An A to Z of comics

Lit­tle by lit­tle, the world of comics is mak­ing an im­pres­sion on gal­leries and art cen­tres. The ever more fre­quent ex­hi­bi­tions of comics and comic strips are win­ning over a pub­lic that may have been un­aware of their artis­tic and cre­ative po­ten­tial. Caix­aFo­rum has joined this trend and you can now see the ex­hi­bi­tion ’Còmic’ at the in­sti­tu­tion’s Barcelona head­quar­ters, be­fore it moves on to other Caix­aFo­rums, ex­cept for the one in Madrid, where it has al­ready been shown.

’Comic. Dreams and His­tory’ runs until Jan­u­ary 15 and dis­plays 350 items of which 300 are orig­i­nal draw­ings, pro­vid­ing an image of the west­ern comic from its cre­ation to the pre­sent day. A hand­ful of col­lec­tors and au­thors apart, the vast ma­jor­ity of the works be­long to the French col­lec­tor Bernard Mahé. This ex­hi­bi­tion by Fun­dació La Caixa has ben­e­fited from the ad­vice of jour­nal­ist and col­lec­tor, Vi­cent San­chis, and, ac­cord­ing to Mahé, is aimed at all au­di­ences, both “the neo­phyte and the spe­cial­ist”.

The ex­hi­bi­tion’s ed­u­ca­tional com­po­nent can be seen in its chrono­log­i­cal order that be­gins with an iconic piece: one of the few orig­i­nals left in the world of The Yel­low Kid, cre­ated and drawn by Richard F. Out­cault, and con­sid­ered the first comic book se­ries to use word bal­loons, in­flu­enc­ing the basic ap­pear­ance and use of bal­loons in sub­se­quent news­pa­per comic strips and comic books. The Yel­low Kid ap­peared from 1895 to 1898 in the United States, co­in­cid­ing with the birth of cin­ema and the ex­plo­sion of jazz. In the same room we find other items from the early days of comics, such as plates of Krazy Cat, the sur­real won­der cre­ated by Her­ri­man, and Lit­tle Nemo by Win­sor McCay, a dream­like work drawn with an art deco ex­u­ber­ance that is still con­sid­ered one of the great mas­ter­pieces in the his­tory of the comic. “Win­sor McCay, in ad­di­tion to being a fore­run­ner, un­der­stood the cre­ative pos­si­bil­i­ties of the comic even when the medium was still in its in­fancy. In ad­di­tion to being a great car­toon­ist, he was a trans­gres­sor,” ex­plains San­chis. This room also fea­tures a paint­ing by George Mc­Manus, the Amer­i­can in­spi­ra­tion for work of Tintin cre­ator, Hergé.

At the be­gin­ning, the comic was al­most ex­clu­sively as­so­ci­ated with hu­mour, but after the Wall Street Crash of 1929, they began also to re­flect every­day sto­ries and this was also the time when the ad­ven­ture genre first ap­peared that would give rise to an au­then­tic golden age of Amer­i­can comics and such icons as Prince Valiant and Tarzan by Harold Fos­ter and Flash Gor­don by Alex Ray­mond. Orig­i­nals of these char­ac­ters can be seen in the ex­hi­bi­tion along­side oth­ers, such as Lee Falk’s The Phan­tom and Man­drake the Ma­gi­cian, su­per­heroes who would break into the Span­ish mar­ket as El Hom­bre En­mas­carado and Man­drake el mago. In this sec­tion we can also see the work of Will Eis­ner, the cre­ator of The Spirit and the first au­thor to come up with the con­cept of the graphic novel.

The comic was linked ex­clu­sively to the press in its be­gin­nings but later found its own space in comic books. This de­vel­op­ment co­in­cided with the ex­plo­sion on to the scene of su­per­heroes, with the birth of such iconic char­ac­ters as Su­per­man, Bat­man, Spi­der­man, Thor and Dare­devil, all of which are to be found on dis­play here.

The ex­hi­bi­tion also makes space for Span­ish comics, from post-war to un­der­ground comics. Eu­ro­pean comics are rep­re­sented by the work of fan­tasy comic artist Moe­bius and the pres­ence of two ex­cep­tional Tintin orig­i­nals. Mean­while, Ital­ian comic book cre­ator Hugo Pratt is rep­re­sented, as are such greats in the genre of graphic nov­els, such as Ud­erzo, Quino, Schulz and Miller.

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