Paco Roca: Paco Roca: "Fascism is like energy: it is neither created nor destroyed, it is transformed"

ValenciaPaco Roca is busy. On top of his studio desk in Valencia, we find sketches for his latest project: a journalistic comic about the regularization of immigrants, which will be published this Friday by ARA, in an already traditional illustrated newspaper coinciding with Comic Barcelona. Precisely, Roca will visit the multitudinous fair on Thursday to inaugurate an exhibition about his work, one year after receiving the Gran Premi del Cómic. Asked what he believes justifies an ever-growing list of recognitions, Roca speculates about his legacy: having built with other authors "a bridge between the world of comics and the general reader." Roca assures that most of his readers do not usually read comics, and that it is more important to have entered neighborhood bookstores than to have exhibited in museums. Prestige and commercial success have allowed Roca to fulfill the dream of many artists: to make a living from his art, without having to compromise it. That is why, he says, he has the privilege of accepting only the commissions he likes. This is the case of the ARA comic, titled The immigrant in his labyrinth.

He signs the comic with the journalist, also from Valencia, Rodrigo Terrasa, with whom you already worked on The abyss of oblivion (Astiberri, 2023), about families searching for their disappeared in the mass graves of the Civil War.

— We have worked differently. The abyss of oblivion was more hybrid, more from my part towards his, and now it has been the reverse. He has made a written report, like those he often does for the press, without taking into account that it had to be drawn afterwards. The challenge has been to turn it into images and make a comic.

Your working method is quite journalistic.

— The documentation work is almost indistinguishable from that of a journalist. The basis is more or less the same when I make a journalistic comic as when I make a fictional one. I talk to witnesses, check things, and put them in context with the work of historians, books I read, research, talking to knowledgeable people.

What does journalism bring you as a comic book author?

— Fiction leads you to narrate everything: you put into characters' mouths things you've taken from here and there. It's all a big falsehood. What I like about journalism is that it demands a different language from you. On one hand, you can't mix who says what. But on the other, it gives you great freedom, because not everything has to be dramatized or put into characters' mouths: when necessary, you can make a narrative parenthesis and use the journalistic voice to provide context and explain more complicated things. I believe that comics are greatly enriched when they move away from naked and raw fiction.

A part of your work is very autobiographical. In La casa (2015) you are inspired by your father, in Regreso al Edén (2020) by your mother, and in your next comic, El viaje, by a separation. Does it help you to park autofiction and tell other people's stories?

— I always look for topics that help me understand the world. I try to make comics enrich me as a person and as an author. And the two things go hand in hand: I look for topics that lead me to reflect, such as immigration, and that make me learn about myself, about my prejudices, about how I see the world. And since they are often topics that have not been much explored in the world of comics, it forces me to see what tools I can use to explain them, and that makes me grow as an author.

In you said that comics are your medium for asking yourself questions and trying to answer them. What question did you ask yourself in the comic for ARA?

— The question is obvious: why does someone decide to leave their homeland? No one chooses to be born in a developing country, with a lot of misery and high mortality. So, we would all do the same: try to improve our lives, try to be happy. The lives of many migrants seem incredible to me. Everything they have left behind, families, a home... They have a thousand adventures, they risk their lives, some sleep on the street. And all this to come here and live poorly doing jobs that no one wants to do. And, to top it off, there are those who say they come to take advantage, to rape and to steal. There is a philosopher who assures that immigration has currently become what witches were in the Middle Ages: the cause of all evils. For the far-right, everything is the fault of immigration. It's the easy answer.

In a way, you already spoke about the adventure of leaving your land in The Furrows of Chance (2013), where you talk about the republican exile.

— All societies go through the same thing: having to leave, whether due to a war, a dictatorship, or because the economy does not allow you to subsist. We are a country that has experienced all kinds of exoduses. That is why it is incredible that we are not solidary.

The metaphor of the labyrinth recalls, precisely, The furrows of chance and the maps of the exiles' paths, all difficult.

— In daily life, a bad decision can leave you jobless, but generally it doesn't cost you your life. But during the republican exile, it could lead you to a concentration camp. With migration, it's a bit the same: you leave Africa and have to make many decisions with very little information, and you can end up dead from a shot in the desert, or by embarking on a raft and drowning, or by being deported when you arrive in Spain. It's a labyrinth of decisions that, in the best-case scenario, leads you to extreme situations.

In The Furrows of Chance you explained the story of the Spaniards who liberated Paris from fascism. How do you see fascism today?

— Fascism is like energy: it is neither created nor destroyed, it transforms. It is always there; it takes advantage of basic fears. There are times when these fears are controlled. But in times of change, like now, they come out suddenly and are magnified. Before, being a fascist was a shame, but now there are those who are proud of it. The anti-fascist struggle should be in the genes of any democracy.