The New Spanish Memory Comics

Abstract

Since the end of the 1990s, more and more Spanish comics have focused on the recent Spanish past, including the memory of the Civil War (1936–1939) and the succeeding dictatorship. This article offers an analysis of a particular comics volume, Cuerda de presas (2005) by Jorge García and Fidel Martínez, and discusses the way in which it interprets the role of the past in Spanish society thirty years after the political transition to democracy. I argue that Cuerda de presas participates in the questioning of the dominant memory about the past. It does this by undermining narrative coherence and by pointing to the plural and unstable characteristics of memories. Charles Peirce's semiotics constitutes the framework for the analysis, according to which there is a dynamic relationship between Cuerda de presas and Spanish society.