Audiovisuals have accustomed us to images and fictions whose purpose is the gallows in American prisons. Movies, TV series, documentaries and even reality shows have told us in great detail the terrible conditions experienced by those sentenced to death. But the comic wasn’t so generous with the death penalty. Of course, throughout comic book history it has been portrayed as an assimilated part of a historical reality that cartoons simply reflect, but ninth art has rarely been used to explore this theme in depth. Ten years ago, journalist Anne-Frédérique Widmann and cartoonist Patrick Chappatte illustrated a series of testimonies from death row inmates for the New York Times, and it remained almost an exception, confirming an unwritten rule.
Valentine Cuny-Le Callet’s Perpendicular al sol (published in Spanish by Salamandra Graphic, translated by Carlos Mayor, and in Catalan by Editorial Finestres, translated by Marta Marfany) arrives in bookstores and suddenly fills this gap. Write the story of the young writer’s long letter relationship with death row inmate Renaldo McGirth. However, with that being said, the book will be indispensable; Whatever the logical weaknesses of the ethical argument that can be made by looking for the bloodiest and most vile examples, it is a powerful story against the extreme cruelty that capital punishment entails. The vast majority of those who live in these corridors are people who have done something at some point in their lives that we will never understand, but that does not rid them of hope of salvation.
But this book goes much further: McGirth’s co-authorship, obscured and disguised by necessity but present on every page, transposes hundreds of letters into the realm of illustration to find a way to break society-imposed limitations on symbolism. This condemned that man to death. Absurd censorship, which reduces the possibility of a simple epistolary relationship to a summary of previously agreed and accepted statements, to a simulation of a conversation in which the creativity of the heroes will cross their lines.
The combination of McGirth’s drawings with Cuny-Le Callet’s extraordinary talent explodes on the pages of baroque composition, where images reveal a hidden essence by exploring words cut out by censorship, interpreting inexpressible pain. The despair of those who claim an innocence that no one believes. The story created tells us about a relationship that has given up years of letters and drawings, an imaginary space that would be embodied in a visit where drawings give way to real faces and hands stop holding pencils. to each. A parenthesis that gives reality a strange dream-like fantasy feel to confirm as real what comes out of the blank pages, a life drawn in black and white in the absence of colors, impossible to see in a cell without light. something that filtered in almost by accident. The power the young author has achieved in his first long story may be surprising, but when we turn the pages it is easy to understand that we are not faced with a normal work, Perpendicular to the Sun is much more than a comic book: it is a personal attempt and sincerity to recover a life known to be doomed to extinction.