"I'm a little impressed, I hope not to be paralyzed by mythomania, with these four heroes of my life." This is how the inaugural session of the Kosmopolis Festival, which brought together four guests who, as the director of the CCCB, Judit Carrera, said, "have marked the universal history of comics." It was only natural that the presenter of the event, Jordi Costa, admitted to being nervous before starting the talk with the artists Art Spiegelman, Charles Burns and Chris Ware and with Françoise Mouly, art director of The New Yorker for thirty years. (Yes, the magazine that produces those mind-blowing illustrated covers.) Jordi Costa wasn't the only one impressed in the room: tickets flew off the shelves as soon as they went on sale, there was a lot of anticipation, and a certain emotion was palpable in the air. The truth is, I felt privileged, like I was experiencing a special moment. It was hard to believe those four talents were sitting together, right in front of us, and they were greeted (and bid farewell) with tremendous applause. Chris Ware will forever remember it because he took out his camera and started taking a video of the audience. I don't know if it was an exceptional encounter for them, in the sense that it seemed like they met regularly; they were happy and relaxed. They conveyed a great admiration for one another, and this was perhaps one of the most beautiful things about the night: seeing how they spoke to each other and experiencing the respect they have for each other. Towards the end of the talk, when they were commenting that creating can be hard, an emotional Chris Ware told Spiegelman that it hurt him to hear that for the author of Maus It could be a suffering. "You've inspired me my whole life," Ware told her, and it came so naturally, almost as if it were the first time, that I must confess I was moved.

In its thirteenth edition, the Kosmopolis festival has set out to focus on what is seemingly marginal and peripheral and place it at the center. Hence, three of its axes are comics, South Korean literature, and creation in Galician. "If we make the effort to move away from the comfort of the center, we will have the opportunity to discover new names and recognize their talent," says Elisabet Goula, director of the festival, which will be held from October 22 to 26 at the Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona (CCCB) and will feature ninety artists from around the world, such as Spiegelman, Charles Burns, and Chris Ware; novelists such as Isabella Hammad, Sigrid Nunez, Kim Hye-hin, José Eduardo Agualusa and Miquel de Palol; poets such as Ismael Ramos and Blanca Luz Vidal; essayists such as Didier Eribon and Kapka Kassabova, and filmmakers such as Carla Simón.

"Best, best, best"This is what she said, excitedly, a fan of writer and artist Chris Ware, while he was signing one of his books at the Barcelona Comic Festival. His emotion was captured in a report on the program Martians from TV3 (get it back!) about the visit to Barcelona, ​​​​a few weeks ago, of the American comic book artist, on the occasion of the opening of the retrospective exhibition about him that can be seen at the CCCB, Drawing is thinkingThis article is, above all, to convey this message: don't miss it. Well, actually, there are two messages: let me add that Chris Ware is a genius.

Last week, Nico Rodríguez (Reus, 1973) received an unexpected visitor at Fatbottom, his bookstore specializing in comics: it was Chris Ware, the most influential American cartoonist of his generation, to whom the CCCB is dedicating an exhibition until November 9. "I was doing the quarterly invoices and, suddenly, I raised my head and saw her there," explains the bookseller, still incredulous. Ware is not only the patron saint of modern experimental comics, but a very important author for Rodríguez. "I had been a big comics reader, but over time I became detached," he explains. "And one day, when I was living in England and hadn't read anything for five or six years, I went into the Forbidden Planet bookstore to browse and bought the Jimmy Corrigan Ware's work and I got hooked on comics again." A few years later, already in Barcelona, the 2008 crisis forced Rodríguez to abandon his job as a photographer, and he opened a bookstore specializing in author comics with a special focus on fanzines, self-published comics and imported comics, in other words, exactly what was missing from the other bookstores.

The characters in Chris Ware's (Omaha, 1967) comics exude a devastating sadness, but the most important American cartoonist of his generation is in good spirits: "Yesterday I called home and my wife and daughter said, 'What's wrong? You seem happy.'" The reason for his happiness, apart from the vegetarian restaurants he has discovered in Barcelona, ​​is the magnificent exhibition on his work that opens this Wednesday at the CCCB, the most important ever held in Catalonia on a living international comics artist.