I saw the light 10 years ago and it must be a single book. But it has become ambitious comic book tetralogy: in practice 1,000 pages of cartoons of blood and coal dust from the minesreflecting the misery of those who descended the well and their families, the arrogance of employers and marquises who exploited them, and the violent repression of military and civilian guards ordered by a shaken Second Republic Government. After more than a tail 42,000 copies sold from the first three books “The Song of the North” (Astiberria), Alfonso Zapico ends in the fourth of his fictional story of failure. Asturian Revolutionwhile in October 1934During the Second Republic, the miners of Las Cuencas revolted, demanding better living conditions.
Zapico (Blimea, 1981) redeems this memory through characters such as mining leader Apolonio, his daughter Isolina, and the marquis’ son Tristán, a couple living a complicated love story. “Unknown. The Civil War swallowed it up. It’s a forgotten story even in Asturias. It has two versions: the most epic of the basins, the commune of miners, dynamite and workers, and that of Oviedo. “Those savages from the basins who overturned the capital and destroyed the cathedral” are referred to as prejudices. was done,” he explains. from AngoulemeIt is the place where the Asturian cartoonist, who settled entirely in France, also lived and worked as a teacher.
Zapico winner in 2012 National Comics Award, for James Joyce biography ‘Dublinés’ to end it tragic story of loserssurvivors hiding in the mountains like maquis. “They have a nihilistic side. They were people who had just lost the brutal strikes in 1917. Then they lost in the Civil War. There was a strike of silence in the 1960s, then the re-conversion. “They feel obliged to make sacrifices to enter that garden and pave the way for those who come after them,”
the author “Bridges of Moscow” (Graphic article on the Basque conflict with Fermín Muguruza and Eduardo Madina) believes that the wounds of this revolution “still linger”. “They’re mixed with theirs. Civil war. They were timed. But now the generations that lived it perish, and with them the youth of their memory regains it, for in the mine valleys many people are dead in the ditches and wells. Not talking about something and hiding it feeds resentment,” he says, the grandson of a mining family that, like most of his generation, feels “uprooted and empty and an identity obsession” in order to “reclaim the legacy that allowed us to build on” origins and as humans”.
The cartoonist reassembles the pages reserved for this in the three volumes preceding the night on a white background and a black background, and reassembles the scenes in the mine. “But there’s a metaphor for the dramatic here, the tragedy that’s coming.” There is also more silence. The drawing speaks for itself. like in cartoons execution based on a real case, That of “a young football player from Racing de Sama who was hanged to set an example in a square like in the Middle Ages”.
scarcity of documentation and direct statements about maquisity of the 34 revolution led the author ‘other sea’ resorting to the “tricks” of fiction to use certain episodes that actually happened in the post-war period, such as a meeting in the middle of the bush between a lemur and two pairs of civil guards in which they avoid confrontation. “Neither side wanted to shoot. When there was much misery and cold winters in the 1940s, many civilian guards sold ammunition to the fleeing rebels.”
“Alien in Your Country”
It’s also a real shot western in a bar like a ‘lounge’ in a town. He starred Commander Kills, a maki that Zapico is currently making a documentary comic about. “He participated in the October Revolution and then the Civil War. He was a Republican guerrilla and went into exile in France in 1948. After Franco’s death he waited to return to Spain, but after the democratic elections he found himself a foreigner in a country. That he didn’t fit in and that he came back to die in France like many others. This surprised me a lot, because I think to myself, I’m calculating to return to Spain before I retire.”
‘Ballad of the North’ has already been released in Sweden and will be in France this year. Complaining about the revisionism of the right to legitimize the 1936 coup, Zapico said, “There they sell it as the great novel of the Spanish Civil War!” But it was a workers’ uprising that started from below and was mixed with a coup from above. There are many books on this subject in France. Pius Moa Those who argue that the war began there and that Franco came to order the fugitive and revolutionary strike of the miners. Actually these are Tired of his life of misery. The Republic had promised them changes, and they found that it was not fulfilled. That explosive cocktail crystallized in the revolution.”
It does not shy away from reflecting unknown aspects such as informants in the ranks of the workers or in the role of miners’ wives, “a solidarity network the collective prevailed”. “It doesn’t appear in the books, but it was fundamental because they welcomed and protected orphaned children or those whose parents were in prison”. Manuel Chaves recalls Nogales and Josep Pla witnessing “these”. “Abandoned children like wild animals” that Zapico rescued ” ‘Children of cigarettes’ (Pez de Plata, 2018) with her signature journalist Aitana Castaño “Carbonera” (2020). “This is something to argue in an age of individualism.”