Sergio García, the illustrator who experiments to open new paths in Spanish comics | Culture | EUROtoday

“When accepting a project, I am not so concerned about the publication itself, but rather what they allow me to experiment with it,” defends the illustrator and cartoonist Sergio García Sánchez (Gorafe, Granada, 57 years outdated). His identify has been making headlines for a while now: cowl story The New Yorkercartoonist The sky within the head, included in lots of lists of one of the best comics of 2023, winner of the 2022 National Illustration Prize. In June, the panel he made for the brand new Paris metro might be unveiled, throughout the framework of the 2024 Olympic Games. The Granada native, who Now receiving late recognition in Spain after being distinguished and revealed in France and the United States, it has reached most of the people with an avant-garde fashion, in fixed transformation and that pursues ideas reminiscent of multilinear narration, expanded codecs or tailored area.

“I like that the scriptwriters give me the freedom to make the narrative and the staging flow without too many indications,” he says by cellphone from Granada, the place he’s a professor on the Faculty of Fine Arts at a public college. Whether in comics, for instance articles in The New York Times Book Reviewmake covers for The weekly nation o Babelia, in exhibitions or in funded analysis initiatives, García makes use of drawing to search out new methods of telling. What he calls “multilinear storytelling” is among the strategies he most makes use of to attain that objective. In it, a determine features as a container for tales that encompasses a number of drawings in flip. For instance in our bodies of crime (Dibbuks, 2017), scripted by Antonio Altarriba, makes use of the limbs of a corpse to inform a homicide from completely different factors of view discovered within the head.

To type these “adapted spaces”, which draw from ladies faculty de Will Eisner o 13, Rue del Percebe by Ibáñez, can be utilized from Putin's face (cowl of March 27, 2022 of The weekly nation) to Walt Whitman's beard for a overview of The New York Times. “He seemed to me to be the most creative and imaginative person we have on the Spanish scene. I have not seen that way of connecting the images with the text in any other author in Europe,” says Ricardo Esteban, founding father of Dibukks, present editor of Nuevo Nueve and who returned García to the Spanish market after virtually a decade. Another weapon in his narrative arsenal is to put a personality within the heart of the web page that invades and pertains to the remainder of the drawings on the web page, as might be seen repeatedly in The sky within the head (Norma, 2023), winner of the ACBD Critics' Grand Prix on the 2024 Angoulême Festival.

“He is one of the great masters of narrative composition in Spain. He breaks with the conventional sequentiality of the pages without sacrificing the narrative at any time,” says García's editor in Norma, Luis Martínez. “The rectangle is oppressive, it doesn't let me expand. Death to the rectangle, let's break its limits,” writes García in his scientific article The Story Container: Multilinear Storytelling in Expansive Space. This resource has been transferred to larger formats in recent years, such as the mural Guerra which he made in 2020, inspired by the Guernica and which is displayed in the National Picasso Museum in Paris, or in the 11 panels of almost four meters that will decorate the Stade de France station from the summer.

All the experimentation that García carries out cannot be understood without the research work he does as a teacher. “It is important for me not to dissociate my work as a university professor and cartoonist,” he says. He has exercised his function as a popularizer and theorist in conferences which have reached Belgium or Morocco, but additionally in some comics. History of a web page (Glénat, 2003), Anatomy of a cartoon (Sins Entido, 2004) and How to make a comic book (Faktoria Ok de Libros, 2009) are books – first revealed in French – through which he displays on tips on how to assemble a web page, the composition of the vignettes or the factors for selecting method to the scenes.

In those works from the early 2000s you can still see García's early style: rounded strokes, clear lines and an organic drawing, inspired by his European comic references: Moebius and Hergé. He has returned to these styles when he has undertaken children's projects, such as Lost in NYC (ECC, 2015), but mainly in Odi's blog (Dibbuks, 2013). A comic without dialogue, first edited by Dargaud in 2008, which tells several stories in two or three pages and the work that García is most fond of. The reason? The protagonists, Odi and his partner Adisson, are a another self of the author and his wife and main co-worker, Lola Moral.

“The time when we did Odi's blog It coincided with a moment of change, when we moved to the mountain. With her characters we try to decipher a reality that has always been presented to us encrypted and with which we do not feel completely identified,” explains Moral, who scripted the play and colors all of her husband's works. She met García when they were taking tests to enter the Fine Arts degree, they began dating in 1986 and married in 1993. Odi's blog It was the first comic in which Moral was in charge of the script, but in color he was present in García's career since The three paths (2009, Sins Entido). “I know Sergio's stroke very well and he knows my color. We complement each other almost without talking about it, when he puts very black shadows I interpret it with bright and natural colors to achieve a balance,” responds the multidisciplinary artist.

Both fight so that the colorist's work is more valued and his credits appear on the covers. “Color is the first thing the reader sees when he enters a bookstore and picks up a book, what it transmits to him in the first instance,” defends Moral. His children, aged 26 and 22, have also decided to dedicate themselves to illustration. “The only thing left is for the cat and the dog to start drawing. We say that our house [ubicada en una montaña de La Zubia] It is a workshop with beds to sleep in and a kitchen to eat.”

After his wife, García has worked the most with the screenwriters Antonio Altarriba and the Frenchman Lewis Trondheim. “The first is more cinematic and the other theatrical. Antonio has many changes of shot, low angle shots and Lewis describes characters who act in more or less fixed spaces, in full body. The good thing is that both leave me complete creative freedom,” he says. With whom he “would not repeat the experience” is Léo, a partner with whom he performed Dexter London (2002, Dargaud). “Being also an excellent illustrator, he likes the script to be just as he conceives it. In the style of Alan Moore, he likes illustrators who do what he thinks, which is not something negative but it does not suit my way of working.”

After publishing his miniseries Amura (1995, Glénat), García immersed himself in the French market. “It is difficult to work with comics in Spain because the prices are lower. You have two options left: the United States or France.” Thus, in the nineties and the first decade of the 2000s he dedicated himself almost exclusively to working in French. Except The sky in the head y Lost in NYC, all of his comics are impossible to obtain in Spain, as they are out of print or unpublished in Spanish. Before receiving the Illustration Prize in Spain in 2022, he had already been recognized at the BD Festival in Sierre (Switzerland) in 2001 and by the Society of Illustrators of New York (2016).

García points to his work in the press as being responsible for giving him visibility in Hispanic territory: “Making the illustrations for the reviews of The New York Times, who has a million subscribers, and make three covers for The weekly country “It has given me a lot of cachet.” Esteban, who rediscovered him in a comic book salon in Granada in 2007, and his current editor Martínez agree with him: “Norma's directors met him in the pages of EL PAÍS and on the covers of The New Yorker”, points out the latter. However, he does not believe that he has been ignored these years in Spain, but rather that he has made “the leap to the general public”: “He has been taking steps like a gazelle, it has been like an escalation and right now he is at the best point he could be.” ”.

Whether or not he is a prophet in his own land, García has projects as divergent as usual: he is preparing an illustrated book in French for the end of the year, Crossed paths in the golden valley, with a script by Trondheim, and in 2025 it will star in an anthological exhibition at the Cayón gallery in Madrid.

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