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.

In 2020, a 14-page comic biography of Caritat del Río made Pep Brocal (Terrassa, 1967) the first winner of the Premi ARA de Còmic. A few years later, the cartoonist revisits and expands that project in the form of a graphic novel – published by Garbuix in Catalan and Spanish – to continue exploring the chiaroscuro of one of the most mysterious figures of the 20th century, a spy in the service of communism who pulled the strings of history.