The light was seen a decade ago and it points to a singular work that grew into a bold four-volume epic. In the end, about a thousand pages of comics trace the lives altered by coal and blood, the misery carved into mine valleys, the arrogance of factory owners, and the enforcement of guards by a shaken Second Republic. After selling more than 42,000 copies across the first three volumes, The Song of the North, the fourth installment closes a fictional arc about failure in industrial old-world towns. It follows the 1934 Asturias upheaval during the Second Republic when Las Cuencas miners rose up, demanding a fair shot at life.
Alfonso Zapico, born in Blimea in 1981, breathes life into memory through figures like Apolonio, a mining leader, his daughter Isolina, and Tristán, the Marquis’s son. Their lives entwine in a difficult love story. We hear from Zapico that the civil war erased much of this tale, leaving it largely forgotten in Asturias. The narrative exists in two versions: the epic sweep of the mining basins, the miners’ commune, and the explosive industrial centers, contrasted with the tale from Oviedo. So-called savages from the basins, who once toppled the capital and shattered a cathedral, are fed by long-standing prejudices. The author notes that Angoulême became a refuge and a place of work for him as a teacher and artist, after he settled in France.
Lead from the fourth installment of Ballad of the North carries the line forward. The work earned Zapico the National Comics Award in 2012 for an illustrated biography of James Joyce, Dublinés, which signaled a turn toward grim realism about those who lose and survive in mountains and maquis-like places. The author emphasizes a nihilistic strand in his subjects, people who endured brutal strikes in 1917, the Civil War, and subsequent quiet years in the 1960s, when the economy shifted and each generation faced a fresh test. They felt compelled to endure and sacrifice to clear a way for those who would come after, creating a fragile link to their own pasts.
Images from Zapico’s studio in Angoulême show the artist’s long engagement with the region. His earlier work Bridges of Moscow, a graphic exploration of the Basque conflict with Fermín Muguruza and Eduardo Madina, frames the idea that the wounds from this period linger. Those wounds persist not merely as history but as living memory, especially in the mine valleys where many people are gone, leaving behind a hard memory even for younger generations who inherit a sense of dislocation and a need to reclaim a family legacy. This legacy shapes how humans define themselves in the years that follow.
The artist reconfigures pages from the three previous volumes, arranging them on stark white and black backgrounds to re-create mining scenes. The approach underscores the dramatic tragedy that remains to unfold, while offering a quiet, almost suffocating silence in places where the drawing communicates what words cannot. The work also touches on a real episode: the execution of a young footballer from Racing de Sama, hanged in a public square as a grim warning from centuries past.
Scarce documentation about the Maquis period of the 1934 revolution led Zapico to use fiction’s tools to fill gaps, including scenes that occurred in the post-war years. One notable anecdote tells of a middle-of-the-bush meeting between a lemur and two pairs of civil guards that nonetheless avoided direct confrontation. The tale suggests that neither side wished to shoot, and the era’s misery and cold winters drove some guards to sell ammunition to fleeing rebels. This blend of fact and invention helps render a complex, morally ambiguous history that remains debated to this day.
Alien in Your Country
The narrative then unfolds like a Western in a bar, a lounge set in a small town where Commander Kills appears. Zapico is developing a documentary-style comic about this figure, who took part in the October Revolution before the Civil War. He was a Republican guerrilla who sought exile in France in 1948 and, after Franco’s death, returned to find himself permanently a foreigner in his homeland. He eventually died in France, mirroring the fates of many who could not quite fit back into a changed country, a surprise that even the artist found striking as he imagines future returns to Spain.
The Ballad of the North has seen publication in Sweden and is slated for release in France this year. Zapico has criticized revisionist attempts to claim the 1936 coup as a great Spanish Civil War epic and argues that the uprising grew from below, out of workers, while a coup above attempted to stabilize power. He notes that there are many books in France that frame the conflict differently, and he points to arguments that the war began with localized strikes and that Franco’s regime exploited those tensions. The work insists that the Republic’s promises did not fully materialize, and the resulting crisis produced a volatile mix that exploded into revolution.
The author does not shy away from less celebrated aspects, including informants within the workers’ ranks or the role of miners’ wives, described as a strong solidarity network that kept the community together. This maternal and communal bond helped shelter orphans and those whose parents were imprisoned, a historical detail that is rarely foregrounded in conventional histories. The intergenerational memory of these acts remains central, as veterans and descendants alike wrestle with what their lives meant and how those lessons should be carried forward. The memory work is not a simple record but a living conversation that shapes identity and belonging in contemporary times.