The persistent (in)mortality of the comic

It has been seven years since Pep Brocal decided to figuratively cross the door that separates life from death in what would undoubtedly become one of his major works: Inframundo, the story of Amalia, a girl who, wandering through hell under the shadow of Dante and Arnold Böcklin, ended up finding herself again. At first glance, Anatomía de un esqueleto seems the obvious dance partner of Inframundo, another story starring a character who crosses to the other side of existence to live an adventure that will unfold, with dazzling dynamism and a sustained unraveling of brilliant ideas, over several hundred pages (in this case, 256). But the comic book artist Félix Filacterio, the protagonist of this latest work, is not exactly the male counterpart to Amalia and, beyond its classification as an existential drama, Anatomía de un esqueleto has its own identity and agenda, embodying a significant delve into the maturity codes of an author who is experiencing a moment of unquestionable creative fullness. At its core, and among many other things, the album is a masterful lesson on the very difficult art of reconciling mastery and lightness, a work that poses itself as a problem in order to solve its own equation in a celebration of the pleasure of execution (of the line, of the composition) that unfolds into reader enjoyment.

The protagonist has the bad luck of dying –in a manner as spectacular as it is cleverly referential– just as he believes he has finished the masterpiece of his life. A masterpiece that runs the risk of never seeing the light of day. A reprieve granted by Death herself (Tana Tos, a schematic presence situated between Veronica Lake and a Modigliani) will activate the adventure's mechanism, allowing Brocal, playing the roman à clef –through the pages appear, transfigured, from editor Josep Toutain (redefined as a kind of Ozymandias) to the author's battle companions–, to offer a sharp look at the comic industry in times of persistent precariousness under the threat of voracious AI.

In one scene, Filacterio is forced to explain to Death what comics are and, after resorting to synonyms like tebeo, historieta, or

pulgarcito, he adds: “Some also prefer to call it a graphic novel, but there are all sorts of people.” Here is a declaration of principles, because, definitively, Anatomía de un esqueleto is a work that has the dimensions of a graphic novel, but which subverts its codes by proudly being, page after page, essentially a comic governed by the pleasure principle, not so far removed from how Joann Sfar did it in Aspirina or Vampir. There is a Dionysian kinship between what Brocal proposes here and what exploded in French comics at the hands of the L'Association group, of which another author who has just proposed a fortunate –and quite different– journey to limbo was also a part: David B. with El señor Búho y el País de los Muertos.

Brocal harmoniously integrates the most heterogeneous references, always placing them at the service of a narrative that is pure visual choreography in perpetual motion: a particularly successful moment relates the kinetic stroke of Harvey Kurtzman with an emblematic situation appropriated from Bernard Krigstein's classic Master race by Bernard Krigstein, without forgetting the full-page finish that recalls how the latter author paid homage to the representation of time and movement in Nude descending a staircase by Marcel Duchamp. A whole map of relevant connections. But let the reader not think that Anatomy of a skeleton is a dense jungle of recondite references, even though Kafka and his schematic drawings play a relevant narrative role, possibly inspiring the schematic configuration of the protagonist as a skeleton endowed with great gestural versatility. Brocal usually makes the references explicit, in footnotes that allow this work to be understood as a moment in the history of a language that almost began with a brick thrown at the head of a cat by a mouse that was nothing more than a seductive doodle.

Far from being exhibitionistic in its deployment of resources and its flashes of metalanguage, Brocal ironizes about the concept of the Great Work, ultimately daring to suggest that, perhaps, between what will redeem humanity and what gives us a little pleasure at the best moment of the day, there is only a change of pagination.