The art of ageing in contemporary Spanish graphic narratives

McGlade, Rhiannon; Dapena, Xavier and Britland, Joanne, eds. (2023) The art of ageing in contemporary Spanish graphic narratives. In: The Political Imagination in Contemporary Spanish Graphic Narrative. Advances in Comics Studies . Routledge, 9781032433271.

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Abstract

‘The Art of Ageing in Contemporary Graphic Narratives’ engages the “social imaginary” of the fourth age as experienced by female subjects in Roca’s Arrugas (2007]); Altarriba and Kim’s El arte de volar (2009) and El ala rota (2016); and Penyas’s Estamos todas bien (2017). In the context of understanding ageing lives, these works underscore the capacity of the unique interplay between image and text to act as an ideal frame for the figurative rendering of social and cultural experience, whilst transcending established aesthetic limits of representation. Although the topoi of vulnerability, decline, isolation and infantilization pervade the texts in question, these are buoyed by moments of agency and freedom that speak to a more nuanced representation of the ageing experience. Indeed, each of these texts can be seen to challenge established notions of “relevance”, “value” and “beauty” as the exclusive purview of the young. Moreover, via the incorporation of the doubly-marginalized female ageing “voice”, these graphic narratives present us with the example of a medium harnessing its own often-marginalized status to become the ideal locus from which to foreground marginalized subjects: from which to make the invisible visible.

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