The ARA of the comic returns with a cover by Paco Roca and the entire newspaper illustrated by Catalan classics

BarcelonaThe comic will once again be the absolute protagonist of ARA's pages next week. To mark the opening of the major sector fair, Còmic Barcelona, on Friday, May 15, the entire newspaper will be illustrated by cartoonists. On this occasion, the bulk of the images are part of the history of Catalan comics through the archive of the Generalitat de Catalunya, which is collaborating on this special edition. In fact, past and present will go hand in hand because, as we have done in the already increasingly long tradition of special comic newspapers, the cover and the day's dossier will be the work of a comic author: Paco Roca, along with Valencian journalist Rodrigo Terrasa, will give their vision of a current topic, and it will be demonstrated once again that comics are also a journalistic genre.

Ten years ago Paco Roca, one of the key figures in contemporary comics, was already in charge of illustrating the cover of the Diari del Còmic. But if the 2016 cover reflected the citizens' weariness with the situation of misgovernance of those months, this year's cover focuses on immigrants and the labyrinth of vital, economic, and bureaucratic obstacles they must navigate to regularize their legal status. This will also be the theme of the unpublished three-page comic strip that Roca and Terrasa have created especially for this special ARA: The immigrant in their labyrinth.

For years, ARA has championed comics as a journalistic language to explain our world. In 2019, the Diari del Còmic opened with a comic strip by Manuel Bartual and Javier Olivares about the dangers of over-information in the audiovisual world; in 2023, the topic for Manel Fontdevila and Albert Monteys was drought and, therefore, climate emergency; and last year, Nadia Hafid dedicated her comic to the housing crisis.

Roca and Terrasa chose this year's theme in response to the anti-immigration speeches of far-right parties. "We didn't want to give a voice to these people, we found it much more interesting to talk about immigration from the immigrants' point of view – Terrasa points out –. Especially because the regularization process transforms brutal personal stories into a bureaucratic phenomenon".

In The Immigrant in Their Labyrinth, Roca and Terrasa give voice to two real stories, those of Karol and Keyassoh. She arrived by plane from Peru on a tourist visa; and he, originally from Ivory Coast, after crossing the desert and the Mediterranean by boat. "They represent two different realities of the migratory phenomenon, but deep down there are many parallels between them, they have suffered many hardships throughout the process and have had to navigate the labyrinth that Paco has drawn on the cover," comments Terrasa. Together they had already worked on the graphic novel The Abyss of Oblivion, where they delved into the history of a mass grave in Paterna. That comic won the ACDCómic Critics' Award for Best Spanish Work of 2023 and the Bulles Prize from the newspaper L'Humanité.

An illustrated diary with Catalan drawn heritage

Beyond the dossier, the newspaper will be even more special because it wants to highlight the important collection of comics and illustration that is part of the national collection of the Generalitat de Catalunya, a collection that is largely unknown to the general public. It is a collection scattered among various centers that over the years have been preserving and acquiring works and collections, but which also, since 2019, has been enriched by the specific purchases made by the Commission for Comics and Illustration promoted by the Generalitat, in which the different public institutions that care for this graphic heritage participate, as well as external specialists.

These purchases include both historical illustrators from the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as the youngest and most contemporary authors of the 21st century who are progressively being incorporated into the collection. What is acquired are the original works that were subsequently published in magazines, newspapers, or independent albums in order to have a sufficiently relevant body of pieces that will allow for a complete and broad discourse on the evolution of this artistic discipline in Catalonia in the future.

The acquisitions for this collection, decided by a commission that includes administration technicians and independent experts, are always made with their final destination in mind so that the different museums and other heritage facilities can incorporate this discipline into their general discourse. This is why the works acquired are deposited among the different museums in Catalonia and other facilities such as the Library of Catalonia. More and more Catalan museums are introducing/incorporating comics as another discipline in their exhibition discourse, although a significant portion of this heritage is found/preserved in the MNAC and the Library of Catalonia, which in 2012 began its own acquisition policy to address the importance of this discipline. These are precisely the two cultural institutions that basically supply the drawings that can be seen in the special edition of ARA.

Both one center and the other already had an important heritage collection of illustration and comics, drawing and engraving, and in both cases there is a clear intention to expand, revalue, and disseminate these collections to place comics on the same level as other artistic disciplines.

With the collaboration of the technicians and managers of these two centers, the collaboration of the Museums Service of the Department of Culture, which coordinates acquisitions, and the global support of the Generalitat de Catalunya, we have been able to expressly digitize for this special ARA some of its collections and show the richness of a heritage that includes historical drawings by Picarol, Apa (Feliu Elias), Junceda or, more recently, Miguel Gallardo, Alfons López or Pilarín Bayés, as well as Perich, Romeu or Coll. An authentic feast of high-quality comics that shows the potential of a collection that grows day by day.