Examines Spain's top sci-fi comics.

It always happens when we find a great artist in our country. The daily rush of Anglo-Saxon genius who create crucial television programs, comics, films, and books overwhelms us, so we don’t realize that Spain has one of the world’s best science fiction talents. That’s true.

A few months ago, Albert Monteys published an astonishing adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s famous literary satire with a time travel alibi ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ with a writing by Ryan North. This current release, which was previously published in the US and released in Spain through Astiberri, is merely the latest in a peculiar career that has only recently focused on the genre. However, Monteys has always liked science fiction’s possibilities and dimensions.

We asked him about his favorite writers and how his work, even when it was satirical like ‘Tato, with moto y sin contrato’ and ‘Para ti que eres joven’ or directed ‘El Jueves’, has always been concerned with science fiction. Reviewing Vonnegut’s ‘¡Universo!’, published before ‘Matadero Cinco’, reveals his comedy and narrative influence.

“For me, Vonnegut’s tone is fundamental,” he says. The first issue of Universe! is based on The Sirens of Titan, one of his early novels, in which aliens create life on Earth and evolve humans to find a ship part. That idea underpinned Universe’s inaugural issue.”

“Vonnegut is a bit like Kirby,” Monteys: “If he gets into your house, he gets into your kitchen.” However, the author admits that he is still far behind his reference: “I’d like to employ Vonnegut’s fractured and chaotic narrative, which I don’t do out of cowardice. I don’t think it’s satisfying unless I bow at the end. I got it from ‘El Jueves’, which said, ‘Let everything be understood’.”

Monteys commissioned ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ and did not write it. Despite its suitability, North’s script was written in 2017, long before he joined the project. In early 2019, they suggested it to him “I initially thought ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ couldn’t be adapted. I’ve avoided a film to avoid influencing my work.”

After seeing the script, he changed his mind: “It hit all the appropriate notes and was even conceived with the concept that it would look the work had originally been produced with the comedy in mind, which I believe is quite successful and enhances many things. I signed up for the subject and had a terrible year-and-a-half.”

“I think the most strong ideas in the comic were already in Ryan’s script,” Monteys says, “without false modesty. I followed his script exactly, and it worked. I tried to draw like Vonnegut’s basic, passionate prose. The comic’s trademark ideas—character presentation, storyboard, paper doll—are Ryan’s.”

“I had always said that I would not do a graphic novel,” he admits, “but by not worrying about the script, that is, focusing only on the graphic part, I can avoid what would be really painful, which is writing something of this length.” He feared more abstractly: “I did not want to go down in history as the cartoonist who ruined Vonnegut.”

He says, “I spent six months beating around the bush and making sketches and designs, and when I got down to it, the first hundred pages were like ‘what crap, what crap’, but I had to keep rowing forward. After 75% of the book, you say, ‘Well, we’re wedded to this, it is what it is’. Two or three months of reconciliation with your actions precede the final color.”

Examines Spain’s top sci-fi comics.

By knl9j

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