David Zimmerman, a Parisian photographer who has just broken up with his partner, is dragged by his insistent best friend to a New Year's Eve party. The presence of his ex doesn't bode well for a memorable evening, but he suddenly discovers among the guests the face of a girl he photographed months earlier: mesmerized, he follows her, and without exchanging a word, they make passionate love. The next day, when he wakes up at home, still dazed, he discovers that his body has transformed into that of the girl and that she has disappeared without a trace. In a strange body, terribly confused and frightened, David asks himself many questions. What exactly happened? Who was the girl? How can he get his body back? And, above all, is he still the same person?

"We could write a story about an air force pilot. A general asks him to bomb a Palestinian camp and he refuses. Then, they condemn him for treason and want to shoot him. But in reality, instead of shooting him, they entrust him with a suicide mission. He falls in love with the chief's daughter. In fact, our hero is like in Blueberry, supports the Indians; well, in our case, the Palestinians. However… It's a shame not to do a western", explains little Pierre, Charles Berberian's childhood friend, as they walk through the streets of Beirut in the 1970s and fantasize about making comics like those of Jean Giraud, Hergé either Uderzo and Goscinny. An oriental education It unfolds in a Proustian manner, as a first-person evocation during the pandemic confinement, in Paris, when the idea of staying locked up at home reminds Berberian of the distant days of 1975, with the civil war besieging Lebanon without anyone being able to know how long it would last, and the comic vignettes of reality.

A mythographer is a person who describes, explains, or composes myths. This is the profession of the protagonist of The Curse of Castelmaure, a writer who has been collecting stories for years while searching for the trail of the deceased King Eric, sovereign of the kingdom of Castelmaure. A good starting point for the latest work to arrive at our house from the formidable Lewis Trondheim (Fontainebleau, 1964), an author who is never where he is expected, accompanied by the pencil of another older one, Alfred (Grenoble, 1976).

Hayao Miyazaki He was captivated by the file dedicated to the Phaeacian princess Nausicaä included in an introduction to Greek mythology. He was so fascinated by her free and courageous spirit that when he finally read theOdyssey He was disappointed to find that Homer's epic poem did not give the character the relief that the future director ofSpirited Away believed he deserved it. Surely, at that time Miyazaki had already begun to fantasize about his version of Nausicaä, materialized when in 1982 the magazine Animage commissioned him to write a manga.

Feed the ghosts (Reservoir Books) is one of the great publishing bets of the first months of the year. Finalist for the Kirkus Prize for Non-Fiction and the Andrew Carnegie Medal, this "graphic memoir" - according to the original subtitle, changed in a disconcerting way by "autobiography in vinyetes" in the Spanish edition - is very ambitious: the North American of Chinese origin Tessa Hulls (Califòrnia, 1984) does not He had only faced a work as long as this one. It is a graphic novel of nearly four hundred dense pages – and a painstaking translation by Juan Naranjo – the result of almost a decade of intense research by Hulls, which traces the family history of three generations of women: her grandmother, Sun Yi, who had to flee China when Mao Tse-Tung came to power; Rose, her mother, affected by her mixed-race status and marked by her parent's mental illness; and Tessa Hulls herself, on whom the accumulated trauma somehow falls, the ghosts that give the work its title and that have accompanied her throughout her life.

When one starts reading the last Magius (2021 National Award for satire Spring for Madrid), bells begin to ring. Perhaps the bells of hell, but counterpointed by the sound of toy bells placed on a baby's crib. Because, on the one hand, this tells a story we already know: that of the genesis and self-destruction of the Black Metal scene in Norway in the 1990s, which was captured in the celebrated essay Lords of Chaos (It's Pop) by Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind and later brought to the cinema under the direction of Jonas ÅkerlundIn other words, the nihilistic escalation that led a generation of overprotected children of one of Europe's most placid countries to unleash a civil Ragnarock punctuated by church burnings, instinctual murders, and induced suicides.