First, a ship that has survived its mooring and a baby paratrooper on a special mission get lost in Goodbye, friends. And Nightmares in Ex-Machina II. Manipulation of dreams in favor of the British secret services in World War II
According to great scholars of the genre like Mandel, the police officer is born when the drama surrounding a person’s disappearance becomes a mystery. As great practitioners of this genre, from Agatha Christie to George Simenon, Preminger to Hitchcock have taken, the focus shifts from absence and its consequences to the mechanism of crime, putting all the weight of the plot on detective investigation. advantage.. However, the mystery is not only part of these successful fictions, it is also a constant protagonist of everyday reality, without us even realizing it. The omissions can be as troubling as they can be assimilated, depending on what’s not exactly intangible, what we might call the “degree of mystery” surrounding the story. In Goodbye Friends (Apa Apa comics), Begoña García-Alén categorizes three types of disappearance, three degrees of which form a vital axis: the first, the everyday, the absence considered a part of everyday life. It is the distance imposed by work that compels us to develop life with a constant and present void, but which allows us to know that it is imminent and accidental.
Second, the unexpected, the mystery that no one can explain, the mystery that appears suddenly and produces stories flowing from mouth to mouth like a snowball, turns into a fiction that transcends reality, breaks the limit of logic and enters the fertile land of mystery. . But the third disappearance is the scariest, connecting both, the everyday with the mysterious, creating an insoluble human drama. Forcing us to descend from these fictions to reality to see imminent flashes of possible tragedies that overwhelm and heartbreak. García-Alén transfers the teachings and tools of graphic poetry, which he has successfully applied, to the graphic novel, showing that emotions and feelings can generate reflections and doubts in the reader with the same force that his own poetry stimulates. The poetic compositions that create a story as different as they are magnetic have just won the Castelao Graphic Novel Award.
But as we said, this drama can leave tragedy and focus on mystery and wander around the more classical genre. Thierry Smolderen and Jorge González immerse themselves in Pesadillas Ex-Machina (ECC Comics, translated Isabel Moragón) and plot a plot that serves as the perfect metafiction about the genre itself, based on a story starring the genre’s most infamous author. offers its readers the solution of an impossible murder from its first page.
Smolderen is a student of popular culture who, in her previous work, has shown an extraordinary ability to reflect on history from fictions that society has created itself, seeking that strange feedback that keeps history moving forward on clues paradoxically left behind with a capital H. wildest human imagination. With Jorge González full of atmospheric creation, the work will unravel its mysteries by engaging in a dialogue between the characters used in the novels of the authors of the first half of the 20th century and those persecuted by the Nazis with their esoteric illusions. A surprising analysis of the mechanisms that govern gender.
Mysteries that arise from an author’s day-to-day or boiling mind, but which eventually form truths that alternate between tragedy and comedy, showing that life is perhaps not far from the fictions that represent it.