UNTIL SUNDAY 9/11
VAT. Guillem de Castro, 112
How to put a countercultural product like the fanzine in an official institution like the IVAM and not kill it in the attempt? That was the great challenge (unrealizable) of the curators of the exhibition This no It is comic!, Noelia Ibarra and Álvaro Pons; the latter, bastion of the exhibition thanks to the donation of four thousand fanzines that he made to IVAM to set up its fanzinotheca, the first comic book fan library in the country and one of the most important in Europe. When the street art enter a room, he voguing Madonna dances to it and the fanzines leave the circuit underground, the essence is lost, but we gain a panoramic view of half a century of creation until we reach the present day.
The selection of This no It is comic! includes legendary Spanish fanzines from the seventies such as The divine piranha of Nazario, one of the pioneers of comics underground homeland, or the first issue of the horizontal magazine of anarchist humor TMEO; representations of the Valencian fanzine with the signature of Don Rogelio and pieces by contemporary authors. They are not the most representative, but a wide thematic range is displayed, aesthetic and format, where fiction creators fit (Carlos Maiques), artists who work in abstraction (Cynthia Alonso), the humor (Ana Coco), autofiction and customs (Esteban Hernandez) or the social background (Nadia Hafid), authors framed in formal experimentation and graphic poetry (Ana Calling) and representatives of underground as Bigger, an obvious example that, from the margins, institutional glory can be achieved with a National Comic Award. An exhibition to prove that the fanzine is the germ of the avant-garde and modernity of comics. AU
