'The Silent Wars': Spain, Morocco, and the conflict Franco refused to talk about

From personal experiences, a work can be created that appeals to the collective. It moves, impacts, and speaks to events that transcend the individual to reveal a collective history. Silent Wars (Norma Editorial) is part of what we could call Jaime Martín's memory trilogy, three comic books that can be read independently but that, together, paint a picture (in both the literal and metaphorical sense of the term) of the history, society, and culture of 20th-century Spain.

The Silent Wars narrates the youth of the author's parents, Pepe and Encarna. He was forced to perform 18 months of military service in Ifni, a Moroccan enclave that was Spanish until 1969. She was a prisoner of the social role that Franco's Spain reserved for women, destined to be wives, mothers, and guardians of good morals. Some had to face a life silenced by political, religious, or social impositions; others, like the recruits destined for Morocco, had to deal with a silenced war.

It was in October 1957 that a war broke out between the Spanish garrisons in Ifni and the Moroccan Liberation Army. The conflict lasted eight months (until April 1958) and claimed 198 Spanish lives, but the Franco regime concealed it. So much so that when the author's father was assigned to Ifni for military service in 1962, neither he nor his comrades knew that a war had been fought there.

“It was called the 'silent war' because it was barely mentioned to the population,” we read in these pages. “So… you didn't know anything about the ceasefire?” the author asks his father. And he replies: “No. And neither did you know about the war that went on before.” Jaime Martín portrays the living conditions in the impoverished Ifni detachment: the heat, the scarce food, the gratuitous punishments, the old weapons, and the almost useless equipment.

The mother's story represents a valuable reversal of the father's. Through her memories, we learn about peninsular Spanish society during those years: the relationships between parents and children, courtships, the importance of family service and raising a family. Martín magnificently portrays these two settings: the urban and everyday life versus the desert and military landscape.

Virtuous storyteller Jaime Martín stands out for his ability to imbue his stories with sensitivity.

To this, he adds a third layer that brings both together in an exercise in autofiction, a first-person account: the story of the cartoonist himself in a moment of creative crisis, searching for an idea that seems stimulating enough for his new comic.

The Silent Wars was the first title in Jaime Martín 's family trilogy. It was originally published in France in 2013 (and was nominated for Best Work at the prestigious Angoulême Film Festival ), and the following year Norma Editorial published it in Spanish. It has now been reissued, with extra pages and some color adjustments, such as a redder cover, to better fit with the other two titles. Valuable pages have also been added at the end to help understand the creative process and the documentary effort involved in the work.

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Jaime Martín continued his exploration of family memory with a truly extraordinary book, dedicated to the story of his maternal grandparents, Jamás tenré veinte años (I'll Never Be Twenty Years Old ) (2016), which won the Best Work award at the Barcelona Comic Fair. Four years later, Siempre Tenemos 20 Años (We'll Always Be 20 Years Old) appeared, in which he recounts his own experiences, from the death of Franco to the outbreak of the 2008 financial crisis. The book forms an excellent trilogy of cartoons about the 20th century.

With clear and clean drawings, supported by a wealth of documentary evidence, Martín stands out for his ability to imbue his stories with a deeply authentic sensibility. He's not only a great draftsman (and colorist, as demonstrated in these pages), but he also possesses an enviable narrative effectiveness that allows his stories to immediately connect with the reader. We've already recommended Jaime Martín 's latest published work in this space, Un oscuro manto (A Dark Mantle) , a comic about the "trementinaires" (trementinaires) of the Catalan Pyrenees .

The note Three books on comics

We recommend three books about comics so you can read everything you need this August. The first is Historia de los cómics en España (ACT), a brief but well-documented overview of the history of comics in our country from the publication of the first comic to the present day. It features four chapters written by specialists in the field: Manuel Barrero, Antonio Altarriba, Antoni Guiral, Álvaro Pons, and Noelia Ibarra. Concise, rigorous, and enjoyable.

It was a real success to compile a book of the interviews Victoria Bermejo published in the celebrated magazine Cairo , a publication that was the flagship of the new clear, modern, and innovative line, without abandoning the classics. To know it is to love it. The interviews from 'Cairo' (Efe Eme) include interviews with Daniel Torres, Gallardo, Tha, Micharmut, and Coll. As the prologue rightly states, "information of infinite value."

We conclude with a comprehensive and well-documented biography: The Oesterhelds: The Life and Tragedy of the Creator of 'El Eternauta' and His Family (Roca Editorial), by Fernanda Nicolini and Alicia Beltrami. Narrated with enormous literary vigor, this biography delves into the story of Héctor Germán Oesterheld and the works he created alongside artists such as Hugo Pratt and Alberto Breccia . It also recounts the circumstances that led him to create El Eternauta and also his commitment to culture and his ideas, which led him, his four daughters, three sons-in-law, and two grandchildren to be listed among the "disappeared" (that is, murdered) by the Argentine dictatorship. More than 400 pages that read like a novel. Harrowing.