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.

NOW ON SPECIAL

Here in The West, and particularly The United States, many – perhaps most – mistakenly identify Iran as a whole with the policies and actions of its Islamic leadership.  This is a mistake.  Readers of Woman, Life, Freedom will be fully disabused of this notion by the time they get to the last page – and likely well before.  Iran is a diverse nation comprised by a intermingling of peoples – Persians, Kurds, Arabs and more – with long and rich histories stretching back thousands of years, making for a multi-faceted culture with many traditions predating Islam.  The story of Iran today is a tragic – and complex – tale, and one in which The West is complicit in bringing about through its self-interested actions (read: access to oil; cold war proxy fight) taken at the expense of the Iranian people. 

As readers of Woman, Life, Freedom will clearly see, the Iranian people are now striving to regain the self-determination that had been taken from them.  This striving is taking the form of a rebellion against the stifling and repressive, theocratic patriarchy of the Islamic Republic and their grotesquely vindictive enforcers, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.  The courage and bravery on display in these pages will be as humbling to Western readers as the savage responses of the Islamic regime will be horrifying.  But there is also much humor, joy and celebration to be found here, as well as plenty of satire, some of which is quite scathing.

And, yes, this is a comics anthology.  The twenty-four comics that fill this softcover volume's 268 pages have been created in black in white, duo-tone and full color, and in style and approach they vary as far and wide as called for by the nature of the contents, with each creator well matched to the story they have to tell.  Standouts for us here at Copacetic include the fantastically cartooned story by Coco, as well as those by Bahareh Akrami, Paco Roca and Mana Neyestani, each of whom produced two tales, but every artist brings their all to the tale(s) they tell, and all are effective as well as affecting.

Woman, Life, Freedom is a project initiated and led by Marjane Satrapi (the creator of the wildly successful two-part graphic novel, Persepolis).  It takes its title from the name of the movement that it is documenting and supporting.  Anyone interested in learning more about this movement can access a PDF of the 2023 Brown Democracy Medal winning study, Woman, Life, Freedom: Our Fight for Human Rights and Equality in Iran by Nasin Sotoudeh, HERE.

The international aspect of this work led to translations from multiple languages into the French of the original edition, which has been in turn translated in its entirety into the English of this edition by Una Dimitrijevic.  The lettering of the English language text blends so seamlessly into the artwork that one would not guess that it wasn't the original.  Kudos to the art director(s) who managed this feat!