Items15The creator’s order
  1. 1Blacksad (2010)Blacksad (2010) 7.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 2010Probably the most familiar Spanish comic in English, and a hardboiled detective series in which every character is an animal whose species suits its personality. John Blacksad, a cat private eye, works late-1950s America, and Juanjo Guarnido's painted art gives every snout and whisker real acting.…0
  2. 2Wrinkles (2016)Wrinkles (2016)Published Jan 1, 2016If you read only one Paco Roca book, make it this one. A man with Alzheimer's is placed in a care home, and Roca follows him and the residents around him with clear, gentle cartooning that lets the comedy and the dread sit side by side. It never turns into a lecture about aging; the small routines…0
  3. 3The Winter of the Cartoonist (2020)The Winter of the Cartoonist (2020)Published Jan 1, 2020A love letter to Spanish comics themselves. In the 1950s five cartoonists walked out of Bruguera, one of the country's biggest publishers, to run a magazine of their own, and Roca dramatises what that rebellion meant for artists working under Franco's dictatorship. Read it after Wrinkles: it is a…0
  4. 4Twists of Fate (2018)Twists of Fate (2018)Published Jan 1, 2018Roca's war epic tells a story most English readers have never heard: Spanish Republicans who lost the Civil War, fled to France and fought on, some of them in La Nueve, the company that fought its way to the liberation of Paris. A cartoonist, Roca's stand-in, coaxes the memories out of Miguel Ruiz,…0
  5. 5The HouseThe HouseRoca's quietest book. Three grown siblings, José, Vicente and Carla, return to the vacation home their late father built and kept tinkering with, to clear it out and decide whether to sell. Every half-finished repair and overgrown corner brings back a different memory, because each of them…0
  6. 6Return to Eden (2024)Return to Eden (2024)Published Jan 1, 2024Roca's most personal book grows out of a single old photograph of his mother, Antonia, at a beach picnic as a teenager. From it he rebuilds her family's overcrowded apartment in Valencia and the poverty, nationalism and black-market corruption of Franco's Spain, as seen by a girl who kept hoping…0
  7. 7Paracuellos (2016)Paracuellos (2016)Published Jan 1, 2016A cornerstone of Spanish autobiographical comics. Carlos Giménez was one of the children of the defeated, shuttled from one Church-run home to another in the years after the Civil War, and his short episodes from that childhood read like memories told across a table. IDW's 2016 EuroComics edition…0
  8. 8We're All Just Fine (2023)We're All Just Fine (2023)Published Jan 1, 2023Ana Penyas's debut is a portrait of her two grandmothers, chosen because their lives stand for those of most Spanish women who grew up and grew old under Franco. Penyas storyboards by hand, then builds pages from photographs and drawing, so kitchens, televisions and family snapshots feel physically…0
  9. 9The Art of FlyingThe Art of FlyingWriter Antonio Altarriba set out to understand why his father took his own life at the age of ninety, and the result is a whole Spanish century in one man: a poor childhood in rural Aragon, service in Franco's army during the Civil War and the long disappointments that followed. Kim's plain,…0
  10. 10David Rubín's The Hero (2015)David Rubín's The Hero (2015) 8.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 2015For anyone who thinks Spanish comics means memoir, here is the antidote. David Rubín retells the life of Heracles as a loud, saturated superhero saga in which swords and sandals share the page with video monitors, and his elastic, explosive cartooning turns every labor into a set piece. Dark Horse…0