Abstract
With an eye on the past that informs today’s political situation, Simón Abad analyzes the concepts of memory and forgetting from a clinical and historical perspective in three recent Spanish graphic narratives: Antonio Altarriba and Kim’s El arte de volar, Paco Roca’s Los surcos del azar, and Santiago García and Luis Bustos’s ¡García!. Although each of these graphic novels differs in aesthetics and style, they all address the impact of the Civil War and Francoism on the Spanish democratic society of the post-Transition period. By tracing the line between these novels’ pedagogical and historical importance, Simón Abad demonstrates how the past continues to have echoes in the present.
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Change history
27 April 2021
The book was inadvertently published with a couple of errors: 1. The last name of one of the contributors appears incorrectly on the webpage (https://www.springer.com/us/book/9783030568191). It appears as: Abad, Fernando Simón but should appear as: Fernando, Simón Abad. 2. The same should be corrected on the source line of the opening page of chapter 3 in the PDF: appears as F.S. Abad but must appear as F. Simon Abad.
Notes
- 1.
Scholars agree that the period of Transition to democracy in Spain began with Franco’s death in 1975. What is less certain is when this transition formally ended, with some suggesting that it was with the 1977 election or the 1978 Constitution, and others asserting that is was not until the 1981 attempted coup or the 1982 PSOE election victory.
- 2.
All translations are my own.
- 3.
In El arte de volar (2009 ) Antonio Altarriba describes his father’s point of view regarding what happens in the family environment, although he would later pay tribute to his mother with El ala rota (2017), giving a more holistic view of the situations that occurred within the marriage. Both titles are complementary to one another and at the same time independent in their points of view.
- 4.
Agent García is a reference to the Spanish comic books of the 1940s, like Roberto Alcázar and Pedrín, but the reader can also see the influence of characters from the comic and Anglo-Saxon novels, such as Jack Kirby’s Captain America or Ian Fleming’s James Bond. The cryogenisation of García’s character and his subsequent thawing create a parallel with Steve Rogers (Captain America) that can be seen in the way both characters fight and in the conservative and traditional attitude and manners that both espouse.
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Simón Abad, F. (2020). Memory, Amnesia, and Forgetting: Graphic Representations of a Chronic Disease in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Spain. In: McKinney, C., Richter, D.F. (eds) Spanish Graphic Narratives. Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56820-7_3
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