Return to Eden, an homage to the artist's mother, creates a vivid portrait of one family's life during – under – the Franco regime, stretching from the Spanish civil war through the Second World War and up through the present – with the primary focus being the post-WWII years, when the artist's mother, Antonia, was growing up and coming of age.

Roca has created a highly empathic and moving portrait of two generations of women surviving, and prevailing, through a harsh, violent period in Spanish history through which a man's authority remained unquestioned.  Clearly sympathizing with the plight of his mother and grandmother, Roca shines a light on the grossly inequitable gender roles that prevailed during this era, implicitly linking fascism and sexism, and revealing outright misogyny underlying the particular, Catholicism-tinged brand of Spanish fascism, and in so doing revealing facets of human nature that continue unfortunately, to be relevant today.

In Return to Eden, Roca has demonstrated measurable artistic growth, using more of the tools in the comics toolkit and putting them to better use in delineating the porous border between characters' internal lives and their external realities, producing his strongest work yet.

To learn more, read Scott Cederlund's review, at From Cover to Cover, HERE.

Translated from the original Spanish by Andrea Rosenberg.

Recommended.

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