Poétiser la Guerre d’Espagne : "Constancio y Manolo" de José Muñoz et Carlos Sampayo.

José Muñoz and Carlos Sampayo’s Constancio y Manolo (1976) is their seventh story featuring New York-based detective Alack Sinner. It depicts a Spanish family whose patriarch fought for the Republicans during the Civil War. It also mentions events that took place when Constancio y Manolo was being made: the US presidential election, the death of Francisco Franco and the consequent fall of Spanish dictatorship, and, albeit implicitly, the rise of a similar military, theocratic, and violent regime in the cartoonists’ native country, Argentina. The graphic style is heterogeneous, the main plot is fragmentary and numerous secondary stories interfere with its development; and yet, we are paradoxically dealing with a highlycoherent work. Muñoz and Sampayo’s poetics of fragments are put in the service of their own worldview, committed to resist against all mechanisms of oppression and expressing a deep empathy for all those left out of “economic progress”.