The Barcelona Comic Fair (Comic Barcelona 42), the great comic book festival – a hundred guests, more than 200 exhibitors, 52,000 square meters – which is held at the Fira de Montjuïc from Friday to Sunday. And it is already leaving unforgettable images such as seeing a visitor dressed as Mortadelo (We don’t need another hero, of course) tucked into the Thunderdome, the willful reproduction of the famous structure for fights to the death that presides over the Mad Max exhibition and from which hangs a rusty sign that reads “High Fatality Road, deaths this year: 57″. Cels Piñol, who sponsors the expo, described as a “journey to the heart of myth”, remembers that there are Mad Max cars for Scalextrix! I want my Ford Falcon V8 now! Another image: a young woman dressed as Cat Woman passing by the life-size doll of John Blacksad, Canales and Garrido’s cat detective (who are signing at the fair), and who seems to wink at the feline girl, although it is that The cat investigator has him at the funeral in one fell swoop. A lot of cosplay, as you can see. You can be looking at Asterix albums (in the Anaya booth they have set up a Roman fort) and notice a jingle next to it: it is a Gaul who carries his sword on his belt and accidentally hits the news table with it. In the area dedicated to the cosplayers, with changing rooms, stalls where they sell you everything to dress up (in Hephastus Cospley Forge you enter as Joan and leave as Wonderous Joan, for example), and even a “Cosplay Help” booth, the hall warns on several signs that “Cosplay is not consent” and that if you want to photograph someone in costume you have to ask them first, ask for permission and “respect their right to say no.” Also that “do not touch or hug without permission.”
The exposition about Ibáñez (where Mortadelo was undoubtedly headed before falling into the clutches of Tina Turner’s Aunty Entity, Aunt Ama, who may have confused him for wearing black with Mad Max/Mel Gibson), is very exciting and On a screen it records the repeated visits, each year, of the late and beloved cartoonist to the Salon. Faced with the images of the author in the 2002 edition, a mature man gets excited and exclaims: “Look, that’s when he signed me!” “When you see so many people waiting for you, you get scared,” Ibáñez is saying on the screen, “but the truth is that you appreciate the contact,” something that many of the authors present today at the Salon would sign (and it’s worth the word). Among the material on display in the exhibition, in addition to recovering the 2016 exhibition in which 86 authors recreated the world and characters of Ibáñez for his 80 years, is the poster of the 34th salon created by him (a joke about salon and the western saloon) and the only drawing he made about the covid epidemic (“kick in the butt against the damn virus”).
Enric Fontcuberta (EFE)
By one of those wonderful coincidences that always occur at the fair, along with another of the exhibitions, the one dedicated to witches (Illustrated coven, with 30 authors who “pay homage to an essential representation in fiction”), on Friday none other than Tanino Liberatore was giving a talk that focused a lot on his amoral cyborg RanXerox. He remembered with nostalgia his comrade Stefano Tamburini and the seventies, “in which there was some hope.” He said that “when we drew RanXerox we believed that things could change, but today it is clear that no, there are no countries, no governments, no politics, only an elite that rules; It is serious, yes.” While a young woman dressed as Batman’s Poison Ivy listened to him, he explained that the person who has influenced him the most is Michelangelo, “who also distorted and deformed the human body to show it how he wanted.” Regarding the sex and violence of his RanXerox world, he reflected that the real human being is much worse.
When this special envoy asked the cartoons if they had no trouble with the photocopier company from which they took the name of their character, initially Rank Xerox, he responded: “Oh, yes, a lawyer sent us a letter, Stefano answered him very RanXerox and there were no consequences, we changed the name a little and continued it as Ranx.” More thorny is the issue of Lubna, RanXerox’s 12-year-old girlfriend… “Today you couldn’t create a character like that, the sensitivity of society has changed a lot and there is a different attitude. The curious thing is that I have been criticized a lot for violence but almost no one has mentioned the word pedophilia. When we created the character he was far from any unhealthy spirit. Now society is very poorly thought out. In reality, the bad character in RanXerox is her, who is very bad!”
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Many photos today, Saturday, World Star Wars Day, with the imperial assault troops in a Hall in which George Lucas’ universe is very present. The Mandalorian’s helmet costs 132 euros, an endearing animated Grogu for 80 and a sparkling lightsaber for a whopping 240 euros (of course, if it helps you cut Darth Maul in two, the price is worth it). The Hall also claims fantasy dungeon & dragons style and in the Heroquest game booth you can sit down to prepare your adventure in a classic tavern of the genre where only Thulsa Doom is missing serving drinks.
Enric Fontcuberta (EFE)
Comics for all tastes everywhere. From the biopics in vignettes of Camus, Rimbaud or Jack London to the monsters of we have demons by Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo (sic), passing through the graphic novel of Dune or its expansions. Queues at the Astiberri booth for Javi de Castro’s signing of his successful Cosmo in space. In Penguin’s large stacks of the award-winning Satrapi’s albums. A moving moment: Gerardo Balsa dedicating a copy of his series The shadow of the condor (and drawing a pilot) to the representative of the Association of Aviators of the Republic (Adar), Antonio Valldeperes.
In Norma’s booth, with the indispensable Josefina setting the pace like the comitre of the Ben-Hur galley, some of the stars of the fair signed in front of long lines, such as Miguelanxo Prado, with the complete edition of easy preythe tandem of the elegant Sana Takeda and Marjorie Liu, with the new installment of their fantasy and supernatural horror series Monstress or George Bess and Pia Bess with their version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo. To highlight George Bess his Dracula, in which the count’s three “brides” multiply exponentially to the ecstatic astonishment of Jonathan Harker (who would catch a dedicated vampire!).
This special envoy has taken, among other things, the VI album of the wonderful series The eagles of Rome, by Marini, who is signing these days, also with Norma; a drawn biography of Lovecraft published by Oberon, the submarine war adventure Hitler’s last secretby Mariolle and Piacentini (Hachette Graphic), and the sensational edition of The shadow over Insmouth by Lovecraft himself illustrated by Tomás Jr. (Minotaur). To Tomás Jr. (Tomás Sánchez, his stage name comes from his friends who called him that to distinguish him from his father) the Hall dedicates an exhibition (Fantastic graphics) in which you can admire his extraordinary illustrations of Tolkien’s work – how wonderful the pursuit of Frodo by the 9 Nazgûl on horseback! -, the originals of his tarot The Lord of the rings or the one dedicated to his admirer Guillermo del Toro (no less). Conversing while he dedicates to me The shadow over Insmouth with the drawing of a friendly batracian relative of the Marshes and the phrase “for Jacinto, from the abyss”, we talk about the influence on his works of the images of fairy tales and Slavic folklore, and what Lovecraft likes (the shadow is his favorite story, of course), whom he discovered at the age of 13 in the seminal Alianza y Llopis edition of The Cthulhu Mythos. Also about how thin skin some Tolkien fans have. He, who is a member of the Tolkien Society and winner of its Best Award in 2015, had a guy jump on his neck for depicting Boromir with a beard, arguing that in canonical purity a Dúneadin should not have one. What you have to see, and draw.