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Abstract

Spanish comics represent an exciting and diverse field, but with few exceptions they are unknown to most comics scholars outside of Spain. This is one important reason behind choosing the subject for not only one but two special issues of European Comic Art. Another reason is the opportunity to draw attention to the extensive comics research in Spanish, and a third is that a national comics focus such as this one contributes to two perspectives within comics research that are very much in vogue, namely transnational studies and memory studies. The six articles included in this issue contribute in different ways to one or all three of these concerns and, despite their necessarily limited number, represent a surprisingly broad spectrum of historical periods, genres and themes.

The introduction offers an overview of English-language and Spanish-language scholarship about Spanish comics since 2000. This research is typically concerned with one of four main chronological periods, i.e. early comics history 1875-1939; the Francoist dictatorship 1939-1975; the Political Transition 1970-1985; and Democratic Spain from the early 1980s, and some of its recurrent themes are memory, gender, regional identities and history, and/or a focus on social or educational comics. The articles in the two special issues on Spanish comics (11.1 and 11.2) almost all relate to these periods and themes in different ways, and together they show that comics scholarship about Spanish comics is a fascinating field, and one that offers plenty of opportunities for further study.

This edition of European Comic Art was not planned as a themed issue, but during the editing process, we noted that all four articles may be regarded as offering variations on mise en abyme, the use of an image within an image or text within a text, whereby the inner picture or story illuminates the outer work. This is a term whose heraldic origins link it to visual depictions, and a figure that the comics medium, with its single and multiple frames, can deploy to particular effect. We will show in our conclusion how the frame within a frame occurs in the articles introduced below, either literally or metaphorically.

This edition of European Comic Art begins by adopting a retrospective viewpoint and ends with a look to the future, not entirely rosy but not wholly bleak. Our first article offers a reassessment of the relationship between Hergé's Tintin and conservative Catholic discourses of the 1930s. We then move on to a personal recollection of a landmark moment in the legitimisation of comics in France: the Cerisy conference of 1987. In our third article, two virtuoso comics autobiographers reflect (in an email discussion that took place in 2006, here translated into English for the first time) on the loss of the searching, edgy tonality of early comics life writing in favour of something more crowd-pleasing. Finally, a young Brighton-based comics artist shares her love of the medium and her experience of solidarity among her fellow artists but has a cooler appraisal of the current political scene and the health of the comics culture in the United Kingdom.