This is a real Comic Con: Chronicle of Comic Barcelona, ​​an event held in Europe from which Peru can learn

(Special from Barcelona). It’s easy to get lost in shops for funkos, t-shirts, and role-playing games. Distract yourself with each splendid She Hulk that passes by or discreetly pass by a Stormtrooper, always intimidating. If one wants to reach the nerve of Cómic Barcelona, ​​one must break the siege of merchandising stores and the processions of cosplayers in front of the food courts until reaching the editorial platforms convened every year, at the beginning of April, in the convention center from Montjuic.

For Meritxell Puig, its general director, it has not been easy to rebuild the formerly called Salón del Cómic and reach the 41st edition after the health crisis. “It was two years of a pandemic without being able to hold events,” she explains. A possible survival thanks to the “online” events, but always waiting for the long-awaited face-to-face. To resume last year, coinciding with its 40th anniversary, it had to recompose an already dispersed human team, for what was an event that, in its timid restart, served to test the optimistic response of the recovered public.

This edition, after closing its doors with the figure of 110,000 visitors, was much more rewarding for the organizers. Puig calls it “the year of effervescence”, thanks to the return of international guests and major exhibitions. This year, the Salón Grand Prix was won by cartoonist Trini Tinturé (Lérida, 1935), an institution of comics and illustration on the peninsula, but invisible under the gray years of Francoism. To her recognition was added a powerful presence of women dedicated to graphic humor, who, without a doubt, stole a good part of the attention that is devoted to hypermuscled superheroes. Names that in Latin America don’t sound familiar, but in Spain are essential: from the pioneers Àngels Sabatés, Isabel Bas or Mariel Soria, to the contemporary Flavita Banana, Moderna de Pueblo, Raquel Gu, Pedrita Parker or Ana Oncina, as well as Latin Americans who They have managed to enter the European market such as the Argentine Agustina Guerrero, the Colombian Angi Mansur or the Peruvian Rocío Quillahuamán. “We are living a very beautiful moment in Spain, with wonderful and consolidated authors, a new generation that is taking risks with very diverse and interesting projects. It is not easy to be an author, but I think that in Spain they are doing very well”, points out Puig, who encourages cartoonists in the region to take the leap: “I think that for the Latin American author, if they want to come to Spain to start his career, this is the moment”.

A note about the industry

With an average of 110,000 visitors, Comic Barcelona is an event where the public comes to discover new things, get to know their favorite authors, and take part in conferences, exhibitions or shows. But especially, he comes to the convention center installed in front of Plaza España, to buy. Its projection in sales is equivalent to what publishers obtain in the Christmas and Sant Jordi seasons, as Book Day is celebrated in Barcelona.

Anyone who entered Cómic Barcelona having in their heads the names of authors who reigned a decade ago will have to take an intensive course to discover the authors of the replacement generation. If there is one thing that characterizes the Catalan fair, it is that its main focus is on showcasing the new trends in European comics, which is always fighting for its space against the Japanese manga industries and super heroic production concentrated in the American houses Marvel and DC. “While superheroes are still on the rise, there are other things to like as well. It surprises me and I like to see how comics that have nothing to do with this genre are circulating strongly among young people and adults”, warns Puig.

And what are those books that set trends? To find out, we talked to a local legend: Emilio Bernárdez, the editor of the Cúpula, and one of the people in charge of the magazine “El Víbora”, together with the also legendary Josep Maria Berenguer, founded in 1979, and who recruited teachers of Spanish comics as recognizable as Nazario, Martí, Max or Roger. Great connoisseur of the comic book market, thanks to our noses, Spanish-speaking readers have been able to discover the work of authors such as Ralf König, Daniel Clowes or Peter Bagge, a guest at Comic Barcelona last year and whose key work, “Odio”, has already reached the third volume translated into Spanish by the writer Hernán Migoya. Likewise, this label published the first LGBT and feminist comics in the peninsula (with authors such as Gloeckner and Dreschler), and launched the careers of several young Spanish authors, such as Ana Oncina, Sole Otero or Anabel Colazo. “Let’s say that we are very selective with the material we choose. There were people who laughed at us, at what we did, and who are now taking out the checkbook to hire the authors that we used to have. Because now they are business ”, Bernárdez proudly tells us at his stand, one of the most besieged by readers who do not make concessions to the mainstream, fed up with characters with superpowers or the evolution of pokemons.

“Last year there were not so many visitors to the Show,” confirms the editor when we ask him about the recovery of the industry after the health emergency. The truth is that, since the confinement, the local public began to consume more comics on the Internet, paper editions that they bought virtually to read at home. “The pandemic was a misfortune for almost everything, but the comic benefited from a growth of close to 5%. Given the precarious nature of this industry, we appreciated that 5%”, he comments.

This year, the novelty of his label was “Dulce de Leche”, a disturbing work by Miguel Vila, an Italian cartoonist of Argentine descent, who offers a very peculiar vision of paraphilias, in this case, the protagonist’s obsession with lactating women. His is a comic that is on the lips of all critics and specialized Spanish media. Another requested title is “May the end of the world find us dancing”, by Sebas Martín, a homosexual love story during the years of the Spanish Republic, a few months after the outbreak of the Civil War.

Latin America, almost absent

Any Latin American visitor will be surprised that Latin American authors are a marginal presence. The only author of the poster, whose sales are still insured, is the late Quino. And if you ask publishers about them, it will be especially women authors who have found a place on the shelves. Thus, in addition to the aforementioned Guerrero, Mansur and Quillahuamán, Bernárdez highlights the works of Chilean authors around the Brígida magazine, such as Marcela Trujillo, Sol Díaz, Isabel Molina or Pati Aguilera, as well as the Colombian-Ecuadorian Power Paola.

Other novelties to highlight, and for which we will have to wait a long time in case they reach local bookstores are “Por culpa de una flor” by María Medem (Blackie Books), an ambitious comic by this 28-year-old Sevillian author, focused on sensations that transmits nature, and that replicates with an explosion of color; “Some teachers and the whole truth”, by Valencian Daniel Torres (Norma), who won the Barcelona Comic Grand Prix last year, and whose work is exhibited as the fair’s major exhibition; “Ukrainian notebooks. Diary of an invasion” (Salamandra Graphic), by the Italian Igort, a chilling volume that accounts for the first hundred days of the war in Ukraine through testimonies collected from the country invaded by Russia a year ago.

Likewise, another example of the best European comic is “María la Jabalina”, by Cristina Durán and Miguel Ángel Giner (Astiberri), which illustrates the story of María la Jabalina, a young anarchist who in 1942, at the age of 25 in Paterna, became in the last woman shot by the Franco regime; also “Frankenstein” (Bang Ediciones), by the Barcelonan Sandra Hernández, which proposes an original twist to the novel by Mary Shelley, without breaking with the spirit of the classic or with its atmosphere of terror, focused on motherhood and the fear of the different