History against the grain? On the relationship between visual aesthetics and historical interpretation in the contemporary Spanish graphic novel

In this essay the traditional historiographical distinctions between events and representations, texts and images, and 'good' and 'bad' images are interrogated through a reading of the contemporary Spanish graphic novel. The focus is on the material form of the images in the historical BD Lope de Aguirre. This trilogy has one writer Fernandez-Cava and three different artists for each part of the trilogy: Enrique Breccia, Federico del Barrio, and Ricard Castells. An analysis of formal BD structures, artistic and visual decisions, is applied to the trilogy. One finds that visual form proves more important than the narrative content for the post-colonial politics of the texts.