Nowt/Aktion #4

Gabriel Corbera, Miedo Publicaciones, Spain, April 2014, 20 pages, black and white, 2,50 euros.

Printed in a hundred copies and already sold out, the fourth issue of Nowt/Aktion is a new effort by Gabriel Corbera, the Spanish cartoonist well-known for his web-comic Monday Sucide and for his books published in the United States by Space Face. With Miedo, the imprint founded with his girlfriend Eva Monleón, aka Misako Mimoko, Corbera creates a lot of self-published comics. In this series we witness the performer Nowt in some reckless actions as jumping, grasping the wings of a plane, hanging to chains, breaking a glass with a fist and so on, while images and objects typical of Corbera's art - cobwebs, destroyed buildings, desolate landscapes, shotguns, tigers and caves  - recur.

Beyond the author's undeniable ability to build his own narrative universe with perseverance and dedication, mixing references to contemporary art with manga influences, there is much more in these comics. The last pages are in fact dedicated to the clash between Nowt and The Sad Machine, a device which manages to wear down and then to give up even the inexhaustible Nowt thanks to its "supersonic moans". This is only one of the situations in which Corbera's characters have to deal with something bigger than themselves, be it a machine, a conspiracy or a villain. The Spanish author is good at conveying this sense of oppression, usually vague but that sometimes becomes clearer, acquiring a social and political dimension, as it happens for example in Heroisch, a one-page story published earlier this year in Mould Map #3.

If you still don't know Gabriel Corbera and you want to get familiar with him, you can take a look at his Tumblr and keep an eye on Miedo website and on that of Space Face, that will publish soon a 120-page book with one of the best titles of the year, Days Longer Than Long Pork Sausages.