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ABSTRACT
In this article, after analyzing the comics industry in Spain in the context of the 2008 crisis, which reveals how small and medium publishers have adapted to new trends in consumption, I focus on the graphic novel Barcelona. Los vagabundos de la chatarra (2015) by Jorge Carrión and Sagar. This comic depicts the underworld of scrap metal collection in Barcelona, where mainly immigrant workers wander the streets, barely eking a living out of the detritus of consumerist society. It is an example of graphic journalism in comics, one of the most interesting developments in the genre in the past few years. It is also a novelty in Spanish comics because certain topics were far from common in the existing repertoire, which had been dominated by adventures, fantasy, and science fiction. Drawing on Verónica Gago's La razón neoliberal (2014) and Saskia Sassen's Expulsions (2015), I challenge conventional approaches to neoliberalism by focusing on neoliberalism from below, which is seen by Gago to point toward the emergence of a new historical consciousness of living in perpetual crisis.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the peer reviewers for their insightful comments and Mauro Jiménez for his kindness in handing me a copy of Barcelona. Los vagabundos de la chatarra during the inaugural conference for the CRIC project titled “Cultural Narratives of Crisis and Renewal” that took place at Newcastle University in June 2015.
Notes
1. The promotional animated video for Españistán, created by the then young artist Aleix Saló to encourage readers to buy his comic went viral thanks to several elements (satirical style, colloquial and direct language, engaging story, and social media sharing coinciding with the 15M movement). Uploaded on 25 May 2011, the video has currently reached 6 million viewings.
3. No page indicated because it is an online source. Please see the bibliography section for details.
4. Paco Roca is an excellent example of quality and wide readership. Arrugas (Citation2007), initially published in France as Rides by Delcourt, and two months later in Spain, has reached 50,000 copies and 10 editions. The comic won the National Prize for Comics in Spain in 2008, and a successful animated movie was released in 2011. The comic has subsequently been translated into Italian, Dutch, and Japanese. His graphic novel Los surcos del azar (Citation2013) won the award for the best Spanish comic at the Salón Internacional del Cómic in Barcelona (Citation2014). It was published on 29 November 2013, with 10,000 copies, and a second edition (5,000 copies) followed a month later. A Franco-Spanish project is currently underway to produce a television miniseries based on this comic. For a detailed analysis of this comic I refer to my study “Exilio y memoria en la nueva novela gráfica española. El caso de Los surcos del azar,” to be published by Brill in 2017 for the volume Españoles en Europa: Identidad y Exilio desde la Edad Moderna hasta nuestros días.
5. Figures for sales and readership are taken from Félix López et al. “La industria de la historieta en España en Citation2015” Tebeosfera Citation2016, who conducted a survey using six bookshops (Action Comics, Murcia; Atom Comics, Madrid; Generación X, Valencia; Joker Comics, Bilbao; Sindicato del Cómic, Ourense; The Comic Co, Madrid; Universal, Barcelona). Many more were invited but declined to take part in the survey.
6. For a more detailed analysis on the concept of crisis drawing on Habermas, Durkheim, Touraine, and Wieviorka in relation to social sciences and the humanities, I refer to my article “Crisis y su tratamiento en la obra de José Ricardo Morales” (Citation2014), Laberintos: revista de estudios sobre los exilios culturales españoles n. 16, pp. 249–63.
7. Kirchnerism is an Argentinian political group (originally a faction in the Justicialist Party and directly linked to Peronism) formed by the supporters of the late Néstor Kirchner, president of Argentina from 2003 to 2007, and of his wife Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, president from 2007 until 2015.
9. In Spain, for example, close to 90 percent of those made redundant had been employed on temporary contracts. <http://eurohealthnet.eu/sites/eurohealthnet.eu/files/publications/EC%20Consultation%20-%20Green%20Paper%20on%20Restructuring.pdf>.
11. Gago uses the idea of governmentality developed by Michel Foucault during his 1979 courses on neoliberalism. Published under the title The Birth of Biopolitics (2010), Foucault uses the concept of governmentality to expand “the analysis of neoliberalism beyond the role (or lack of a role) of states, shifting the focus to a wider spectrum of ways in which people ‘conduct the conduct’ of others” (Moreno-Caballud 24).
12. “Growth was of course crucial to the project of the welfare state. But it was also a means of advancing public interest, of increasing a prosperity in which many would share, even if some far more than others. Today, by contrast, our institutions and assumptions are increasingly geared to serve corporate economic growth. This is the new system logic […] Anything or anybody, whether a law or a civic effort, that gets in the way of profit risks being pushed aside—expelled. This switch in economic logics is one major systemic trend not fully captured in current explanations” (Sassen, “Expulsions” 213). Despite the book's strengths, it is certainly debatable Sassen's assessment of communist regimes in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe having welfare states “that took care of their citizens” (Sassen, “Expulsions” 214–15). I agree that huge numbers of homeless people and the lack of social services for the very poor is a new challenge for these countries, but the idea that communist regimes looked after their citizens needs a wider reflection in light of the numerous examples that point toward precisely the opposite direction.
13. This shift in the understanding of progress and growth can be traced back at least to the ideas of Adam Smith, the pioneer of free market policies: “The feminist Italian economist Antonella Picchio reminds us that the so-called classical political economics of Smith, Ricardo, and Marx always kept very clearly in mind the cultural—ethical and political—dimension of economics, beyond its technical, quantitative, or specialized aspects […] Picchio notes a key moment in this transformation: the appearance of the famous Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science, written in 1932 by the British economist Lionel Robbins (1935). In it, asserts Picchio, with the purpose of reaching his goal of redefining economics, he trades the analytical object of wellbeing—understood as effective living conditions—for the more general, abstract idea of utility as optimization of individual choices, under the bonds of scarcity’ (35)” (Moreno-Caballud 29–30).
16. Translation mine.