The embassy of Spain is very grateful to the Finnish Comics Society for their choice of Spain as a special guest in such a remarkable ephemerides as its 50th anniversary.
Comics have played a first rate social and political role in Spain from mid 19th Century to our days. For example, a period of outstanding liberating influence was the Franco´s dictatorship. The comics strips and periodicals, extensively read by the public when most media were firmly repressed and often blunted by the authorities, presented the public characters with the strength, poetry and humanity of the best neorealism. Comics periodicals as “la Codorniz” were the most efficient corroders of the regime. Nothing could eat away the pillars of the imposed ideology as the laughter; nothing has contributed more to fix resistance in the mind of millions of Spaniards as the visual intelligence of those strips.
Democracy inaugurated a boom of comics: of course still satiric strips accompanying the political, social and sexual liberation; but also adventure, science fiction, social marginalization, so many realities that nobody could reveal better that comics writers and designers.
Eduardo Serradilla Sanchis, an expert in comics because he is a true lover of them, has acted as the best ambassador of Spain when helping to select a group of samples that so well represent the multifaceted nature of comics: deeply engaged in social realities and politically committed, yes, but also bursting with imagination and adventure. Thanks to him, the Finnish public will have the occasion to get acquainted with La Brigada Lincoln, Elisa y Marcela and the retrospective on Alfonso Azpiri.
Luis Tejada Chacón
Ambassador of Spain in Finland
