Consequential Art: Comics Culture in Contemporary Spain ed. by Samuel Amago, and Matthew J. Marr

Reviewed by: Consequential Art: Comics Culture in Contemporary Spain ed. by Samuel Amago, and Matthew J. Marr Raquel Vega-Durán Amago, Samuel, and Matthew J. Marr, editors. Consequential Art: Comics Culture in Contemporary Spain. U of Toronto P, 2019. 260 pp. ISBN: 9781487505035. Consequential Art: Comics Culture in Contemporary Spain, edited by Samuel Amago and Matthew J. Marr, is an original reflection on the importance of graphic narratives for the study of the evolving Spanish social reality since the 1980s, with a particular emphasis on the connection between memory and history in Spain. The volume argues convincingly that comic books and graphic novels deserve attention as creating a space for complex narratives that problematize how to record and represent the past and the present. Consequential Art recognizes the difficulty of narrating the hidden, the forgotten, the erased, the unknown, the marginal, and the (self)censored, all characteristics of 20th-century Spanish history, and pays particular attention to the subject of postmemory and the ways in which the past is "remembered" by generations who have not experienced it. Indeed, the book's title might helpfully have reflected its focus on questions of history, memory, and representation, which appear throughout the contributions. Consequential Art offers the reader a remarkably comprehensive contextualization of the graphic novel. Although the volume focuses on Spain, it also establishes a dialogue with the work of international artists such as Joe Sacco, Marjane Satrapi, and Daniel Clowes, and acknowledges the importance of American and British volumes such as Teaching the Graphic Novel and The Routledge Companion to Comics. In Spain, the growing number of books, exhibitions, and talks by scholars, art critics, and historians, together with large print runs, multiple editions, and reprints, evidence the ever-growing interest in the graphic novel over the last forty years. Consequential Art argues that comics culture in Spain, although rich and growing, is still in need of critical scholarship. This volume successfully contributes to filling this gap, choosing as its particular focus the historical, political, and cultural context of Spain since the 1980s. In a dialogical and interdisciplinary spirit, it calls for the publication of more critical studies of hybrid nature to consolidate it as a legitimate genre. Within this context, the volume points out the complexities of the genre and the obstacles it has encountered in its efforts to attain cultural legitimacy. It examines a genre of many names—novela gráfica, tebeo de autor, cómic, comix, historieta—and delves into some of the misconceptions that see it as a mere form of entertainment, with a relatively small audience, that cannot be understood as a single type of narrative. Helpfully, this volume does not take a defensive approach; instead, the scholarly [End Page 211] sophistication of the chapters, as well as the serious engagement with history, memory, and representation in the works examined, offer a clear explanation of what makes the graphic novel different and particularly interesting. The volume's authors successfully demonstrate that comics culture not only deserves legitimacy, but that it also contributes in a unique way to understanding the past in present-day Spain. The seven essays in this volume deal with different topics: comics incorporating real historical material; the use of fictitious memoirs and crime thrillers to understand history; and social journalism about precarious workers, unemployed people, and marginal citizens. Together, they offer an innovative intervention into the "official" discourse that has developed among academics, historians, artists, politicians, and memory activists, around the "pact of forgetting," "historical memory," "amnesty," and the complex relationship between reality and representation. If the contributions have something in common, it may be their understanding of comics as a medium focused on the citizen, and as a way to democratize access to knowledge. Inspired by the hybrid nature of graphic novels, the chapters in this volume demonstrate that history can be remembered, recorded, and retold in different ways. Thus, Samuel Amago analyzes the usage of authentic historical materials to demonstrate how comics make Spanish history known to a popular readership; Pedro Pérez del Solar sees invented memories as a way to create continuity between the past and the present; and Xavier Dapena looks at crime thrillers to investigate how...

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