“And now how do I speak? You have done very well, you have deceived me! For me, who founded this salon, it is a brutal illusion,” said a very emotional Marika Vila when she went on stage to receive the Comic Barcelona Grand Prize: she didn’t know, they had only told her that she would give one of the prizes.
Vila is much more than a cartoonist: after starting out at the Selections Ilustradas agency, she became involved in groups of authors, and collaborated in magazines such as El Jueves or Interviú, and later worked at Planeta DeAgostini – she brought the manga Bola de Drac here – . Among her works is Mata-Hari (Nabumbu Island), with a script by Andreu Martín, initially published in Totem el Comix and, as Jordi Canyissà pointed out a few days ago, currently the only comic of hers available on the market.
But the award-winner has also dedicated herself to research on gender and feminist activism, as seen in her latest book, recently published, Unsokupar el cuerpo; the voices of female authors in Spanish comics (Ed. Marmotilla), based on her doctoral thesis. It is an analysis of the comic discourse from the Republic until now with a gender perspective, analyzing why women’s bodies have been so present and their voices so little. Vila – which she has on tour, now in Cerdanyola, the exhibition Cossos que parlen. The representations of things in comic authors. 1910-2022–, she points out that “there has been a big change in the last 10 years. At the end of the century there was a disaster, the magazines, which financed the works, fell, and towards 2002 fanzines came out again but with higher quality; Later, more independent comic editors emerged, professional cartoonists began to work abroad beyond the US and the Franco-Belgian market, so the profession revived. Starting in 2013, more women began to come out, we created an association and gained visibility, but there is still a long way to go, because although there are more of us, we are only 20%. The ministries and departments of equality have also contributed to women winning awards and being on juries, and there are many more girls in drawing schools, and also more readers.”
What would you recommend to those starting out? “Responsibility, because you have a means of communication, you are not playing to make cartoons, whether you do humor, children or adults, you are transmitting messages and you have a responsibility for the ideology and models that you transmit. Secondly, patience, and thirdly, perseverance. A lot of resilience is needed in this profession, both for men and women, but until now we women have needed it much more.”
The winner of the Grand Prix insists that “we must claim it”: “I come from a time when it seemed like you were successful, but instead the following year you might have disappeared, and that always keeps us exceptional: we have to be in the women’s tables to recover the historical difference that we have accumulated, because there are no references, there is a lack of bibliography… but we also have to be at all the other tables.”
Catalan version, here
