The ARA of comics 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 sector's major fair, Comic 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 collection 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 increasingly long tradition of special comic newspapers, the cover and the day's dossier will be handled by a comic author: Paco Roca, along with the Valencian journalist Rodrigo Terrasa, will give their vision of a current topic, and it will be demonstrated 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 Comic Newspaper. But if the 2016 cover reflected the citizens' exhaustion with the situation of misgovernance in 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 This will also be the theme of the unpublished three-page comic strip that Roca and Terrasa have created especially for this special ARA: The immigrant in their labyrinth.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 advocated for comics as a journalistic language to explain our world. In 2019, the Comic Newspaper opened with a comic strip by Manuel Bartual and Javier Olivares about the danger of deepfakes in the audiovisual world; in 2023, the topic of Manel Fontdevila and Albert Monteys was drought and, therefore, the climate emergency; and last year, Nadia Hafid dedicated her comic to the housing crisis.

Roca and Terrasa chose this year's theme as a response to the anti-immigration discourses 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 with a tourist visa; and he, originally from Ivory Coast, after crossing the desert and the Mediterranean by raft. "They represent two different realities of the migratory phenomenon, but deep down there are many parallels between both, who 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 El abismo del olvido, 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 L'Humanité newspaper's Bulles prize.

An illustrated diary with Catalan drawn heritage

Beyond the dossier, the newspaper will be even more special because it aims to highlight the important collection of comics and illustrations that are part of the national collection of the Generalitat de Catalunya, a collection that for the most part is unknown to the general public. It is a collection dispersed among various centers that over the years have been conserving and acquiring works and collections, but which have also been replenished since 2019 by 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 historical illustrators from the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as the youngest and most current authors of the 21st century who are progressively being incorporated into the collection. What is acquired are the originals of the works that were subsequently published in magazines, newspapers, or independent albums, in order to have a sufficiently relevant collection of pieces that will allow for a complete and broad discourse on the evolution of this artistic discipline in Catalonia in the future.

This collection is subsequently distributed among the different centers, encompassing the entire network of Museums of Catalonia, although the bulk is preserved at the Biblioteca de Catalunya, which in 2012 began its own acquisition policy to address the importance of this discipline, and the MNAC. These are precisely the two cultural institutions that basically supply the drawings that can be seen in the special edition of ARA.

Both centers already had an important heritage collection of illustrations and comics, drawings and engravings, 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 digitize expressly 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, including Perich, Romeu or Coll. An authentic feast of high-quality comics that shows the potential of a collection that grows day by day.