J. Lobo Hispano López (Barcelona, ​​2003) was born and raised in the Gràcia neighborhood, where in recent years he has witnessed the disintegration of "the entire neighborhood life." The impact of tourism and the housing crisis are the recurring themes in his short but already remarkable work as a comic book author: first, the comic strip. Tourism and utopia, included in Vignette 5 (Windows, 2025), and now 15 square meters, the brand-new winner of the ARA Prize for Catalan Comics 2025, which readers will be able to read in early 2026 in Panel 6

"It's important to have stories from young voices about our crises," J. Lobo Hispano López astutely points out. in the interview we published with the new winner of the ARA Comic Award in CatalàThis twenty-two-year-old boy, "born and raised in the Gràcia neighborhood" and who studies international relations in Paris, has won the 10,000 euros of the sixth edition of the short non-fiction comic strip competition organized by the newspaper ARA with the support of the Department of Linguistic Policy of the Generalitat of Catalonia.

The ARA (Argentine Association of Catalan Comics) is once again announcing the Ara Prize for Comics in Catalan. This will be the sixth edition of the award, which was created with the aim of promoting the creation of comics in Catalan in non-fiction genres, where the language was underrepresented, and thus stimulating the production of journalistic, biographical, autobiographical, and essay-based comics in Catalan. The initiative is supported by the Department of Language Policy of the Generalitat (Catalan Government), and the rules for the call can be found on the website. Premicomic.ara.cat.

When the first edition of the ARA Comic AwardIn April 2020, the situation of comics in Catalan did not invite optimism: according to data collected by the portal Comic Book IslandThe previous year, in 2019, only 184 comics had been published in Catalan, most of them aimed at children. Five years later, the picture is different: last year, in 2024, 411 titles were published in Catalan, with a strong presence of manga and children's comics, but also adult genres such as graphic novels and non-fiction. And in the first three months of 2025, 108 comics have already been published in Catalan, a figure that suggests this year's harvest will be even more abundant.