Daniel Torres is a name that sits at the core of Valencia’s visual identity for many readers and artists alike. In the 1980s, his work joined a wave of bold lines and buoyant watercolor tones that the New Valencian School helped popularize, reshaping the city’s comic book landscape. Alongside Micharmut, Sento, Mique Beltrán, Manel Gimeno, and Miguel Calatayud, Torres contributed to a stylistic shift defined by strong geometry and energetic typography that seemed to breathe life into letters themselves.
Torres’s trajectory stretches beyond a simple signature style. Though his early years aligned with a particular design sensibility and architectural aura, his evolution reveals a deeper motive: a relentless passion for storytelling that hides in plain sight behind a crisp, engineered line. A forty-year career can be distilled into a single throughline: a designer’s devotion to narrative through cartoons. Yet the subtle ambitions behind his craft often emerge only when his pages are studied closely. The initial works Claudio Cueco and Opium were sometimes read as satirical pushbacks against the genre, but they were, in fact, experiments that probed how stories are built, absorbed, and textured by the reader like a sponge absorbing color and form. The enduring Roco Vargas saga reads as a science-fiction soap opera, but its real significance lies in its patient examination of how comics have grown over time. It begins with a fascination for Calatayud’s reinterpretation of Alex Raymond and, over time, becomes a deliberate, mature voice that threads references from Megas to Moebius into new storytelling grammars. In Torres’s hands, lines become actors; pages become stages where memory and invention perform side by side.
That expansive curiosity paved the way for projects as ambitious as La Casa, a narrative that straddles architecture and comic art as if they were two sides of the same coin. The story charts a journey through invention and belief, presenting how human imagination can stitch together science and art, fantasy and reality. The book known as Some Teachers and the Whole Truth (The Publishing Standard) stands out as an unconventional twelve-page piece that may feel like a portfolio, yet it serves as Torres’s most intimate statement about the craft of storytelling. It captures a moment when a comics artist lays bare the craft behind each panel, inviting readers to witness the process from outline to finished plate. It is an intimate behind-the-scenes tour through a world where the act of drawing opens windows into how ideas become pages and how those pages become shared experiences with readers.
Torres’s artwork is marked by daring compositions that resemble high-contrast baroque illustrations, yet they remain legible and inviting, much like the familiar rhythm of a Sunday comic. The pages carry a lively dialogue between the personal vision of the creator and the crafted system of the medium. Readers encounter a masterful balance between detail and clarity, where intricate architectural lines support a narrative flow that never loses sight of human moment and emotion. The result is a visual spectacle that delights and challenges, a reminder that comic artistry can be both grand in scope and intimate in perception.
The essence of Torres’s practice lies in transparency: there is no hidden agenda, no veil concealing the work’s inner mechanics. What appears on the surface as childlike wonder or straightforward humor often reveals a deeper education in design and storytelling. The artist’s early impressions, the influences drawn from mentors, the formal experiments, and the playful yet rigorous approach to storytelling all converge into a philosophy that values technique as a vehicle for meaning. In twelve pages, the reader witnesses the alchemical transformation that blends biology, chemistry, and physics into a narrative universe where limits dissolve and imagination takes flight. It is a testament to a lifetime of study, experimentation, and relentless curiosity about how images tell stories and how stories live inside the reader’s mind. Torres offers a rare invitation to observe the craft from the inside out and to appreciate the generous, generous mind behind the artwork. Don’t miss this opportunity to explore a storyteller who turns pages into experiences and lines into conversation.