20 new comic books in Catalan to give as gifts this Sant Jordi

BarcelonaSant Jordi is a good indicator to measure how far it goes the push of comics in Catalan in recent yearsIn 2024, comics represented 7% of Total sales of books in Catalan for Sant Jordi, an increase of almost two percentage points compared to the previous year's figures (5.2%). And the sales growth coincides with an increasingly diverse and varied offering in terms of genres and styles. ARA has selected twenty new releases from recent months, including children's comics, journalistic comics, humor, manga, adventure, and autobiography.

A post-apocalyptic world in the style Mad Max It is the unexpected setting for one of the season's youth comics. Ivy collect the comic strip The plan (Cavall Fort award 2020) and the pages published in Strong Horse between 2022 and 2024 of this series about a girl who survived the apocalypse and her friends, a dystopian adventure with dark moments, but at the same time sensitive, bright and fun. With extraordinary drawings by Barcelona's Màriam Ben-Arab and scripts by German Volker Schmitt, the true dystopia would be that Ivy may not end up being one of the best-selling youth books this Sant Jordi.

Couscous Friday. Algiers 1993 Captures the happiness and uncertainty of growing up in Algiers in the 1980s and early 1990s as the son of a Catalan mother and an Algerian father, and the hustle and bustle of watching your world of childhood games and adventures in the Ben Omar neighborhood destroyed by the arrival of Islamic civil fundamentalism and the first battles of an incipient. Musician Yacine Belahcene, formerly of Cheb Balowski and other groups, makes a firm debut in comics with the help of his partner in musical adventures Santi Eizaguirre on the scripts and the magnificent drawings of Cristina Bueno.

Yes, there are fanzines in Catalan too, and they're quite brilliant. "Here's a guy who liked to make jokes about the Holocaust" is the provocative opening of this article. If this is a joke, and the boy in question was the screenwriter Joan Ferrús, who once again teams up with the cartoonist Camille Vannier –they are the authors of one of the best comics of Vineyard 5and the ARA series My girlfriend is the worst– to reflect with irony and lucidity on the limits of humor and the dynamics of a couple. Camille Vannier's website or at the Ventanas Bookstore.

In any town in Baix Llobregat, We called him Bebeto recreates the summers of Carlos's childhood and early adolescence, the endless afternoons spent following Indurain's exploits on TV or playing soccer on the neighborhood's cement courts. With an overwhelming mastery of visual storytelling and mature prose, Javi Rey crafts a beautiful coming-of-age story shot through with nostalgia and the unhealed wounds of first loves and first losses. Without a doubt, one of the comics of the year.

A timely reissue—for the first time in Catalan—of the founding classic of journalistic comics. In the early 1990s, Joe Sacco traveled to the occupied territories of Palestine to document the experience of its inhabitants during the first Intifada. "My idea wasn't to write an objective book, but an honest one," Sacco says in the prologue to a key work for understanding the evolution of comics in recent decades. The edition includes texts byEdward Said, extracts from Sacco's workbooks, sketches and other documentary materials.

In the 2024 Finestres Award, a racialized employee of a large corporation is subjected to a particularly hypocritical form of violence when a foul odor spreads through the company's offices. Nadia Hafid, who drew the cover of the latest edition of the ARA Comics, portrays in Bad smell racism and the homogenizing compulsion of the business world with its synthetic style of minimalist lines, a drawing that experiments with the language of comics to look at an uncomfortable subject.

The phenomenon of modern Italian comics In her new comic, she focuses on her relationship with her father and explores the chain of traumas inherited by the men in her family. Pallarés from Catalan, a creative and coherent solution.

Locked in at home with family due to Covid confinement, Charles Berberian (Mr. Jean) recalls his adolescence in Lebanon in 1975, when the outbreak of civil war destroyed any normality. An oriental education remember the days when cartoons Blueberry and Asterix served as a fragile shield against the merciless reality of a decaying society. In the midst of today's turbulent geopolitics, the album is most timely and dialogues beautifully with another new release of these months, Couscous Friday. Algiers 1993.

Troubadours, spells, missing kings and witches roam the world of The Curse of Castelmaure, in which Lewis Trondheim invokes the fantastic spirit of The dungeon With the complicity of Alfred's drawings, who, exceptionally, abandons his usual finesse to showcase a more playful and direct drawing in tune with Trondheim's mischievous script. Fast-paced and absorbing, it's a comic that young readers can easily enjoy, but which also leaves the door wide open for readers.

Published in Catalan for the first time Nausicaä and the Valley of the Wind, the manga that Hayao Miyazaki serialized –with various interruptions– from 1982 to 1994 in the magazine Animage and which in 1984 (a decade before completing it) inspired the anime of the same name, whose success allowed the founding of the Ghibli studio.

Liv Strömquist portrays the self-help culture they embody influencersgurus and various experts who make a living by providing advice through social media. With a style that playfully blends humor and academic quotations (from figures such as Zygmunt Bauman, Byung-Chul Han, Eva Illouz, and Slavoj Zizek), the Swedish author's new graphic essay once again showcases her talent for analyzing contemporary society through the medium of comics.

The fifth volume of the anthology Vineyard It collects the best comics presented in the 5th edition of the ARA Comic Award, headed by Indians of Barcelona, the anti-racist claim of Ed Carosia and Lluc Silvestre who won the competition organized by the ARA. The eleven comics of Vineyard 5 They show that the new non-fiction comic in Catalan takes on the most diverse forms: a delirious chronicle of a visit to Montserrat in the company of Oriol Junqueras, an intimate reflection on the death of a father, a denunciation of the conditions of the Francoist institution for the "protection of women" or a memory of the master of comics.

Canadian Kate Beaton won the award for best foreign-authored work at the 2024 Barcelona Comic Con with Ducks, a harrowing first-person account of her years working in the Alberta oil sands, but she has a parallel body of work as a children's author. The tauroneta, halfway between the language of a comic and a short story, is a charming and spirited story starring a hybrid of a shark and a human girl who wants revenge on the captain of a fishing boat that captured her.

The drawn memoirs of Joan Escandell (Ibiza, 1937) begin in post-war Ibiza, with summers spent swimming in Sa Penya or sailing, and span the second half of the 20th century and part of the 21st century with a love of comics as the common thread. With the help of Joan Miquel Morey, the cartoonist ofAntares He recalls his years at Bruguera, but also how he reinvented his style to work in the foreign market from the 1980s onwards. Winner of the 2023 Ciutat de Palma Award, Escandell's story is a valuable testimony to a generation and a way of understanding comics that had almost disappeared.

As Toni Benages explains in the prologue, the spirit of the science fiction and horror magazines of the 80s hovers over the fantastic comics ofCuttings, which the author adapts from stories published in anthologies by the publishing house Males Herbes by Elisenda Solsona, Ferran Garcia, Eva Espinosa, Carme Torras and Roser Cabré-Verdiell. There is a lot of love for the genre in the pages ofSketches, which moves naturally between the folk horror, the hallucinated nightmare and the reinvention of lycanthropy.

The most unusual and delirious version of theOrlando by Virginia Woolf is the first reference in the comic collection in Catalan The grinding machine, from La Topera publishing house. Drawing on her memories of the original novel and with a sense of humor as fine as her minimalist style, Delphine Panique reimagines Orlando like the initiatory journey of a poet queer in the king's court, a sensual and literary adventure full of expressive discoveries.

With a delightful blend of wit and tenderness, Magali Le Huche adapts Clémentine Beauvais's novel about three teenagers humiliated online who set off on a bicycle trip to Paris to sneak into a party at the Élysée Gardens. Le Huche's luminous, vibrant drawing—reminiscent of peers like Catherine Meurisse and Aude Picault—and her uncondescending humor combine to create one of the year's best-selling graphic novels for young people, a well-deserved winner at the Angoulême Film Festival.

The myth of the confrontation between Saint Anthony and the demons that inspires traditional Mallorcan festivals comes to comics for the first time thanks to Alex Fito, who filters the folklore through the sieve of graphic modernity: without dialogue and with an iconic drawing in striking colours, The Adventures of Saint Anthony: What the hell? it's like a manga shonen Dreamed up by Chris Ware, a pure comic who is closer to the abstraction of UPA cartoons than to the illustrations of children's stories. And yet, designed for boys and girls of all ages.

The publishing house Amaníaco has granted legendary cartoonist Julio Ribera's last wish: that his autobiography in cartoons be published in Catalan. Unpublished in our country, the work brings together the three memoir albums of the co-author ofThe Vagabond of Limbo –One of the most popular science fiction sagas in France, the book reviews Ribera's life and career, from his beginnings in comics and jazz (he played with Tete Montoliu) to his subsequent exile and artistic consecration in France. The edition is complemented by original drawings, photographs, and tributes from author friends.

The winning work of the 2024 Carnet Jove Award is this crazy adventure in which the summer routine is shattered when some children discover magical frogs. The mystery of the pink geode offers an adventure touched by nostalgia for the stories we invented as children when we played with friends.