundings and turn into journalists of a sort as they seek out more of the history of the islands. This journalistic search, of course, is interpolated with beach and club scenes.77 Throughout, the characteristic island imagery is imbued with a tone that prioritizes active knowledge-­seeking rather than passive enjoyment.The book bemoans the excesses of (nonintellectual) tourism quite directly, mentioning attempts to defend the islands from massive urbanization that brought ecological damage (fig. 5.2).78 Yet, after the 1970s and 1980s, as one panel states, the reality was that “el turisme ja era part essencial de la nostra economia i potser, s’estava convertint en una senya d’identitat” (tourism was already an essential part of our economy and, perhaps, was becoming a mark of identity).79 In this sense, the comic admits the reality of dependence on tertiary circuits of capital accumulation while asserting a hope that tourism should not necessarily entail a resignation to the mere production and consumption of spectacular landscapes. The third and final text explored here is perhaps the most significant. Pere Joan’s graphic novel Viaje a Cotiledonia (2015) is a commissioned

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Figure 5.2. Pere Joan and Felip Hernández, Història del turisme a les Illes Balears (2009:54)

comics adaptation of a 1965 novel of the same name, originally written by the Mallorcan author Cristóbal Serra Simó (Palma, 1922–2012).The invention of the fictitious landscapes of Cotiledonia and its inhabitants is clearly connected to the literary tradition marked by Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels as well as by the work of French author Henri Michaux.80 As such, the prose text is quite obviously a literary geography in its own terms, and Pere Joan’s graphic novel even more so. Here, the comics artist’s representation of the communities, folk practices, and cultural landscapes of the fictional Cotiledonia reconfigures elements of Serra’s original prose text to be read in a visual and topographical fashion. Here, as elsewhere in the comics artist’s oeuvre, the interrelationship between relatively autonomous page elements set against a white background allows a free-­form style of reading in which viewers contemplate the page as they would a landscape. As Josep Maria Nadal Suau writes in his epilogue to the graphic-­novel version, Serra was not a very well-known author, but he did nevertheless manage to attract a kind of cult following that extended far beyond the place of his birth.81 Nadal Suau is quite right to insist on the commonalities between the two Mallorcan artists:

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Porque de este trasvase serriano de la literatura al cómic sólo podía encargarse alguien como Pere Joan. Aunque puedan parecer muy alejados, adaptador y adaptado comparten tres cosas fundamentales: son isleños, mediterráneos y un poco disparatados. Pere es un moderno, pero cree en la lentitud; Cristóbal era un espíritu de otra época, pero sus libros siempre estarán en vanguardia. A Pere le interesan los pictogramas, que son un poco los aforismos de la ilustración; a Serra le fascinaban los aforismos, que son como pictogramas poéticos. (Because only someone like Pere Joan could manage this Serra-­like transfer from literature to the comic. Although they might seem quite different, the adapting artist and the author of the adapted work have three fundamental things in common: they are islanders (Mallorcan), Mediterranean, and lean toward the absurd side of things. Pere is a modern, but he believes in slowness; Cristóbal was a spirit from another era, but his books will always be at the vanguard. Pere is interested in pictograms, which are a bit like the aphorisms of illustration; Serra is fascinated by aphorisms, which are like poetic pictograms.)82

Interestingly, Serra is known most of all for the “brevity and frugality” of his prose and, stylistically, for avoiding “la pomposidad” and “la grandiloquencia” (pomposity and grandiloquence).83 These traits should echo for readers descriptions of Pere Joan in earlier chapters of this book, particularly with the visual artist’s sparing style and his predilection for preserving vast swaths of empty space on the page. As intimated in Nadal Suau’s comparison, Pere Joan’s 100 pictogramas para un siglo (XX) (2014) can be read as a text composed of visual aphorisms in the form of pictograms with deeply historical resonance. Most important, however—even though it is not explicit in the above comparison—is the pair’s common emphasis on the theme of cultural landscape. This thematic consideration is arguably just as important as the fact that both Pere Joan and Serra are Mallorcan. Moreover, Pere Joan is undeniably the only choice to adapt the work of Serra when one acknowledges the comics artist’s emphasis on space/place and imaginative geographies that I have traced throughout this book. As explored below, in terms of content, Serra’s Viaje a Cotiledonia (1965) is already a highly landscape-­ driven prose text. Along with its sequel, Retorno a Cotiledonia (1989), this work in particular has undoubtedly contributed substantially to Serra’s

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reputation among critics as an author linked with geography, terrain, the earth, and cultural landscapes.84 Two scholars contribute directly to such a geographic understanding of Serra. Both José Carlos Llop and Luis M. Fernández Ripoll praise the prose author in terrestrial terms. First, Llop has written that “Decir Cristóbal Serra . . . es hablar de un territorio distinto de la literatura española del siglo XX. . . . Resulta curioso para quien jamás ha recorrido la topografía de ese territorio, pero no para aquél que haya sido un iniciado en el misterio insular de Cristóbal Serra” (To say Cristóbal Serra . . . is to speak of a distinct territory of Spanish literature in the twentieth century. . . . It seems quite curious to those who have never traversed that territory’s topography, but not to those who have been initiated into the insular mystery of Cristóbal Serra).85 For this critic, saying the author’s name is synonymous with “nombrar un mapa” (naming a map): “Yo no sé si Serra es un poderoso cartógrafo en una isla perdida o un cartógrafo perdido en una isla poderosa” (I don’t know if Serra is a powerful cartographer on a lost island or a cartographer lost on a powerful island).86 The comments of Fernández Ripoll are equally informative in this regard. He writes that “Cristóbal Serra es un escritor telúrico o geocéntrico. La presencia de la tierra como origen, como madre, será una constante en sus Viaje a Cotiledonia, ese continente de ensoñaciones, reflejo de la fuerza vital del Mediterráneo. El albaricoque terrestre, nombre con el que bautiza a nuestro planeta y que resume en sí mismo la idea que estamos expresando, será siempre descrito mediante la luz, el mar, el fuego o el viento” (Cristóbal Serra is a telluric or geocentric writer.The presence of the earth as origin, as mother, will be a constant in his Viaje a Cotiledonia, that continent of reveries, a reflection of the vital force of the Mediterranean.The terrestrial apricot, a name with which he baptizes our planet and that in itself summarizes the idea that we are expressing, will always be described by way of light, sea, fire or wind).87 Serra’s prose artistic vision—like Pere Joan’s comics vision—is saturated with images of space, place, and landscape. What is most important in this analysis is a sense of what Pere Joan brings to the adaptation in graphic terms, but comparing both versions can be instructive. While the original text by Serra ran a concise 89 numbered pages, the comics adaptation is 107 pages.88 This is decidedly not carried out as an exact transposition of the verbal text. In fact, whole chapters of the original are excluded from the graphic-­novel version.89 In some cases, Pere Joan divides a single chapter into two or three distinct headings,

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or he combines two chapters into one.90 In line with the visual potential of comics as a medium in general—and the artist’s specific preference to exalt the image zone over the textual zone in terms of page layout91—there are times when he converts textual description from Serra’s original into a corresponding image or where he leaves textual content implicit in an image that serves another purpose.92 Elsewhere, Pere Joan creates dialogue in the comic from either description or third-­person narration in the original.93 At times, sentences are eliminated, ellipses are introduced to suggest a flow between the text accompanying discrete images, and minor spelling or wording changes also appear where it seems to suit the comics artist.94 Overall, then, the adaptation process shows very clearly that Pere Joan has subordinated verbal text to the visual image. Interestingly, at times the visual depiction of isolated verbal items follows a style established in Pere Joan’s other works. One instance of this can be seen in the decision to draw a collection of twisted tiles with each one stuck in the ground and protruding vertically, evoking similar bent-­item landscapes from both 16 novel·les amb hòmens blaus (1996) and Azul y ceniza (2004).95 In another example, the use of images within word balloons recalls the provocative “Untitled” image from Baladas Urbanas (1976).96 In yet another, the artist employs the nonlinear topographical layout that was frequent in 100 pictogramas (2014) but also appeared in El aprendizaje de la lentitud (2011).97 Moreover, the first two pages of the section devoted to the folk community members known as “Los nimbos” (fig. 5.3) are striking in their resemblance to both the gallery layout and the visual depiction of the “Seres con corona” (Beings with halos) from 16 novel·les amb hòmens blaus.98 Perhaps the most aesthetically satisfying example of the triumph of the image in Viaje a Cotiledonia the graphic novel is Pere Joan’s ambitious decision to turn a two-­sentence aphorism into a three-­page visual sequence.99 The aphorism in question reads: “La muerte es un pez negro con muchas espinas blancas. En todo tiempo da coletazos y sobre todo cuando las hojas de los árboles se caen las mañanas o las tardes de otoño” (Death is a black fish with many white spines. It is constantly thrashing its tail and most of all when the leaves of trees come down in the mornings or afternoons of fall; fig. 5.4).100 It cannot be ignored that the water theme of this particular aphorism by Serra is what has likely piqued Pere Joan’s interest, although its philosophical, conceptual resonance may certainly have contributed as well. The formal aspects of the decision to foreground and visually expand upon this two-­sentence pair are also of interest. Similar to the way

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Figure 5.3. Pere Joan and Cristóbal Serra, “Los nimbos,” from Viaje a Cotiledonia: La novela gráfica (2015:79)

the artist expanded the space taken up on the comics page of a particularly intriguing verbal fragment of text from Nocilla Experience,101 here he increases the amount of time that viewers spend with the image.102 This result is a meditation on the looming nature of death, embodied through an expansive and haunting visual treatment of a most unusual fish. True to his frequent incursions into representing the correspondence between inner experience and outer landscape, Pere Joan envisions the

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Figure 5.4. Pere Joan and Cristóbal Serra, Viaje a Cotiledonia: La novela gráfica (2015:83)

phrase “muchas espinas blancas” (many white spines/thorns) in two interconnected ways.103 In drawing the fish itself, he allows readers to see into the animal. He colors its spinal column white, depicting several other white spines that collectively evoke a bone structure protruding from the central column of the fish’s spine. In addition, however, the textured floor of the depicted landscape surface also features several protruding white thorns (see fig. 5.4). The images on all three pages are a quite poetic rendering of

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the original aphorism, and the excessive use of blank white space in Pere Joan’s hallmark open hyperframe page layout here provides an appropriate feel of expansiveness that reinforces the starkly transcendent character of Serra’s treatment of death and mortality.104 Aside from the compositional and stylistic elements already mentioned above, what Pere Joan brings to Serra’s prose contents throughout Viaje a Cotiledonia is a visual form of topographical costumbrismo. In Spain, the nineteenth-­century costumbrista tradition encouraged typological observations of a local or regional character—as introduced in chapter 1 of the present book in the context of discussing José Luis Pellicer’s early comic “Por un coracero” (1873), for example. While the folk communities of Viaje a Cotiledonia are fictitious, Serra’s emphasis is nevertheless on their customs, traditions, and everyday practices. What Pere Joan achieves in his visual text is to systematically embed these customs, traditions, and practices within an artistically rendered and visual cultural landscape. Both artists exploit the conceit of fiction to delve into more broadly observable human experiences of social power and cultural landscape. Returning to Buswell’s observations on Mallorcan society provides additional insight into how the fictional folkways that appear in the graphic novel tie into existing island spaces and histories. Most simply, Pere Joan’s images can be taken as reflections of what the geographer calls the island’s classically western Mediterranean geomorphology and climate.105 Images of water, waves, rocky coasts, beaches, shorelines, docks, marine animals, and the open sea are omnipresent throughout the comic.106 Regarding the social history of the island, there is a clear visual echo in Viaje a Cotiledonia of accounts indicating the lack of coherence resulting from the fact that Roman settlement had little impact on the island’s cultural environment, and that Mallorca’s inhabitants were late to industrialization.107 On paper, Cotiledonia appears to consist of relatively isolated societies that evoke the distributed social relationships of Mallorca’s history: complete with its feudal landlords, the influence of Berber settlements, the early introduction of sharecropping, the “cash and kind ritual” of regular trading partnerships, and even the depiction of “chieftain-­led tribal groupings.”108 One specific example that is particularly striking in both visual and historical terms appears in the section devoted to the community of “Los golindones.”109 A large towering column rises out of the ground in the community’s rural village, and on the column crawl a number of scarabs. The verbal text in both versions reveals that the scarab is a symbol of

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virility, and an accompanying word-­image combination at the bottom of the page supports this idea with the statement by a male Golindón who insists that “Todos los escarabajos son machos” (All scarabs are male).110 The ending of the story line illustrates how the relatively benign and paternalistic (if not messianic and also quixotic) rule of a leader named Prun unified settlements, while exalting the weak and the meek and providing equality for women.111 Also of great interest in this scene is Buswell’s exploration of a specific element of Mallorca’s landscape history. The geographer documents the existence of a “tower-­like element at the heart of new settlements” on the island, which in the present reading suggests a real-­world parallel for the main visual element of the “Los golindones” segment.112 Buswell notes that such a tower “may have had a functional purpose as a lookout, but more probably it came to represent in symbolic form a statement of landownership and a willingness to defend it.”113 Stylistically, however, the representation of Cotiledonia’s cultural landscapes is quite interesting. Against the empty background of the open hyperframe and its excessive white space, Pere Joan has a tendency to represent his landscape scenes as self-­contained areas of irregular shape. The island of rocky cliffs spanning a two-­page spread after the graphic novel’s dedication page is a case in point. As viewers, we stare across the white expanse at the page bottom—and thus also across an expanse of diegetic water—and contemplate the marvelous yellow, blue-­g reen, and red hues that overlay the island’s curved topography. At left, dotting the rocks composing this landscape view of an island from the imagined space of Cotiledonia, are a few specimens of the donkey—one of Serra’s preferred literary figures.114 There is no background sky, no horizon in the distance, no clouds, no sun . . . no weather of any kind. Adopting a bird’s-­ eye view of the page allows readers to consider the irregular contours of the island in a complementary way to its head-­on view.That is, the lack of detail in the hyperframe’s whiteness allows the island landscape to hover and float on the page, just as it simultaneously floats in the water scene. Vertical and horizontal axes of the image thus replicate one another in this sense: the irregular shape of the island’s formal representation is preserved whether one focuses on the page as an artistic composition in two dimensions or as a depicted landscape in an imaginative three dimensions. Pere Joan uses this strategy throughout Viaje a Cotiledonia, frequently depicting communities and cultural landscapes of its various regions in irregular shapes with bright swatches of color against a ubiquitous and

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seemingly eternal white background.115 In this way, the people, things, and landscape elements of the graphic novel’s content become landscapes of their own, in formal and aesthetic terms.When we as readers scan the page, our eyes hop from one of these visual islands to the next in our topographical reading. In the process, we repeatedly leap, in our imaginations, across the expansive white hyperframe that—a bit like water perhaps—at once distances each image from the other and also provides the common ground for their interconnection. Along with the explicit representation of coastal areas, beaches, and rocky cliffs in this work, this approach to page layout can also be seen as a strategy that replicates the visual coastlines of the artist’s images in its formal representation. Looking at things this way allows us to return to the cultural studies framework of this chapter. Under a paradigm of mass tourism, the urbanization patterns that Mallorca has experienced over the course of the twentieth century have had the effect of “increasing the amount of coastline.”116 This is true in a material sense, as urbanizing development creates a new built environment for leisure and touristic enjoyment of sites on the island’s coast.Yet the island’s coastline has been increased visually in an aesthetic sense as well. This has been accomplished through the proliferation of the photographic, videographic, and still images that have historically accompanied the marketing of space/place through global travel circuits. The question, however, is how to reconcile comics geographies of the sort carried out in Viaje a Cotiledonia (and with them, literary geographies and artistic geographies more broadly) with the promotional images of coastline that foreground Mallorca as a visual spectacle. In a way, Pere Joan’s graphic novel also potentially extends the island coastline into an aesthetic realm. But this aesthetic realm differs incredibly from the spectacular visual realm of promotional tourism and capital accumulation strategies on the large scale. I insist that Pere Joan and Cristóbal Serra Simó need to be linked, instead, with an attempt to forge an autochthonous and topographical tradition of literary/comics geographies.While the recovery of works produced by noted authors connected with a specific place can indeed form a key node in a larger strategy of (literary) touristic accumulation strategies, the legacy of both Serra and Pere Joan is somewhat too intellectual, too daring, and too avant-­garde to cater to travelers in search of exceptionalized and spectacularized island experiences.

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Rather than connect Viaje a Cotiledonia with the visual spectacle of mass tourism as carried out from the 1960s onward, a more fortuitous point of comparison might be the tourist board originally established in Mallorca in 1903. Returning to the Fomento del Turismo de Mallorca’s early call to use tourism as “an instrument for stimulating cultural and intellectual activity” might suggest that a different kind of cultural and intellectual engagement is possible with comics texts. This engagement has the potential to prompt reflection and contemplation of the nuanced island imaginaries these texts produce. Viaje a Cotiledonia, after all, prompts deep reflection on complicated issues of space/place and conviviality. It does not, in my view, square with the promotion of cultural landscapes cleansed of social conflict and dedicated to themes of leisure. In the context of Serra’s astute observations regarding the pervasive social realities of conflict and even violence, Pere Joan’s images are quite far removed from exalting the “quaintness” of island inhabitants or serving as a postcard snapshot of place. Given Pere Joan’s generalized critique of promotional schemes and advertising, as mentioned in the introduction of this book, such a simplistic categorization would be a complete misreading of his artistic motivation and style. In light of the contrary tenor of his four decades of comics production, it is thus quite hard to imagine Pere Joan’s stylistic penchant for contemplative geographies playing into the spectacularization of Mallorcan tourist geographies. Moreover, it is important here to make a more general comment about the current social position occupied by comics art. While the representations of island landscapes in Pere Joan’s oeuvre might be increasingly seen as expressions from popular culture, in the end it is more accurate to say they are expressions from what theorist Bart Beaty calls the “unpopular culture” of the ninth art.117 As such, they are somewhat unpopular (whether because they are intellectual, emotional, unusual, or strange) contributions to an unpopular artistic medium (comics) from an unpopular sector of the comics world (whether this is seen as Spain, Catalonia, or Mallorca). The comics combination of verbal text and visual image in this specific instance of Viaje a Cotiledonia is an intriguing mix, potentially mitigating Xavier Pla’s concern that the Catalan landscape has become a visual spectacle. In line with Henri Lefebvre’s allowance for representations of space to contribute to patterns of contestation and resistance—whether from cultural and literary texts or more broadly in social discourse—the active

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role of Pere Joan’s contemplative implicit reader certainly diverges from the passive role of the tourist who merely stands in awe of visual spectacle. In fact, Pere Joan’s comics art may very well serve to reinforce Pla’s support for “a horizontal panorama where every detail is revelatory.” In turning from one page of Viaje a Cotiledonia to the next, a horizon of interdependent visual details is opened up to readers. In responding to the forms of topographical reading that the comics artist cultivates through his unique style and open hyperframe, viewers contemplate a comics geography that is simultaneously a cultural landscape in its own right. Traversing this cultural landscape requires the reader’s engagement with both the Mallorcan island imagination and the material, historical, social, and political dimensions of our increasingly global world.

Conclusion

The chapters of this book have identified recurring themes that have continued to resonate throughout Pere Joan’s career. One of these is the insistence that the image can have narrative properties—outside of the sequence and without the need for text. The example of “Untitled” from Baladas Urbanas (1976) in chapter 2 showed how juxtaposition, image interplay, and the way topographical features are evident in both the form and content of the page work together to suggest story and meaning. From the 1980s through the 2010s, I have argued, Pere Joan in fact progressively encourages a topographical form of reading in which viewers engage with relatively autonomous page items at their own pace and in the manner they find most fitting. This effect is maximized through his increasing reliance on large-­page (and oversized-­page) formats as well as nonlinear arrangements. It is clearly evident throughout his highly conceptual work 100 pictogramas para un siglo (XX) (2014) and in selected oversized pages of his midcareer masterpiece Azul y ceniza (2004). Overall, this formal strategy has the effect of underscoring the importance of contemplation. A

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reader contemplates Pere Joan’s pages much as one might a landscape. As even his relatively rare panel sequences are most frequently detached from action-­to-­action chains, viewers have the opportunity and the responsibility to linger on specific features of his visual and formal landscapes. They are not rushed from image to image, but are instead encouraged to think more deeply about the comic they are reading. Simultaneously, they consider issues of subjectivity, ecology, belonging, social marginality, human relationships, mobility, and art itself in the context of compelling depictions of rural, urban, and island spaces. Beyond the importance of cultural landscape as a concept for understanding Pere Joan’s oeuvre, his work is significant within the broader field of comics studies for a number of reasons. In addition to his unique style—one that Francesca Lladó Pol has referred to as intimist—the consistently geographical or spatial tenor of his art, and his important role as an innovative practitioner and editor of the ninth art in the cultural landscape of comics in Spain, his original work also helps comics theory in general consider many of the questions so important to the field today. Starting with the introduction and continuing throughout the book, I have drawn Pere Joan’s art into dialogue with a wide range of comics theorists. The priority of stylistic questions in the Mallorcan’s work connects with Barbara Postema’s comments on style in comics more generally. His insistence on the power and potential of the image, over word and verbal text, relates productively with the pictorial emphasis touted by David Beronä, the links Joseph Witek has established between images and concepts, and the notion of iconostasis as explored by Andrei Molotiu. Pere Joan’s more provocative comics contribute to intense debates over whether comics need to be unambiguous, as David Carrier seems to believe, or whether a single image can narrate, as discussed by Thierry Groensteen. Considered in its totality, Pere Joan’s artistic production provides evidence that the image itself—rather than the sequence or panel—should be seen as the primary building block of comics. As stated in the introduction to this book, my hope is that readers will find provocation in the numerous unique qualities of Pere Joan’s art. His persistent push beyond the waffle-­iron/grid pattern of traditional comics considerably widens existing definitions of what Scott McCloud, inspired by Will Eisner, somewhat simplistically called “sequential art.” The artist’s metaphorical, abstract, contemplative, and philosophical mode of storytelling brings new life even to the use of what may appear to be traditional

C o n c l u s i o n     2 0 3

panel sequences, as indicated by the flattened horizontality of the “Grupaje” section from El aprendizaje de la lentitud discussed in chapter 3. His deep interest in representing emotions spatially on the page perhaps recalls the early comic “Estudios psicológicos” (1880) by Apeles Mestres. The stark relief and striking two-­dimensionality of the historical aphorisms in 100 pictogramas para un siglo (XX), as I suggested in chapter 2 with an appeal to the work of Pascal Lefèvre, are perfectly crafted so as to prompt the reader’s confrontation with the extra-­artistic sociohistorical world. Equally striking is the effect found in Azul y ceniza whereby the reader detonates a bomb within the story with the mere action of turning a comics page. In concluding, I thus return to a comment made in the introduction, Groensteen’s claim that the academic disciplines most relevant to the study of comics are semiotics, history, and sociology. I have sought to harness the strikingly original work of Pere Joan to make a compelling case that, moving forward, the discipline of geography should be added to this list. Understanding the full range of geographical theory brings us a much greater appreciation of his legacy. Space considerations have prevented me from delving into the theoretical nuances of cultural landscape studies—or emotional, rural, and urban geographies, for that matter—but in any event, doing so would have relegated the comics art under study to a secondary role. I have sought to realize two purposes: to suggest a topographical approach to the ninth art but also to introduce the Anglophone world to one of the most important and innovative artists of twentieth-­and twenty-­ first-­century comics. Pere Joan remains in a class of his own. That said, Anglophone scholarship is still scratching the surface when it comes to engaging in Iberian and Latin American comics traditions. My hope is that other monographs devoted to ninth-­art innovators from those and other areas will soon follow this one.

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Notes

I ntrod u ction

1. Groensteen 2008:91. 2. Cuadrado 2000:979. 3. Cuadrado 2000:979–980. 4. Lladó Pol 2009:5. 5. This is suggested in Lladó Pol 2009:9. 6. The volume mixes artists from Barcelona and elsewhere in a clear call to assert itself as the urban center of activity over the relative autonomy of other local traditions: Jordi Bernet (Barcelona, 1944), Ramón Boldú (Tarroja de Segarra, 1951), Pep Brocal (Terrassa, 1967), Cifré (Barcelona, 1952), Fernando de Felipe (Zaragoza, 1965), Miguel Gallardo (Lleida, 1956), Kim (Barcelona, 1942), Max (Barcelona, 1956), Nazario (Castilleja del Campo, Sevilla, 1944), Pere Joan (Palma de Mallorca, 1956), Rubén Pellejero (Badalona, 1952), and Bartolomé Seguí (Mallorca, 1962). 7. He elaborates in that same essay that “la ciutat de Barcelona ha estat, és, i probablement serà el centre creador u productor d’historietes més important del mercat espanyol” (The city of Barcelona has been, is, and probably will be the most important creative or productive center of comics for the Spanish market; Navarro 1998:13). 8. Clos 1998:7. For more details on the city’s turn-­of-­the-­century promotion of comics (including the exposition titled El Còmic a Barcelona) in the context of establishing a wider dialogue on artistic creation in general, see Mascarell and Pericay 1998. 9. Lladó Pol 2009:27; this comment concerns the recognition of Max and Pere Joan in 1986 through a dedicated exhibition preceding the II Setmana del Còmic. This is discussed further in chapter 1 of the present book. 10. See, for example, Antonio Altarriba 2007:12. Readers should also consult the “Important Note on Spain for the General Reader” in this book.

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11. See also further comments on these issues by Lladó Pol (2009:49–50). 12. Lladó Pol 2009:33. Elsewhere Lladó Pol writes of Pere Joan’s stories in general that they are situated in Mallorca (Lladó Pol 2001:105). I have my doubts, however, about how widely this statement can be applied. 13. Lladó Pol (2009:37) distinguishes a younger generation of Mallorcan comics artists born between 1967 and 1979 from Pere Joan’s generation, born in the 1950s and 1960s. 14. See Altarriba 2002:111; 2001:324.Viviane Alary follows suit in her important essay (2002:125). 15. Pérez del Solar 2013:145, 241–242, 250–252. See also Pérez del Solar’s (2003) article in Ana Merino’s guest-­edited section of the International Journal of Comic Art 5(2). 16. Dopico 2005:281. 17. Pere Joan’s links with (mis)perceptions of the clear-­line / ligne claire / línea clara style are discussed in greater depth in chapter 1. 18. The reference occurs late in the text—appropriate enough given the chronological approach—but even so is a cursory nod given to both Pere Joan and Max for their creation of Nosotros somos los muertos (García 2010:214). 19. García writes that formal experimentation has been a secondary consideration for artists in Spain (2010:264). He then moves on to consider a few artists who compose works that might be understood as being located “en la frontera entre el arte y la viñeta” (on the border between art and comics) without mentioning Pere Joan—quite an oversight, in my view. 20. Bart Beaty’s Unpopular Culture is an example of this, where the scholar focuses on Max and his “liminal position, alternately on the margins and at the centre of these international developments” (2007:115), though Pere Joan is mentioned in passing (2007:116).The tendency here, as elsewhere, is to absorb Max as a representative of Iberian comics and assimilate him into a wider international comics discourse, while using this constructed concept of internationalism to patently ignore the web of other Iberian artists with whom he is connected. As I argue throughout this book, to explore the “international influence of Spanish cartooning” we first need to explore comics artists from Spain just as thoroughly as scholarship has explored artists from the Franco-­Belgian and Anglophone traditions. 21. In the introduction to the collection El hombre que se comió a sí mismo, Pere Joan writes that “durante los años que duró la revista Cairo no tuve intención de atarme a un personaje” (throughout the years that the magazine Cairo lasted I had no intention of tying myself to one character [1999:5]). See also his seeming regret later, expressed in an interview, that he did not create an iconic recurring character (Pere Joan 1998:114).

N o t e s t o P a g e s 7 – 8     2 0 7

22. On this principle, see Román Gubern’s (1972:59) remarks. 23. He does cite the underground as a general (if not also unavoidable) influence in an interview (Pere Joan 1998), but I would say this influence is less pronounced in Pere Joan’s case than it is in relation to Max or Miguel Gallardo, for example. 24. This point regarding the underground comic is explored in greater depth in chapter one. 25. This appears in Lladó Pol (2001:105). 26. See the interview published as Pere Joan (1998), wherein the artist comments on Passatger en trànsit, noting that for him, the adventure story is subjugated to stylistic and conceptual issues. For a remark explicitly on how plot is relatively uninteresting to him, see Pere Joan (1998:114). 27. Pere Joan 1998:115. 28. All in España (1998:112), including the longer statement “Encara que ha fabricat historietes dotades d’una estructura tradicional, Pere Joan cada dia es troba més a gust en una narrativa el·líptica i deliberadament confusa que s’inclina pel suggeriment més que no pas per l’afirmació” (Although he has created comics with a traditional structure, Pere Joan is most comfortable with elliptical and deliberately confusing narrative that tends to suggest rather than clearly affirm). 29. The critic writes of Pere Joan that he possesses “un estilo sumamente personal que permite distinguirlo de cualquier otro artista” (an extremely personal style that distinguishes him from any other artist; Lladó Pol 2001:105; the same phrase appears again in 2009:14; see also 14–15). See also her comments regarding “una composición estructurada a partir de una considerable número de viñetas por página, que en ocasiones suele superar las veinte” (a composition structured by a considerable number of vignettes per page, that occasionally exceeds twenty) and “un montaje analítico y detallado de ciertos aspectos relevantes de la historia” (an analytical and detailed layout of certain aspects relevant to the story; Lladó Pol 2001:105, 107). 30. Lladó Pol 2001:107. 31. One example is Pérez del Solar (2013:278), who talks about “expresión subjetiva” (subjective expression) in relation to the comics magazine Madriz, but also specifically mentions its relevance to Pere Joan, whom he names in the context of other artists. This theme is pursued further in chapter 3. 32. Chris Ware’s work first appeared in Nosotros somos los muertos in 1998, as Pere Joan himself reflects in NSLM 9 (2004) in a brief statement titled “Chris Ware, contención radical” (93). A two-­page spread from Ware’s Building Stories appears in that issue of the magazine. For more, see “Ofrezco mucho”

2 0 8    N o t e s t o P a g e s 8 – 1 4

(Infame&Co. 2013) and NSLM 8. The influence of Ware on Pere Joan can be seen in some of the images from his adaptation of Nocilla Experience. 33. Note that Pere Joan’s sequential art actually appeared in volume 3 of the Nocilla trilogy written by Fernández Mallo—Nocilla Lab (2009:169–178). See Fraser 2012, 2016, and chapter 4 of this book for more on Nocilla Experience. 34. Muérdago can be viewed at https://​issuu​.com​/cantitats​/docs​/muerdago​ _1976​_​_1​_​/1. 35. See reflections to this effect made by Max on his blog, Capdevila 2011. 36. Lladó Pol 2009:8. Another erasure parallel to Lladó Pol’s elision of Rosa María Sánchez occurs when Pablo Dopico (2005:379) attributes Muérdago only to Max and not to Pere Joan (nor Sánchez, for that matter). 37. This comic is notable enough to receive attention by Pérez del Solar, who mentions “En el recuerdo,” published in Cairo 17, briefly describing its plot (2013:241n28). 38.This comic in particular—along with others by Pere Joan in the 1980s—is a key counterargument to the wholesale reduction of Pere Joan’s work to the clear-­line style, as discussed in chapter 1 of this book. A particular segment of Azul y ceniza (2004) continues this style to a large degree, though analysis of that segment has not found a way into this book project. 39. Pere Joan 1999:5. 40. McCloud 1994. 41. Pere Joan’s comments in the introduction to El hombre que se comió a sí mismo state quite clearly his lack of interest in action comics—“Quien busque la adrenalina que dispensan los heroes machacados y machacantes está claro que deberá encontrarla en otro sitio” (Those who might be looking for the adrenaline dispensed by heroes engaging in violence should clearly look elsewhere; 1999:5). 42. Alan Aumbry was one of the pen names of English sci-­fi writer Barrington J. Bayley. 43. Bufill 1984:3. The phrase appears there in Catalan as “geografia contemplativa” in its translation from Spanish by Albert Ullibarri. Note that Bufill also provides a prologue to Pere Joan’s Mi cabeza bajo el mar (1990), which he titles “No hay memoria” (Bufill 1990). 44. Lladó Pol (2001:92) precedes her discussion of “Pasajero en tránsito” with the observation that “temas como la soledad del individuo en la ciudad serán una constante que llevan a los personajes a buscar otras alternativas, aunque siempre terminan cuestionándose su propia existencia” (themes like the solitude of the individual in the city are a constant that prompt characters to seek out alternatives, although they always end up questioning their own existence).

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 4 – 1 6     2 0 9

45. Lladó Pol 2001:92. Prior to this in her book, a full page from Pere Joan’s “Pasajero en tránsito” appears on the recto page and, on the verso facing it, a lengthy discussion (2001:90–91). 46. Lladó Pol 2001:90. 47. Lladó Pol 2001:90. 48. Lladó Pol 2001:90. 49. Lladó Pol 2001:90. 50. A quotation from Lladó Pol is relevant here. She notes that “a Pere Joan le interesa contar historias abiertas a la sorpresa, donde la fugacidad, la precariedad, el olvido y la muerte son siempre una constante, pretendiendo con ello que el espectador encuentre algo más allá de la hermosura de las imágenes” (Pere Joan is interested in telling stories open to surprise, where transience, precarity, forgetting and death are always a constant, hoping in this way that the reader will find something [more] beyond the beauty of the images; Lladó Pol 2001:105). I treat the 1980s explosion of comics with a wider lens in chapter 1. 51. Lladó Pol 2001:105. 52. See Marcus 1983 for more information about the 1982 elections, which are synonymous with the triumph of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE; Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party) in newly democratic Spain. Pérez del Solar (2013:251) notes that these other figures include “el hombre de Michelín, el mayordomo del limpia metales Netol y el cara de limón de bebidas Schuss; y por personajes de tebeos, como Eustaquio Morcillón (de Benejam) y Don Pío (de Peñarroya)” (the Michelin man, the butler of the metal cleaner Netol and the lemon-­faced character of the drink Schuss; and the comic-­strip characters like Eustaquio Morcillón [Benejam] and Don Pío [Peñarroya]). 53. Pérez del Solar 2013:250–252. 54. Here Pérez del Solar writes of “las ilusiones de consumo del desarrollismo” (the illusions of consumption of the development years; 2013:251), using the word “desarrollismo” to comment on the specific strategies enacted by the Spanish state in the 1960s to foment development and link culture with the dictatorship’s aims. The entire sociopolitical context of 1960s-­1980s Spain is dealt with more carefully and in greater detail in chapter 1 of this book. See also Afinoguénova and Martí-­Olivella 2008; Crumbaugh 2009; Longhurst 2000; Pavlovica 2012. 55. Pérez del Solar 2013:251. 56. Pérez del Solar 2013:252. Also relevant, the comic is “otra historieta poblada (y actuada) por habitantes de la vieja publicidad” (another comic populated [and acted] by agents of bygone advertising) that reveals the “marca indeleble de los medios masivos sobre la población, especialmente cuando se lleva al terreno

2 1 0    N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 6 – 2 3

de la política” (great impact of mass media on the population, especially when it is carried to the terrain of politics; Pérez del Solar 2013:251). 57. Lladó Pol (2001:92–93) does not explore the social critique as Pérez del Solar does, but her remarks on “La conjura del pasado” are of equal interest. 58. Lladó Pol 2001:92. Interestingly, the original Spanish includes the word “réplicas,” which is similar to the term “replicants” used to describe the androids of Blade Runner. In a later interview, Pere Joan states that after creating the concept of mixelization, he realized that it was a metaphor for AIDS. A segment of his later Azul y ceniza (2004) also references AIDS, as discussed briefly in chapter 4 of this book. 59. On mixelización in “La lluvia blanca,” see Lladó Pol 2001:92. 60. I build here on the analysis by Pérez del Solar (2013:250–252). 61. Pere Joan 1999:104. 62. Pere Joan 1999:143. 63. Pere Joan 1999:83. 64. Pérez del Solar 2013:241. 65. Pérez del Solar 2013:242. 66. Text zone/word balloon: Pere Joan 1999:12, 56, 75. Character: Pere Joan 1999:82. Inset image: Pere Joan 1999:19. 67. Standard insets: Pere Joan 1999:41. Unframed panels/white space of the page: Pere Joan 1999:19. Thin/rhetorical layout panels: Pere Joan 1999:14, 15. Panels of identical dimensions: Pere Joan 1999:134–136. 68.These are all relatively autonomous parts of what appears in El hombre que se comió a sí mismo as the comic “6 historias de un detective” (Pere Joan 1999). Pérez del Solar (2013:145) comments on these texts insightfully. 69. Wordless sequences: Pere Joan 1999:32, 67. Full-­page panel composition: Pere Joan 1999:88. Full-­page panel with multiple insets: Pere Joan 1999:85, 126. Full-­page, nonpaneled composition, text undemarcated from image: Pere Joan 1999:123. 70. Pere Joan 1999:67. 71. Pere Joan 1999:145. 72. Pere Joan 1999:156–157. 73. Pere Joan 1999:121–124. 74. Lladó Pol 2009:33. 75. Chapters of note in the books include Cocola 2011; Cosgrove 2011; Hones 2011; Luria 2011a, 2011b; Richardson 2011. 76. See Ayers 2010 and Holmes 2010. 77. See Fraser 2014b, 2014c. 78. See Fraser 2015; Gregory 2010; Lilley 2011.

N o t e s t o P a g e s 2 3 – 2 7     2 1 1

79. On film and geography/space, see, for example, Clarke 1997; Shiel and Fitzmaurice 2001; and Cresswell and Dixon 2002; on videogames, see, for example, Juul 2007; Nitsche 2008; Souza e Silva and Sutko 2009; Taylor 1997; Wolf 1997, 2001. 80. Dittmer 2014:15. 81. Dittmer 2014:17, 18. Also, “The division between geography and wider comics studies is all the more surprising given their mutual interest in space. . . . If there ever was a visual form well suited to speak to a universe of spaces which are brought into relation with one another, it is that of comic books” (Dittmer 2014:15). 82. Ahrens and Meteling 2010:5. 83. Ahrens and Meteling 2010:4. 84. Ahrens and Meteling 2010:5, 7. 85. See Dittmer 2014a:17–18; as well as Gallacher 2011; Livingstone 2005. Doel (2014:172) references insights on space and time from Bergsonian philosophy. 86. Mitchell 2000:21. 87. See Mitchell 2000:21, 28; 2003. Don Mitchell is himself an important figure in amplifying the breadth of cultural geography to include a range of humanistic and sociopolitical concerns. 88. “The Morphology of Landscape” (Sauer 1925), cited in Mitchell 2000:27. 89. Moreover, as mentioned in The New Ruralism, edited by Resina and Viestenz (2012:12), landscape deserves to be seen as “an aesthetic mediation of the primary reality of the land.” 90. Anderson and Smith 2001; Ettlinger 2004; Tolia-­Kelly 2006; Wood and Smith 2004. 91. Important references include a piece published in Social and Cultural Geography titled “Editorial: Embodying Emotion Sensing Space: Introducing Emotional Geographies,” where Joyce Davidson and Christine Milligan write that “there is little we can think apart from feeling” (2004:523; original emphasis), as well as work by Bondi 2002:7; and especially Susan J. Smith (1997:502; also 2000). I explore these arguments further in Fraser 2015. 92. On the connections between emotion and affect, see Anderson and Harrison 2006 and Thien 2005. 93. See Henderson 2008 and McGaw and Vance 2008. 94. See Bowen, Dunn, and Kasdan 2010:209. 95. Georg Simmel 2010 is important here.The work of the Chicago school of the 1920s and 1930s is particularly well known. See, for example, Robert E. Park (1967) and Louis Wirth (1938) as well as remarks by David Harvey (2012). Lewis Mumford (1934, 1937, 1938) also deserves particular mention for a historical and

2 1 2    N o t e s t o P a g e s 2 7 – 3 3

cultural approach to the urban as developed in his many works. See LeGates and Stout 2005. 96. Arguably one of the most significant is a tradition running through the work of Henri Lefebvre (1976, 1991a, 1991b, 1995, 1996, 2003); see also Fraser 2014b, 2014c, 2015; Stanek 2011. Lefebvre’s work suggests that the tension between the urban and the planned city arises as the spatial project of a bourgeois science of modern planning and that space increasingly becomes a commodity. Readers can trace his explicit and implicit influence on later generations of urban thinkers—among whom we may identify David Harvey (1989, 1990, 2006, 2009, 2012); Neil Smith (1984); Edward Soja (1980, 1996); Sharon Zukin (1995); Richard Sennett (1992, 1994, 2008); and on Spain, Degen (2000) and Manuel Delgado Ruiz (1999, 2007a, 2007b). See also Latham and McCormack 2004; Philo and Kearns 1993; Straw and Boutros 2010. 97. Postema 2013:122. 98. Postema 2013:45. 99. Beronä 2012:18; see also Beronä 2008. Also see Witek’s statement regarding the image, that “its narrative strategies are deployed not simply to replicate action in space but to embody conceptual relationships” (Witek 2012:32–34 [unusual pagination caused by picture on 33]). 100. Witek 2012:32. 101. Molotiu 2012:91. 102. Molotiu 2012:91. 103. This English translation of “chunga” is borrowed from Simone Castaldi’s (2016) essay “A Brief History of Comics in Italy and Spain” from The Routledge Companion to Comics. It might also be described as grotesque, dirty, smarmy, vaguely comparable to the reputation in the United States of work published in Mad magazine or by alternative comics pioneer Robert Crumb. The clear line, owing to Joost Swarte, is linked to the Franco-­Belgian tradition of Hergé and the work he inspired.The discourse opposing these traditions is briefly explored in chapter 1. C hapter 1 : T he C omics L andscape of S pain

1. I refer here to images created by comics artists Franz Masereel, Will Eisner, and Joost Swarte, for example, that depict the artistic workshop space. While those representations frame comics as an industry, Pere Joan’s poster and evocative title portray the solitary work of the individual comics creator. 2. On the first page of the introduction to his masterful study Imágenes del desencanto: Nueva historieta española 1980–1986 (2013), Pedro Pérez del Solar provides a concise snapshot of these differing approaches (2013:11n1).

N o t e s t o P a g e s 3 3 – 3 5     2 1 3

3. Readers should consult Carr (1970, 2000) and Vilar (1977, 2002) for more detailed surveys of these centuries; Juliá’s Historia de las dos Españas (2004) explores persisting schisms within Spain. 4. It is often remarked that these attempts at a republic came relatively late when compared with Spain’s French neighbors north of the Pyrenees. While ascribing wholesale to the narrative that Spain was a late-­modernizing country can overshadow the interplay of more nuanced social dynamics, it is interesting that the standard history of comics in Spain tends to repeat the late-­ modernization narrative. This concerns not merely the late development of comics within nineteenth-­century Spain but also the relatively late development of comics for adults in general and the late adoption of the alternative comics tradition in particular.This narrative can also be seen in comics history narratives of other countries, which are often contrasted with the comics market in the United States, which was arguably directed simultaneously toward children and adults from the very beginning. See Juan Benet’s ¿Qué fue la Guerra Civil? (1999) and also Paul Preston’s Las tres Españas del 36 (1998). 5. Readers should consult Brenan (1951, 1960); also Ullman’s The Tragic Week (1968). 6. Essential sources are Bookchin 1977; Brenan 1960; Casanova 2005; Graham 2002; Jackson 1965; Payne 1967; Preston 1983. 7. Even this statement obscures two important points that have already received attention in scholarship: (1) the complex dynamics that led to Franco’s leadership of the dictatorship over other generals, and (2) the fact that the Spanish Civil War was arguably ignited by two revolutions simultaneously, the military from the right and the anarchists from the left. 8. See Moradiellos 2003; Payne 1987. 9. The effects of the dictatorship on these areas of the Spanish state are discussed in Graham and Labanyi 1995; see also Douglas et al. 1999; Jones 1976. 10. For a variety of time periods and topics, see Graham and Labanyi 1995. 11. Abellán 1980; Ruiz Bautista 2005; see also Tusell 2011. 12. See Cate-­Arries 2012; Ugarte 1999. 13. Lefèvre 2014:130. 14. On the paradoxical attitudes of technocrats, see José Casanova 1983. Pavlovica 2012 and Crumbaugh 2009 are crucial to any understanding of this period. Also see Pack 2006. 15. For more on these migrations, see the essays collected in Afinoguénova and Martí-­Olivella 2008; also Hooper 1995. 16. I work through relevant literature on the subject of rural-­to-­urban migration, using the example of Madrid, in my book on the paintings of Antonio

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López García (Fraser 2014a), particularly in the chapter dealing with Vallecas. Hooper (1995) also discusses migration. 17. For a look at the urban experience before and during the war, see Fraser 2011a, 2014a; Larson 2011; Larson and Woods 2005; Ramos 2010; Resina 2008; Ricci 2009; Sambricio 2004. 18. On consumer goods, see the essay by Longhurst (2000). On literature, see Burunat 1980; Compitello 1983; Herzberger 1976, 1995; Labanyi 1989; Sobejano 2005; Spires 1978. 19. For example: Juan Benet, with whom I deal in Understanding Juan Benet: New Perspectives (Fraser 2013b), engaged profoundly with the specter of civil war and violence in chaotic and labyrinthine texts that invite comparison to William Faulkner’s style; Luis Martín-­Santos penned Tiempo de silencio (1997), documenting the squalid living conditions experienced by the large numbers of rural emigrants who flocked to Spain’s urban centers; and among the works of Juan Goytisolo, in exile since 1956, stands Señas de identidad (1999), an indictment of the insularity that coexisted with the uneven modernization, urbanization, and economic aperture that accompanied the final decade of the dictatorship. 20. On the economic aspect of the aperture, see García Delgado 1995. Justin Crumbaugh (2009) explores the policies of Spain’s broader tourist policy during these years. 21. The scholarly excavation and analysis of the Movida has been substantial—though neither exhaustive nor sufficient—in Hispanic studies. And yet, beyond highly visible pioneers in film and music (e.g., Pedro Almodóvar, Alaska . . .), practitioners of visual arts, and in particular, creators of comics art of the period, have not received the sustained attention they are due. On La Movida in general, see books by Vilarós (2002) and Nichols and Song (2014); also Jordan and Morgan-­Tamosunas (2000) and the essay by Triana-­Toribio (2000). 22. From Gubern’s prologue to Alary 2002b, which lacks page numbers. 23. See Alary 2000, 2002b, 2009; Altarriba Ordóñez 1981, 1983, 2001, 2002; Altarriba Ordóñez and Remesar 1987; Bufill 1994; Conde 2001; Cuadrado 1997, 2000; Dopico 2005; García 2010; Gubern 2002; Lara 1968, 2002; Lladó Pol 2001; Martín Martínez 1978, 1998, 2000a, 2000b; Merino 2002, 2009; Moix 1968, 2007; Palmer 2000; Pérez del Solar 2013; Pons, Porcel, and Sorni 2007; Ramírez 1975a, 1975b;Vázquez de Parga 1980;Vilarós 2002. 24. See also Ramírez’s El “comic” femenino en España:Arte sub y anulación (1975). 25. This tradition of close reading has been growing but must grapple with insufficient publication venues and what can be seen as a market preference for Franco-­Belgian, Japanese, and German traditions that pervades peer-­reviewed journals and university press book lines. See, for example, Díaz de Guereñu 2011;

N o t e s t o P a g e s 3 7 – 4 0     2 1 5

Fraser 2013a, 2016a; González del Pozo 2014; Gutiérrez García Huidobro 2014; Harris 2015; Lladó Pol 2009, 2012; Magnussen 2009, 2014; Pons 2013; Prout 2015; Torres 2012. Interestingly, too, Groensteen indicates that this focus on overviews and wider histories has also eclipsed the focus on individual comics artists and works in contexts other than Spain (2014b:63). 26. Pérez del Solar 2013:33. 27.“In Spanish, at least four different terms have been used:‘cómic,’‘historieta’ [little story], ‘tebeo’ or ‘monitos’ [little sketches]. ‘Tebeo,’ which is derived from the name of a children’s magazine (T.B.O., first published in 1917), originally designated the origin of comics as well as the physical medium, the illustrated magazine. The term now only refers to a comics magazine, not the medium as a whole, and it is used exclusively in Spain. ‘Monitos’ in contrast, is used in Mexico, while ‘cómic’ (with the accent) and ‘historieta’ (which at one time was divided into ‘historieta gráfica [little graphic story], ‘historieta dibujada’ [little drawn story] or ‘historieta ilustrada’ [little illustrated story]) are found in the entire Hispanic world” (Groensteen 2014a:95). 28. Alary 2002c:32. 29. Alary 2002c:32; also Lara 2002:45, 71; Moix 2007:103. It is also of note that in 1964 the French dictionary Petit Larousse illustré was similarly maligning comics as an art form (Groensteen 2009b:5). 30. Alary 2002a:123. 31. Pérez del Solar 2013:172. 32. Moix 2007:93; García 2010:265. 33. The quoted phrase is from Altarriba 2002:107. See that page for further discussion. 34. Further discussion by Gasca (1972:9) is revealing in this respect. 35. Lefèvre and Dierick 1998:11. See also Alary 2002c:23. 36. Groensteen 2009b:4; on Töpffer, see also Kunzle 1973, 2007, 2009. 37. “Question: who defined a comics album as ‘a book that, addressed directly to the eyes, expresses itself through representation and not through narration’? Answer: Rodolphe Töpffer, and that sentence was written in 1830” (Groensteen 2014b:64, quoting from Töpffer). 38.The most recent and significant contributions to the study of narration in comics may be Postema 2013; Groensteen 2013, not to mention also Groensteen 2007. 39. See Chatman 1990 and Baetens 2008, for example. El Refaie (2012:56) discusses these texts and this matter in her work. 40. On early comics from the nineteenth century, also see Navarro (1998:13). Navarro, however, still notes that this and other earlier examples were not as

2 1 6    N o t e s t o P a g e s 4 0 – 4 1

decisive as the work of Apeles Mestres, who is discussed further in the main text of this chapter. 41. Alary 2002c:38. These three cities also were under Republican control until the end of the civil war. 42. Since accounts of the Restoration and its dates can vary according to the concerns of an individual historian, I am obliged to mention that these are the dates used by Martín. This descriptor for Martín appears in García 2010:48. Martín’s date for the birth of the comic is from Alary 2002c:24. Additionally, in “Notes on the Birth of the Comics in Spain, 1873–1900,” Martín (1998:130) begins by saying that “in Spain the invention of comics happened rather late.” Viviane Alary (2002c:24) writes: “Para A. Martín, la historieta española nació durante el período de la Restauración (1876–1902)” (For A. Martín, the Spanish historieta was born during the period of the Restoration [1876–1902]). 43. The literacy rate is cited in García 2010:48. Remarks on the Press Act appear in Martín 1998:129. 44. Martín 1998:130, 134; Altarriba 2001:13; Barrero 2003:28. Note also Santiago García’s assertion that subsequent scholarship will surely uncover earlier examples of “first comics.” Referencing Cuba, which was still part of Spain until the late nineteenth century, he writes that “más recientemente, Barrero ha identificado como historieta pionera una página publicada en la revista cubana Don Junípero en 1864 por el militar bilbaíno Víctor Patricio de Landaluze” (more recently, Barrero has identified as a pioneering historieta a page published in the Cuban magazine Don Junípero in 1864 by the soldier from Bilbao named Víctor Patricio de Landaluze; 2010:48). 45. See Alary 2002c:24–25; Martín 1998, 2000a, 2000b:30–31. 46. Martín 1998:135. 47. Alary 2002c:25. 48. Note that the costumbrista tradition of the early to mid-­nineteenth century is sufficiently broad so as to include, for example, both the derisive social critique of Mariano José de Larra and the congratulatory urban boosterism of Ramón de Mesonero Romanos (see Fraser 2011c).This tradition, roughly contemporary with the development of the photographic image—first on nickel plate (1826) and then on paper (1839)—prioritized the visible world and prized its accurate representation in prose, leading into the realist and subsequent naturalist literary traditions of the second half of the century. 49. Martín 1998:134. 50. In his Spanish-­language book, Gubern (1972) comments at length on Outcault and competing US publishing giants William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, testifying to the impact of these early comics also on a history

N o t e s t o P a g e s 4 1 – 4 3     2 1 7

of comics in Spain. Outcault’s memorable comics included combinations of text-­image commonly associated with a naïve view of the medium and also site-­specific representations of New York City. In their introduction to The Art of Comics, Meskin and Cook state that although Outcault’s Hogan’s Alley and The Yellow Kid are credited as first comics, this is really for the United States, as “serialized strips with recurring characters, such as Charles H. Ross’s Ally Sloper, had appeared in magazines in Britain as early as 1884” (2012: xxii). See also Ahrens and Meteling 2010:4. 51. Such a view prevails in the essay by Wartenberg (2012). For all his attempts to expand the definition of comics so as to include single-­panel works, thus going beyond McCloud’s sequential definition of the form, Wartenberg maintains—myopically in my view—that “my central claim is that it is characteristic of comics to give equal priority to the text and the pictures” (2012:87); and again later, “The central point I have been trying to establish here is that a distinctive feature of comics is that the images and text both contribute at an equally basic level to their story-­worlds” (2012:97). This contradicts, to some degree, his affirmation that “text is not a necessary feature of a comic” (2012:88). 52. Gubern notes that Richard Felton Outcault was the “autor de los primeros comics y de sus primeros balloons” (author of the first comics and of their first word-­balloons (1972:141). 53. Alary 2002c:25, citing Martín 2000b:15. See also Martín 1998:140. 54. See Martín 1998:155. 55. Apeles Mestres collaborated on Barcelona’s well-­known satirical publication L’Esquella de la Torratxa (Alary 2002c:40; see also Martín 1998:130, 139), which is mentioned in this book’s later analysis of Pere Joan and Manzano’s comic “Un cocodril a l’Eixample” in chapter 4.Terenci Moix (2007:126) is more critical of the magazine. 56. Mecáchis was the pseudonym of Eduardo Sáenz Hermúa (Martín 1998:148). 57. See García 2010:48. 58. Alary 2002c:27. 59. On Estudios psicológicos, see Alary 2002c:25; the critic cites Antonio Martín in her declaration that the pages of Granizada were populated exclusively with creations of Apeles Mestres: “En ella, se expresa su capacidad innovadora porque tiene una total libertad gráfica” (In it, his innovative capacity is expressed because he enjoys a total artistic freedom; 2002c:26). 60. Alary 2002c:26. Alary (2002c:27) specifies these activities in the case of Mecáchis, drawing on the encyclopedic (1997) work of Jesús Cuadrado, and also notes that “ser dibujante de historieta no se percibe como actividad específica

2 1 8    N o t e s t o P a g e s 4 3 – 4 4

para nadie sino más bien como un campo de exploración para artistas tan dispares y famosos como Valeriano Bécquer, Gustave Doré o Nadar” (being a comics artist was not seen as an activity specific to a given person but rather as a field explored by artists as diverse and famous as Valeriano Bécquer, Gustave Doré or Nadar). 61. Consider a statement by the artist himself, made in an interview published in 1998: “Sempre m’ha interessat acostar la literatura a l’activitat gràfica. . . . És veritat que m’interessen les tortuositats de la memòria, la divagació, el pas del temps, més que no pas la trama” (I have always been interested in bringing literature into graphic art. . . . It is true that I am more interested in the subtleties of memory, in wandering, and in the passage of time than I am in the plot; Pere Joan 1998:114). 62. On the daily strip, see Gubern 1972:39; on the serial comic, Gubern 1972:38. 63. Moix 2007:133. 64. Making this distinction is Lladó Pol 2001:25. In remarks that can be read as commenting on the French tradition, Groensteen (2009b:4) notes that comics attracted adult readers in the nineteenth century and then were relegated to children in the twentieth. 65. Pascal Lefèvre describes TBO as one of “a growing number of children’s magazines [that] invaded the press stands” (2014:128). Joan Navarro reflects on the role of TBO and the word “historieta” in his (1998) essay “Barcelona, la ciutat dels tebeos.” Alary (2002b:12; 2002c:32) reports that TBO closed in 1939, with Pulgarcito not far behind in 1940. On consumer culture, see Alary 2002c:32. 66. Alary 2002c:34; see also Altarriba 2001:24. 67. Moix 2007:126. 68. On US influence, see Moix 2007:153; on economic factors, Moix 2007:161. 69. Alary 2002c:34. 70. Moix 2007:153; see also 164. 71. Gubern 2002:8. 72. This is reported by Moix (2007:163). 73.This appears in a remark in a much broader context: “Not only in dictatorial countries [such] as Franco’s fascist Spain or the communist Eastern countries superheroes comics were prohibited, but also in a country such as Great Britain” (Lefèvre 2014:130). 74. Writing about the postwar 1945–1970s comics in an international European framework, Lefèvre (2014:129) references a tradition in Spain: “While most comics were published in the upright format (with vertical page orientation), in countries like the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, and Poland, the oblong format (or landscape format with horizontal page orientation) was largely used. Typical

N o t e s t o P a g e s 4 5 – 4 6     2 1 9

series of the cheap monochrome minibooks are Sigurd, Tibor, and Nick from Germany, Fulgor and Akim from Italy, El Guerrero del Antifaz and Capitán Trueno from Spain. They were mostly adventure series set in the middle ages or in the future, or which featured a Tarzan-­like hero.” 75. This argument is made by Altarriba 2001:13; see also Moix 2007:105 and Gubern’s prologue to Moix 2007. 76. Altarriba 2001:322. 77. This is reported in Altarriba 2002:82. 78. This is reported in Lara 2002:65. 79. Referring back to his comment on the same page regarding “la enorme violencia de las historietas de Bruguera” (the sheer violence of the Bruguera comics), Pérez del Solar writes that “de cualquier modo, en 1956 empezó el fin de la gran época de estas revistas con la imposición de una censura aún más estricta que la existente hasta ese momento. El poder comunicativo de la historieta había sido detectado por el radar del Estado” (at any rate, in 1956 began the end of the great era of these magazines with the launch of a more strict censorship than had existed previously. The communicative power of the comic had been detected by the radar of the State; Pérez del Solar 2013:22). 80. Altarriba 2002:87. 81. Francisca Lladó Pol (2001:25) notes that “en 1962 se creó la Comisión de Información y Publicaciones Infantiles y Juveniles (C.I.P.I.J.) dependiente de la Dirección General de Prensa del Ministerio de Información y Turismo, que tenía unas funciones claramente censorias—eliminar los contenidos violentos o eróticos—. Con ello era evidente que el gobierno pretendía hacer del cómic un puro elemento de diversión al margen de cualquier connotación ideológica” (in 1962 the Commission of Information and Publications for Young Readers was created, overseen by the General Press Director of the Ministry of Information and Tourism, whose function clearly involved censorship—to eliminate violent or erotic content—.With this it was evident that the government sought to turn the comic into a pure element of entertainment, purging it of any ideological connotation). 82. Altarriba (2002:82) on the 1970s: “Será la década siguiente, la de los años setenta, la que contemple la agonía de estas revistas, algunas de las cuales, dada su antigüedad y su popularidad, se habían convertido en auténticos mitos editoriales” (It would be the next decade, that of the seventies, that would see the agony of these magazines, some of which, given their legacy and their popularity, had become authentic publishing myths). 83. Altarriba 2001:323. 84. Noted by both Altarriba (2002:84) and Merino (2002:49).

2 2 0    N o t e s t o P a g e s 4 6 – 4 7

85. Joaquín Marco’s prologue to Moix’s Historia social del cómic emphasizes this new attitude that surged in the late 1960s (Moix 2007:21–22). 86. Altarriba 2002:85. On Cuto, see also Moix 2007:87, 171. 87. Lladó Pol 2001:26. 88. On the disappearance of these titles, see Altarriba 2002:85–86, who cites from Cantarellas Camps 2001:9–10. 89. Alary (2002a:123) remarks that this period saw “un claro rechazo del pasado del que nos ha hablado A. Lara” (a clear rejection of the past that A. Lara spoke to us about). 90. Altarriba 2001:330–331. 91. Altarriba 2001:331. 92. Altarriba 2002:92. 93. Alary (2002a:123) sees the 1970s as a crucial decade for comics, with “profundos cambios llevados a cabo en los años setenta con los primeros cómics críticos, contraculturales y subversivos. A un cuestionamiento sobre el nuevo papel que podía desempeñar el cómic en la sociedad, se añade, con el tiempo, su correlato que consiste en explorar las potencialidades de su lenguaje” (profound changes carried out in the seventies with the first critical, countercultural, and subversive comics.To the questioning of the new role that the comic was playing in society there would, in time, be added a corollary that consisted of exploring the potentialities of its language). 94. Altarriba 2002:90. Notably, Román Gubern’s influential El lenguaje de los cómics (1972), featuring a prologue by Luis Gasca, is dedicated to Enric Sió. Among other things, Gubern (1972:132) notes that Sió was known for his innovative alternation of black and white and color. An article by Magnussen (2003:67–73) explores the theme of the repressive family in Sió’s comics. 95. Santiago García’s book is a comprehensive look at comics and graphic novels within an international frame, but he does not look too closely at the case of Spain. Nevertheless, he does provide meaningful context at key points. Readers of English can find the paragraph cited here in chapter three of the translation (2015): Tres antologías traducirán las páginas de Crumb, Shelton, Robert Williams,Victor Moscoso, S. Clay Wilson, Skip Williamson, Justin Green y demás luminarias de la Costa Oeste. La primera de ellas, Comix Underground USA volumen 1 (1972), publicada por Editorial Fundamentos, está editada por Chumy Chúmez y OPS, seudónimo de Andrés Rábago (en la actualidad conocido como El Roto), que también la traduce. Los dos siguientes volúmenes aparecerían en 1973 y 1976, y se pueden considerar

N o t e s t o P a g e s 4 7 – 4 8     2 2 1

la chispa que enciende el fuego underground en los jóvenes dibujantes que marcarán este movimiento, los Nazario, Max, Mariscal o los hermanos Farriol, que se reunirán en 1973 en el álbum El Rrollo Enmascarado. “Al encontrarme con esta gente [el grupo que formaría El Rrollo Enmascarado] y descubrir los cómics de Robert Crumb publicados por editorial Fundamentos, recibí un impacto. Supongo que yo no me había planteado hacer cómic porque las historias que había leído hasta entonces no me habían interesado demasiado. Pero al ver lo de Crumb comprendí que se podía hacer de todo,” recordaría Max, que destacaba la influencia de los temas de los autores americanos, al igual que el impacto gráfico de “el conjunto de los underground americanos, la mezcla en un solo tebeo de los Crumb, Shelton, Spain Rodriguez.” (García 2010:163–164)

96. Altarriba 2002:89. 97. Danner and Mazur 2014:161; also Dopico 2005:196; Altarriba 2002:92. 98. “Les particularitats d’aquesta publicació influïren decisivament en les generacions de joves dibuixants com el mallorquí Pere Joan (Pere Joan Riera, Palma, 1956) i el català, avui resident a Mallorca, Max, els quals passaren de lectors a dibuixants que publicaren en la revista esmentada” (The particularities of this publication decisively influence the generations of young artists like the Mallorcan Pere Joan [Pere Joan Riera, Palma, 1956] and the Catalan, residing in Mallorca, Max, who passed from readers to artists who published in the magazine mentioned; Lladó Pol 2009:8). 99. Dopico (2005:48–66) offers an expansive exploration of El Rrollo Enmascarado, noting that “sin lugar a dudas, en El Rrollo Enmascarado se encuentra el origen de la nueva historieta española” (without a doubt, in El Rrollo Enmascarado can be found the origin of the new Spanish comic; 65). These magazines departed from traditional tebeos to “realizar variaciones satíricas y contestatarias llenas de referencias y guiños al lector cómplice” (yield satiric and rebellious products filled with references and winks to the complicit reader; Dopico 2005:66). On the censorship of El Papus, see Dopico 2005:29; see also Altarriba 2002:91. Altarriba (2002:93) notes that El Papus was the object of an attack from the far right that left the doorman of their building, Juan Peñalver, dead in 1977. 100. Altarriba 2002:91–92. 101. See Lladó Pol 2009:8. 102. Altarriba 2002:93. 103. Altarriba 2002:93.Ana Merino’s El cómic hispánico contains remarks on the post-­Franco period (2002:142–145). Merino is a pioneering scholar of comics from Spain and edited a section of the International Journal of Comic Art (5[2],

2 2 2    N o t e s t o P a g e s 4 8 – 5 0

2003) titled “Spanish Comics: A Symposium.” More recently see also Merino 2012, 2014, 2016. 104. See Dopico 2005:139, 141, 193; 193n91. 105. Gubern 2002:11. He mentions the appearance of El Víbora, Cairo, and Madriz. 106. Lladó Pol 2001:99. 107. Altarriba 2002:109, also see 108. 108. Altarriba 2002:109, 110. 109. “Los que ya desde los años 70 desempeñaban un papel importante en revistas y proyectos diferentes: Carlos Giménez, Marika, Josep Ma Bea, LPO, Felipe Hernández Cava, Nazario o Miguel Calatayud. Y la nueva generación: Raúl, Daniel Torres, Federico Del Barrio, Ana Juan, Ana Miralles, Laura, Miguelanxo Prado, Pere Joan. . . . Estábamos en un contexto histórico excepcional, en un período profuso, centrado en la expresión gráfica del dibujante que debía imponerse no ya como ‘vil mecánico’ sino como verdadero artista, autor, sujeto creador, y que debía utilizar, explorar esa libertad total de la cual, por fin, gozaba” (Those who from the seventies were already playing an important role in various magazines and projects: Carlos Giménez, Marika, Josep Ma Beá, LOP, Felipe Hernández Cava, Nazario o Miguel Calatayud. And the new generation: Raúl, Daniel Torres, Federico Del Barrio, Ana Juan, Ana Miralles, Laura, Miguelanxo Prado, Pere Joan. . . . We were in an exceptional historical context, in a period of abundance, centered on the graphic expression of the artist who was expected to reveal himself to be less of a “brute mechanic” and more of a true artist, auteur, creative subject, and to utilize, to explore that total freedom which, finally, he was able to enjoy; Alary 2002a:125). 110. Altarriba 2001:324. 111. Altarriba 2001:323. 112. Dopico notes that the three issues of Los Tebeos del Rollo were a precursor to El Víbora (2005:176) and that El Víbora drew on El Rrollo Enmascarado specifically (2005:320). The 1970s and 1980s seem to be so chock-­full of innovation in comics that while Dopico can write that “en El Rrollo Enmascarado se encuentra el origen de la nueva historieta española” (in El Rrollo Enmascarado can be found the origin of the new Spanish comic; 2005:65), Pedro Pérez del Solar (2013:11) can also write that with the first editorial of El Víbora in 1979 “se inauguraba la nueva historieta española de los años 80” (the new Spanish comic of the eighties was inaugurated). 113. Santiago García (2010:165), for example, writes that “nombres como Gallardo, Mediavilla, Martí, Montesol, Ceesepe, Pons, Azagra, Roger o El Cubrí se acabarán aglutinando en revistas comerciales como Star (1974) y, finalmente, en

N o t e s t o P a g e s 5 0 – 5 2     2 2 3

la que se convertirá en la revista ‘oficial’ del underground español (por paradójico que resulte): El Víbora (1979). Durante los años ochenta se desplomarán los editoriales que habían sostenido el tebeo tradicional español, con Bruguera a la cabeza, y se vivirá un boom del cómic español moderno alrededor de una serie de nuevas cabeceras” (names like Gallardo, Mediavilla, Martí, Montesol, Ceesepe, Pons, Azagra, Roger, or El Cubrí could be found together in commercial magazines like Star (1974) and, later, in the one that would become the “official” magazine of the Spanish underground (as paradoxical as that may be): El Víbora (1979). During the eighties the publishing houses that had sustained the traditional Soanish comic, Bruguera most of all, would collapse and a new boom in the modern Spanish comic would emerge centered around a series of new leading venues). See also Magnussen 2009:100. 114. Pérez del Solar 2013:29. 115. Pérez del Solar 2013:29–30. 116. Dopico 2005:15; see also 2005:15–16. On the relationship between the “alternative comic” and the “underground comic,” for example, see Hatfield 2005 and Palmer 2000. 117. This English translation of chunga is borrowed from Simone Castaldi’s essay “A Brief History of Comics in Italy and Spain” from The Routledge Companion to Comics (2016). It might also be described as grotesque, dirty, or smarmy, thus vaguely comparable to the reputation in the United States of work published in Mad magazine or by underground comics pioneer Robert Crumb.The “clear line,” owing to Joost Swart (1947), is linked to the Franco-­Belgian tradition of Hergé and the work he inspired.The discourse opposing these traditions is briefly explored in the main text of this book. 118. Lladó Pol 2001:46. 119. See the discussion by Pérez del Solar (2013:51). 120. See Pérez del Solar 2013:49; García 2010:163. 121. Vázquez de Parga (1984), quoted in Pedro Pérez del Solar’s comments (2013:49). In her (2001) book, Lladó Pol specifies a list of fourteen characteristics of the clear line lettered a through n (104–105). 122. Lladó Pol 2001:46–47. 123. See Lladó Pol (2001:46) for her comments. 124. See Pérez del Solar 2013:171. 125. Pérez del Solar 2013:69. The critic also places some of the blame on the cover art: “La imagen proyectada desde las portadas de Cairo fue malinterpretada como infantil en sectores importantes del campo” (The image projected from the covers of Cairo was misinterpreted as juvenile in important areas of the industry; 2013:35).

2 2 4    N o t e s t o P a g e s 5 2 – 5 3

126. Pérez del Solar 2013:60. 127. Pérez del Solar 2013:17, 172. Interesting in this respect is Pere Joan’s decision, in the second half of the 1990s, to also work on juvenile comics. He did so, I would say, in a secondary fashion, rather than seeing this as his primary work: “Paral·lelement, el 1996 [Àlex Fito] s’associà a Pere Joan com a guionista per engegar una diferenciada, creativa i tal vegada incompresa sèrie adreçaa al mercat infantil, Bit i Bat, publicada en El Pequeño País —suplement dominical del diari El País” (In parallel, in 1996 he [Àlex Fito] began working with Pere Joan as a scriptwriter engaging a distinct, creative, and perhaps misunderstood series directed at the juvenile market, Bit i Bat, published in El Pequeño País—the Sunday supplement of the daily El País; Lladó Pol 2009:40). He also contributed to magazines in Catalan directed to children from the Conselleria d’Educació i Cultura del Govern Balear: “Així va néxer Còmics Clips, que comptà amb dibuixants com Tomeu Segui, Gabi Beltran, Pau, Linhart, Paco Diaz, Rafel Vaquer, Max i Pere Joan” (Thus was born Còmics Clips, with cartoonists such as Tomeu Segui, Gabi Beltran, Pau, Linhart, Paco Diaz, Rafel Vaquer, Max, and Pere Joan; Lladó Pol 2009:47). 128. Altarriba 2002:90. 129. Lladó Pol 2001:51. 130. See Altarriba 2001:318; Lladó Pol 2001:12; Pérez del Solar 2013:46. 131. Pérez del Solar (2013:173) cites Gubern in asserting Cairo’s connection with the cómic de autor and Ramón de España for its connection with the historieta literaria. His remark on criticism in Cairo appears a few pages later (2013:176). On its readership, Pérez del Solar (2013:30) states that Cairo “se diferenció de El Víbora al probar una imagen propia decididamente no-­underground, buscar una audiencia más sofisticada en la lectura de comics e introducir y promover en España la versión adulta de la escuela franco-­belga, que había erigido como padre a Hergé, y a Tintín como texto fundamental” (distinguished itself from El Víbora by putting forth a decidedly original nonunderground style, seeking an audience that was more sophisticated in reading comics and introducing and promoting in Spain the adult version of the Franco-­Belgian school, which had claimed Hergé as its father figure and Tintín as its fundamental text). 132. The motivation behind the choice of the term “neotebeo” is related by Lladó Pol (2001:50). She also discusses the clear line at length (2001:46–49). 133. “Other artists, such as Mique Beltrán and Pere Joan (Pedro Juan Riera), used línea clara or similar retro styles for very different effects” (Danner and Mazur 2014:162). “Su inclusión [Pere Joan, Roger y Scaramuix] dentro de la línea clara obedece a criterios lingüísticos pero no temáticos” (Their [Pere Joan, Roger, and Scaramuix] inclusion in the clear line follows linguistic [semiotic] but not thematic criteria; Lladó Pol 2001:105).

N o t e s t o P a g e s 5 3 – 5 5     2 2 5

134. See Moix 2007:164. 135. Each of these genres received a significant amount of attention in Lladó Pol’s (2001) book: “ciencia ficción” (62–70), “relato negro” (70–73), “fantasía heroica” (73–75), “ambientación histórica” (76–77), “aventuras en segundo grado” (77–81), “temática política” (81–85), “temática social” (85–88), “difícil integración social” (88–90), “expresión de estados de ánimo” (90–92), “fábulas fantásticas” (92–93), and “el cómic en el cómic” (93–95). 136. Alary 2002a:126. On Rock Comix, see Dopico 2005:220–247. 137. See Pérez-­Sánchez (2007:176–177), who quotes from Lladó Pol 2001 in making the point. 138. Pérez-­Sánchez 2007:143. See the scholar’s chapter 5, “Drawing Difference: The Cultural Renovations of the 1980s,” where discussions of El Víbora, artist Nazario Luque, his character Anarcoma, and the magazine Madriz predominate. Note that Pérez-­Sánchez generally equates Cairo with the clear-­line tradition, in line with established patterns of comics scholarship. 139. Lladó Pol 2001:17. 140. Alary 2002a:137. 141. See Altarriba 2002:120. 142. Altarriba 2001:322. 143. “La historieta ya no funciona—al menos no lo hace de forma tan exagerada—como signo de distinción” (the comic no longer functions—at least not in as exaggerated a way—as a sign of distinction; Altarriba 2001:322). 144. Altarriba 2001:323. 145. Pérez del Solar 2013:30–31. 146. Lladó Pol 2009:27. 147. “Seguint els paràmetres estatals, la dècada dels noranta es caracteritzà per les dificultats de les revistes per mantenir-­se vigents al mercat” (Following the state parameters, the decade of the nineties is characterized by the difficulty of magazines in keeping their market position; Lladó Pol 2009:32); on other art forms, see Altarriba 2001:322. “It was only from the 1990s on that various local European comics markets (especially in Italy, France, Spain, and Germany) were flooded by translated Japanese comics, a cultural invasion that was prepared by the massive broadcasting of anime series on television” (Lefèvre 2014:1024). 148. Javier Coma was “uno de los críticos de mayor presencia e influencia en las revistas de los ochenta” (one of the critics with the most presence and influence in the magazines of the eighties), and Jesús Cuadrado, “uno de los analistas más respetados en los últimos años” (one of the most respected analysts in recent years; Altarriba 2002:120). Alary mentions that Viñetas was considered a continuation of Bang! (2002a:134).

2 2 6    N o t e s t o P a g e s 5 5 – 5 7

149. Altarriba 2001:329. 150. Altarriba 2001:329, 322. 151. Altarriba 2001:321; Pérez del Solar 2013:289. 152. See Dopico 2005:374. More generally, Bart Beaty draws attention to how “the distinctions between amateur and professional comics creation” began to blur during the 1990s (2007:10; see also chapter 2 of his book). 153. Dopico 2005:384. 154. Alary 2002a:126, 127; Lladó Pol 2009:34–35. 155. Alary 2002a:126; Alary reproduces the manifesto in her chapter. 156. Merino 2002:144; on manga, see Lladó Pol 2009:35. 157. See the discussion in Altarriba 2002:120. 158. García 2010:213; on the market-­driven comic and NSLM: “Els editors— Pere Joan i Max—optaren pel format de llibre per evitar així l’associació amb el còmic del mercat, motiu pel qual aquesta producció va ser definida com a novel·la gràfica” (The editors—Pere Joan and Max—opted for the book format to avoid this association with the market comic, which is the reason this product was to be defined as a graphic novel; Lladó Pol 2009:36). 159. See the description of Nosotros somos los muertos and the list of artists given in García 2010:213–214 and Beaty 2007:119. Beaty’s comment on that same page in the context of discussing Max and Pere Joan’s publication continues to affirm Franco-­Belgian comics as the center of an international scene in which artists from Spain are regarded as exceptions: “In this way, it is hoped, the enthusiasm of the French scene will be transported into Spain, with one of the few Spanish cartoonists to have crossed into that scene laying a foundation for others from that country” (2007:119). 160. Lladó Pol 2009:35. 161. “Arran de la creació de Nosotros Somos los Muertos, Max i Pere Joan posaren en marxa dues col·leccions paral·leles, ‘Nosotros Somos los Muertos/Bueno & Raro’ i ‘Los Medio Muertos’” (Following the creation of Nosotros somos los muertos, Max and Pere Joan launched two parallel collections, “Nosotros Somos los Muertos/Bueno & Raro” and “Los Medio Muertos”; Lladó Pol 2009:37). 162. Altarriba 2002:116. 163. Altarriba 2002:116. 164. Altarriba 2001:322; 2002:116–117. 165. Altarriba 2002:117. 166. Alary 2002a:126. 167. Altarriba 2002:120–121. See also the conclusion to Bart Beaty’s Unpopular Culture, which mentions and discusses a similar remark by L’Association president Jean-­Christophe Menu in 2005 (2007:241).

N o t e s t o P a g e s 5 7 – 6 4     2 2 7

168. See the discussions in Altarriba 2001:321; 2002:118. 169. García 2010:264. 170. The complete listing currently includes: Max (2007), Paco Roca (2008), Bartolomé Seguí (2009), Felipe Hernández Cava (2009), Kim (2010), Antonio Altarriba (2010), Santiago Valenzuela (2011), Alfonso Zapico (2012), Miguelanxo Prado (2013), Juanjo Guarnido (2014), Juan Díaz Canales (2014), Santiago García (2015), Javier Olivares Conde (2015), and Pablo Auladell (2016). C hapter 2 : T opographies of the I mage , P anel , and P age

1. McCloud 1994:9. 2. McCloud 1994:5; emphasis in the original. See also Eisner 2008. 3. Holbo 2012:4, 8–9. 4. Holbo 2012:11; emphasis in the original. 5. Groensteen 2014:64, quoting from Töpffer. 6. Carrier 2000:14.Also,“But some caricatures are protocomics because understanding them requires imagining a later moment of the action” (2000:15–16). 7. “The great discovery of high art was that it was possible to narrate highly complex scenes without any appeal to words” (Carrier 2000:2). Carrier also establishes a relatively strict correlation between the ninth art and combinations of words and images, particularly in chapter 4. He notes that “speech balloons and closely linked narrative sequences—these are the crucial, the defining, elements of comics” (2000:65) and that “two images already constitute a narrative” (2000:50–51). 8. Postema 2013:19. See Groensteen 2007 for his use of “arthrology” in relation to comics. As part of this, Postema also underscores “the temporality that can itself already be implied in the single image” (2013:58). 9. Beronä 2012:18. 10. It is relevant here, as Elisabeth El Refaie (2012:56) underscores, that “some scholars believe that the way in which a story is presented visually, for example in films or comics, should also be regarded as a form of narration (Chatman 1990; Baetens 2008).” In the main text of this chapter, I rely more on insights from Groensteen, which El Refaie also mentions in her work. 11. Pere Joan, Max, and Sánchez 1976:7. 12. Cohn (2013:35–37) refers to word balloons as one example of the syntactical category of “carriers.” 13. Pere Joan 2004:2–11. 14. Hatfield 2009:147. 15. Lefèvre 2009:158. 16. Thierry Groensteen (2013:35) might call this a monoframe.

2 2 8    N o t e s t o P a g e s 6 4 – 7 0

17. Because I am most interested in a formal analysis of this image here, I do not explore whether the human figure in this image bears any connection with traditional Mallorcan figures such as “the roter (agricultural labourer) clearing the land and making fields in the eighteenth century” or “the pagès (the small farmer) and their families experimenting with new crop rotations” (Buswell 2013:4).The cultural geography of Mallorca is explored in greater depth in chapter 5. 18. In particular, this image brings up Witek’s (2012:32) considerations regarding how caricature can be used to provide comics images with conceptual or philosophical meaning. He also mentions the tendency for the page to operate simultaneously “as a textual field for the immediate enactment of overtly symbolic meaning,” and the tendency for images to “stand in for concepts rather than for physical bodies” (32). See also Holbo’s (2012:14) mention of the “emblem poem.” 19. Groensteen 2013:21. 20. Groensteen 2013:21–22. 21. Groensteen 2013:114. 22. Morgan 2003, cited in Groensteen 2013:22. 23. Morgan 2003, cited in Groensteen 2013:23.This can also be compared with the aforementioned comment by Carrier (2000:14) relating to the single image’s ability to suggest “earlier and later moments of an ongoing visual narrative.” 24. Groensteen 2013:23. 25. Groensteen 2013:23. In this Groensteen is agreeing with “the majority” of critics and borrows the evoke-­versus-­tell contrast from Aron Kibédi Varga. 26. Morgan is cited in Groensteen 2013:22. 27. Groensteen 2013:23–24. He cites Garnier 1982:40, and Steiner 2004:154. 28. Pere Joan 2003:4. 29. Miller and Beaty 2014:30. Carrier (2000:28) writes that “Ralph Hodgon has been identified as the first artist to put speech within the frame, using an ingenious compromise, explanatory placards.” 30. Kunzle 1973:2–3; see also Carrier 2000:3. The second quotation is from Carrier 2000:4. 31. Carrier 2000:4. 32. Holbo (2012:12) implies that the balloon is more clearly constitutive of narrative. 33. Gubern 1972:151. 34. See the discussion in Gubern 1972:145. 35. Gubern 1972:148 36. Carrier 2000:31. See also Gasca and Gubern 1988. El Refaie (2012:25) draws attention to this in her work.

N o t e s t o P a g e s 7 0 – 7 3     2 2 9

37.“The balloon can contain any image combined with any words; it may even be completely blank, showing that a character has no thoughts” (Carrier 2000:31). 38. Gubern (1972:176), for example, argues that reading comics depends on prior familiarity with a common/conventional code. 39. See Hatfield 2009:133. 40. Carrier 2000:28. “Balloons, ‘the word made image,’ as one French semiotic commentator calls them, neither purely verbal nor just pictorial, but both one and the other at once, bridge the word/image gap.” 41. Groensteen 2013:97, 157. 42. Groensteen 2007. 43. Carrier 2000:33. 44. Postema 2013:14. This appears in her text along with a reference to Eisner’s Comics and Sequential Art where he contrasted illustrations and visuals. 45. Another interesting consideration is the spatial context of the balloon. Carrier observes several times that words in balloons occupy a strange and even liminal position: “Words in balloons cannot be placed within this apparently inescapable word/image binary opposition, for they are neither entirely within the picture space nor outside it” (2000:29); “balloon words are neither in nor outside the picture; like thoughts, sometimes said to be located ‘inside your head,’ they have no position in space” (2000:29–30); echoed again in the statement that words in balloons “do not have any position in space” (2000:41). 46. “We can first of all disassociate three major zones where writing may occur. The use of print is reserved for the periphery of the work; lettering is the prerogative of the comments of the narrator or the dialogue; and the same treatment as drawn objects within the fiction is accorded to words occurring as part of the image” (Baetens and Lefèvre 2014a:185). 47. Eisner 2008:20. See also the work of David Beronä (2001, 2008, 2012). 48.This is discussed in chapter 1 of the present book. Remember in particular Pere Joan’s use of stories by such authors as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Alan Aumbry in his early work, as well as the imaginative appeal of comics such as “En el recuerdo,” “La lluvia blanca,” and “6 historias de un detective.” 49. Groensteen 2013:27. 50. Carrier 2000:14. 51. Carrier (2000:33): “Comics generally are absolutely unambiguous, for they need to be read quickly.” 52. Compare to Carrier (2000:57), who writes:“Because we interpret a comic by gathering together the successive scenes, it takes a certain self-­conscious effort to linger on a single panel, treating it as if it were a self-­sufficient picture. . . . Isolate segments, and they become highly ambiguous.”

2 3 0    N o t e s t o P a g e s 7 3 – 7 5

53. Though he differentiates narrative and meaning in his discussion, Groensteen (2013:30) has been very clear on the possibilities for comics images to have multiple meanings: “Some uncaptioned (silent) images only lend themselves to one reading and carry a perfectly clear and unequivocal meaning. In others the meaning is indeterminate, and only the addition of a verbal element reduces their polysemy.” 54.This is, of course, a standard and relatively uncontroversial remark in comics theory. See, for example, the concept of closure advanced by McCloud (1994). 55. Alary 2002c:34. 56. Lefèvre 2000:99. The critic explores the “comic strip in the newspaper; the comic book series; the manga magazine; the European album series; the one shot; small press.” Azul y ceniza may share some characteristics with a small press release, but its dimensions are too large and its layouts too variable to be relevant to Lefèvre’s comments in that book chapter. Note, too, Bart Beaty’s discussion of the format of comics in the 1990s (2007:10; also chapter 2 in his book). 57. See tables 1 and 2 in Lefèvre 2000:100, 101. 58. The use of the inset, in this sense, merely intensifies an operation already evident in Pere Joan’s text, as noted by Groensteen (2007:86): “This apparatus, which I will designate as the inset (incrustation), gives evidence of the extreme suppleness that characterizes the management of space within comics. It opens up a large range of procedures in which the repartition of frames, escaping from the relative automation of tabular compartmentalization (or, anticipating a notion that will be defined later on, the logic of gridding), is more directly dictated by the semantic articulations of the story and fully participates in the mise en scène.” 59. Lladó Pol 2009:33. 60. Pere Joan 1999:27. 61. Pere Joan 1999:31, 32, 33, 34, 36, 40, 41. 62. Pere Joan 1999:54. 63. Pere Joan 1999:85; 1999:67–68, respectively. 64. Pere Joan 1999:126. Consider also Pere Joan’s use of peripheral images in “El plano del tesoro,” a usage that reappears less frequently in the page margins of Azul y ceniza.The example given of Cosey’s book Le Voyage en Italie (fig. 9, on p. 88 of Groensteen’s [2007] The System of Comics) is similar to one of the early Pere Joan insets. 65. Groensteen 2007:87. 66. Postema 2013:44.The example that Postema (2013:42) gives from McKean and Gaiman’s Black Orchid is very connected to the action-­and-­plot sequence, and the example from Pere Joan’s work explored here reads, by contrast, as a

N o t e s t o P a g e s 7 5 – 7 7     2 3 1

specific illustration of inner experience, even if connected to outer experience as I highlight in the main text. On the other hand, Pere Joan’s usage is much more connected with action than the example of Here by Richard McGuire. In Here, “some panels contain as many as three insets, almost crowding out the ‘original’ panel” (Postema 2013:43). It shows a single location in multiple points of time. In the sequence from Azul y ceniza, we have a single location in one time but different modalities or aspects of that time and space. Postema (2013:43) writes of Here that “the insets in this comic give glimpses into multiple times, sometimes giving a sense of synchronicity,” and she goes on to state that in Here, “the layout is the story” (43). This is equally true of Pere Joan’s example. 67. Postema (2013:43) illustrates this effect in Richard McGuire’s (1988) Here. 68. “Insets can be very useful in signifying various effects of time, as Groensteen also observed” (Postema 2013:45). See also Groensteen 2007:89–91. 69. Postema 2013:42. 70. Groensteen (2007:86) notes that “the inset is a figure in which the benefits are sometimes accrued to the base (inclusive) panel, and sometimes to the inset panel . . . I would say that the inset serves the purpose of the picture when it magnifies the background panel, whereas it more clearly serves the story when its purpose is the contextualization of the inset panel. In the first case, it allows itself to be reduced to a simple superimposition; in the second, it puts in place a dialogic interaction between the concerned panels.” 71. See Postema 2013:42 for examples where this does occur in the work of other artists. 72. Postema 2013:45. 73. Groensteen 2007:89; emphasis in original. And on the same page: “Let us also retain another frequent modality of the inset, the establishment of a relation of simultaneity between two or more panels; this relationship represents a pause in the flux of the temporal succession—the ordinary regime of sequential consecution between juxtaposed panels.” 74. Gasca and Gubern 1988:626. 75. Pere Joan 2004:2–11. As noted on the back inside cover, “Los diálogos del responsible del atentado del aeropuerto están parcialmente basados en las auténticas declaraciones del ciudadano turco Alí Agca, quien, en efecto, viajó a Mallorca para decidir lo que sería su intento—fallido—de asesinar al Papa (en el comic transformado en la bomba del aeropuerto)” (The dialogues of the person responsible for the attack on the airport are partially based on the authentic declarations of the Turkish citizen Alí Agca, who, in effect, traveled to Mallorca to think through what would be his attempt—foiled—to assassinate the Pope [in the comic transformed into the airport bomb]).

2 3 2    N o t e s t o P a g e s 7 7 – 8 2

76. McCloud 1994. 77. Pere Joan 2004:2. 78. Pere Joan 2004:3. 79. Pere Joan 2004:4–5. 80. Pere Joan 2004:6–7. 81. Pere Joan 2004:10. 82. Pere Joan 2004:2–4. 83. Pere Joan 2004:3–4. There are two instances of two insets together and one instance of four insets together. Pere Joan’s use of the inset here supports comments made by Groensteen (2007:89): “The inset, in comics, is only a local phenomenon. Within a multiplicity of images characterized by different levels and degrees of iconic solidarity, it is content to institute or (more frequently) to highlight a privileged relationship between two terms.These relationships, however, ask to be read and interpreted in taking account everything that, upstream and downstream, can index or echo it.” 84. This comment is in line with Postema’s (2013:42) observation that “insets often derive their effect from their contrast with a text’s standard panel layout.” As I explore in the main text of this chapter, however, the effect is not merely contrasted with the standard layout but also linked to it through parallel rhythmic and thematic connections. Groensteen’s (2007:87) comments are also relevant. 85. Pere Joan 2004:4. 86. In this, the comic needs to be approached in light of the broadly influential phenomenological traditions of thought that influenced Spain, France, and the United States throughout the twentieth century. Elsewhere, I explore Henri Bergson as a figure central to these traditions and their international connections. In Encounters with Bergson(ism) in Spain (Fraser 2010), I suggest that his thought greatly influenced a range of artists and philosophers in Spain beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing through the twenty-­first, although I do not mention Pere Joan or comics art there. I also make the case there, as well as in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (Fraser 2008), that Bergson’s thinking is at the core of contemporary theoretical approaches to space and place not merely in Spain but also in Francophone and Anglophone traditions.These latter traditions are connected through the figure of Henri Lefebvre, whom I argue was greatly influenced by Bergson—an aspect of his thought that remains underappreciated. See also Fraser 2011a, 2015. 87. Ecology is addressed explicitly in the main text of chapter 3, where I explore rural spaces. 88. With relevance for the present discussion, Postema (2013:39) writes that “it is rare to see a comic rely entirely on frameless panels.” Similarly relevant,

N o t e s t o P a g e s 8 3 – 8 4     2 3 3

on Eisner’s A Contract with God, Postema (2013:39) writes: “These stories show Eisner breaking free from established comics traditions, most notably the mainstream comic book tradition that he had himself been a major part of with his series The Spirit. Traditional comics tended to be clearly structured, often as formulaic in layout as in plot, and institutionalized as an industry.The prevalence of frameless panels in A Contract with God shows Eisner ridding himself of boundaries, not only in relation to the comics industry but also formally on the page. The frameless panels in the text have the effect of opening up the page as spaces bleed into each other.” 89. Remember comments by Molotiu (2012) discussed in the introduction about the gallery format and the self-­pacing approaches it encourages in readers. Here I use the term “ungridded” in line with Postema’s use of the grid as a specifically lined arrangement. She writes that “I use the term grid for panels that are separated by lines only, not by gutter space between the lines: the lines dividing up the page form a grid. . . . The gutterless grid can signify in other ways depending on the text in which it is applied” (Postema 2013:40). 90. Pere Joan 2004:9. The sequence plays again with fluctuating panel size on pages 10–11. Though there is not space enough in this book to explore as complex a work as Azul y ceniza at length, it is also significant that in its final pages, the character of the unremarkable bomb-­planting stranger returns. Blue interviews him in a prison, and three orange-­red panel insets reappear (Pere Joan 2004:61–62). The end of the comic drowns Blue, and readers, in a flood of blue fluid and expansive panel size over a number of pages (2004:62–67), including even two full-­page panels (2004:64–65) and a metaphysical and metaliterary hotel room scene (2004:67–68). 91. Pere Joan 2004:8, 9. 92. Whereas before, the red creature with horns reflected the complete absence of creative ideas and Blue’s growing frustration, the appearance of wings on page 9 represents a moment of creativity that quickly vanishes.This interpretation is also supported by the fact that the creature lights itself on fire and burns into ash during the oneiric subjective sequence in the airplane. 93. The comments by Díaz de Guereñu may be of interest to readers exploring the context of European comic art in general: Ponent ha incluido en su catálogo obras de lo más sustantivo entre los autores españoles, consagrados o principiantes, en particular los procedentes de su área geográfica próxima. Figuran en él Sento, Micharmut, Miguel Calatayud, Pere Joan, Max, Cifré, El Cubrí, María Colino, Ricard Castells, Santiago Valenzuela, Mauro Entrialgo, Luis Durán, Pablo Auladell y muchos

2 3 4    N o t e s t o P a g e 8 4

otros. Constituyen el grueso de su producción . . . Ponent edita con regularidad, un título por mes, a veces dos. Las tiradas suelen ser cortas, de 1.000 ejemplares, y en consecuencia los ingresos de los autores, de poca monta . . . Ponent estableció en España un modelo editorial similar al de algunos independientes americanos y franceses (Fantagraphics, Drawn & Quarterly, L’Association) y mostró que era posible publicar cómics de otra manera, como se editan los buenos libros” (In its catalog Ponent has included many substantive works by esteemed and beginning Spanish artists, in particular those coming from its surrounding geographic area. These include Sento, Micharmut, Miguel Calatayud, Pere Joan, Max, Cifré, El Cubrí, María Colino, Ricard Castells, Santiago Valenzuela, Mauro Entrialgo, Luis Durán, Pablo Auladell, and many more. They make up the bulk of its offerings . . . Ponent releases titles regularly, one per month, sometimes two. The print runs tend to be small, usually 1,000 copies, and as a consequence the artists’ earnings are limited . . . In Spain, Ponent established an editorial model similar to that of some independent American and French publishers [Fantagraphics, Drawn & Quarterly, L’Association] and showed it was possible to publish comics in a different way, as good books are published; Díaz de Guereñu 2011:218).

See Pons 2003 for more on alternative comics publishing in Spain. 94. The quoted material is from Bufill 1994:25. Adding to the comments I make in chapter 1, José María Conget refers to Nosotros somos los muertos (NSLM) as “una revista surgida en 1995 del afán incombustible de Max y Pere Joan por crear tebeos independientes, heterodoxos y con voluntad de experimentación” (a magazine that emerged in 1995 out of the laborious zeal of Max and Pere Joan to create independent, heterodox, and experimental comics), as proof that “el tebeo español vive” (the Spanish comic is alive and well) and that “el tebeo no es un arte alternativo: es un arte” (the comic is not an alternative art: it is an art [period]; 2004:24; see also Díaz de Guereñu 2011:215–216; Pons 2003. 95. Consider Ponent’s contribution to the avant-­garde historieta in general, as seen in a statement by Joan Bufill that the latter enjoys “un criterio similar al que se emplea en relación al arte contemporáneo —donde se valora sobre todo la innovación y la vanguardia y se prescinde de consideraciones sobre la repercusión popular” (an esteem similar to that in which contemporary art is held—where innovation and the avant-­garde are valued above all else and considerations regarding popular acceptance are eschewed; 1994:25). 96. A potential point of reference for locating this comic within the broader terrain of Spanish philosophy might be José Ortega y Gasset’s Meditaciones sobre

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el Quijote e ideas sobre la novela (1970), wherein he links individual identity and what he calls circumstances: “yo soy yo y mis circunstancias.” 97. Pere Joan 2014:6–8. 98. I make this argument in a separate article-­length publication forthcoming in Romance Studies (Fraser 2018b). See also Bloom 2010; Dresner and Herring 2010; Filik et al. 2016; Hjorth 2009a, 2009b; Thompson and Filik 2016; Tomic a, Martinez, and Vrbanec 2013. While the graphic (and technological) history of the emoticon and its influence on Pere Joan’s text is itself a worthy topic of investigation, discussion here focuses instead on the artist’s use of an innovative page format. 99. See McCloud 1994; Wyss 1999. The artist makes further remarks on how the internet has influenced his comic in the work’s epilogue; see Pere Joan 2014:119–121. As I discuss in an article on the digital resonance of this work, considerations include those outlined by N. Katherine Hayles in How We Think (2012) and Nicholas Carr in The Shallows:What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (2010). 100. Merino 2002:9. 101. It is equally interesting to consider, of course, that even in this ambitious album, Pere Joan remains faithful to the iconic properties of comics, in which, as Lefèvre (2009:157) writes, “a particular space is necessary to situate the action. Therefore a lot of artists use stereotypical icons (like the Statue of Liberty for New York or the pyramids for Egypt) because such famous buildings or monuments can be easily recognized by the readers.” 102. 100 pictogramas (2014) does, however, express connections with another tradition of comics that draws inspiration from earlier illustrated encyclopedias. Miguel Brieva’s Bienvenido al mundo: Enciclopedia universal Clismón (2007) is a prime example.That said, one arrives at some clear distinctions between the two. Brieva leans more toward the formal presentation of the illustrated text as a form of satire and a challenge to the scientific-­rational forms of knowledge underlying contemporary capitalism and its maintenance of a consumer society. Instead, despite his interest in large-­scale historical matters, Pere Joan’s visual tone is more personal, intimate, reflective, and philosophical. 103. Cohn 2009. In asserting the page as the structuring unit of graphic art, Cohn builds on the work of Hatfield and Groensteen. 104. Lefèvre 2009:157. 105. Lefèvre 2009:158. 106. Lefèvre 2009:157. 107. “The reader constructs the diegetic space in various ways: both by elements that appear inside the frame of a panel and by elements that remain unseen (in French called hors champ). This non-­visualized space does not only refer to

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the virtual supposed space outside the frame (in French called hors cadre) of a certain panel, but also to the supposed ‘hidden’ space within the borders of the panel itself (in French called hors champ interne): for instance figures can overlap one another and hide parts from the eye of the viewer” (Lefèvre 2009:157–158). 108. Lefèvre 2009:159. 109. Lefèvre 2009:160. 110. Pere Joan 2014:29, 62, 76, 77, 80. 111. McCloud (1994:77) writes that “in the fifth type, by definition, nothing ‘happens’ at all! . . . But, most striking of all is the substantial presence of the fifth type of transition, a type rarely seen in the west” (78). “Aspect-­to-­aspect transitions have been an integral part of Japanese mainstream comics almost from the beginning” (McCloud 1994:79). 112. McCloud 1994:72. 113. McCloud 1994:79. In Understanding Comics, McCloud also writes that “in the limbo of the gutter, human imagination takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea,” and that “closure allows us to connect these moments and mentally construct a continuous unified reality” (McCloud 1994:66, 67). 114. Pere Joan 2014:7–8, 118–121. 115. Postema 2013:39. 116. Pere Joan 2014:16. 117. Pere Joan 2014:46, 95, 99. “Curar por hablar,” for example, represents a human figure in the act of confession and a human brain participating in traditional psychoanalysis relying purely on the meaning conveyed through images. Here there are neither gutters nor panels, and it is significant—in the context of normative Catholicism during the Franco dictatorship—that both religious and secular practices are given equal weight on the page through their nonhierarchical spatial arrangement. 118. Baetens and Lefèvre (2014:183): “How wordless really are so-­ called ‘wordless’ stories? Can there be such a thing as a purely visual narrative, in which words play no part at all?” 119. Readers will note that the use of onomatopoeia in “La política como opio del pueblo” constitutes a possible exception to wordlessness in the strictest sense, but even here this view may be challenged by appealing to the iconic nature of signification in spoken onomatopoetic forms.This page brings to mind Marx’s critique of religion and its ideological function within advanced capitalism. The use of “Plas!” is clearly onomatopoetic, and “Bla” is also an example of nonsense text that conveys the impotence of textual/written language. On the

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whole, this graphic narrative represents the futility of communication in the public political sphere. 120. Pere Joan 2014:113, 68, and 103, respectively. 121. Pere Joan 2014:42, 51, 55, 57, 60, 83. 122. Pere Joan 2014:83. 123. See the comments Pere Joan makes in the epilogue to the album: Decidí primeramente volcar la mirada en un elemento ciertamente en decadencia. Las enciclopedias. La característica física del libro permite una panorámica de búsqueda menos dispersa. Que internet, por ejemplo. En donde la fragmentación no está categorizada y por lo tanto convierte a este laberinto en un desvarío sin discurso. Así que partí de varias enciclopedias. No para creérmelas, evidentemente. Sino como un punto de partida a cuestionar y desde donde construir. . . . [La enciclopedia,] este artefacto de antes del siglo XX, pesado.Y estático en su contenido. Que ahora muere para que crezca lo liviano y cambiante. Existiendo en el almacén incorpóreo e informe. Aunque es cierto que aún se sigue editando en formato de papel. Sin ir más lejos, como esta misma agrupación de ideas en 100 pictogramas” (I decided first to focus my attention on an element clearly in decadence. Encylopedias. The physical character of the book yields a more concentrated search area. More so than the internet, for example, where fragmentation is not categorized, thus turning this labyrinth into a rant without direction. Thus I began with various encyclopedias. Not to take them to heart, evidently. But rather as a point of departure to question and from which to begin construction. . . . [The encyclopedia,] this artifact from before the twentieth century, unwieldy. And static in its content. Which now dies so that light and ever-­changing [forms of knowledge] might grow. Existing in an intangible and unshaped warehouse [of knowledge]. Though it is true that paper-­format editions are still published. Without straying too far [from the topic], there are those such as this very collection of ideas in 100 pictograms). (Pere Joan 2014:119–121) C hapter 3 : R u ral C artographies

1. Pérez del Solar 2013:278. 2. See the discussion of the word zone and the textual zone in the analysis of “Untitled,” chapter 2. 3. See remarks made by Molotiu (2012) discussed in the introduction to this book. The gallery format appears markedly at the end of El aprendizaje de la

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lentitud accompanying the textual section titled “El museo del barro” (The clay museum); see Pere Joan 2011:62, 63. 4.This is a view shared by Henri Bergson, David Harvey, and Paul Hewitt; see Fraser 2010. Relationships between objects are not imposed from the outside but rather by properties inherent to the things themselves. Dialectical interconnections are not an overarching system of relationships forced on the thing, external to it, but rather a relationship grounded in the inextricably connected nature of quantitative and qualitative multiplicities. 5. Carrier 2000:33. I introduced this idea in chapter 2. 6.This strategy was also employed through the two-­dimensional composition of 100 pictogramas, as discussed in chapter 2. 7. I discussed this briefly in chapter 2. 8. In this sense, the larger black-­and-­white images of “Huidas” (Pere Joan 1999, originally published in 1995) can be seen as the immediate precursor of the style he uses here. 9. Specifically, I refer here to his colorful graphic-­novel adaptation of Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Nocilla Experience: La novela gráfica (Alfaguara, 2011) and the rich tones of 100 pictogramas para un siglo (XX) (Ponent, 2014). 10. Readers should note that sequences of two or more panels in this particular publication are extremely rare indeed. Apart from the two-­page sequence of panels analyzed below (Pere Joan 2011:14–15), such paneled sequences only appear two other times (17–19 and 36–37) in a book of 68 numbered pages. 11. Transatlántico 2010:1. 12. Pere Joan 2010.“La apuesta también fue la de iniciar un corredor cultural a lo largo del río. La idea partió de la Casa de España en Rosario y fue apoyada por la Agencia Española de Cooperación” (The wager was also to initiate a cultural corridor along the river.The idea came from the Casa de España in Rosario and was supported by the Agencia Española de Cooperación). 13. Pere Joan 2011:50–53, 51. 14. See the interview in Infame&Co. 2013. 15. Pere Joan 2011:16. 16. Pere Joan 2011:2. 17. Pere Joan 2011:20–21, 22, 22, 23, respectively. 18. In formal terms, the lack of temporality indicated by the formal presentation of the hats brings Pere Joan’s art in line with the tradition of spatial page composition that is evident, for example, in the early page layout of Apeles Mestres’s “Estudios psicológicos” (Psychological studies; 1880). See chapter 1 of this book. 19. Pere Joan 2011:48.

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20. Pere Joan 2011:49. 21. Pere Joan 2011:52. 22. Pere Joan 2011:9–12. 23. Pere Joan 2011:10: “Y a golpe de líneas rectas y cuadras —manzanas de casas— en perfecta alineación se construyó La Plata. Pensando y viendo ese diseño con voluntad de racionalidad absoluta no puedo dejar de contraponerlo a nuestro cuerpo, a la imagen del sistema sanguíneo y a la formación orgánica del río, que se divide y fluye orgánicamente en multitud de canales” (And at the stroke of straight lines and a grid—blocks of houses—La Plata was constructed in perfect linearity. Considering and seeing that design willed into being with such absolute rationality, I cannot help but place it alongside our body, the image of our circulatory system (of blood) and the organic formation of the river, which divides and flows organically into a multitude of canals). 24. See Fraser 2011a, 2011b. 25. Cerdà 1867. 26. Note, too, that a hand-­drawn map image also appears on page 61, mixing Pere Joan’s imaginative images with landscape in what might be called an emotional topography. 27. Pere Joan 2011:34–37, 54–60. 28. This is a concept explored most extensively by the spatial theorist Henri Lefebvre in Rhythmanalysis (2006). See also Fraser 2011a, 2015. Lefebvre is discussed in chapters 4 and 5 in the context of urban theory. 29. Pere Joan 2011:57. 30. The sheer amount of text included in the panels here cannot be ignored, but readers need to be aware that Pere Joan’s use of this contemplative panel sequence format is not always this wordy. It should be noted that similarly structured but wordless or nearly wordless panel sequences of this variant appear with some frequency in his work, as occurs for example in Nocilla Experience, 100 pictogramas para un siglo (XX), and even El aprendizaje de la lentitud itself, all of which may be considered counterexamples. For example, respectively: Pere Joan and Fernández Mallo 2011:8–9, 45, 58, 153, 154, 169, 189; Pere Joan 2014:35, 62, 76, 77, 80, 121; Pere Joan 2011, sequences on 36–37. 31. Groensteen refers to this form of correspondence between nonadjacent panels as “braiding” in The System of Comics (2007). 32. See Groensteen 2007:93–95. 33. Pere Joan 2011:14. 34. Pere Joan 2011:16, 25, 33, 34, 35, 37, 46, and 53, for example. 35. Note also that the false match in background color between panels 6 and 10, discussed earlier, also offers the possibility of a retroactive determination in

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which the final image of a group of people sustains the ambiguity—people or insects?—produced by the graphic similarity between panels 5 and 6. 36. Pere Joan 2011:38–47. 37. Pere Joan 2011:38. 38. Pere Joan 2011:39. 39. Pere Joan 2011:41, 43, different directions; 40, looking down; 42, lying facedown. 40. Pere Joan 2011:46–47. As Pere Joan explains in the brief text introducing the sequence, “Con el paso del tiempo, las estatuas se van degradando, fundiéndose y devuelven a su entorno el material de la que están hechas” (With the passing of time, the statues degrade, decompose, and return the material with which they were made to their surroundings). 41. Lefèvre 2009:157–158. 42. Lefèvre 2009:157. 43. Pere Joan 2011:44–45. 44. Pere Joan 1996. “El nudo desnudo,” beginning on page 8; “Seres con corona,” 22; “Paisajes,” 38; “Paisaje. 1 figura. 1 excusa.,” 40. 45. Pere Joan 1996. See “Inmediato exterior físico,” 12; “El silencio de las tortugas,” 18; “Gordos de orilla,” 26; “36 novelas cortas,” 34; “Austero,” 42. 46. Pere Joan 1996. See “Nuevas profesiones,” 28;“Contra el amor,” 46;“Escoger rostros,” 52; “Tránsitos (1),” 56. 47. Pere Joan 1996. See “Fantasma odia a Drácula,” 14; “Tránsitos (II) Diario tailandés,” 60; and “Azul,” 68, respectively. 48. This is a theme that Pere Joan notably continued in Azul y ceniza (2004), a work of greater dimensions, lengthier page extension, and arguably, too, heightened formal innovation. See the present book’s second and fourth chapters for more. 49. Pere Joan 1996:52. 50. Pere Joan 1996. Juxtapose, for example, pages 46 and 22. 51. Pere Joan 1996:71. 52. See Pere Joan 1996:8, 9, 72, 75. 53. Hugo famously said, “L’art, c’est l’azur,” a remark that resonated profoundly and impacted Rubén Darío directly. 54. Pere Joan 1996:12, 14, 18, 28, 46. 55. Pere Joan 1996:14, 22. 56. Pere Joan 1996:12; 10, 26, 70, 68, respectively. 57. Pere Joan 1996:34, 40, 41, 42, respectively. 58. Pere Joan: 1996:13. 59. In particular, one may think of Henri Bergson’s writings on sensation and how perception installs our consciousness in things (see Fraser 2010).

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60. Pere Joan 1996:19, 20, 57–58, 61–67, respectively. 61. Pere Joan 1996:10–11, 68–69, respectively. Compare these with the very similar compositions of heads sprouting from the landscape appearing in El aprendizaje de la lentitud (2011:38–47). 62. See the important book by Laura Otis titled Membranes (2000), which deals with science, biology, and Spanish literature. 63. See Pere Joan 1996:9, 18, respectively. 64. See Pere Joan 1996:8–11, 74–75. 65. See Pere Joan 1996:69, 73. 66. See Pere Joan 1996:33. 67. Pere Joan 1996:22–25. 68. This description applies just as well to page 23 as it does to the two-­ page spread composed of pages 24–25, reproduced and analyzed in greater depth below in the main text. 69.When discussing a particular “Being with halo,” for convenience, I employ a number 1–9 starting with the upper-­left corner of the page as number 1 and proceeding left to right by rows down the page to end with number 9 in the bottom-­r ight corner. “V” denotes the verso page, 24, and “R” denotes the recto page, 25. 70. Groensteen 2007:93. 71. Groensteen 2007:93. 72. Groensteen 2007:115. 73. Molotiu 2012:91. 74. Molotiu 2012:91. 75. This brings to mind the shift that the dominant forms of nineteenth-­ century Belgian popular prints (i.e., four-­ by-­ four and four-­ by-­ three grids) underwent when adapted to twentieth-­century broadsheets boasting panels of variable widths (Lefèvre 2009:235). 76. This would be the case with the use of raccord by Frank King in Gasoline Alley, for example. In Spain, a more recent example would be the architectural (horizontal and vertical) logic and use of raccord in Paco Roca’s La casa (2016). 77. This is a departure from the more routine comics aesthetic that focuses on the interconnection across panels. An interesting counterexample—one of a great many of course—can be seen in the architectural panel formations of Paco Roca in La casa (Fraser 2018c). 78. Groensteen’s (2007:66) discussion of Bloody Mary (1983) by Jean Teulé and Jean Vautrin is relevant here. 79. This remark distinguishes the contemplative panel sequence employed by Pere Joan in his later years from his earlier use of sequences in which word

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balloons do indeed impact the reader’s eyes. Examples of this earlier use of word balloons as a more active part of the hyperframe can be seen in many of Pere Joan’s earlier comics collected in El hombre que se comió a sí mismo (1999). Nonetheless, the evolution of word balloons in “La lluvia blanca” (1984) already shows utterances being confined to a panel, usually one word balloon per panel, and very seldom if at all breaking the panel frame extending into or through the gutter (in the lengthy composition of “La lluvia blanca,” for example, we see only two exceptions, on (1984:106, 112). In works like “En el recuerdo” (1983) and “Cita en Jartum” (1983), we see examples of consistent combinations of page-­ spanning panel width and preference for undemarcated narrative text over word balloons; in “El fantasma de la obra” (1984–1985), we see an early example of the persistent structural subordination of word to image. 80. See Groensteen 2007:110. 81. On the latter, see the example of Spanish artist Aleix Barba’s A Winter Story (1985) discussed in Groensteen 2007:55. Some of Pere Joan’s work from the 1980s, as discussed earlier in this book, serve as a meaningful point of contrast here. 82. Moreover, in Pere Joan’s sequencing of panels, there is an interesting inversion created. If one adopts a syntactical perspective that comics are a language, then Pere Joan’s rows act like the printed lines of a prose layout, with the panel thus substituting for the word in pursuit of a purely linear and single-­vector flow of information. In essence, the image co-­opts the formal mechanism of textual representation.This tends to illustrate how the hallmark traits of spoken/written language can be directed toward other ends, in effect undermining the logocentric tendency in Western society more generally. Pere Joan thus shows the inadequacy of arguments touting the uniqueness of the representational power and denotative force of the printed text in comics art. While in another artist’s work this refined and full appropriation of linearity by the image might be taken as a subordination of image to text, here, in the context of Pere Joan’s aesthetic, it is the versatility of image that is on display—its ability to mimic the linearity of verbal language and simultaneously deliver extralinguistic feeling and thought through visual signification. Text is thus not primary over image; rather it is image that is primary, even when guised as text. 83. Groensteen 2007:67. 84. Groensteen 2007:68. The other artists mentioned are “Claire Bretécher, Jules Feiffer, or the Fred of Petit Cirque.” 85. “One can already distinguish four levels in the relation that is established between the balloon and the host panel, between the part and the entirety. Initially we think in terms of depth. We also speak of a relationship that opposes two forms, then, of a relation between two areas, otherwise called a rapport of

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proportions; and the final criterion is the positioning of the balloon within the panel” (Groensteen 2007:69). 86. See Groensteen 2007:69. 87. See the example of Pere Joan 1996:14. 88. Groensteen 2007:106. 89. Pere Joan 2011:63; Pere Joan 1996:24–25. 90. Pere Joan, Max, and Sánchez 1976:8. 91. The third page of the section “El aprendizaje de la lentitud,” in Pere Joan 2011:32; “Paisatges,” in Pere Joan 1996:38–39; also 1996:62–63, 66–67, 74. 92. Groensteen 2013:16. 93. Remember the example from “La lluvia blanca” (Pere Joan 1999, originally published in 1984) discussed briefly in the introduction. 94. Groensteen 2007:112. I have no intention of exhaustively exploring Groensteen’s rather nuanced analysis or even of entering this debate. But the gutter is worth mentioning in passing, as it can assist us in charting the distance between the two key hyperframe variants I have chosen as a way of exploring Pere Joan’s work. It is easily observed that the polarizing distance between Pere Joan’s nontraditional panel sequence hyperframe and the open hyperframe hinges in large measure on the presence of the gutter in the first and its absence in the second. 95. Groensteen 2007:112–113. 96. Groensteen 2007:114–115. C hapter 4 : Urban G eographies

1. See the present book’s introduction for discussion of Comics and the City (2010), edited by Ahrens and Meteling, and Jason Dittmer’s Comic Book Geographies (2014). 2. See my discussion in chapter 3. The section of El aprendizaje in question is titled “Lo orgánico y la cuadrícula” (Pere Joan 2011:10). 3. It is interesting that the organic metaphor has been a structuring element of urban planning (e.g., in the work of Ildefons Cerdà, discussed below) and also a way of critiquing the staid, linear, and grid-­like approach of planners (e.g., Jacobs 1961). For more, see Fraser 2011a, 2011b. In Hispanic studies, the work of Daniel Frost (2008) has been particularly important in understanding urban shifts involving nature in nineteenth-­century Madrid. 4. See Wirth 1938:2; Jacobs 1969. Also see William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis (1991) on the case of Chicago. 5. In their introduction to The New Ruralism, editors Joan Ramon Resina and William R.Viestenz underscore that

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there is no way of speaking about the urban without automatically conjuring its opposite, the rural. It can be said that the rural is the urban unconscious, that which the urban rejects, the great outdoors. There is nothing strange about this. The urban is merely a fold in nature, a state of exceptionality that began historically with physical demarcations (walls, gates, ditches, shrines) intended for protection and eventually becoming the seat of certain privileges and immunities (a more advanced form of protection). (2012:7)

6. Here I follow Henri Lefebvre’s understanding of how capitalist alienation fragments both experience and knowledge into a number of seemingly autonomous realms. See Lefebvre 1991a, Fraser 2015. 7. See Harvey (1998), who criticizes such simplistic understandings of the environment. Similarly, see Beilin and Viestenz (2016). 8. Kaika and Swyngedouw 2011:98. See also Kaika and Swyngedouw 2014; Heynen 2014; Heynen, Kaika, and Swyngedouw 2006; Swyngedouw and Heynen 2003. 9. Prádanos-­García 2016:155. 10. Resina and Viestenz 2012:11; my emphasis. 11. At least this is the account provided by the Diario de Mallorca in 2011. See the unsigned piece titled “Una bestia que resultó ser un cocodrilo” for a brief paragraph on the subject. 12. On the urban in Fernández Mallo’s original version, see Fraser 2012. 13. Groensteen 2007:122. 14. This work’s status as a comics text is perhaps not universally accepted as I explain in this note. Born in Blankenberge, near Ghent, Belgium, Masereel lived in Paris and later Geneva. He originally published the work in Paris as La Ville: Cent gravures sur bois. It was received as a wordless novel in woodcuts, and not as a comics text proper. I argue, however, that in light of the growing push to allow for full-­page images to be considered comics (see chapter 2, this volume, in discussion of “Untitled”), The City deserves further attention from comics theorists. The fact that noted comics theorist David A. Beronä authored the introduction to the 2007 Dover edition of Masereel’s Passionate Journey (originally published in 1919) is a sign of growing awareness of the intersection between wordless novels and comics art. In his introduction, Beronä emphasizes Masereel’s ability to “create emotional ties between the reader and the main character” (Masereel 2007: vii) and notes that he “captures the heart of the reader in much the same way as cartoonists in their display of the magic of sequential art with less, rather than more, realistic representation of the action” (ibid.). See also Beronä’s Wordless Novels:The Original Graphic Novels (2008).

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15. I do explore this subject at length in the monograph Visible Cities: Urban Images and Spatial Form in Global Comics, under contract with the University Press of Mississippi. 16. At the time of this writing, parts of a future third volume of Berlin have already been published in segments. 17. Note that Pere Joan’s own publishing company Inrevés published Doucet’s My New York Diary in Spanish translation. These authors, I argue, follow somewhat necessarily in Will Eisner’s footsteps regarding the urban locations and what are perhaps more complex links with an autobiographical comics tradition. 18.Along with Joe Matt and Chester Brown, Seth is one of the “Toronto Three,” and he has spoken repeatedly on his disappointment regarding the Canadian city’s lack of a feeling of place. Most interesting, perhaps, is Seth’s creation of the fictional town of Dominion, which is incorporated into George Sprott (1894–1975). See also Seth’s Dominion, a documentary film by Luc Chamberland that features comments on Dominion and on Seth’s style more generally. At the time of this writing, the most recent volume of Palookaville is Palookaville 22. Note that It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken was originally published as part of the Palookaville series. 19. On Ware’s Building Stories, see Dittmer 2014b; Fraser 2016b. Also, on Ben Katchor’s urban comics art, see Feldman 2009. I explore the architectural composition of the recent graphic novel La casa (2016) by Paco Roca in an article from European Comic Art (Fraser 2018c). 20. More recently, it is of interest that Gabi Beltrán and Bartolomé Seguí’s Historias de barrio (2011) is an urban graphic novel that takes place in Palma de Mallorca. 21. Note that this famous installation of the Makoki series was reedited in book form in both 2009 and 2017. Gallardo deserves further attention as a comics artist for the visual disability representations that figure into his autobiographical collaborations with his daughter, María, who has autism. See Fraser 2013, 2018a. While Gallardo is gaining attention outside of Spain and Iberian studies—see El Refaie 2012—Pere Joan has not been so fortunate thus far. 22. In this work, the representation of the Spanish capital’s Plaza de España is notable in its formal innovation as well as the priority given to the urban. A similarly important representation of Barcelona figures in a two-­page spread of Butifarra!: El urbanismo feroz (1979). 23. See this book’s chapter 1, which cites Alary 2002c:38. 24. Pérez-­Sánchez 2007:151, 153. See also Compitello and Larson 1997. 25. See her discussion in Pérez-­Sánchez 2007:155. 26. Pérez-­Sánchez 2007:157; also see her comments on the intentions of Madriz director Felipe Hernández Cava (2007:155–156).

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27. Pérez-­Sánchez 2007:161. 28. On the former group, see comments in the introduction to this book, including the undeniable significance of the urban noir genre for understanding each of these comics. Regarding the latter group, “La conjura del pasado,” for instance, is clearly a continuation of the themes of urbanized spectacle and consumption that figure in “El bestiario.” “Pasajero en tránsito,” just like the original story by Alan Aumbry, can be read as a transposition of the implied urban society that, for Karl Marx and David Harvey, structures experience of the rural in Robinson Crusoe to a state of liminality that depends on specific, if implied, traits of an increasingly mobile and urbanized society. 29. Delgado 1999:17. 30. Delgado 1999:12. 31. Delgado 2007a. 32. Delgado 2007a. 33. Delgado 2010. 34. Lefebvre 1996, 2003; Fraser 2015. 35. The terms are Lefebvre’s from The Production of Space (1991). See Fraser’s Toward an Urban Cultural Studies: Henri Lefebvre and the Humanities (2015) for a primer on Lefebvre, and for further reading, see also Lefebvre 1976, 1996, 2003. The broader dialectical understanding of space/place has deep roots in the fields of cultural and human geography as developed by Carl Sauer and others since the mid-­1920s and pervades a significant strain of work from traditionally literary fields in the humanities since the English translation of Lefebvre’s work by Donald Nicholson-­Smith was published in 1991. 36. Latham and McCormack 2004. 37. Williams 2007; Fraser 2014b, 2014c. 38. For more thorough introductions to what I am calling the urban cultural studies method, see Fraser 2014b, 2014c, 2015. 39. Lefebvre 1996, 2003. 40.This list is too robust and internally heterogeneous to explore in the present context, but I regard the tradition of scholarship adopting a critical view on urbanism from explicit or implicit cultural studies perspectives to be particularly significant: Degen 2000, 2004a, 2004b, 2008; Epps 2001, 2002; Kent 2002; McNeill 1999, 2002; Resina 2003, 2008. 41. Fernández 1995:342–343. 42. Fernández 1995:343. 43. I comment at greater length on this book in the introduction. 44. I thank one of the anonymous readers of an earlier draft of this analysis for signaling the importance of this context, which might provoke this possible interpretation. I paraphrase here the wording conveyed by that reader.

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45. Aribau Street is named after one of the “figureheads of the Renaixença” (Hughes 1992:288), thus playing into the construction of a modern Catalan identity, and also figures prominently in the literary imagination of the postwar novel, given its location as one residence of the protagonist in Carmen Laforet’s novel Nada (1944). 46. See Hughes 1992; also Epps 2001 and Losada 2012. 47. Davidson 2014:87–88. 48. Davidson 2014:87; Hughes 1992:189, 2004:69; Sen Tato 2010:22. 49. San Tato 2010:22–24; see also Hall 1997. Interestingly, of course, the construction of la Barceloneta did not begin “until 1753, a generation later” as Hughes (1992:193) notes. 50. Resina 2008:22; Fraser 2011b. 51. Interested readers should consult treatments of Cerdà’s plan in Delgado 2007b; Fraser 2011a, 2011b; and Resina 2008, among others, for more information about the interconnection of these themes. Goldston 1969 provides some well-­crafted prose snapshots of the district. 52. This aspect of his full plan was, however, not carried out to a degree he regarded as sufficient. Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (1990:76) has written that the result of Cerdà’s plan was “an Eixample which has turned out to be as far from Cerdà’s dreams as it is from the malevolent schemes of the speculators.” 53. Resina 2008:22. 54. Fraser 2011a, 2011b. 55. Choay 1969; Harvey 2006. I deliberately mean for the word “circulation” to refer to both air and transportation. Metaphorically, city streets were specifically conceived as circulatory systems by urban planners in light of the modern discovery of the circulation of blood by William Harvey. See Fraser 2011a; Sennett 2008. On Paris, see Choay 1969 and Harvey 2006. 56. Davidson 2014:89; Hochadel and Valls 2016:29. 57. Kent 2002:225; Resina 2008:43. 58. It is of interest that at first the Plan was referred to as the Parc de Barcelona, but this did in time change to the Parc de la Ciutadella. 59. Barey 1980. 60. Hughes 1992:356. 61. Hochadel and Valls 2016:26. 62. Hochadel and Valls 2016:27. 63. Hochadel andValls 2016:26. Hochadel andValls state explicitly that “Nature was to be exploited and more than that, to be actively transformed through specific animal technologies for the benefit of the economy and thus society as a whole” (2016:25). Also of interest are the Museu Martorell, inaugurated in 1882 as the first public museum in Barcelona (Hochadel and Valls 2016:30), and the

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geological stone exhibit, which featured a stone donation by the industrialist Eusebi Güell, known also for his connections with Antoni Gaudí (2016:37). Gaudí also worked with Fontserè on the Parc de la Ciutadella. 64. Hughes 1992:362. 65. Hochadel and Valls 2016:31. 66. Hochadel and Valls 2016:31. True to the intention to provide a public space in which all classes could learn about natural science, the zoo did not charge an entry fee until the late 1920s (Hochadel and Valls 2016:32). 67. A more recent example of how Catalan identity has been tangled up in the discourse of animals based in Barcelona can be seen in the case of Floquet de Neu/Copito de Nieve/Snowflake, an albino gorilla living at the Barcelona Zoo from 1966 until his death in 2003; see https://​cat​.elpais​.com​/cat​/2016​/11​ /23​/catalunya​/1479919745​_608545​.html. 68. Hochadel and Valls 2016:25; see also 35–36. 69. Hochadel and Valls 2016:43. 70. Hochadel and Valls 2016:43. The authors draw on information in the Arxiu Històric (Historical Archive), Museu de Ciències Naturals de Barcelona. 71. Hochadel and Valls 2016:43. Hochadel and Valls cite newspaper reports of lit cigarettes being thrown at an elephant as well as deliberate poisoning of flamingos and a white swan (2016:42). 72. Hochadel and Valls 2016:38–39. 73. Hochadel and Valls 2016:40. 74. While this is not the only function of laughter, it is a significant one, as Henri Bergson explored extensively in his work Laughter (1900). 75. Hochadel and Valls (2016:43) do not focus on this aspect of the image, but they do acknowledge that “the case of the ‘travelling whale’ shows that the border between popular culture—Paralelo—and bourgeois popular education—the Parc—was porous.” 76. While the return of the whale to the Parc is necessarily involuntary, as Robert Hughes points out in humanizing terms, there are also exotic animals who choose the location. He writes in Barcelona: The Great Enchantress of the exotic birds displayed on the Ramblas in the twentieth century who routinely escaped and moved to the Parc de la Ciutadella (2004:79). Hughes’s tone conveys amusement and perhaps even more subtly an appreciation of the birds’ strength of will and desire to move freely throughout Barcelona, a clear mirror for the strains of determination, resilience, and self-­management that he equates more globally with Catalan identity in his writings. 77. “L’Aperitiv” 1933:2. 78. “Cocodril improvitzat” 1924:34.

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79. “A propòsit de la guerra” 1914:4. Readers should note that the phrase is used in a Catalan publication to refer to Spanish anticlericalism. 80. Pere Joan and Manzano 1987:15. 81. Interested readers might begin with Baudelaire’s prose poems and compare those with related discussions found in Berman 1982; Harvey 2006; Merrifield 2014. 82. Pere Joan and Manzano 1987:12. 83. Pere Joan and Manzano 1987:12. 84. Pere Joan and Manzano 1987:12. 85. Resina 2008. 86. Groensteen 2007:86. 87. Pere Joan and Manzano 1987:13. 88. The mention of Cuba is particularly resonant from a historical perspective: given that the Cuban War of Independence occurred at the end of the nineteenth century, Hughes (1992:422–423) makes some interesting comments that connect police brutality in Barcelona with the war through the figure of Valerià Wyler i Nicolau, a colonial administrator serving as Governor General of Cuba who “had the police round up every anarchist and anticlerical they could lay hands on and take them to the military prison on Montjuic,” where many were beaten, tortured, and killed.Though this is a significant detail that would permit a postcolonial perspective on the crocodile, I have not pursued it in this chapter for reasons of space. 89. Hughes 1992:287–288. 90. Pere Joan and Manzano 1987:13. 91. Pere Joan and Manzano 1987:14. 92. See Miles (2007:88); Epps 2001. 93. Pere Joan and Manzano 1987:14. 94. Pere Joan and Manzano 1987:15. 95. It would be logical for readers of the comic who are grounded in Barcelona’s urban history to presume that this museum is located in the Parc de la Ciutadella, given the history of animal exhibitions outlined in this chapter. 96. Pere Joan and Manzano 1987:15. 97. Lefebvre 1996. 98. Pere Joan and Manzano 1987:13. 99. Pere Joan and Manzano 1987:15. 100. Hochadel and Valls 2016:43. 101. Lefebvre 1995:3. 102. Delgado 1999, 2007a. 103. For such a perspective, see Julio Gutiérrez García Huidobro (2014), who has written, as I understand it, the only peer-­reviewed take on Pere Joan’s

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graphic adaptation to date. See Henseler (2011b:153) for mention of the graphic novel version, whose complexities I do not hope to fully explore here. 104. Fernández Mallo’s work itself can be seen as rereading—in particular his work published the same year as Pere Joan’s graphic novel titled El hacedor (de Borges), Remake (2011). Note, too, that artist and critic Santiago García (2011) has written in his blog that “Pere Joan no se acerca a Nocilla Experience para que al rozarse con la novela original caiga sobre sus viñetas algo de polvo del prestigio literario, sino porque encuentra en ella una buena excusa para hacer su propia obra” (Pere Joan does not approach Nocilla Experience so that upon brushing up with the original novel a bit of prestigious literary dust might fall on his images, but rather because he finds in it a good excuse for making his own work). Even so, the tendency there is to minimize the value added by graphic representation rather than to delve into its specifics, “el dibujante mallorquín toma el texto original casi literalmente letra por letra, sin introducir grandes variantes, sin apenas eliminar material y sin añadir nada” (the Mallorcan artist takes the original text almost literally letter by letter, without introducing large changes, without hardly eliminating material and without adding anything; ibid.). This is true on the whole, but barring a few isolated though still revealing examples that García’s brief post makes, such a reflection does not do justice to the artistic decisions Pere Joan has made in his remake. 105. “Pensamos que la conexión de la poesía con las otras artes (incluidas las ciencias) es condición indispensable para despertarla de su letargo, letargo tan prolongado que la reapertura de sus ojos no podrá darse sin pasar necesariamente por un renacimiento” (We think that the connection of poetry with other arts (the sciences included) is the indispensable condition for waking it up from its lethargy, a lethargy that is so prolonged that it cannot open its eyes without necessarily passing through a renaissance; Fernández Mallo 2006:12). The implication of this statement and of his various projects is that science is itself an art: “Y es que la ciencia, como las artes, no es el mundo, sino una representación del mundo, y como tal representación es ficción” (And it is that science, like the arts, is not the world, but rather a representation of the world, and as a representation it is fiction; 2006:19). In an interview with Jesse Jason Barker published in the journal Anales de Literatura Española Contemporánea (ALEC), however, Fernández Mallo made the following clarification: “En mi opinión la ciencia, siempre, no es el mundo sino una representación del mundo, y como tal es ficción. Ahora bien, las diferencias entre la poesía y las ciencias para crear sus representaciones son muy grandes. Son métodos que nada tienen que ver” (In my opinion science, always, is not the world but rather a representation of the world, and as such it is fiction. Now, the differences between poetry and the sciences in creating

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representations are quite great. They are methods that have nothing to do with each other; Barker 2010:344). 106. I discuss the role of science in Pere Joan’s graphic novel version of Nocilla Experience more extensively in an article from the International Journal of Comic Art (Fraser 2016a). Therein I argue that Pere Joan casts an artistic lens on scientific representation and uses the visual language of science to inform artistic representation. This is, in a sense, true to Fernández Mallo’s original goal, as I articulate with reference to Thomas Kuhn’s (1970) work on paradigm shifts in the sciences. Pere Joan’s version effectively moves beyond Fernández Mallo’s assertion that art and science are “métodos que nada tienen que ver” (methods that have nothing to do with each other; quoted in Barker 2010:344). 107. I leave aside, also, the debates over this generation of contemporary writers itself, which has been alternately called “Nocilla,” “Mutante,” or “Afterpop” (Ros Ferrer 2013:69).Violeta Ros Ferrer notes that this generation first became visible as such “tras la celebración del primer encuentro de nuevos narradores ‘Atlas Literario Español’, organizado por la editorial Seix-­Barral y la Fundación José Manuel Lara, celebrado en Sevilla del 26 al 28 de junio de 2007” (after the celebration of the first meeting of new narrators called the “Spanish Literary Atlas,” organized by the publishing house Seix-­Barral and the José Manuel Lara Foundation, celebrated in Seville from the 26 to the 28 of June, 2007; 2013:70). See Fraser 2012 for a consideration of Nocilla Experience as an urban project. 108. In addition, the original prose narrative has a thirty-­three-­page epilogue falling between numbers 111 and 112. 109. McCloud 1994:100. 110. As discussed in the introduction, Alan Aumbry’s original story and Pere Joan’s comics text feature a protagonist who perpetually flies between London and Nairobi (and back). 111. Pere Joan 2011:9, 154. The only difference on these two pages is the text that appears in a single word balloon. 112. See, in particular, the way Pere Joan uses page-­spanning images of successive sizes in three specific, interconnected instances to convey an expanding view of human consciousness and spatial/temporal relationships (Fraser 2016a). 113. These three instances are found on 2011:8, 104, and 142–143 in the graphic novel and 2008:10, 101, 142 in the prose narrative original. As I explore in Fraser 2016a, these pages are a particularly important visual representation of spatial and temporal simultaneity. Key elements of form, text, coloring, and composition repeat in each instance. I make the case there that this instance of repetition is significant because, as Jesse Cohn writes, “At times, while reading a graphic novel, we can lose sight of the fact that we are looking at a page”

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(2009:44; original emphasis).This decision by Pere Joan is another way he introduces additive value to the graphic novel. All three instances taken together have a collective power greater than the sum of the parts, given that the image dimensions in question expand from three quarters of a page to a single page to a two-­page-­spanning panel in the last instance. 114. Two-­dimensional maps occur on (Pere Joan and Fernández Mallo 2011) pages 100, 101, and 147 (the latter evoking the same map used in El aprendizaje de la lentitud’s sequence “Lo orgánico y la cuadrícula”; Google map pins on 29; and even a combination of both that evokes a Google Earth view on 34. See also page 56, which in my view represents a poetic take on the iconic outline of Google Maps points. 115. At the “poetic” extreme of this scale, some of the representations move toward the more abstract nature of Pere Joan’s line drawings in Tingram and El aprendizaje de la lentitud. Regarding the representation of rivers, see an iconic Mallorcan water scene onto which Sandra cries while on her airplane trip (Pere Joan and Fernández Mallo 2011:9, 154). 116. Pere Joan and Fernández Mallo 2011:80, 92.Various buildings from London and the Torre Windsor from Madrid also make appearances; see pages 153, 154. 117. This open hyperframe technique is discussed in chapter 3 of the present book. 118. Pere Joan and Fernández Mallo 2011:26–27, 96 119. Pere Joan and Fernández Mallo 2011:15; Fernández Mallo 2008:15–16. 120.The first segment of Azul y ceniza was discussed in chapter 2 for its innovative use of panel insets. 121. Real social events: the Heaven’s Gate cult, self-­harming in Ibiza, self-­ injection of HIV in Cuba; real people: Sylvia Plath,Ted Hughes, Assia, Marianne Faithful, Hildegart Rodríguez (an activist born in Madrid in 1914 and murdered by her own mother in 1933), Nicolás Branda, Kiichi Matsuura; and real places mentioned in the text. 122. Pere Joan 2004:18–20. An actor in Paris breaks up with his love interest—both are little people—over his refusal to reconstruct their flat and thus do away with an interior scale proportional to normative bodies. He goes on to undergo painful bodily modification surgery to extend the length of his legs only to find that he can no longer find roles in the cinema.The character’s negotiation of bodily norms would be interesting to explore from a disability studies perspective, although that is beyond the scope of the present chapter. 123. See Pere Joan 2004:41. 124. The names of these creatures are given at the beginning of the work along with the names of all the other characters, including historical figures:

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Umbilical, Escualizador, Senso, Limpio, Cobarde, Ruido, Nervio, Héroe, Oscuro, Sin Nombre. 125. See the introduction to this book, as well as Lladó Pol 2001. 126. Here I use the term “non-­sequitur transition” from McCloud. Interestingly, given its fragmented form, one might say that Fernández Mallo’s prose text is perhaps well suited to the nonlogical transitions that are also so specific to the comics medium—see in particular McCloud’s (1994:77) taxonomy of comics transitions, where he noted that in the #5 “aspect-­to-­aspect” transition, “by definition, nothing ‘happens’ at all” and that the #6 “non-­sequitur transition” is “unconcerned with events or any narrative purposes of any sort.” But Pere Joan exploits this in new ways. The graphic novel version of Nocilla Experience continues to trace the paradigm sketched out by Fernández Mallo wherein art and science converge to constitute a theory of isolation and connection based on the irruption of the new against a background of simultaneity across distances. But this is a problem that Pere Joan’s text translates effectively to a spatial dimension, without deemphasizing temporality. Comics art arguably poses matters of spatial distinction and temporal simultaneity much better than does prose literature on account of its representational potential. 127. Don Mitchell 2003:18. 128. See The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs 1961), Justice and the Politics of Difference (Young 1990), and Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Harvey 1996). 129. See Fraser 2012. 130. The marked appearance and reappearance of famed author Julio Cortázar as a visually identifiable character in the novel in segments based in Palma de Mallorca (with Marc), in London (with Sandra and Jota), in Armenia (with Vartan), and in New York (with Steve and Polly) also functions as a visual element of mataxis and illustrates the interconnectedness that drives the characters’ lives and the book as a whole. 131. Gutiérrez García Huidobro 2014:193–194. 132. Gutiérrez García Huidobro 2014:194. 133. Fernández Mallo 2008:44; Pere Joan and Fernández Mallo 2011:49. This sequence also reveals how Pere Joan has adapted Fernández Mallo’s text by making structural changes to the plot. I refer here to the originally numbered segments of the prose text: Pere Joan combines #25 (p. 56) and #26 (p. 44) in his graphic presentation of the conversation between Sandra and Jota (Pere Joan and Fernández Mallo 2011:48–50).This is merely an example of other subtle changes. 134. McCloud 1994:132. 135. Pere Joan and Fernández Mallo 2011:13–17, 66, 98–99, 146–147, 164–166.

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136. Because he is more focused on the scientific (postpoetic) principle underlying the book, Fernández Mallo thus seems less focused on the urban aspect of his work. The scientific principle of interconnectedness appears also in the author’s subsequent novel Limbo (2014:9), which I explore further in Fraser 2016a. 137. Pere Joan and Fernández Mallo 2011:13–17; see also 44, 128, 146–147, 164. 138. Pere Joan and Fernández Mallo 2011:48. Jota (2011:49) explains that his painting of gum stuck to the city sidewalk (represented on 2011:42–43) is directly related to this insight into the four-­color scheme of Parchís. 139. Pere Joan and Fernández Mallo 2011:55. Marc, of course, is connected to Sandra at the level of plot, such that the colors recall her earlier discussion with Jota;Vladimir and Rush visit the Parchís Palace. 140. Pere Joan and Fernández Mallo 2011:7; cf. Fernández Mallo 2008:9. 141. See Fraser 2016a. 142. A rare use of the waffle-­iron grid occurs on Pere Joan and Fernández Mallo 2011:57 and the gallery format of text-­image pairings on 2011:68–69. 143. See examples of this scattered/topographical arrangement throughout: Pere Joan and Fernández Mallo 2011:8, 12, 17, 55, 63, 67, 80, 89, 107, 111, 121, 122, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 145, 162, 163, 164. 144. Examples of peritextual visual elements accompanying—but not representing—text appear on Pere Joan and Fernández Mallo 2011:20, 24, 28, 31, 33, 56, 61, 63, 83, 100, 103, 115, 123, 124, 137, 138, 145, 150. 145. Insets occur on Pere Joan and Fernández Mallo 2011:8, 22, 37, 104, 142– 143; examples of varying width and height of panels are far too numerous to mention. Extremely large-­sized panels occur on 31 (quite an artistic example), 37, 43, 47, 75, 76, 86–87, 165, 166, and in the sequence of similarly structured panels appearing on pages 8, 104, 142–143. The latter are referenced in the body text here and explored in greater depth in Fraser 2016a. C hapter 5 : I sland I maginaries

1. Torrents are frequently dry, especially in the summer months. Buswell writes that “the lower river bed of the Riera (the rambla) had probably always been an informal paseo. In 1812 it was proposed that it become a new route cutting through the low town toward the port. . .” (Buswell 2013:160). 2. See Bufill 1984:3. The Catalan translation from Spanish is by Albert Ullibarri. 3. España 1998b:112. The artist himself has stated that “m’agrada dibuixar les coses com si tot estigués en moviment, dins d’un gran bol de sopa o sota l’aigua” (I enjoy drawing things as if everything was moving, in a large bowl of soup or underwater) (Pere Joan 1998:113).

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4. Grydehøj 2014:183. 5. Grydehøj 2014:183. 6. Buswell 2013:7. It is interesting that Spanish geographers, during the 1990s, had “little concern for landscape as they pursued other leads set down by American and British human geographers. .  .  . However, in the early twenty-­first century there seems to have been a revival of interest in the links between geography and history amongst some Spanish geographers, perhaps because the landscape in so many parts of their national territory has been changing rapidly, especially from the effects of tourism in coastal zones” (ibid.). The present chapter is thus a correction for the activities of geographers in 1990s Spain, who arguably demonstrated a lack of concern for landscape. 7. Francesca Lladó Pol (2009) makes an attempt along these lines in her book Treinta anys de comic a Mallorca (1975–2005). 8. Essex, Kent, and Newnham 2004:8; citing also Bull 1997:140. 9. Buswell 2013:xi. 10. Buswell 2013:xiii, 3. It “attempts to cover at least four and a half thousand years,” but discussion of mass tourism over the last fifty years is most relevant to the present discussion; see chapter 11, “Mass Tourism and the Landscape.” 11. Buswell 2013:11. 12. Buswell 2013:16; see also 22. 13. See Sauer 1925; Mitchell 2000; and the introduction to the present book where Sauer’s contributions are prioritized. 14. Elsewhere I reappropriate the definition of cultural studies put forward by Raymond Williams (2007) for use in a broader spatial framework (Fraser 2014b, 2014c). 15. Buswell (2013) discusses “the physical basis of the landscape” extensively in chapter 3 of his book. 16. It is possible to assert a connection between the island’s characteristic cultural landscapes and the key components of the image “Untitled” from Baladas Urbanas. Buswell (2013:28) discusses the reasons for the poverty of Mallorcan soil in depth, and explores “navetes” as structural remnants from the Bronze Age, including instructive photos (2013:44–45). He also notes that “the very earliest cultural landscapes in Mallorca are those created by prehistoric societies” (2013:40). 17. Buswell 2013:132. 18. Butzer 1962:193. Buswell (2013:26) notes that “to the north and west it [the coastline] consists primarily of steep cliffs descending almost vertically into the sea in the central section.” The “Junio” image also appears on page 5 of Mi cabeza bajo el mar (Pere Joan 1990).

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19. Pere Joan implies an interesting and revealing contrast between himself and his collaborator Max. In the brief introduction to Max: Conversación/sketchbook, Pere Joan writes: “Max es más hombre de bosque que de costa. Sus dibujos, su mitología particular, remite, gráfica y conceptualmente, a lo arbóreo, a la exuberancia vegetal” (Max is more a person of the forest than of the coast. His drawings, his particular mythology, turns, graphically and conceptually, on the arboreal, on vegetal exuberance; Pere Joan and Max 2005:4–5). 20. Barceló i Pons 2000:31. This article, published in the journal Treballs de la Societat Catalana de Geografía, features quite a comprehensive bibliography of tourism in Mallorca. 21. Buswell 2013:174. On that same page he also highlights “the island’s geology, especially the commercial exploitation of its extensive cave systems.” 22. Buswell 2013:174. Elsewhere, Buswell notes that the Archduke “first came to Mallorca in 1867. He has become somewhat of a legendary figure on the island, partly because of his alleged prowess with women, but more importantly for us, as a major influence on part of the island’s western landscape” (2013:149; see also 150–151). 23. See Essex, Kent, and Newnham 2004:8; Buswell 2013:150; Barceló i Pons 2000:38–39; Royle 2009:228–229. George Sand, who published the book Un Hiver à Majorque (A Winter in Majorca; Royle 2009:229) is mentioned in numerous sources. Barceló i Pons notes that Miguel de Unamuno visited Mallorca in 1916 and includes three articles on it in his Andanzas y visiones españolas (2000:38), and that Rubén Darío visited the island in both 1906–1907 and 1913 (2000:39). 24. Barceló i Pons 2000. Moreover, these works owe much to an earlier book: “El llibre de José Vargas Ponce, titulat Descripciones de las islas Pithiusas y Baleares, publicat a Madrid el 1787, constitueix la primera descripció moderna en les nostres illes” (The book by José Vargas Ponce, titled Descripciones de las islas Pithiusas y Baleares, published in Madrid in 1787, constitutes the first modern description of our islands; Barceló i Pons 2000:32). 25. Essex, Kent, and Newnham (2004:8), who cite Bull 1997:141. 26. Buswell 2013:177. 27. Buswell 2013:181. 28. See Longhurst 2000; Afinoguénova and Martí-­Olivella 2008; Pavlovic a 2012; Crumbaugh 2009; and the related discussion in chapter 1 of this book, including accompanying notes. 29. See Picornell 2014:223. 30. See Buswell 2013:19 on “ruin” and “degradation.” 31. Essex, Kent, and Newnham 2004:10: “Up to 70% of the population is now employed in tourism-­related industries (Bull 1997:138) and many other sectors,

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such as agriculture and horticulture, are influenced heavily by the demands of the tourist industry.” 32. Essex, Kent, and Newnham 2004:10, see also 4, 12. 33. Essex, Kent, and Newnham 2004:4, 12. See also Wheeler 1995:284; Kent, Newnham, and Essex 2002. 34. Grydehøj 2014:188, describing Picornell 2014. 35. Picornell’s (2014:223) article “considers geographical, literary and media discourses along with particular mass-­consumption cultural products to argue that Palma is represented as a predatory ‘monster’ devouring the island’s ‘local’ identity. It is argued that different types of neo-­ruralism have emerged and reinforced the opposition between the island and the city”; the scholar argues convincingly that “this image [of Palma as a monster] reinforces a symbolic and relational opposition between the urban and the rural that becomes evident in a number of popular-­consumption cultural products recently created in Mallorca” (Picornell 2014:224). 36. Picornell 2014:227–228. Flaquer (2006:31, cited in Picornell 2014:228) writes of a “concrete monster that gains ground to the sea.” 37. Picornell 2014:229. 38. Picornell (2014:228) also notes the effects of migration to the island, distinguishing that this migration was from Spain in pursuit of jobs in the 1970s but since the 1990s has been from abroad. 39. Picornell 2014:227: “We may note that the term ‘balearitzar’ .  .  . was coined in relation to the urban model developed in the Balearic Islands in the 1960s-­1970s, characterized by massive waterfront construction.” 40. See Pons, Rullán, and Murray 2014; Hof and Blázquez-­Salom 2013. 41. Pons, Rullán, and Murray 2014:240; Royle 2009:231. 42. See Picornell 2014:230, 226. 43. Resina and Viestenz 2012:22: “In Catalonia, between 1999 and 2007, 12,128 farms disappeared, a loss of 18% in less than a decade. In human terms, this figure represents four peasants quitting every day.” 44. Regarding the continuing distinction between spaces of production and spaces of leisure, see Lefebvre 1991b; I also explore this aspect of Lefebvre’s theory in Fraser 2011a, 2015. See also Pons, Rullán, and Murray (2014:239) on the superimposition of landscapes for production and consumption under mass tourism. 45.Vives Miró 2011:1; emphasis in original. 46. See Vives Miró 2011:2, where this reference is made in a general paraphrase of Lefebvre’s exact statement, without citation. The original statement appears in Lefebvre 1976:21.

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47. Harvey 2000. 48. See both Harvey 2009 and Harvey 2012 to get a sense of the full arc of this influence. See also Harvey 1996:218–219 for another concise statement delivered in a midcareer work. 49. Harvey 2001:394–411; 2012:89–112. 50. See, for example, Harvey 1990:203: “Our subjective experience can take us into realms of perception, imagination, fiction and fantasy, which produce mental spaces and maps as so many mirages of the supposedly ‘real thing’.” Harvey connects cartography and mapmaking with systems of power and historical/ political empire (1989:176–177; 2001:217–220). 51. Lefebvre 1988:82–83; emphasis in original; see also Fraser 2015. 52. Harvey 1990, 2003. His unfortunate statement was that film is “in the final analysis, a spectacle projected within an enclosed space on a depthless screen” (1990:308). Harvey’s more capacious and later view is highlighted and explored in two essays by Malcolm Compitello (2013, 2014a). Compitello (2014a:25) cites from Harvey (2003:28). 53. Léger 2006:143. See also Fraser 2015:36–37. 54. Lefebvre 1988:82–83; also see Lefebvre 2006a. 55. Drawing from Lefebvre 2006b, I explore this at length in Fraser 2015:72–79. 56. Fraser 2015. 57. Lefebvre 2006b; Fraser 2015. 58.These sources are mentioned in the introduction to this book and listed in the bibliography under Dear et al. (2011) and Daniels et al. (2011). Significantly, both are books promoted by the American Association of Geographers. 59. Pla 2012:126–127. This appears in the volume The New Ruralism, mentioned in chapter 4 of the present book. Extending Pla’s premise to the artistic realm of comics presents a productive way of rereading El aprendizaje de la lentitud in chapter 3. 60. I am thinking here of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, and the organic relationship between that work and Henri Lefebvre’s contemporary work on everyday life and the city. See Fraser 2015 on the connection between Debord and Lefebvre. 61. I refer here to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Roman Jakobson among others. See Fraser 2015 for a discussion of the concept of literariness and the dominant in the context of urban cultural studies. 62. On the question of medium specificity, see Carroll 1985. The debates on whether comics are or are not literary are too convoluted to engage in the space allotted here. 63. Seguí et al. 2008:3.

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64. Seguí et al. 2008:3. Compare this island approach with the urbanistic strategy to link comics with Barcelona in Borbonet’s (1998) book referenced in the introduction, containing an essay by then mayor Joan Clos. 65. Pere Joan 2008:35. 66. Pere Joan 2008:35, 46. See chapter 2 of this book for a discussion of this form of conceptual/historical page layout. 67. Pere Joan 2008:36. The sketch he embeds in the page contains images of Rosa María Sánchez, Laura Medina, Isidro Mateo, Jordi Tolosa, Max, Pere Joan, Xavier Canals, and Carles Peramón. 68. Pere Joan 2008:37. 69. Pere Joan 2008:39. 70. Pere Joan 2008:40, 41, 43, 45. 71. Pere Joan 2008:46. 72. Pere Joan and Hernández 2009:5. 73. Pere Joan and Hernández 2009:14–16. 74. Pere Joan and Hernández 2009:18–21. 75. Pere Joan and Hernández 2009:22–27. 76. Pere Joan and Hernández 2009:34–35. Note that the policies of Manuel Fraga Iribarne are implicit here and that the pop song “El turista 1.999.999” is given emphasis. On both, see Crumbaugh 2009. 77. Pere Joan and Hernández 2009: for example, 22, 29–31, 39–42. 78. Pere Joan and Hernández 2009: see 44–45 and especially 54. 79. Pere Joan and Hernández 2009:57. 80. Note that Serra’s prologue includes a reference to “H.M.” without specifying who that is, whereas in the graphic-­novel version, an asterisk clues in readers to the identity of Henri Michaux as the author behind these initials. 81.This brief epilogue appears in Pere Joan and Serra 2015:110–111. Nadal Suau writes: “No fue un escritor muy conocido, pero no hay ciudad del mundo en la que no se esconda al menos un lector de su obra.Y quien lo ha leído, lo venera. Entre sus defensores hay algunos nombres importantes: Octavio Paz, Joan Perucho, Enrique Vila-­Matas” (He was not a well-­known author, but there is no city in the world in which there does not hide at least one reader of his work. And those who have read it, venerate him. Among his defenders there are some important names: Octavio Paz, Joan Perucho, Enrique Vila-­Matas; 110). On Octavio Paz, see also Fernández Ripoll 1994:115. On the next page, Nadal Suau also uses the phrase “escritor de culto” within quotes to describe Serra (Pere Joan and Serra 2015:111). 82. This appears in his epilogue; see Pere Joan and Serra 2015:111. 83.The quotations are from Guasp 2003:38; and from Ibáñez 1997:40. See also Ramis Barceló 2012.

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84. For an opposing view, see Andrés Ibánez (1997:40), who suggests that Serra’s fragmented works (aphoristic texts, for example) are arguably better than his constructed works (that is, the two Cotiledonias). 85. Llop 2004:10. 86. Llop 2004:10. 87. Fernández Ripoll 1994:118. The phrase “albaricoque terrestre” comes from one of Serra’s preliminary pages, wherein he dedicates the text “a los habitants del albaricoque terrestre” (to the inhabitants of the terrestrial apricot). This poetically geocentric phrase appears also as the dedication to the graphic-­novel version. 88. This excludes the epilogue and ignores the inside/outside covers and front/back matter. Readers should keep in mind that the covers and paratextual aspects of comics are very important and are in fact an integral part of the medium’s content. 89. The chapters of Serra’s text titled “Los apagones” (1973:25), “Los oniritas” (1973:37), “Los panas” (1973:61), “Los ávilas” (1973:67), and “Los zafacocas” (1973:69) are entirely missing from the graphic-­novel version. 90. Pere Joan splits Serra’s “Entre los furios” (1973:17) into two chapters titled “Entre los furios” (Pere Joan and Serra 2015:21) and “Los pirones” (Pere Joan and Serra 2015:30); he combines “Los onerarios” (Serra 1973:43) and “Los dobeítas” (Serra 1973:47) into one chapter titled “Los onerarios y los dobeítas” (Pere Joan and Serra 2015:39); and he splits “Los marimondinos” (Serra 1973:71) into three chapters titled “Los marimondinos” (Pere Joan and Serra 2015:69), “Tomanova” (Pere Joan and Serra 2015:76) and “Los nimbos” (Pere Joan and Serra 2015:83). 91. I discussed this in chapter 1. 92.This is the case with description from Serra 1973:34 (“Un escotillón, coge un pescado, le observa las branquias, y te dice”); 1973:43 (“En la cama, si sestean, hacen planes ‘negociales’ con sus esposas o amantes”). 93. This happens with description from Serra 1973:18. Later, third-­person quoted dialogue (Serra 1973:21) is turned into first-­person dialogue (Pere Joan and Serra 2015:31). 94. Examples of sentences/phrases eliminated from the original (not including elimination of entire chapters) include Serra 1973:17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 31, 33, 35, 36, 45, 48, 49, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, and the list goes on and on. Examples of wording changes: “las noches” (Serra 1973:12) becomes “la noche” (Pere Joan and Serra 2015:13); “que” (Serra 1973:14) is omitted (Pere Joan and Serra 2015:17); the reference to a character known as ‘H.’ (Serra 1973:22) is eliminated (Pere Joan and Serra 2015:32); “la” and “a los” are added (Pere Joan and Serra 2015:32); “Porque el Escotillón no necesita” (Serra 1973:35) becomes “No

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necesitan” (Pere Joan and Serra 2015:38); “los envían a morir en las meseta” (Serra 1973:44) becomes “los envían a morir en las mesetas” (Pere Joan and Serra 2015:44); “En la fachada del gran templo” (Serra 1973:52) becomes “Sobre el gran templo” (Pere Joan and Serra 2015:51); “el don maravilloso” (Serra 1973:54) becomes “el don maravillosos [sic]” (Pere Joan and Serra 2015:56); and the list goes on and on. Examples of ellipses introduced into verbal text: (Serra 1973:14/ Pere Joan and Serra 2015:17). Example of parentheses from the original deleted in the comic: (Serra 1973:46). Also, the distinction of Marés from Libidina is completely excised in the graphic novel; see Serra 1973:52. 95. See Serra 1973:56; Pere Joan and Serra 2015:60. Another example from Pere Joan and Serra 2015 is the use of bones protruding from the landscape on Pere Joan and Serra 2015:59; the usage on Pere Joan and Serra 2015:32 is also conventional. Intriguingly, a word balloon with image is used to express a collective state on Pere Joan and Serra 2015:19. 96. See Pere Joan and Serra 2015:85; see also Pere Joan and Serra 2015:58, 68 for a somewhat more conventional usage of the image in a word balloon. 97. See Pere Joan and Serra 2015:84. 98. Pere Joan and Serra 2015:83–84. See also chapter 3 of this book. 99.This example elucidates the point made by Josep Maria Nadal Suau in his epilogue, which is cited above in the main text. 100. Serra 1973:79; compare with Pere Joan and Serra 2015:79–81, including the repetition of the first sentence as inscribed on a stone at the top of page, Pere Joan and Serra 2015:82. 101. See notes in chapter 4; also Fraser 2016a. 102. I am referring implicitly to Scott McCloud’s notion that space equals time in comics, mentioned earlier in the present book. 103. This correspondence was explored most extensively in the chapter 2 discussion of Azul y ceniza and the chapter 3 discussion of 16 novel·les amb hòmens blaus. 104. This open hyperframe is explored most extensively in chapter 3 of the present book. 105. Buswell 2013:18–19. 106. See Pere Joan and Serra 2015:4–5, 7, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 21, 24, 33, 35, 36, 37, 72, 74, 76, 77, 79–81, 82, 90, 91, 93, 94, as well as the front and back covers of the graphic novel. 107. Buswell 2013:18–19. 108. Buswell 2013:18–19; see also 47, 134. 109. Pere Joan and Serra 2015:49–54. 110. Pere Joan and Serra 2015:54.

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111. For example, under Prun’s rule, “Las mujeres cambiaron de modo de ser. Hablaron de lo que antes estaba vedado y buscaron emociones que antes les habían causado pánico” (Women’s way of being changed. They spoke about what had previously been forbidden and sought out emotions that previously had been difficult for them; Pere Joan and Serra 2015:100). Recall the anti-­ machista statement penned by Pere Joan in the first installment of Nosotros somos los muertos (1993), discussed in chapter 1, and one sees yet another likely thematic correspondence between Serra and the graphic artist. The story ends on a dark note, however, as Prun’s legacy is eventually overturned. 112. Buswell 2013:47. 113. Buswell 2013:47. 114. For remarks on how the asno (donkey) is a central figure/theme in Serra’s work, see Ibáñez 1997:40. 115. See, for example, the way specific scenes are drawn as irregular colored shapes against a white background, thus suggesting island forms, specifically on pages 9, 10, 17, 18, 27, 30, 34, 41, 47 in Pere Joan and Serra 2015. 116. Pons, Rullán, and Murray 2014:239. 117. I refer to the theorist’s astute argument on the social positioning of the ninth art. Unpopular Culture is the title of Beaty’s 2007 book, wherein the critic insists that comics are still very much an unpopular culture due to their marginal status in society at large as well as in academic circles. I agree fully with this statement and support the application of this idea to comics in Spain and to Iberian studies in the United States. Note that his book mentions Pere Joan in passing but focuses more on Max, bringing up complicated issues surrounding the international interest in comics artists from Spain.

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Inde x

AAG/American Association of Geographers, 2, 23, 258n58 Abad, Mercedes, 143 Afinoguénova, Eugenia, 209n54 Ahrens, Jörn, 24 airports, 63, 77–78, 80–82, 167 air travel, 14, 63, 80 Ajuntament de Barcelona, 143–145 Alary,Viviane, 36–37, 41–45, 53–54, 56–57, 73 Alaska (artist), 214n21 Alaska (state), 163 Alcázar, Paco, 37, 56 Almodóvar, Pedro, 214n21 Altarriba Ordóñez, Antonio, 6, 36, 38, 45–46, 48–49, 52, 54–55, 57–58; and first cycle of Spanish comics, 45; and second cycle of Spanish comics, 46; and third cycle of Spanish comics, 54 anarchism, 34, 157, 213n7, 249n88 Anarcoma, 54, 225n138 animals, 17, 143, 146, 149–151, 155, 158, 196 anthropology, 98, 140–141, 180 Aragon, xviii architecture, xii, 23, 27, 82, 98, 139, 146, 153, 157, 165, 167, 241n77 Argentina, xiii, 98 Armenia, 163, 253n130 Astiberri, 58

Asturian language, xviii Asturias, xviii Asunción, 98 Atiza (artist), 42 Aumbry, Alan, 14, 208n42 Azerbaijan, 163 Azpiri, Alfonso, 49 Baetens, Jan, 72, 90 Balearic Islands, xviii, xix, 5, 34, 177–178, 180–182, 187 Balearic Studies, Institute of, 186 balearitzar, 181, 257n39 Balzac, Honoré de, 182 Bang!, 46, 225n148 Bangkok, 168 Barceló i Pons, Bartomeu, 179 Barcelona, xviii, 5, 14, 35, 40–41, 55, 101, 136–140, 142–162, 186–187; Aribau Street, 145, 157, 247n45; Avenida del Paralelo, 150, 248n75; Born neighborhood, 147; and comics industry, xix, 5, 11; Eixample district, 101, 138, 143, 145–147, 151–160, 162, 173; La Barceloneta, 147–148, 247n49; Parc de la Ciutadella, 138, 146–150, 158, 247n63; Passeig de Gràcia, 157; Ribera neighborhood, 147; Universal Exposition of 1888, 148; vocation of modernity in, 154

2 9 2    I n d e x

Barcelona International Comics Fair, 55 Barthes, Roland, 91, 98 Basque language, xii, xviii, 34 Basque region, xviii, xix, 34 Basra, 163 Beá, Josep María, 143 Beaty, Bart, 199, 206n20, 226n152, 230n56, 262n117 Beilin, Katarzyna, 136 Belgium, xii, 2, 37, 51, 241n75, 244n14 Beltrán, Gabi, 56, 186, 245n20 Beltrán, Miquel, 52, 224n133 Benet, Juan, 72, 213n4, 214n19 Bergson, Henri, 232n86, 238n4, 240n59, 248n74 Berlin, 138, 168, 245n16 Bermejo,Victoria, 143 Bernet, Jordi, 205n6 Beronä, David, 3, 28–29, 61, 202, 212n99, 244n14 Best Work in the Barcelona International Comics Fair (award), 8 Bibendum. See Michelin Man Bidwell, Charles Toll, 180 Bilbao, 58, 216n44 Blade Runner, 16, 210n58 Blasco, Jesús, 46 blogs, 19, 208n35, 250n104 boats, 98–100, 102, 104–107, 109, 112, 114 Boldú, Ramón, 205n6 Borges, Jorge Luis, 20, 250n104 Bosch Quevedo, Juan Enrique. See Micharmut Boston, 163 braiding, 103, 138, 142, 168, 170, 174, 239n31 Breccia, Alberto, 47 Brieva, Miguel, 235n102 Brocal, Pep, 205n6 Brooklyn, 163 Bruguera, Juan, 44–45

Buenos Aires, 20, 98, 101 Bufill, Joan, 14, 176, 208n43, 234n95 Buru Lan, 47 Busch, Wilhelm, 39 Buswell, Richard J., 178–180, 184, 196– 197, 228n17, 254n1, 255n6, 255n16, 256n21 Cabrero Arnal, José, 34 Cairo, 4, 13, 15, 49–50, 52–53, 72, 143, 187, 206n21, 222n105, 223n105, 224n131 Caixa de Barcelona, 143–145 Callao cinema. See under cinema Cancún, 163 Canizales, Harold Jiménez, 186 Capa, Robert, 86 Capdevila Gisbert, Francesc. See Max capitalism, 19, 33, 35, 90, 137, 141–143, 154, 157–158, 177, 181–184, 189, 235n102, 236n119, 244n6 Capitán Trueno, 44, 219n74 Capmany, Maria Aurèlia, 143–144 Capó, Miquel, 180 Capp, Al, 47 caricature, 41, 61, 227n6, 228n18 Carr, Raymond, 213n3 Carrier, David, 61, 70, 73, 94–95, 202, 227nn6–7, 229n37, 229n52 cartography, 20, 25, 68, 95, 101, 115, 192, 258n50. See also maps Catalan language, xii, xiv, xviii–xix, 34, 144–145, 175; and identity, 146, 148– 149, 183–184, 199, 248n67; publishing industry, 14, 143–144, 205n7, 224n127, 247n45, 249n79 Catalan-speaking region, xii, xviii–xix, 34, 144, 183–184, 199; and mammoths, 149 Catalonia, xviii–xix, 5, 146, 148–149, 184, 199; disappearance of farms in, 181, 257n43

I n d e x     2 9 3

censorship, 34–35, 42, 45, 48, 144, 219n81; of comics, 48, 219n79, 219n81, 221n99 Cerdà, Ildefons, 101, 138, 145, 147, 151, 153, 155–156, 158, 160, 162, 173, 243n3, 247nn51–52; xamfrà used by, 147, 158 Chicago, 139, 243n4 Chicago school of urban sociology, 211n95 Chicos, 46 Chopin, Frédéric, 180, 189 Cifré, 205n6, 233n93 Cilla, Ramón, 42 cinema, 17, 24, 35, 44, 121–122, 154, 182, 252n122; Callao cinema (Madrid), 164 class, 35, 44, 90–91, 99, 148–151, 157, 173–174, 179–180, 248n66 clear-line style, 30, 50–53, 206n17, 208n38, 225n138 Clos, Joan (mayor of Barcelona), 5, 145, 259n64 Coc, Bartomeu, 138 Cohn, Jesse, 86, 227n12, 235n103, 251n113 coloring, 8, 49, 53, 68, 80–82, 97, 103, 106–107, 114, 116–117, 167–168, 170–172, 197; and braiding, 103, 142; as comics art specialization, 69; and metaphor, 167–172; and reading, 103, 107–111; and text, 106 Coma, Javier, 51, 225n148 comics: adaptations from prose literature, 8, 14, 138, 161, 164–165, 190, 192–193; challenges of comics artists, 1–2, 4–5, 38, 42; definitions of, 24–25, 39–40, 49, 59–60, 66, 69–70, 202, 215n37, 217n51, 227n7; Franco-Belgian tradition in, 37, 51, 73, 206n20, 212n103, 214n25, 223n117, 224n131, 226n159; genres

of, 10–11, 44–45, 53, 225n135, 246n28; international visibility of, 1–2, 47, 58; late twentieth-century, 48–57; literary, 10, 14–15, 45, 52, 72, 74, 184; nineteenth-century, 39–43; simultaneity in, 43, 61, 74–75, 77, 82, 121, 168–169, 231n73; as status symbol, 49; style in, 27, 51, 55; terminology of, in Hispanic world, 37–38, 50, 52–53, 215n27, 224n132; twentieth-century, 24, 43–48; twenty-first-century, 57–58; underground, 6–7, 37, 47–50, 53, 207n23, 220n95, 223n113, 223nn116–117, 224n131; as unpopular culture, 199– 200, 206n20, 262n117; wordless, 28, 64, 90, 138, 236n118, 244n14; writing zones in, 72, 229n46. See also fanzines comics awards. See Eisner award; Harvey award; Ignatz award; National Comics Award (Spain); Best Work in the Barcelona International Comics Fair comics form. See hyperframe; page layout; panels; and other specific aspects comics industry in Spain, xix, 4–6, 177, 185–186; artistic constraints of, 44, 49, 54–56, 73; comic del bolsillo, 44–45; comics for children vs. comics for adults, 38, 44–46, 52, 223n125; and independent market, 57, 73–74, 84, 234n94; as influenced by United States, 47; and kiosks, 4, 50, 52; production costs/quality in, 44, 73; and self-publication, 11, 48, 55, 64, 67, 84 comics magazines, 45–46. See also individual comics magazines comics publishers. See individual comics publishers comics scholarship/theory: in Spain, 35–37; outside Spain, xi, 27–29, 37, 60, 202. See also individual scholars

2 9 4    I n d e x

comics space, 24–25; as visual ontology, 88, 133 Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (CEDA), 34 Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), 34 conquistador, 33, 99, 114–115 consumers/consumption, 16, 35–36, 44, 90, 140, 157, 181, 189, 209n54, 214n18, 235n102, 257n35 Córcoles Moncusí, Raquel, 140 costumbrismo, 41, 196, 216n48 Crumb, Robert, 47, 212n103, 220n95, 223n117 Crumbaugh, Justin, 209n54, 213n14, 214n20, 256n28, 259n76 Cuadrado, Jesús, 3, 6, 36, 225n148 Cuba, 80, 145, 156, 167, 216n44, 249n88, 252n121 cultural studies, xiii, 142, 176–177, 182–183, 185, 198, 246n40. See also urban cultural studies method Cuto, 46, 220n86 D’ache, Caran, 39 Dalí, Salvador, 86 Darder, Francesc, 149 Darío, Rubén, 116, 180, 189, 240n53, 256n23 David B. (Pierre-François “David” Beauchard), 56 Davidson, Robert, 146 Debord, Guy, 258n60 De España, Ramón, 7, 53, 176, 207n28, 224n131 De Felipe, Fernando, 49, 205n6 De Juan, Javier, 4 Del Barrio, Federico, 56, 222n109 Delgado Ruiz, Manuel, 137, 140–142, 145, 161 De Rojas, Pedro, 42 detectives, 11, 20, 24

Díaz de Guereñu, Juan Manuel, 83–84, 233n93 dictatorship: of Franco, 5, 34–36, 43–44, 46–48, 72, 144, 213n7, 213n9, 236n117, 214n19; and postdictatorial Spain (1975–), 29, 33, 35, 49, 52, 54; of Primo de Rivera, 33 digital/analog culture, 85–86, 92 digital humanities, 23 Dittmer, Jason, 24–25 Dominguín, 44 Dopico, Pablo, 6, 37, 50, 55–56, 208n36, 221n99, 222n112 Doré, Gustave, 39, 189, 218n60 Doucet, Julie, 56, 138–139, 245n17 Drac de na Coca, xiii, 137–138 drugs, 46, 52–53, 139 ecology, 25–26, 82, 100, 111, 117, 136–137, 168, 175, 189, 202 Edicions de Ponent, 57, 83–84, 97, 233n93, 234n95 Editorial Bruguera, 44–45, 219n79, 223n113 Editorial Complot, 4, 143 Eisner, Will, 47, 60, 72, 138, 202, 212n1, 233n88, 245n17 Eisner award, xii El Gato Negro, 44 El Guerrero del Antifaz, 44, 219n74 El Jueves, 49 El Mundo Cómico, 40, 60 El Papus, 47–48, 221n99 El Paso, 163 El Rrollo Enmascarado, 47, 49, 221n95, 222n112 El Víbora, 4, 13, 49–50, 52, 54, 143, 187, 212n105, 212n112, 223n113, 224n131, 225n138 emotion, 8, 11, 14, 26, 53, 66, 97; and reading, 244n14; representation of, through artistic or iconic forms, 67,

I n d e x     2 9 5

83, 122, 170, 203, 239n26; and space, 10, 23, 26–27, 62–63, 68, 73, 95, 97–98; states of, 81, 117, 122 Ensenyat, Joan B., 180 Escola de Belles Arts de Sant Jordi, 11 exchange-value, 142, 157, 160 Falange, 34 fanzines, 11, 46, 48–49, 55, 57, 64 Farriol, Josep, 48, 221n95 fascism, 34, 56, 218n73 fashion, 90–91, 99 Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI), 34 Fernández, Josep-Anton, 144 Fernández Mallo, Agustín, 8, 14, 22, 27, 138, 161–173, 250nn104–105 Fernández Ripoll, Luis M., 192, 259n81 film, 23, 142, 177, 214n21, 258n52; and geography, 211n79 film studies, 24 Fito, Álex, 186, 224n127 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 14, 229n48 flâneurs, 24, 146, 154, 160 Flaquer, Miquel, 181, 257n36 Fomento del Turismo de Mallorca, 180, 199 Fontserè i Mestre, Josep, 148, 248n63 France, xii, xviii, 34–35, 225n147, 232n86; comics industry in, 34 Franco, Francisco, xvii–xix, 33–36, 43–44, 47–48, 72, 139, 144, 180, 213n7, 218n73, 221n103, 236n117 Galician language, xii, xviii, 34 Galician region, xii, xviii, 34 Gallardo, Miguel, 4, 7, 49, 52, 56–57, 139, 143, 205n6, 207n23, 223n113, 245n21 García, Santiago, xii–xiii, 6, 36–38, 47, 57–58, 206nn18–19, 216n44, 220n95, 222n113, 227n170, 250n104 Garnier, François, 70

Gasca, Luis, 35–36, 38, 44, 46–47, 77, 215n34 Gaudí, Antoni, 160, 248n63 gaze: of comics reader, 56, 88, 117, 123, 129; of flâneur, 24; and landscape, 25; urban, 24 gender, 56, 140, 197, 262n111 Geneva, 39, 244n14 geography, xiii, 2–3, 14, 23–27, 98, 177, 199, 202–203; and comics, 24–25, 186, 198; cultural, xiii, 2–3, 23, 25–26, 73, 82, 93, 96, 117; emotional, 2–3, 26, 68, 82, 211n91; and GIS, 23; landscape and climate features, 62, 64, 66–68, 196; literary, 183–184, 190, 192, 198, 257n35; quantitative and qualitative, 26–27, 139; in Spain, xvii, 29, 178, 255n6; and uneven development, 142, 174, 176; urban, 2, 26–27, 92, 135 GeoHumanities, 23, 183 Giménez, Carlos, 48–49, 222n109 Glénat, 57 Google Earth, 164, 252n114 Goytisolo, Juan, 214n19 Goytisolo, Luis, 72 Granizada, 42–43, 60, 217n59 Graves, Robert, 180, 189 Groensteen, Thierry, 2, 37, 39, 60–61, 66–71, 73–75, 77, 80, 94, 129–131, 133, 138, 155, 170, 202–203, 215n25, 215n27, 218n64, 230n58, 231n70, 231n73, 232n83 Gubern, Román, 36, 43, 48, 51, 70, 77, 216n50, 217n52, 220n94, 229n38 Gutiérrez García Huidobro, Julio, 169, 249n103 gutter structure, 8, 19, 22, 89–91, 110, 124–125, 131–134, 233n89, 236n113, 243n94 Harvey, David, 136, 168, 177, 182–183, 246n28, 258n50, 258n52

2 9 6    I n d e x

Harvey award, xii Hatfield, Charles, 63, 71 Haussmann, Georges-Eugène, 147 Head, Glenn, 139 health, 147–148 Heaven’s Gate, 80, 252n121 Hemingways, the, 180 Hergé, 50–52, 179, 224n131 Hernández, Felip, 27, 187, 222n109, 227n170 Hernández brothers, 16 Hernández Cava, Felipe, 227n170, 245n26 HIV, 80, 167, 252n121 Hochadel, Oliver, 148–149, 247n63, 248n66, 248n71, 248n75 Holbo, John, 60, 70, 228n32 Hughes, Robert, 148, 156, 247n45, 248n76, 249n88 Hugo,Victor, 116, 240n53 humanities, xii, 2, 23–24, 136, 139, 142, 183, 246n35 humor, 18, 41–42, 44, 48, 50, 53, 150 hyperframe, 80, 94–96, 129, 242n79, 243n94; “open” variant of, 22, 28, 99, 104, 111, 120–121, 123–125, 128–134, 137, 165, 172, 196–198, 200 Iberian studies, xii, 136, 262n117 Ibiza, 80, 252n121 iconic/iconicity, 17, 20, 28, 33, 53, 64, 66–67, 83–91; 99–100, 105–106, 111, 114–115, 121–122, 138, 144, 158, 164, 187, 235n101, 237n119; and ambiguity, 109; in comics balloons, 70–71; iconization of speech, 71; 86; 164–165; and panel shape, 96 iconic redundancy, 126, 128, 168, 172 iconostasis/iconostatization, 29, 43, 97, 125, 127–130, 202 Iglesias, Fernando, 56

Ignatz award, xii image zone, 13–14, 71, 108, 193; overlap of, with text zone, 95, 104, 111, 127, 129–130, 187 Inrevés, 56–57, 73, 84, 186–187, 245n17 insets, 19–20, 27, 61–63, 74–77, 80–83, 87, 153–155, 167, 173, 187, 230n58, 231n66, 231n68, 231n70, 231n73, 232nn83–84, 233n90 islands, 102, 175–200, 202, 256nn23–24, 262n115. See also Balearic Islands Jacobs, Jane, 136, 141, 168 Japan, xii, 2, 55–56, 214n25, 225n147, 236n111 Joseph, Isaac, 141 Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, 23 Juliá, Santos, 213n3 Kaika, Maria, 136, 244n8 Kazakhstan, 163 Keko (comics artist), 56 Kim (comics artist), 58, 205n6, 227n170 King, Frank, 241n76 knowledge, 84, 91–92, 189, 235n102, 237n123, 244n6 Kuhn, Thomas, 251n106 labor, 46, 157 La Coruña, 162–163 Laforet, Carmen, 247n45 landscape, xi–xii, 1, 6, 23, 25, 181, 183– 184, 197, 199; and capitalism, 137, 177; and comics representation, 8, 64, 95, 131, 173, 176, 197; fictional, 190; and/ as human activity, 23, 25–26, 93–94, 96, 113–115, 117, 174, 178; literary/ cultural, 184–186; rural/urban, 25, 35, 101–102, 112, 135, 167; and subjectivity, 125, 131; as thematic focus, 3, 62,

I n d e x     2 9 7

64–73, 192–193; as way of reading/ theorizing comics, 2, 62, 127, 129, 134, 198, 202. See also under panels Lara, Antonio, 36, 46 L’Association, 226n167, 233n, 93 Latin America, xiii, 2, 14, 203 La Vanguardia, 4, 187 Lefebvre, Henri, 137, 141, 158, 173, 182–184, 199, 212n96, 232n86, 244n6, 246n35, 257n44, 257n46 Lefèvre, Pascal, 34, 44, 63, 72, 74, 88, 90, 113, 203, 218n65, 218nn73–74, 225n147, 229n46, 230n56, 235n101, 235n107, 241n75 Leger, Marc James, 183 leisure, 84, 151, 179, 181, 198–199, 257n44 L’Esquella de la Torratxa, 150, 217n55 LGBTQ, 54 Linares, Juan, 143 línea chunga, 30, 50, 212n103 línea chunga vs. línea clara debate, 50–53 Linhart, Francisco Torres, 56, 224n127 literariness, 184–185, 258n61 literature, xii, 14, 23–24, 35, 72, 177, 182, 184–185, 191–192, 214n18 Lladó Pol, Francisca, 4–5, 7, 11, 14–15, 17, 22, 27, 37, 47–53, 56, 74, 185, 202, 206n12, 207n29, 209n50, 219n81, 253n126 Llop, José Carlos, 192 London, 15, 163–164, 168 Longhurst, Alex, 209n54, 214n18 Los Angeles, 163 Lutes, Jason, 138 macédoines/medleys, 131 Madrid, 5, 34, 40–42, 139–140, 165, 213n16, 243n3, 252n121, 256n24: Callao cinema, 164; Gran Vía, 164; Metropolis building, 164; Puerta

del Sol, 41, 140; Windsor Tower, 163, 252n116 Madriz, 4, 49, 139–140, 207n31, 222n105, 225n138, 245n26 Magnussen, Anne, 215n25, 220n94, 223n113 Makoki, 7, 52, 57, 139, 245n21 Mallorca, xii, xviii–xix, 3–7, 8, 34, 37, 41, 47, 55, 63–64, 168, 175–200; and attempted assassination of the Pope, 231n75; Bay of Palma, 175; characteristic geomorphology of, 178–179, 196–198, 255n16; San Telmo, 179; social history, 196, 228n17, 255n16; Torrent de Sa Riera, 175; tourism growth in, 179–181 Mallorquí (language) 34 manga, 2, 56, 230n56 Manzano, Emilio, 8, 10, 14, 27, 56, 137, 140, 143–160, 173 maps, 20, 23, 101, 156, 164, 182, 187, 192, 239n26, 252n114, 258n50. See also cartography March, Guillem, 186 Mariscal, Javier, 48, 143, 221n93 marketing, 16, 19, 145 Martí, Josep, 56 Martínez Castellanos, Rafael, 140 Martín Gaite, 72 Martín Martínez, Antonio, 36, 40–41, 46, 216n42 Martín Santos, Luis, 72, 214n19 Martí-Olivella, Jaume, 209n54, 213n15, 256n28 Marx, Karl, 183, 236n119, 246n28 Marxism, 182–183. See also capitalism; exchange-value; Harvey, David; Lefebvre, Henri; Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista; use-value; ­Williams, Raymond Masereel, Frans, 138, 212n1, 244n14

2 9 8    I n d e x

Max (Francesc Capdevila Gisbert), xii–xiv, 4, 6–8, 11, 47–49, 55–56, 58, 64, 73, 144, 186–187, 205n6, 206n20, 208n35, 221n93, 221n95, 221n98, 224n127, 226nn158–159, 226n161, 227n170, 233n93, 234n94, 256n19, 259n67, 262n117 Mazzucchelli, David, 56 McCloud, Scott, 14, 22, 58, 60, 77, 89, 163, 170, 202, 217n51, 230n54, 236n111, 236n113, 253n126 McGuire, Richard, 231nn66–67 Mecáchis (Eduardo Sáenz Hermúa), 41–42 Mediavilla, Juanito, 7, 139, 222n113 Merino, Ana, xii, xiv, 86, 206n15, 221n103 Mestres, Apeles, 41–43, 60, 203, 217n55, 217n59, 238n18 Meteling, Arno, 24–25 Miami, 163 Micharmut (Juan Enrique Bosch Quevedo), 49, 52, 233n93 Michaux, Henri, 190, 259n80 Michelin Man, 15, 17–19, 209n52 Ministry of Culture (Spain; Ministerio de Cultura de España), 58 Ministry of Information and Tourism (Spain), 45–46, 219n81 Mirador, 150 Miró, Joan, 189 Mitchell, Don, 168, 211n87 modernism (Hispanic) 116 modernity, 86, 154, 161 Moix, Terenci, 36, 38, 44, 53 Molotiu, Andrei, 3, 29, 43, 83, 94, 97, 125, 130, 202, 233n89, 237n3 Mona Lisa, 86 monoframe, 68, 227n16 Montesol, Javier, 52, 222n113 Morgan, Harry, 69–70

Morocco, 139 Motter, Dean, 16 multiframe, 74, 78, 97, 99, 104, 124 Mumford, Lewis, 141, 211n95 Muñoz Molina, Antonio, xvii–xix music, 35, 90, 98, 102, 110, 142, 183, 214n21 Nadal Suau, Josep Maria, 190–191, 259n81 Nairobi, 15 narration, 60, 66–67; blurred-event, 72, 103, 107, 124, 133, 153–157; contrapuntal, 80; juxtaposition as, 70; parallel, 62–63; past vs. present, 71; recitation and monstration, 71; and simultaneity, 62, 74–77, 80–3; in the single-image, 60–61, 66–67, 69–72; and specificity, 72–73; visual, 39–40, 60–62, 69, 86, 90, 227n7, 227n10 narrative structure, 22, 27–29, 43, 61, 86, 89, 94–100; in literature, 35; and word balloons, 67, 70–71 National Comics Award (Spain), 6, 58, 227n170 naturalists (Catholic), 149, 158 nature, 25, 94, 102, 117, 136, 142–144, 147–151, 173, 184, 244n5, 247n63 Navarra, xviii Navarro, Joan, 5, 53, 205n7, 215n40, 218n65 Nazario (Nazario Luque Vera), 48, 54, 205n6, 221n95, 222n109, 225n138 neighborhood associations, 48 neoliberalism, 137, 177 neotebeo, 52, 224n132 New York City, 138–139, 217n50, 235n101, 245n17, 253n130 Nicaragua, 116 1984, 49 noir genre, 16, 140, 246n28

I n d e x     2 9 9

nondualism, 120, 124 nonsequitur image/transition, 62, 167, 253n126 Norma (publisher), 14, 52, 57 Nosotros somos los muertos/NSLM, 4, 8, 55–56, 84, 187, 206n18, 207n32, 226nn158–159, 226n161, 234n94, 262n111 Nova Cançó movement, 144 nueva historieta española, 6, 37, 47, 49, 212n2, 221n99, 222n112 Núñez, Miguel, 56 Olivares, Javier, 56, 227n170 Olympic Games, 145 organic metaphor, 101–102, 135–136, 147, 239n23, 243n3, 247n55 Ortega y Gasset, José, 234n96 Otis, Laura, 241n62 Outcault, Richard Felton, 41, 216n50, 217n52 page layout, xiii, 20, 22–29, 40, 43, 61, 77–78, 82, 89–91, 94–97, 99, 103–115, 120–134, 154–155, 172–174, 187, 193, 196, 198, 207n29; and blank/empty space, 66, 68, 88, 99, 101, 120, 127, 196; clothesline, 91, 99, 187; false horizontal match in, 107; and flatness, 61–63, 87–89, 111, 126–127, 130, 203; gallery, 74, 83, 86, 94–95, 97, 121–125, 130–131, 133, 193, 233n89; and hidden space, 113–114, 235n107; as linked with story action, 82; and “page-as-object,” 63, 105, 124; and scholarship, 86; unpaneled, 22, 40–42, 64, 68, 101, 130–133. See also insets; panels; hyperframe painting, 19, 29, 69, 86, 125, 213n16, 254n138 Palma de Mallorca (Ciutat), xviii, 3, 6, 40, 55, 82, 137, 163–164, 168, 176,

180–182, 186, 190, 245n20, 253n130; as monster, 181, 257nn35–36 Palmer, Óscar, 37 Pamies, Antonio, 48 Pamplona, xviii panels: composition of, 10, 13–16, 19–20, 27, 74–92, 94–97; default format, 27–28; full-page, 20, 74, 94, 112–116, 120–121, 126, 131, 133, 155, 164, 169, 187, 189, 210n69; grid/waffle-iron pattern, 8, 31, 78, 155, 202, 254n142; inking of, 11; landscape, 11, 22, 28, 63, 77–78, 82–83, 102, 164, 179; and reading, 29, 33, 90–91, 103–112, 125–130; size and shape of, 19–20, 74; and transitions, 77, 81, 89, 95, 103, 167, 236n113, 253n126; wordless, 20, 75, 90, 116, 210n69, 239n30. See also hyperframe; insets; page layout Paraguay, 98, 100 Parchís, 169–172, 254nn138–139 Paris, 147, 157, 168, 189, 244n14, 247n55, 252n122 parks, 138, 148–149 Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM), 34 Pavlovica, Tatjana, 209n54, 256n28 Peeters, Benoît, 103, 110, 123–124 Pellejero, Rubén, 49, 143, 205n6 Pellicer, José Luis, 40–42, 60, 196 Pere Joan (Pedro Juan Riera): ambiguity in the work of, 94–95, 105, 109; artist profile of, 3–10, 33; comics style of, 7–10, 14–15, 20, 22, 53, 207n29, 209n50; conception of comics of, 7; contemplative tone of, 105–106; critical attention to, 6–7; depiction of Mallorca by, 175–200, 206n12, 228n17; influence of, 5–6; international attention to, xii; name origin, 175; panel sequences in, 95, 126–127;

3 0 0    I n d e x

Pere Joan (Pedro Juan Riera) (continued) prioritization of the image, 15, 28, 41, 62, 94, 108, 129, 172, 193; recurring characters in works by, 7, 126, 206n21; reflection on own art by, 69, 84–85, 187, 207n26, 208n41, 254n3; reflection on own career by, 13, 187; and relief patterns, 8, 62, 68, 81, 87, 107–108, 129–130, 133, 154, 203; and reterritorialization of the text plane with images, 70; works from 1970s to 1990s by, 10–23 Pere Joan, long-form comics by: Azul y ceniza, 8, 10, 14, 29, 45, 59, 62–63, 73–83, 87, 94, 96, 130, 138, 140, 142, 161, 165, 167–168, 170, 173, 175, 187, 193, 201, 203, 210n58, 230n56, 231n66, 233n90; Baladas Urbanas, xiv, 11, 22, 28–29, 48, 59, 62–73, 131, 178, 187, 193, 201, 255n16; Cada dibuixant és una illa, 177, 186–188; 100 pictogramas para un siglo (XX), 8, 10, 28–29, 45, 59, 63–64, 68, 83–92, 94, 99, 133, 172, 187, 191, 193, 201, 203, 235n102, 237n123; 16 novel·les amb hòmens blaus, 8, 10, 14, 22, 26, 43, 68, 93, 96–97, 115–125, 130–132, 193; El aprendizaje de la lentitud, 10, 14, 22, 26, 33, 43, 68, 93–115, 121, 125–127, 130–131, 133, 135, 137, 172, 175, 179, 187, 193, 203, 237n3, 239n30, 252nn114–15; El hombre que se comió a sí mismo, 10–13, 96, 121, 206n21, 208n41, 210n68, 242n79; Història del turisme a les Illes Balears, 27, 177, 186–187, 189–190; Mi cabeza bajo el mar, 8–9, 96, 175, 208n43, 255n18; Muérdago, 11, 48, 131, 187, 208n34; Nocilla Experience, 8, 10, 14, 22, 27, 138, 140, 142, 161–174, 179, 187, 194, 208nn32–33, 250n104, 251n106, 253n126; Passatger en trànsit,

14, 207n26; Tingram, 69, 131–132, 175, 252n115; Viaje a Cotiledonia, 8, 27, 41, 68, 99, 177, 179, 185–186, 189–200; Yes We Camp!, 140 Pere Joan, short-form comics by: “Cita en Jartum,” 20, 74, 164, 242n79; “Desapego,” 22; “Diana piensa . . . ,” 62, 75–76; “El bestiario,” 16, 140, 246n28; “El Gran Motor Brown-Pericord” 20, 75, 179; “El jardín embozado,” 20; “En el recuerdo,” 11–13, 140, 208n37, 242n79; “En soledad,” 31–33; “Huidas,” 22, 238n8; “Indecisión,” 14; “La conjura del pasado,” 15–18, 140, 210n57, 246n28; “La fórmula,” 20; “La lluvia blanca,” 17–18, 22, 28, 68, 82, 99, 175, 179, 242n79; “Los mensajeros del cuerpo,” 20–21, 75, 140; “Los secretos de la Dragonera,” 74, 179; “Pasajero en tránsito,” 14, 74, 140, 163, 208n44, 246n28; “Promoción,” 19; “700 Cadillacs,” 19–20, 140, 164; “Un cocodril a l’Eixample,” xiii, 10, 14, 27, 43, 101, 137, 140, 142–162, 173–174, 176; “Untitled,” xiv, 62, 64–73, 81, 87, 94, 96, 112, 131, 178, 193, 201, 255n16; “X” 186–88 Pérez del Solar, Pedro, xiv, 6, 16–19, 37–38, 45, 50, 52, 55, 206n15, 207n31, 208n37, 209n52, 209n54, 209n56, 212n2, 219n79, 222n112, 223n125, 224n131 Pérez-Sánchez, Gema, 54, 139–140, 225n138, 245n26 Pérez Vernetti, Laura, 143 Peru, 98, 100 phenomenology, 118, 232n86 philosophy. See Barthes, Roland; Bergson, Henri; Lefebvre, Henri; Ortega y Gasset, José;Virilio, Paul photography, 42, 66, 86, 97–98, 187, 198, 216n48

I n d e x     3 0 1

physics, 162, 238n4 Picasso, Pablo, 117 Picornell, Mercè, 181, 257n35, 257n39 pictogram, 84–85, 87 Pla, Xavier, 183–184, 199–200 Plath, Sylvia, 167, 252n121 police, 35, 46, 154, 156–157, 249n88 politics: and comics of the 1980s–2000s, 53–54, 139–140; and ecology, 136–137, 168; history of, in Spain, xvii–xviii, 6, 16–17, 33–35; and nineteenth-century comics, 41; politicized identities, xvii; as spectacle, 16–17, 90 Pons, Álvaro, 37 Pons, Ángel, 40 Porcel, Pedro, 37 Portela, Carlos, 56 Portugal, xii Postema, Barbara, 3, 27–29, 61, 70–72, 75, 77, 90, 202, 227n8, 230n66, 232n84, 233nn88–99 postmodernism, 16, 140, 168 Prádanos-García, Luis, 136–137 Prado, Miguelanxo, xii, 49, 222n109, 227n170 Puerto Rico, 163 Pulgarcito, 44, 218n65 Rabadán, Marta, 140 Ramírez, Juan Antonio, 36 reading, 75, 77, 81, 89–91, 110; as contemplation, 89, 95, 126–130, 190, 201–202; conventional patterns of, 90, 104; embodied, 63, 96; nonlinear, 91, 173, 189; pace/speed of, 74, 90, 107–108, 113, 127–128, 191; topographical, 29, 62, 73, 86, 97, 125, 198, 200–201; Real Academia Española, 38 Remesar, Antonio, 36–37 Resina, Joan Ramon, 136, 211n89, 243n5

retroactive determination, 75, 78, 83, 105, 127, 133, 239n35 Revista Nova, 151 Ribera, Julio, 34 Riera, Pedro Juan. See Pere Joan Robedano, Robert and José, 42 Roca, Paco, xiii, 58, 227n170, 241n76, 245n19 Roger (Roger Subirachs i Burgaya) 52, 143, 222n113, 224n133 rural areas, 14, 22–23, 25–27, 34–35, 63–73, 90, 93–115, 135–138, 142, 144–145, 147, 150–151, 154–156, 160–165, 167–168, 173–176, 181, 183, 187, 196, 202–203 Russia, 163 Sáenz Hermúa, Eduardo. See Mecáchis Sánchez, Rosa María, 11, 64, 187, 208n36, 259n67 Sand, George, 180, 189, 256n23 Sauer, Carl, 25–26, 178, 246n35 science. See Kuhn, Thomas; Otis, Laura; physics science fiction, 16–17, 47, 53, 81 Seguí, Tomeu, 186, 205n6 Sennett, Richard, 101 Sento (Vicente Josep Llobell Bisbal), 52, 233n93 Sequeiros, Santiago, 56 Serra Simó, Cristóbal, 8, 27, 190–199, 259nn80–81, Seth (Gregory Gallant), 16, 139, 245n18 sex, 50, 52–53, 84 sexuality, 35, 54, 140 Simmel, Georg, 141, 211n95 Sió, Enric, 47, 220n94 social media, 19 Sorni,Vicente, 37 space. See comics space; urban space

3 0 2    I n d e x

Spain, xvii–xix, 98; democracy in, xix, 48, 51; Glorious Revolution, 40; history of, 213n4; international perceptions of, xviii; literacy in, 40; political history of, 33–34; Press Act of, 40, 42; Republics of, First and Second, 33–34; Restoration, the, 40, 42, 216n42; Transition, the, xii, 16, 33, 48, 51; War of Spanish Succession, 146 Spanish Civil War, 34, 36, 40, 43–44, 139, 180, 213n4, 213n7 Spiegelman, Art, 56 Star, 4, 47, 222n113 Stein, Gertrude, 180 Steiner, Wendy, 69–70 Steinlen, Théophile-Alexandre, 39 superhero, 24, 44, 218n73 Swarte, Joost, 51, 212n103 Swift, Jonathan, 190 Switzerland, 39, 60 Swyngedouw, Erik, 136, 244n8 taxidermy, 146, 149–151, 160 TBO, 4, 37, 44, 218n65 technology, 57, 91, 100, 235n98, 247n63 Teixidor, Emili, 47 text zone, 13–14, 19, 62, 71, 91, 94–95, 102, 109, 112, 117, 193; overlap of, with image zone, 71, 95, 104, 111, 127, 129–130, 187 Tharrat Pascual, Josep August, 143 theater, 144, 183 time/temporality, 29, 70–72, 83, 102, 121, 133–134, 138, 227n8, 231n73, 238n18, 251n112, 253n126 Tintin, 50–51, 53, 224n131 Tokyo, 168 Töpffer, Rodolphe, 39–40, 60, 215n37 topography, xi, xiii, 1, 3, 6, 8, 10, 13, 22–24, 26, 28–29, 39–40, 43, 61–64, 67–68, 71, 73, 75, 86, 89–90, 93–97,

125–126, 134, 137, 172–173, 190, 192–193, 196–198, 200–201, 203 Torres, Daniel, 49, 52, 222n109 tourism, 16, 23, 34, 89, 177–188, 198–200, 214n20, 255n6, 256n20; intellectual, 189; mass, 198–199, 256n31. See also Ministry of Information and Tourism travel. See airports; air travel; boats; travelogue, 97–98, 101 Ukraine, 163 Unamuno, Miguel de, 180, 256n23 Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT), 34 United Kingdom, 38 United States, xi–xii, 38, 41, 44, 47, 213n4, 217n50, 262n117 urban boosterism, 143, 145, 216n48 urban cultural studies method, 137–138, 142, 246n38 urbanization, 27, 101–102, 142, 144, 147, 162, 180–182, 189, 198, 214n19, 246n28 urban planning, 35, 101–102, 136, 141, 143, 147–149, 243n3 urban space, 8, 20, 47, 53, 140, 142–161; as privileged theme of comics, 135, 138– 140; as public space, 140–141; and rural space, 27, 136. See also flâneurs urban theory, 2, 140–142, 168, 182–184. See also individual theorists Uruguay, xiii use-value, 142, 145–146, 160 Valencia, xviii, 5, 37, 40, 139 Valentino, Rudolph, 189 Valls, Laura, 148–149, 247n63, 248n66, 248n71, 248n75 Vázquez de la Parga, Salvador, 36, 51 Vázquez Montalbán, Manuel, 247n52 Verboom, George Prosper, 147–148 Verne, Jules, 189

I n d e x     3 0 3

Viestenz, William R., 136, 211n89, 243n5, 244n7 Vilar, Pierre, 213n3 violence, 11, 20, 34, 50, 52–53, 56, 78, 145–146, 150–151, 158, 160, 167, 193–194, 196, 199, 208n41, 209n50, 252n121 Virilio, Paul, 167 Virolet, 151 Vitoria-Gasteiz, xviii Vives Miró, Sònia, 181–182

Willette, Adolphe, 39 Williams, Raymond, 142, 255n14 Wirth, Louis, 136, 141, 145 Witek, Joseph, 3, 28–29, 202, 212n99, 228n18 word/thought balloons, 14, 19, 41, 61–62, 66–67, 70–72, 74, 80, 83, 111, 127, 129–130, 153, 193, 217n52, 227n7, 227n12, 228n32, 229n37, 229n40, 229n45, 242n79, 242n85, 261nn95–96; as topographical marker, 71

Ware, Chris, xi–xii, 8, 29, 56, 139, 207n32, 245n19 Warternberg, Thomas E., 217n51 water, xi, 10, 14, 71, 96–115, 117, 137, 150, 164, 168, 175–200, 238n12, 239n23, 252n115, 254n1, 254n3

Xaudaró, Joaquín, 42 Young, Iris Marion, 168 YouTube, 19 Zaragoza, xviii, 205n6