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WORK TITLE: The Lighthouse
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Roca, Francisco Martinez
BIRTHDATE: 1969
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: Spanish
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/comic-riffs/wp/2014/07/11/with-arrugas-wrinkles-spanish-artist-paco-roca-gives-poignant-voice-to-overlooked-seniors/?utm_term=.2ea6b9b5c23c
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1969, in Valencia, Spain.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Cartoonist, illustrator, lecturer, and radio talk show cohost. Provides illustrations for non-governmental organizations. Has worked formerly making advertisement illustrations.
AWARDS:Barcelona Comic Festival, Best Album and Best Screenplay; National Comic Award, “Arrugas,” 2007. Journal of Tenerife Award; Barcelona Comic Book, best screenplay and best Spanish work; Expocómic, best work and best script, “Creation Journal of Wrinkles: The Winter of the Sketcher,” 2010. The Rome Festival, best comic book prize for specialized bookshops and best work; Barcelona Comic Fair, best Spanish work; Guild of Booksellers of Madrid, Book of the Year finalist; “The Furrows of Chance,” 2013. The specialized libraries, prize for the best comic book of 2015, “Andanzas de una man in pajamas,” 2015.
WRITINGS
Illustrations have been published in Babelia, El Semanal de El País, Las Provincias, and Corriere della Sera or Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin. Comic series have been published in El Vibora, including “GOG,” 2000; “The Grim Game,” 2008; “Sons of the Alambra,” 2007, and “El Faro,” 2004. Graphic works have been exhibited in numerous cultural centers, including the Zamora in the Public Library, 2013; Santa Coloma in the Can Sisteré Art Center, 2013; in Bilbao in the Mediateka de la Alhondiga, 2014; Madrid at the Telefónica Foundation, 2015; and in Palencia at the Palencia Museum, 2016.
This work was adapted to cinemas in September 11, 2011 by Ignacio Ferreras and produced by Perro Verde Films…
SIDELIGHTS
Francisco Martínez Roca, more recognizably known as Paco Roca, is a cartoonist, illustrator, and lecturer. Roca grew up in Valencia, Spain and took an interest in illustrating at a young age. His illustrations have appeared in advertisements, magazines, and publishing houses. Roca provides illustrations for non-governmental organizations and civil associations, such as the Red Cross, Amnesty International, and Greenpeace.
Roca first began publishing his comics with Spanish magazine El Vibora. He has received numerous awards for his comics, including the National Comic Award in 2007 for “Arrugas” and the prize for the best comic book of 2015 by the specialized libraries and the best work and best script by Expocómic in 2010 for “Creation Journal of Wrinkles: The Winter of the Sketcher.” Roca’s comics have been adapted into films and shown in several museums, libraries, and other cultural centers throughout Spain.
Roca has lectured in numerous cities, including Paris, Rome, Mexico City, Tokyo, and Prague. He is a regular speaker on radio talk shows on the National Radio of Spain.
Wrinkles
Wrinkles describes a care home created specifically for people suffering with Alzheimer’s disease. The book opens with Ernest, a retired bank executive, preparing to move to an elder care facility after his son is no longer able to care for him. At the facility, Ernest is roomed with Émile, a mostly friendly man who will periodically scam the other residents for small sums of money. The other residents are also depicted as multi-dimensional, characteristically forgetful, people. One woman stockpiles ketchup packets to give to her grandson, a man plays deaf to get the female staff members close enough that he can try to get handsy.
Ernest is frustrated with the other residents’ forgetfulness. When he expresses this to Émile, Émile takes Ernest upstairs, where those residents that are no longer in touch with reality reside. Ernest hates what he sees, and he vows to never be placed upstairs. He plays games with the doctors, pays extreme attention to his ability to dress himself, and takes other steps to prevent appearing out of touch with reality.
Despite the, at times, dark subject matter, Roca depicts the facility in a gentle light. Julius Purcell in the Guardian wrote that the aesthetics Roca creates “all form a cold poetics of place from which Roca coaxes sparks of warmth and life.”
The Lighthouse
The graphic novel opens in the midst of the Spanish civil war, with protagonist Francisco, a Republican soldier, fleeing Franco’s men and becoming separated from his unit. Teenaged Francisco, who provided falsified documents to the army in order to fight, comes to a lighthouse, where he collapses in the sand due to exhaustion and the pain from his wounds.
Francisco awakens in the lighthouse, his wounds being tended to by lighthouse keeper, Telmo. As Telmo cares for Francisco’s wounds, he tells the young man fantastical stories of a magical, faraway land. Pointing to literary references, the land Telmo describes is a place nearly untouched, where justice is served by rewarding the good rather than punishing the bad. Telmo’s fanciful nature is contrasted with Francisco’s, who has been scarred by the war and is prematurely pessimistic.
The story takes place almost entirely within the lighthouse. Telmo’s words and treatment allow Francisco time to heal emotionally and physically from the devastation of the war, but it is clear that the realities of the violent outside world are ultimately unavoidable. A contributor to Publishers Weekly wrote: “The fantasy elements–neatly delivered here in Roca’s sharp, duotone style–play a counterpoint to the black-and-white harshness of the war, Roca’s slim and affecting novel expertly channels its characters’ desires for a grander and more forgiving world.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Guardian, February 14, 2015, Julius Purcell, review of Wrinkles, p. 11.
Publishers Weekly, January 30, 2017, review of The Lighthouse, p. 188.
ONLINE
Blogcritics, http://blogcritics.org (May 30, 2017), Bill Sherman, review of The Lighthouse.
Comic Bastards, https://comicbastards.com (March 13, 2017), Zeb Larson, review of The Lighthouse.
Good OK Bad, http://goodokbad.com (October 15, 2017), review of Wrinkles.
Graphic Medicine, http://www.graphicmedicine.org (October 15, 2017), Martha Cornog, review of Wrinkles.*
Paco Roca
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This name uses Spanish naming customs: the first or paternal family name is Martínez and the second or maternal family name is Roca.
Roca in 2008
Francisco Martínez Roca aka Paco Roca (born in 1969 on Valencia, Spain) is a Spanish strip cartoonist with experience in graphic novels and advertisement illustrations.[1][2][3]
He's best known for his comic-books like Wrinkles.[4] This work was adapted to cinemas in September 11, 2011 by Ignacio Ferreras and produced by Perro Verde Films.[5]
Contents [hide]
1 Awards
2 Further reading
3 References
4 External links
Awards[edit]
(2008) Premio Nacional del Cómic[6]
(2011) Barcelona International Comics Convention[7]
(2012) Goya Award at Best Adapted Screenplay
(2014) Gran Premio Romics at International Comics Festival Rome[8]
Paco Roca
(Valencia, 1969)
I consider myself one of those privileged who has managed to live out of his childhood dream. Since I was little I wanted to work drawing and nowadays I combine the illustration with the comic.
As an illustrator I have done all kinds of works, from advertising to publishing houses and also in the world of the press, in which I have published among other sites in the cultural supplement Babelia and El Semanal de El País, Las Provincias, Corriere della Sera or Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin.
As for the comic, I started publishing in the Spanish magazine El Vibora . These collaborations followed the albums: GOG (La Cúpula, 2000); The Grim Game, (2008) a personal vision of the surrealist painter Salvador Dalí; Sons of the Alambra (2007) , adventure story about a 19th century French Romantic painter who visits the Alambra; El Faro, (2004) a history with the civil war as a backdrop and awarded the best realistic screenplay by the Diario de Avisos de Tenerife , the dean of the comic awards that are awarded in Spain ; Arrugas (2007) , which deals with Alzheimer's, old age and loneliness and that among other prizes has won the Best Album and Best Screenplay at the Barcelona Comic Festival, the National Comic Award and the awards for the best album in the festivals of Lucca and Rome; The Streets of Arena (2008) , work that deals with the destiny and the absurd society in which we live; Emotional World Tour (2009) , Creation Journal of Wrinkles; The winter of the sketcher (2010) , a story that recreates the life of cartoonists in Franco's Spain and has been awarded the Journal of Tenerife Award, the award for best screenplay and best Spanish work of the Barcelona Comic Book and best work and best script in Expocómic; Memoirs of a Man in Pajamas (2011) , compilation of the Sunday pages appeared in the newspaper Las Provincias; The Metamorphosis (2011) , illustrated book of the short stories of Franz Kafka; The furrows of chance (2013) , a story about Spanish republicans who released Paris at the IIGM, won the best comic book prize for specialized bookshops, best work at the Rome festival, best Spanish work at the Barcelona Comic Fair , prize of the Critic 2014 to the best national work and to the best national screenwriter and finalist to the prize "Book of the Year" granted by the Guild of Booksellers of Madrid ; Viñetas de vida (2104) a collaborative book by Oxfam Intermón with several authors of comics in defense of Spanish Cooperation; Andanzas de una man in pajamas (2014) that compiles my pages published in 'El País Semanal' and La casa (2015) that has been awarded the prize for the best comic book of 2015 by the specialized libraries . Other very important recognitions that I have received are the Prize to a whole Path, Romics D'oro, which I received in Rome or to have been recognized as Favorite Son of the city of Valencia in 2014 .
As far as the exhibition world is concerned, in 2011 a retrospective of my work called the traveling drawer was carried out in the MuVIM museum in Valencia . This recapitulation of my graphic work has been exhibited in several places in Spain: in Zamora in the Public Library (2013), in Santa Coloma in the Can Sisteré Art Center (2013), in Bilbao in the Mediateka de la Alhondiga (2014) , in Madrid at the Telefónica Foundation (2015) and in Palencia at the Palencia Museum (2016) . Also my work Los furcos del azar (2013) has had its own exhibition that has shown in Valencia in Las Naves de Valencia (2014) and in Zaragoza in the Joaquín Roncal Center (2014) . Finally, at the national level my most exciting work has been exhibited in the exhibition Exxxcitante Cartoonist in Valencia in the Gallery Mr Pink (2013). But my career as an author of comics and illustrator has also been represented in Europe, in Italy, in the Instituto Cervantes in Naples with La Mostra di Paco Roca in 2016.
Other arts and facets with which I relate are for example the cinema. I collaborated as a screenwriter and character designer in the adaptation to the cinema of my graphic novel Arrugas, for which I received the Goya for the best adapted script, Mestre Mateo for the best artistic direction and best script. The film has been released in different countries. In the summer of 2014 it was released in the USA with the voices of great actors like Martin Sean. Also during 2017 will end the filming and will surprise Memories of a man in pajamas, the film, which will feature Raul Arevalo as the protagonist.
For the television I have done sketch, headers for some programs and campaigns of solidarity.
In the radio I collaborated every week for years in a radio talk show, in the actaulidad in the program of the Valencian speaker Ramón Palomar and also I participate in It is not any any day with Pepa Fernandez in National Radio of Spain (RNE)
I collaborated as a screenwriter and character designer in the adaptation to the cinema of my graphic novel Arrugas, for which I received the Goya for the best adapted script, Mestre Mateo for the best artistic direction and best script. The film has been released in different countries. In the summer of 2014 it was released in the USA with the voices of great actors like Martin Sean.
In recent years, I have been working as a lecturer and lecturer in Santo Domingo, Mexico City, Paris, Rome, Washington, San Juan de Puerto Rico, Helsinki, Tokyo, Manchester, Edinburgh, Mantova, Prague, Verona , Pozoblanco, La Puebla ...
And to make matters worse, I still look for time to collaborate with non-governmental organizations and other civil associations. With the Red Cross in 2011 I have collaborated with your campaign . It corresponds to us. With Oxfam Intermon and Viñetas de Vida (2014) with Farmamundi in its Christmas Postcard Campaign (2014) with Amnesty International and Illustrate Freedom (2015) and Greenpeace with its Illustrators for the Arctic Campaign in 2016.
With ‘Arrugas (Wrinkles),’ Spanish artist Paco Roca gives poignant voice to overlooked seniors
By David Betancourt July 11, 2014
Artist Paco Roca at the former Spanish Embassy building in Washington. (David Betancourt/TWP)
WHEN SPANISH artist Paco Roca sought inspiration for “Arrugas,” a graphic novel he wrote and illustrated, he believed there was only one place that could provide him with the drama, comedy, heartbreak and unpredictable behavior he needed to breathe life into his project:
A retirement home.
In “Arrugas” (the Spanish word for wrinkles), Roca provides an in-depth look at assisted living for seniors through the eyes of the protagonist: Emilio, a prideful banker whom his son reluctantly places in a retirement home, once it becomes clear that the father has Alzheimer’s.
Roca’s desire to tell a story about senior citizens was largely fueled by his experience with his parents as they aged.
The comic "Arrugas (Wrinkles)."
The comic “Arrugas (Wrinkles).”
“At the time that I began working on ‘Arrugas,’ my parents were getting older,” Roca said, in Spanish, to The Post’s Comic Riffs. “My motive was to try to understand what they were feeling in that moment in their lives, living in a society that doesn’t give much thought to the elderly.”
Roca also saw the effects of Alzheimer’s when the father of a good friend began suffering from the disease..
“I would always go visit [this friend]. His father was very active. Very intelligent,” Roca said. “He loved to talk about books. He was a great mentor to me. It affected me a great deal knowing that he had Alzheimer’s. It advanced very fast, and I could see how it was affecting the entire family.”
“Arrugas” has sold more than 30,000 copies in Spain, where it was also awarded the Premio Nacional del Cómic (National Comic Award) in 2008. The comic was adapted into an animated film when Roca collaborated with director Ignacio Ferreras; their project received much critical acclaim, winning Spain’s premio Goya (Goya Award) for best animated film in 2012, the year of its Spanish release.
Fast-forward two years, and Roca found himself in Washington just before the Fourth of July, as the guest of honor at a screening of the English-dubbed version of “Arrugas,” which was screened for the public at la Antigua Residencia de los Embajadores de España (the former residence of the ambassador of Spain) on 16th Street in Northwest Washington. “Arrugas” made its national debut last Friday in New York and Miami.
The film is being distributed in the United States by GKIDS, whic also had a hand in distributing past animated Oscar nominees “Ernest & Celestine,” “Chico and Rita,” “A Cat in Paris” and “The Secret of Kells.”
[READ: An interview with “Secret of Kells" filmmaker Tomm Moore]
A poster for the film "Arrugas (Wrinkles)."
A poster for the film “Arrugas (Wrinkles).”
The screening in Washington was the first time Roca saw the movie dubbed in English — featuring the voice talents of Martin Sheen and Matthew Modine. When speaking of his collaboration with Ferreras, Roca said that the director, a veteran of animated films, opened his eyes to new ways of storytelling.
“It was interesting because [in making “Arrugas" the comic], you’re by yourself. You think there’s only one way to do things,” Roca said. “There’s no one to discuss ideas with. It’s like a fight with yourself. And when you finish, you think you’ve made it the only way it can be done.
“We made scenes that weren’t in the comic,” Roca continued. “It helped me see that there were other ways to tell the story. He had worked in a lot of big animated productions. He knows how animation works. With him, I learned that the production is so important for an animated film.”
Roca said he was constrained only by the depths of his imagination when working on the “Arrugas” graphic novel: “In the comic, you don’t have limits. Your only limit is your artistic limits.”
“With movies,” he noted, “the limitation is what you can do with the money that you have.”
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Roca does not read his comics after he completes them — doing so, he said, only causes him to see errors he missed during production. But he appreciated seeing the finished film of “Arrugas.”
“When I watched the movie … it wasn’t mine anymore,” Roca said of the story. “It was something that had its own life. It was emotional watching it with the voices of the actors.”
Roca said he takes a considerable amount of pride in giving voice to people — via comics and film — who don’t receive the attention they deserve.
“We can empathize with lives that aren’t our own. We can empathize with a Roman emperor or a psychopath, but there are so few time that we can empathize with an older person,” Roca said.
“In ‘Wrinkles,’ you don’t see any young people. You see everything through the eyes of older people, so we can understand how they feel and see what it is we can do for them.”
The Lighthouse
Publishers Weekly. 264.5 (Jan. 30, 2017): p188.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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The Lighthouse
Paco Roca. NBM, $15.99 (144p) ISBN 978-1-68112-056-0
At the start of this graphic novel set in the Spanish civil war, Francisco, a young Republican soldier, is separated from his unit and fleeing Franco's men. After reaching an old lighthouse on the ocean, he collapses from his wounds and wakes to finds himself rescued and tended to by the lighthouse keeper, Telmo, a burly old spinner of tales. While Francisco recovers at his surprise seaside sanctuary, Telmo builds a fantastical boat in order to take a journey to an even more fantastical-sounding island. Soon, even the prematurely cynical Francisco starts falling for Telmo's tales of mythic adventures and imagines that anything is possible. Like a lighter kind of Guillermo del Toro story in which the fantasy elements--neatly delivered here in Roca's sharp, duotone style--play a counterpoint to the black-and-white harshness of the war, Roca's slim and affecting novel expertly channels its characters' desires for a grander and more forgiving world. But, like his earlier Wrinkles, this story knows that yearning for escape doesn't make it happen. (Feb.)
review: Fiction: A care home for people with Alzheimer's is the setting for a warm and tender comic-strip story from the Spanish illustrator Wrinkles by Paco Roca
The Guardian (London, England). (Feb. 14, 2015): Arts and Entertainment: p11.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Guardian Newspapers. Guardian Newspapers Limited
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian
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Byline: Julius Purcell
About a decade ago, a young Spanish illustrator called Paco Roca drew an elderly couple for an advert. "They're not nice to look at," the marketing people told him. As Roca reluctantly removed them, he decided to wreak what might be called graphic revenge: his first comic-strip novel would be entirely populated by old people.
Set in a care home for people with Alzheimer's disease, Roca's Wrinkles has sold more than 50,000 copies since it was first published in France and Spain in 2007. Now this unflinching tragicomedy can at last be read in English.
Not unlike a Mediterranean Posy Simmonds, Roca has an unerring eye for the surfaces and tics of everyday middle-class life. His autobiographical strip in El Pais, a visual blog of crisis-era Spain, has a loyal readership.
Since the success of Wrinkles, Roca's other graphic novels have included an adaptation of Kafka and works of fantasy and history. All his creations depict, he says, "people struggling to fit in".
Wrinkles opens as Ernest, an ascetic former bank manager, is deposited in a care home following a number of "senior moments". He meets his stocky roommate, Emile, a character who hovers tantalisingly between twinkly-eyed rogue and something more mafioso.
Emile introduces us to the denizens of the home: the seated statues in the day room, the vacant-eyed lunch companions. Roca spent many months touring such homes, distilling what he saw and heard into his spare, uncluttered panels. The rows of vinyl wing-backed chairs, the porthole windows in the double doors - all form a cold poetics of place from which Roca coaxes sparks of warmth and life.
In one scene, deafness and dementia turn a bingo session into noisy farce. In the corridor outside, Emile gulls a muddled old lady into paying him to give her directions to the telephone. "By the time she gets to reception," he cackles, "she'll have forgotten why she's there."
Even dodgy Emile, however, balks at showing his new friend the home's most hellish circle: the dreaded first floor, to which the hopeless cases are transferred. "I'll do anything not to end up there," Ernest begs his guide. "Will you help me?" Cue the tender male camaraderie at which Roca excels, the home's catatonic boredom briefly enlivened by the two men's doomed escape bid.
Accompanying the beautiful details are vertiginous shifts in perspective. In some panels we see a character as she sees herself: an elegant young woman in a plush wagon of the Orient Express. In the next panel, we see her as she is: a wizened old lady in a wheelchair, staring out of her window.
Ignacio Ferreras' 2011 animated version of Wrinkles segued in and out of such flashbacks. The novel itself, with its abrupt transition from panel to panel, lends Roca's masterful shifts in points of view even greater punch. Abrupt cuts from his characters' befuddled present to their deep past function both as narrative and empathetic device, conveying the sickening ellipses of memory, the seepage of vocabulary, the bewilderment.
Unfortunately, there are problems with the translation. Emile's picaresque humour has been lost in horribly unnatural dialogue, rendered not from the Spanish original, but from French. But such is Wrinkles' impact that this doesn't spoil the stunning twist, nor the raw power of Ernest's final, inevitable transfer to the first floor.
Translated by Nora Goldberg. 104pp, Knockabout, pounds 12.99
To order Wrinkles for pounds 9.99 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.
Captions:
Ernest arrives at the care home
Julius Purcell
Graphic Novel Review: ‘The Lighthouse’ by Paco Roca
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Set during the tumultuous Spanish Civil War, Paco Roca’s The Lighthouse (NBM) is a winningly straightforward depiction of humanity revealed in the midst of war’s horrors. The slim graphic novel tells its tale through the eyes of Francisco, a teenaged rifleman in the Republican Guard who had joined the military with documents falsifying his age. When civil war between the Republicans and fascist Nationalists breaks out, the young man witnesses the death of friends and fellow villagers, is wounded and force to flee the fascist army.
Reaching the coast, Franciso is rescued and revived by Telmo, an eccentric elderly lighthouse keeper tending to a structure that’s no longer working. As he nurses the despairing soldier back to health, Telmo regales the boy with stories of the sea and of an island “almost untouched” where people live in peace: “Rather than punishing those who break the laws, justice rewards those who behave.” (Literature lovers will quickly pick up on the literary references within Telmo’s storytelling even if our 16-year-old hero doesn’t.) In this respite from the war, Francisco is able to both physically and emotionally recover, though we know the war will eventually intrude on this idyll.
Simply rendered with grey-blue shading adding a melancholy softness to Roca’s tale of war and redemption, The Lighthouse is a quick read that rewards multiple revisits. The Spanish artist’s art is both simple and expressive, particularly in its loving renderings of the sea in both its rough and calm moments. This is one of those books I’d recommend lending to any acquaintance who condescendingly asks you why you still read “that comic book stuff.” If they don’t get it when they’re done, they probably never will.
REVIEW: THE LIGHTHOUSE
March 13, 2017
BY ZEB LARSON
Paco Roca’s The Lighthouse is an interesting and quirky read, perfect for a Saturday afternoon where you don’t need a heavy story but could do with something that’s still thought-provoking. It’s a quick read but one that still manages to pack a fair bit of material into just over sixty pages: war, peace, dreams, and the collision of all three of those. It’s a worthwhile read, in part because it subverts some of the expectations you might have going into a story like this. Set during the Spanish Civil War, Francisco is a young Republican soldier on the run from the Fascists. After a particularly narrow escape, he takes shelter in an isolated lighthouse with an eccentric keeper, Telmo. Facing the defeat of his side and the question of what comes next, Francisco instead begins looking at life in a new way.
Going into this story, you might expect that a story about the Spanish Civil War will be a political one, given its depiction in other media in the last twenty years or so (Pan’s Labyrinth managed to fit some subtext in on this subject), but this isn’t a political tract in the way you might expect it to be. Francisco is a Republican, but in his own telling his reasons for joining weren’t passion or belief in the noble ideals of democracy. No, he just wanted to impress a pretty girl by making a steady wage. The Fascists aren’t depicted sympathetically or even neutrally, but this isn’t another requiem for the Republican lost cause.
At that level, this isn’t a particularly political story. But Roca doesn’t need to delve into the consequences and tragedies of the war beyond showing Francisco’s circumstances (the facts do speak for themselves, after all). The central drama of this story is the question of what comes next, and here lies its real political significance. Much of the story is about Francisco and Telmo working together to build a boat to go somewhere else, not even as refugees, but simply for the sake of adventure. The suggestion is that we need dreams, stories, and hopes all the more in times of defeat and ugliness because they’re a reason to keep going when everything else is crumbling all around you.
That could seem like an endorsement of escapism, which isn’t necessarily a good thing in terms of adversity either; is it useful to shut out the rest of the world to pretend that everything’s ok? But Roca doesn’t pretend that either of these men can ignore the world around them for forever. The lighthouse is a beautiful and isolated place, but it’s not an island, and the Fascists will catch up to them in some form or another. The point is that when we have to come back to the hard truths of life, dreams and hopes can at least give us some reason to keep going. Francisco has a reason to keep going and not simply yield, which to me felt like the real moral of this story.
Subtle politics aside, the story is charming to read. The art style and aesthetic is straight out of the period. I’ve always had a particular affinity for lighthouses and the sea and Roca has created one that lives up to my own fantasies about them. Stories about this particular subject are another weakness of mine, but I liked the focus on an individual during the war rather than the war itself. It’s useful to remember that conflicts involve hundreds of thousands of people living out their own little stories, and their stories are important too.
The only issue I found with the story has to do with its pacing. Roca tells this the story very briskly, partly because he doesn’t have the luxury of telling this in 180 pages. Part of the atmosphere and charm of Telmo’s lighthouse is supposed to be the fact that it’s cut off to a certain extent from the rest of the world; the pace of modern life and the war are supposed to be gone here. But we don’t have any time to luxuriate at the lighthouse before both men are building the boat and moving ahead. Allowing Francisco a period of languor to enjoy after the nightmare he’s been through would help this place to seem more peaceful, a theme that’s otherwise well-developed throughout the story. Just a place to exist without struggle is a profound kind of peace, but Francisco doesn’t have that luxury.
But I’m picking at a flea with this critique. If it moves a little too quickly, I must once again note that Roca is never jumping ahead of himself in the story. Nothing is out of place, and when events happen at least the pace they occur feels logical. I look forward to parsing Mr. Roca’s work elsewhere.
SCORE: 4/5
Wrinkles
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Author: Paco Roca
Format: paperback
Pages: 104
Publish Date: January 2015
Publisher: Knockabout Comics
Catalog ID: 9780861662371
Where to buy: http://www.knockabout.com/shop/?product=graphic-novels
Author website: http://www.pacoroca.com/ (in Spanish)
Additional info: Translated from French by Nora Goldberg
Review
Guest review by Martha Cornog, Graphic Novel Columnist, Library Journal (this review has no connection with Library Journal and is solely the opinion of the reviewer)
As the comics industry has been maturing in recent decades, so has its content. It’s been both sobering and fascinating to see excellent graphic novels coming out on aging, elder care, and the end of life. I’m thinking particularly of Joyce Farmer’s Special Exits, Roz Chast’s Why Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant, Aneurin Wright’s Things to Do in a Retirement Home Trailer Park…When You’re 29 and Unemployed, Lucy Knisley’s Displacement: A Travelogue, and Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles: A Story about My Mother, Alzheimer’s, and Me—most mentioned elsewhere on the Graphic Medicine website.
A worthy fellow star in the same constellation is this work by Spanish cartoonist Roca, which was originally released in 2007 first in France then in Spain, and adapted into an animated film in 2011. Both book and film have won multiple awards in Europe. Retired bank executive Ernest must accommodate himself reluctantly to an elder care facility when his son will no longer tolerate his father’s mental lapses. Soon Ernest finds himself rooming with Émile, a jovial wheeler-dealer who scams small sums out of the other residents but also procures things for them against the rules—like a dog for Raymond.
Indeed all the seniors have their quirks. Adrienne saves ketchup packets for her grandson, Joseph see himself as a foreign legionnaire, Eugene feigns deafness to lure female staff close enough to cop a feel, and Mrs. Rose thinks she’s riding the Orient Express—and these are the saner folks. Émile has no illusions, and annoyed by the facility’s restrictions and medications, he asserts that the purpose must be for him and his fellow residents “to live longer badly.” Eventually, he tells Ernest about the dreaded upper floor, where those elderly live who cannot manage on their own. Ernest asks Émile to take him up there, and he is appalled how everyone is much more out of touch with reality that the crowd downstairs. Cursing, moaning, and endlessly repeated phrases have replaced anything resembling normal conversation.
Learning that he’s been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, Ernest swears to do everything to avoid moving upstairs and enlists Émile to help. Elaborate, sometimes comical schemes ensue: escaping on a joyride in a car obtained through Émile’s ill-gotten gains (they wreck the car since no one can drive competently), preventing the doctor from administering memory tests, and paying assiduous attention to careful dress. And we realize that these diversions—and indeed many of the residents’ quirks, including Emile’s tricks—function to alleviate the boredom of the facility with its well-intentioned but limited activities. Reading in Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal about Dr. William Thomas introducing 100 parakeets into a nursing home, I longed to drop another hundred birds into this story to supplement the characters’ desperate attempts to inject meaning and color into their waning lives.
The clock winds down. The blind Leon loses his temper and assaults (possibly kills) his roommate Joseph for snoring. Marcel, with more advanced Alzheimer’s, has been transferred upstairs, and devoted wife Georgette goes along to care for him. Ernest, also: He accuses Émile of stealing possessions that he had in fact hidden himself. Then he puts feces in the treasure box of another resident—a prank rather appealingly spirited, given Ernest’s buttoned-up history. And he is at last moved upstairs. Now comes the wonderful twist, for Émile changes. Previously, he had swindled his neighbors, professed happiness at never having married, and declared his scorn for those who care for debilitated spouses. But now Émile misses Ernest, and he moves upstairs himself, living on the dreaded upper floor to look after his old roommate and help feed him. You are never too old to develop as a person. What an ending! As for Adrienne, she decides to join Mrs. Rose on her delusionary train ride. It’s more diverting than being lonely.
Roca’s art draws on the clear-line style commonly found in many European comics, gentle caricatures with restrained pastel coloring. Both reality and fantasy are shown with charming near-realism. In her Orient Express delusion, Mrs. Rose is an exotic young beauty. We also see the aliens Gilberte fears, and the desert legionnaires post where Joseph fancies himself assigned. But in Ernest’s dementia-affected vision towards the end, Émile becomes a faint outline without details or color and then disappears entirely into a blank page. Roca has said that he wanted to do the story for his parents, and he based some of the characters on his family and friends’ families. He did additional research by visiting nursing homes and collecting anecdotes.
The story has much to offer those in the elder care field about understanding their clients and about difficulties in caring for them. In Wrinkles, the facility’s staffers are shown as well-meaning and refreshingly tolerant of the elders’ libidinal urges, but with limited skills and creativity. Moreover, there are too few on duty during peak periods. Perhaps overworked, they forget to follow up on resident requests, mix up medications, fail to intervene in escalating conflicts, and seem unable to learn what the seniors really want and to give it to them. From the residents’ point of view, excitement, stimulation, and rewarding relationships are in heartbreakingly short supply.
Yet as a gently humorous and very moving tribute to the brave humanity of people like Ernest and Émile and Adrienne, Wrinkles has much to offer casual readers as well, who will be in the same situation as the three elders if they are lucky enough to grow old enough. Actually, it’s an introduction to that not-so-happy ending for all of us, ourselves and our family members—if we’re lucky enough to reach advanced age. But we do need those parakeets, or something like that.
Wrinkles
Created by: Paco Roca
Published by: Knockabout
ISBN: 0861662377 (Amazon)
Pages: 104
Genre: Drama, Illness, Psychology, Social Issues
Wrinkles
There are books and movies that I hate but recommend to everybody. They are good books and movies—and often times are even great books and movies. I recommend them because they are good or great. I am able to recognize their nearness to whatever we might be tempted to describe as objective quality. They are well-composed and well-accomplished. Their artistry is evident and clear. And more than that, they speak to some integral aspect of the human condition. They, through craft and talent and effort and grace, say something to the alert reader—and often, something valuable to the proposal of How should we then live?
I recommend these books and movies often and without hesitation. Because it is right to do so. And yet these books and movies I’m talking about: I hate them. Because ignorance is blissful. Because I have a heart. Because I am empathetic. Because I am tuned in to our existence and its fragilities. Because I am not immune to horror or terror. Because the metaphorical nights are long and they threaten always the metaphorical days. Because I too, like many of you, can be undone by simple stories told well.
Review of Wrinkles by Paco Roca
BOING!
One of the great glories of the comics medium (and one that is continually being probed and explored) is its ability to propose a visual-narrative reflection of psychological phenomena. Dreams, visions, thoughts, emotives. This has been especially useful in comics’ navigation of mental disorders.11EXAMPLES:
Glyn Dillon’s Nao of Brown:
David B’s Epileptic:
Joe Kelly’s I Kill Giants:
Comics offer all the toolbox of a relentless CGI but married to a character-driven Dogme 95 production. Comics can do anything and that paves the way to a complex psychological narrative—one that unveils effortlessly to the reader.
Meaning that: authors can vividly convey states of being and mind that would be otherwise difficult or costly in other media. And Paco Roca uses this gift of the medium to wring out the experiential nature of the elderly in a home for those gradually giving in to the disenfranchisement of the mind—suffering through troubles as benign as simple senility or as aggressive as Alzheimer’s. He does a fantastic job conveying lives surrendered to permanent convalescence. He does such a good job, in fact, that I hate Wrinkles. I hate it because it is so good and you should definitely read it.
Review of Wrinkles by Paco Roca
When I was younger, say twenty-one or so, my brother read me an account of an unpopular man in the 1600s who had been driven from a town while being pelted with stones. As a result of the injuries to the man’s head, his personality, character, and beliefs changed. He was unmade and remade because of a bad afternoon. Years later, he reverted again to his former self, but for me the damage was well accomplished. Before I had kids,22Now that I have children whom I cherish, there are any number of terrors that stalk the corners of my waking existence. Death, cancer, bullies, leukemia, pedophiles, them growing up to not like me. my only real fear in life was losing who I was to some catastrophe like brain injury—or to one of the many handfuls of maladies that assault those of old age. Cognition, the particular way that I perceive the world, who I am: those are the essentialities to my existence. After all, if I am not me then who on earth am I?
Review of Wrinkles by Paco Roca
In Wrinkles, Paco Roca underlines, circles, highlights, and writes in the margins of my fear. His protagonist, Ernest, is an older gentleman (a former bank branch manager) who suffers from Alzheimer’s (though he rarely seems cognizant of his own suffering). The text begins with his admission to an assisted care facility equipped to interact with tenants of varying degrees of dementia. Ernest’s case, when compared with some of the other guests, seems almost benign. Ernest will live out the remainder of his days here, a life mediated through the fog of medications.
Review of Wrinkles by Paco Roca
Roca uses the toolset of comics to seamlessly transport guests of the home into the world as they are experiencing it. In one moment a man is seventy-two and standing alone in a foyer, and in the next he is six and is stood up awkwardly before a room of his new classmates. A woman is pictured, seated by the window in her wheel chair, old and haggard; in the prior panel she is a young woman of beauty and elegance, riding the window seat of the Orient Express. Another resident sees members of the Legion everywhere. Another is transported again and again to the moment when he secured the heart of the love of his life.
Review of Wrinkles by Paco Roca
THIS IS EXCERPTED FROM ONE OF THE THE HAPPIEST, MOST SUBLIME, MOST TRAGIC MOMENTS IN THE BOOK.
IT MADE MY HEART SOAR AND DROWN SIMULTANEOUSLY.
The drama of daily living with a fading mind is told with humour and verve and a lightness of being. And I found myself growing more and more anxious. These amusing anecdotes and funny bits and pieces of lives gone askew were toying with my deepest and tremblingest insecurities. On the surface I was enjoying Roca’s book and the story of Ernest’s progressive psychological collapse. It’s bright and colourful and lovely and well-illustrated and well-paced.33Though in what may approach a caveat, I will warn that this story about elderly residents in a home, like all stories about elderly residents in a home, includes the obligatory escape-from-the-home-and-joyride-awhile trope. It was the only moment for me that skirted being a false note. But really, if you’re in a home waiting to die, I’d guess that this sort of thing probably actually happens not infrequently so I gave it a pass. But in the midst of my enjoyment, the terror of existence roiled and rumbled. By the end, I was panicked and undone. Roca had done so good a job of exploring the gradual dissolution of selves that I was entirely exposed, my oldest fear made raw and calamitous—all within one hundred pages in which nothing incredibly terrible happens save for that a handful of people gradually forget themselves.
And that’s the magic of story.