UCLA

Historical memory in Spain has received widespread attention and it has become part of international discussions about the role of reparation, historiography, and trauma worldwide. The increasing interest in memory, generated by associations and movements for the recovery of collective memory, the 2007 Law on Historical Memory and cultural production – mainlyliterature and films – from the turn of the 21st century, culminated in the anti-austerity protests of May 15, 2011. The public expressions of dissent made evident that structural inequality was deeply rooted in thirty-six years of political marginalization and that reframing the past was a form of social justice. In this matter, comics and graphic novels have received international attention for their sophisticated combination of drawings and texts around the topics of democracy, justice and truth. I examine the particular mechanisms that Spanish graphic narrative uses to explore diegetic and extradiegetic rendering of time and space, trauma and memory, identity and nationhood. Comics visualize and narrate previously criminalized experiences and dynamics in the dictatorial regime that call for a public acknowledgement of memory as a form of transitional justice. My overarching argument is that the particular mechanisms of the grammar of comics such as caricature, breakdown or page layout, establish new ways to conceptualize the presence of the past in democratic Spain. In particular, the arrangement of panels and the imbrication of different media in some comics portray an intergenerational approach to memory that places the particularities of the Spanish dictatorial past within an international discourse of Human Rights and crimes against humanity. In works that operate as symbolic justice and historical reparation, I explore the ways in which the recovery of the past is committed to a diverse and inclusive future and how graphic novels spearhead this change.