This is a city that is gradually becoming a ruin. This is a city which streets are constantly covered by puddles and its buildings are decorated with cracks. This is a city that carries a painful past and lives a brutal present. Its inhabitants move alone, but they share the same wish: the desire to…
A Missing Car and a Big Purple Smile: Nueva Berlín
A clothing store. A missing car. A key that gets bigger and bigger in the hands of a young woman. Two women travel around the city, trying to find the missing car of one of them. A willing chair that functions as a bicycle. Dialogs that keep repeating, like echoes of a previous conversation. A…
Ghost, Cities, and Other Pains: The Sad Violence of LOS FANTASMAS DE MI CIUDAD
In Mexico you must learn how to live with empty places on the table, with names that become unpronounceable because they are too painful to be told. You must learn to live with photographs that remind you of those who are gone — those who you do not know whether they will come back. You…
The Harsh Experience of Survival with DESERTER
How do we represent pain? How do we visualize mourning? How do we live knowing that all the people we love is gone? How can we continue living if the world around us is consuming? How do we live knowing that we survive while others could not? All these questions are present in the trilogy…
The Expansion of Comic Language: MELANCOLíA and Graphic Poetry
When we analyze comics, it is very common to find emphasis on the sequential aspect of the comic’s language. As if the continuity of images in a certain order could be the most significant quality of comics. Despite that, it is a reality that the images in a certain order have the capacity to represent…
A Bird with Broken Wings: Hector German Santarriaga’s JULIA
Perhaps one of the most terrifying things to do is to explore the deepest and darkest aspects of human beings. See how far a person can go to expand the limits of existence itself and avoid the terror — the precautions — and watch reality as cruel as it can be. It is an act…
Z: Visions of a Putrefied World
The first encounter with this graphic novel is a violent and disturbing image. A soldier with a skull instead of a face is laughing after cutting off another’s man’s head. The victim looks more as a member of the Hare Krishna movement than a criminal. The man who was executed is falling and his lost…
The Color of Solitude is Black
It starts with three friends and a robbery. Apparently, what seems to be a case of a group of men committing a crime, really is a case of evocation and solitude. In this sense, it is probably more a story about the city and its hidden places than a lawbreaking story. Color de hormiga by Emmanuel…
SUEÑOS ROTOS: SOFÍA: Illusions That Become Real Nightmares
These days, we tend to consider boredom as a kind of disease, something that we have to avoid at any cost. It is common to hear phrases like: “boredom is the mother of all vices.” Boredom is the result of “having too much free time,” therefore being bored is being lazy, unproductive, indifferent. “There is…
Images that Can Be Touched: Patricio Betteo’s CINCO
Our first contact with the world is through sensation. We first experience and feel. We see, we smell, we touch, and after that, we translate the sensations into thoughts, into words that we can communicate to others and to ourselves. We first experience the world, and then we create a language to understand it. Although…
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