Marcos Prior: "The aesthetic of AI is a fascist aesthetic"

BarcelonaWhat would Marcos Prior from 1995, the one who started his career as an author in the fanzine Rau, of Droga a la lluna, the graphic novel he published this year, think? “He would be amazed, but above all because in the 90s it was unimaginable to publish a hardcover book. A staple already seemed like a great opportunity!” For three decades, Marcos Prior (l’Hospitalet de Llobregat, 1975) has had a continuous presence in bookstores, sometimes as a complete author and at other times as a screenwriter for artists like Danide, Artur Laperla, David Rubín, Jordi Pastor, or Gustavo Rico. But it is in the works he signs alone –like the series Focus group, which he published in ARA– where perhaps the purest and most radical Prior emerges, the one who claims the raw line and “a drawing that cannot be used to advertise a bank, that cannot be assimilated by the capitalist system”.

Droga a la lluna (Finestres, 2026) is, indeed, a slap in the face to capitalism in the form of an algorithmic and dystopian nightmare, set in the near future where a dirty war breaks out between anti-capitalist guerrillas and digital oligarchs. “I wanted to criticize mass media, a satire based on the news that appears when you open a browser, which are usually trivial topics or very biased to the right,” explains Prior, who rather than telling a story, unleashes an unstoppable flow of news, each more delirious: explosive antigen tests, a kitchen robot involved in a shootout, the triumph of the United States and Israel in the Neurovision contest… “There are authors for whom only the story matters and they don't care about the medium, but for me it's the other way around – he says. What matters to me is the medium, making comics. And making politics, too. But the story is just an excuse, a subterfuge to get the images to the reader”.

Politicizing art

It goes without saying that Prior is one of the most political Catalan comic authors, but not only for the themes but also for the way he stages them through an experimental narrative that visualizes a fragmented world saturated with stimuli. “Walter Benjamin said that aesthetics and politics are related in two ways: by politicizing art, as communism does, or by aestheticizing politics, which is the path of fascism. What interests me is politicizing art,” he says. One of the wordplays that abound in the book is that the year in which it takes place is “the year of artificial emotional intelligence.” Like most cartoonists, Prior declares himself “at war” against generative AI, which he not only criticizes for the ethical implications of its use but for its “hyperrealistic aesthetic” and always the same lighting. “AI's aesthetic is a fascist aesthetic – he asserts – and it's no coincidence that it's used so readily by the United States government”.

Droga a la lluna is the first long comic Prior has published in Catalan. As he is fond of inventing neologisms and wordplays, this time he has tried to make them “specific to Catalan,” also playing with his own pop imagery. “References like that of Sagrat Corpetit are for a reader who has been a spectator of TV3 and has seen series like Max Headroom or Bola de Drac,” explains the cartoonist. “But there are also visual gags, like having a presenter who is a mix of Max Headroom and Tintin, which is a critique of Tintin's journalism. Prior admits that his clashes and juxtapositions have an element of violence, but qualifies that they also have “a touch of humor”. And he cites the Greek artist Jannis Kounellis, a reference of arte povera, as a reference. “He once brought a horse to an art gallery, that's all – he explains –. I find it an incredible work because it is so surprising that it makes you reflect on what the horse really is. And that is what I want to achieve by representing things from social networks in the comic and taking them out of their context, generating this very interesting strangeness in the reader”.