Oviedo, Feb 10 (EFE).- Ten years and more than a thousand pages after the latest mobilizations in the now-defunct world of coal mining prompted the Alfonso Zapico National Comic Award winner to tell in cartoons the story of the Revolution of 34, the saga that ended up becoming “The Ballad of the North” comes to an end with the publication of its fourth and final volume.
“It wasn’t worth it, but surely it was inevitable,” Zapico reflects on the last workers’ revolution in Europe led by workers who, in many cases, did not even have a great ideological foundation or were very informed of events such as the arrival of Hitler in the power, but they lived in a situation without horizons “and they got into history through the most tragic and violent path”.
In an interview with EFE, the Asturian author (Blimea, 1981) refers to the “complex” context of the 1930s – “it is worth going deeper and reading and not precooking ideas” – for some miners whose life was “the mere subsistence, that they had not seen the sea, nor left their valley: that they dedicated themselves to working in the mine until they burst and that their children gave them relief in the company ».
And in the midst of this conflict, Zapico places characters trapped by the vertigo of history, who grew and changed throughout the four volumes of a work that he defines as “a classic serial from the 19th century” or a “small National Episode Galdós, but in cartoons».
The revolutionary leader in spite of himself, Apolonio, -who already warned when he gave the keys to the mine powder keg to those who aspired to conquer heaven that he was also giving them “the keys to hell”-; His daughter, Isolina, and her boyfriend, Tristán, go through the origin, development, and repression that followed the revolt until they end in a fourth volume that Zapico focuses on resolving the “lower case story” of each one of them, leaving an open door. to the hope.
A DIGNIFIED OUTCOME
Leaving behind the between 1,500 and 2,000 deaths caused by October 1934, the protagonists walk “towards a dignified outcome, at the level of what they had experienced”, always from the perspective that their work “is not that of a historian” and trying to get away from part versions.
“In the middle of them there is a lot of space for a very rich range of colors. In the mining basins – where Zapico grew up – the epic remained and I moved away from it to touch more on the human factor », he affirms.
Although one of the characters questions whether the best way to defend the Republic was to overthrow it with a workers’ revolt justified by the entry of the far-right CEDA into the Government, Zapico rejects “the fashionable story” established in recent years to justify the Revolution. Asturias the subsequent Civil War. “It is very greedy to think that 34 gives the excuse to justify a military coup.”
“THE SONG OF ASTURIAS”
With 50,000 copies of the three volumes edited by Astiberri sold, the fourth will go on sale on February 16, two months before the first of the three installments to be published in France in Zapico’s country of residence, ironically expectant to see if those who say they would start buying “La Balada” when it was finished keep their promise.
Although skeptical when it comes to imagining his work turned into a television series, the author of “Dublinés” and “Café Budapest” claims to still be looking for his style, which he links more to the work of Jacques Tardi than to Hergé’s clear line , and is reluctant to describe as “ambitious” a quadrilogy that he saw as “a very local story” when he began writing and drawing it.
“I don’t know how it fits or what its place is in Spanish comics, but it is my most personal story: I have elaborated on it because it is the one that best explains myself”, a circumstance that, she affirms, brings her closer to another summit of the National comic such as “Paracuellos”, by Carlos Giménez, also recently completed and in which the Madrid author “explains himself and where he came from: from the regime’s orphanages.”
«’Paracuellos’ is a fundamental pillar from which many authors have drunk after, a work from which to learn. Giménez was the first to touch on historical memory when they were not talking about it,” he says, still “a bit blocked” by the strong rate of delivery of pages to which the closure of “La balada del Norte” subjected him, but already working on a story for children also with Astiberri.
And as another reference author of Spanish comics such as Paco Roca has also done in “Los surcos del azar”, Zapico will not move from the field of historical memory to narrate the story of the republican exile in France, of those guerrillas who waited decades for that Franco fell.
«When they returned to Spain they no longer fit. It seemed that they were in the way, they were the remains of the Civil War, they bothered and they did not fit in with the transition of a country that they no longer understood. They died as foreigners in France after returning to Spain and realizing that they were also foreigners,” he says.
Raul Molina
