Much has happened since “reading comics is not reading” and “child, leave the comic and study”. The 40 years that the edition of the Barcelona Comic Fair celebrates give vertigo and at the same time context to all this evolution, and that is why going through its exhibitions and activities these days condenses, as in a perfect vignette, how deeply rooted this cultural phenomenon is .
There are comics for children and adults, for mainstream teenagers seduced by manga, as well as for activists of all ages, women who draw and are drawn, objectified but also transgressive and defiant.
They exude imagination in abundance and above all, a manifest will to explain to ourselves as a society how diverse we can become and at the same time fit into a line framed in a vignette with a minimum note. The narrative of illustration does not seem to have a ceiling, and new technologies make their way into the proposals of authors who share space with other traditional ones, welcome to the comicverse.
The fact that one of the proposals in the program is the screening of a film like ‘Ninjababy’ attests to this transformation: the Norwegian comedy that won the European Film Awards connects comics, young people and our concerns like a somewhat irreverent but honest mirror. It is a woman’s gaze, that of director Yngvild Sve Flikke, which gives movement and a new expression to the vignettes of the author of the comic ‘The Art of Falling’ by Inga H. Saetre, another woman, and that is not a mere coincidence.
The massive irruption of girls and women in the comic culture of manga has an echo in the projects that authors, both scriptwriters and illustrators, have been pushing and devising for some time, in other more consolidated variants of the genre that do not have as much social projection or merchandising behind them.
Cinema and series are a perfect springboard to round off the cultural experience and draw the circle that includes vital concerns, concerns, claims and a whole world that wants to be shared through reading.
It is only necessary to take a look at the fruits of the seed that an already mythical store like Norma Comics, at the apex of Fort Pienc in Barcelona, proposes. Not only has it grown in space and business over the years: it has generated around it a flourishing cosmo of cultural consumption, underpinned by the no less legendary library of the fantastic genre Gigamesh, asian food and manga shops, merchandise and conversation spaces between connected styles and generations but, until recently, not scrambled.
The jump of the Comic Hall
In the same way, the Comic Fair has taken that leap to connect with the new times and the new generations that give continuity to the cultural but also commercial phenomenon. More space for manga, film screenings, and also fantasy themes and role-playing games in their non-comic variants are a catwalk to attract new audiences, to renew the sap that runs through the project. Also reserved time to tell the process of creating an animation of a movie from a comic, or for the little ones to become familiar with this way of telling, from the hand of adults.
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A consecrated cartoonist like Tom Gauld, who this week has published in Salamandra Graphic Kids the story ‘The little wooden robot and the trunk princess’, has achieved with his brilliant illustrations recreate the environment and concerns of the scientific world and also of the literary sector, with its agents, readers, librarians and writers.
The bridge of the imagination opens before our eyes so that we can go through life in its different stages and complications, and the proposal of the world of comics is there, within our reach.