Consequential Art

Spanish comics have attracted considerable critical attention internationally: dissertations have been written, monographs have been published, and an array of cultural institutions in Spain (the media, publishing houses, bookstores, museums, and archives) have increasingly promoted the pleasures, pertinence, and power of graphic narrative to an ever-expanding readership – all in an area of cultural production that was held, until recently, to be the stuff of child’s play, the unenlightened, or the unsophisticated. This volume takes up the charge of examining how contemporary comics in Spain have confronted questions of cultural legitimacy through serious and timely engagement with diverse themes, forms, and approaches – a collective undertaking that, while keenly in step with transnational theoretical trends, foregrounds local, regional, and national dimensions particular to the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Spanish milieu. From memory and history to the economic and the political, and from the body and personal space to mental geography, the essays collected in Consequential Art account for several key ways in which a range of comics practitioners have deployed the image-text connection and alternative methods of seeing to interrogate some of the most significant cultural issues in Spain.

Deploying diverse theoretical approaches – from history, memory, and emotion to urban ecology, feminism, queer studies, intermediality, and visual culture – this volume explores contemporary Spain’s vibrant, diverse, socially-invested, and longstanding comics culture.

• Imprint: University of Toronto Press
• Published: July 2019
• Pages: 280

• epub: 9781487531362
• pdf: 9781487531386
• hardcover: 9781487505035

Samuel Amago is professor of Spanish in the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese at the University of Virginia.

Matthew J. Marr is associate professor of Spanish in the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese at the Pennsylvania State University.

"Experiencing a rebirth, Spanish graphic narratives offer a timely socio-political, economic, and cultural commentary on contemporary Spain. Consequential Art draws on superb archival work and provides an in-depth exploration of the graphic novel in relation to the broader cultural and socio-historical context of Spain in the last two decades."

Benjamin Fraser, Department of Hispanic Studies, East Carolina University

"Experiencing a rebirth in Spain, graphic narratives offer a timely socio-political, economic, and cultural commentary on contemporary Spain. Examining this timely connection, Consequential Art draws on superb archival work and provides an in-depth exploration of the graphic novel in relation to the broader cultural and socio-historical context of Spain in the last two decades."

Jorge Perez, Professor of Iberian Literatures and Cultures, University of Texas at Austin