¡Viaje con nosotros! aims to present a plural display of the new Spanish comics which emerged in the eighties and have achieved their full creative maturity two decades later. This group exhibition closed on 4 September in A Coruña.
Travelling is the central theme of ¡Viaje con nosotros!, which features works by Miguel Gallardo, Keko, Mauro Entrialgo, Max, Micharmut and Miguelanxo Prado, six authors who have created their own personal idiom and who, from six different geographical perspectives (Catalonia, Madrid, the Basque Country, the Balearic Islands, Valencia and Galicia) define in their own distinctive way the current panorama of Spanish comics on the international stage.
Comics and cartoons date from the end of the 19th century, when they were developed as a mass medium rooted in the press, and have undergone far-reaching changes between then and now. Today, alongside a sector fully integrated into the culture industry that focuses on a juvenile audience, comics for adults maintain a significant market share, and a certain mass appeal in the field of humour and satire.
Superhero comics from the US and Japanese manga in all its versions would seem to have swept aside the seventies concept of the American underground comic and the vitality of a number of European publishing houses and authors, in particular from the French-speaking world, who created new, creative ideas closely attuned to the political and cultural concerns of that time.
A generation of authors of so-called independent, alternative or avant-garde comics broke through in the eighties in an attempt to make their voices heard and to overcome the complete disregard of both the established publishing industry and the distribution channels of the commercial comic market.
Few artistic fields have seen such an effort as the world of comics, on the part of authors themselves, to create a framework within which they could freely promote their work, either through fanzines and self-published periodicals or in partnership with small, independent publishing houses.