"I am happy to feel free when creating, whether inventing a story or picking up a pencil to draw. Drawing is a virgin territory, open to experimentation, and I think that is the main reason why I am still in this". Dick Twardzik places his fingers on a piano for the last time in his life, accompanying Chet Baker in Piece caprice, while Pep Brocal enjoys a "classic, no-frills" gin and tonic at the bar, "if the gin is good, with cucumber it's even better".
Creating shapes on a blank sheet has been with him since childhood. "I realized that drawing is pure fun and that, moreover, when I showed any scribble, it caused the admiration of my well-intentioned parents and family. Drawing made everything else secondary, which might not have been very healthy, but the damage was already done", laughs the one who defines himself, above all, as a comic author, "because it better describes what I do, since defining myself as a cartoonist would be incomplete. Comics, for those who don't know, is a story told in images. It is an art, the ninth, that combines narration and graphics, but which, with exceptions, is a story".
The most recent work by this Terrassa native, vintage '67, just published and presented with notable success at the Comic Fair, is the comic adaptation of Taxi (Salamandra Graphic), a novel by fellow parishioner Carlos Zanón. "It's a story with noir overtones that, in reality, escapes that label. It's about Sandino, an insomniac taxi driver who wanders with his yellow and black car through Barcelona trying to escape from everything and himself, occasionally stopping at the apartments of the women he meets, as if they were the islands in Ulysses' journey".
This work follows another that Pep Brocal is particularly proud of: the adaptation of Ramon Llull's Book of Beasts, published last year, "a text that, surprisingly enough, has waited more than seven centuries to reach comics". He currently confesses to being "with a couple of long-term projects, for which I go from one to the other and thus advance them in parallel, but it is still too early to go into details", he cryptically concludes.
Adult comic, round trip
From when he entered the Barcelona Faculty of Fine Arts of Sant Jordi, the regular does not remember the teachings received as the most relevant. "The truly extraordinary thing for me was the human broth I found there in full effervescence, the colleagues who were in the same boat, looking to make their way in the attractive and at the same time hard profession of cartoonist." There, the budding author coincided with great names in Spanish comics: Montana, De Felipe, Padu, Montecarlo, Oscaraibar or Manel Fontdevila. "With Óscar we even worked on a series for the magazine Cairo called John Pájaro, and with Manel we threw caution to the wind and published a fanzine that had the ambition of a magazine, Mister Brain, where we put everything that the publishers of that time were no longer willing to publish." It was a moment of hangover after "the much-vaunted boom of comics, which didn't even touch me. The agonizing end of the magazines of the 80s did not allow, in the following decade, to imagine a professional future. I told myself that it was not I who abandoned comics but just the opposite, which is more accurate."
Pep Brocal is currently working on a couple of long-term projects, "but it's still too early to go into details"That forced the parishioner to reinvent himself. "I took refuge in illustrating children's and young adult books and making comics for magazines Tretzevents and Cavall Fort, who continued to bet on comics, in this case in Catalan and for young children. Later, I published the adventures of Olaf the rabbit as well as those of Lily Megafly, both for early readers."
And so it continued, "until the end of the first decade of the new millennium." Then he realized that this ninth art had also reinvented itself "and I began to rescue ideas, notes, stories, characters, all that magma that had been left in the drawer waiting for a second chance." He published Alter y Walter, Cosmonauta and Inframundo. "The moment arrived and before my astonished eyes a crack opened through which I slipped," he explains, and pauses briefly to continue: "In fact, and this is a bit intimate, I owe that return to the arena to my partner, with whom we invented a movement, Badabum, an editorial platform for experimentation on paper, graphic work, strange comics, etc. It lasted between 2010 and 2016 and it was from there that I rediscovered the need to tell stories with drawings, that which turned out to be comics. And I'm still at it!"
In search of urban scars
Barcelona is the city where Pep Brocal studied and to which he, as a young man, used to pilgrimage on weekends in search of emotions, alcohol, and adventure, "always with moderation, I was never crazy." He also lived here for a few years, "until my post-pandemic exile, which catapulted me 50 kilometers along the coast road, commuter train upwards if there are no disruptions." With Roser Mesa, he made a book, Anecdotario de Barcelona, where they compiled some of the anecdotes "that pepper that other history of the city that has nothing to do with the Barcelona posa't guapa, but with its scars, those corners, facades, nooks and crannies through which its past full of stories, anecdotes, dramas and, also, happy moments, seeps in." Of these singular episodes, the local enumerates his two favorites: "the boxing match between Arthur Cravan and Jack Johnson in the Monumental, in 1916, and the character of Nicomedes Méndez, executioner of the Audiencia de Barcelona between 1877 and 1908, who, already retired and a regular at the tavern Can Ramon on Vila i Vilà street, recounted to anyone who would kindly invite him to a glass of wine his experiences with the garrote vil."
But the city transforms, inevitably, and not always for the better. "I believe Barcelona is living the saddest phase of its history, the definitive and irreparable loss of personality, and it's basically put itself up for sale. Everything goes, everything has a price, and everything is sold. And if everything is for sale, what you're going to lose is everything," he reflects with a certain bitterness, finishing his gin and tonic while, embraced by his quintet, Monk's hands alternate piano and celesta in Pannonica.
—What won't be lost is the unparalleled gastronomic offer of this Bar, if you want to sink your teeth into it. We have a menu, sandwiches, à la carte, portions, tapas…
"Generally, I'm more of a menu person, that ordered ritual of first course, second course, drink, and dessert and/or coffee," replies Pep Brocal, thinking it over in that always delicate decision-making process, which depends on the place and the trust inspired by whoever is behind the stoves.
—I forgot to tell you that we also have combo plates.
The regular then laughs heartily:
—Not that! The combo plate seems like a savage gastronomic degeneration to me!