Pilar Martin |
Madrid (EFE).- The cartoonist Bartolomé Seguí has made two of his historical characters, Lola and Ernesto, grow up and has placed them in their age, that of the so-called “Boomers”, the title of his latest comic where he claims without filters that “youth is overrated”. “We forget a lot about everything that awaits us,” he adds.
“I’m like Pantoja”, that’s how Seguí (Palma, 1962) feels in full promotion of this comic (Salamandra Graphic) about which “this response” that he is having after publishing it was not expected: “It happened to me like pregnant women , who only see pregnant women on the street, and I only hear about ‘boomers’, not just the ones in the book, so the response is being “very good”, he told EFE.
Although he does not have an accurate response to this reception, what is clear to him, and his characters say so, is that youth is overvalued, for an obvious reason: “We all go to the same place and we forget a lot about everything that it awaits us and it comes to us, because in the end we all arrive”.
“We should worry about reaching maturity well and not so much about remembering youth”, has qualified this “boomer” (English term to name those over 55 years of age). Although he has poured much of his thoughts into this comic, he affirms that it is not a “biography” nor a “complaint” of this generation that he also classifies as “the new brothers-in-law”.
He calls his “fifth” that way because they are in charge of saying phrases like “me at your age… in my time that was different…”.
“I would not like this to be a sad story, it is not a complaining comic, but the other way around, it talks about how old age we still have to go, that we are at that point where you think you have to take advantage of the life you have left, that You are the owner of your decisions until others make them for you”, he asserted.
And from this perspective, Seguí “has fled” from the territory of reproach but without ignoring that “shock” that characterizes those of his generation: “We are confused by how everything has changed or by how plans or ideas for a bright future have not been like that. And the pandemic has also happened, which has shaken us up.”
Not only was it a life change for everyone, but it was in full confinement -after years adapting the novels by Pepe Carvalho de Vázquez Montalbán into comics- when he realized that he wanted to return “to those 90s stories” and recover characters who had passed over 40 years.
Those young people “whom life has passed over” and who appeared in works published at the end of the 80s in the magazine “El Víbora” together with the screenwriter Sonia Delgado.
They are characters who talk about sex (about how at their age “the physio is more important than their partner”), work or politics and the media.
“You feel a bit like wandering around a stage, that times have changed but they are still yours and you no longer feel so questioned”, Seguí lamented about this work that was born without the intention of it having continuity despite the fact that it is a one of the first in the national comic that is in charge of counting with luminosity what happens to the “boomers”.
