It starts like this. There’s a young man – not much more than a boy – called Francisco. He is on the run. It’s the dying days of the Spanish Civil War and he’s a Republican soldier being chased by fascists. He’s hoping to make the French border but instead, under fire from his pursuers, falls into the sea and is washed up on a remote headland, home to a broken lighthouse and an old lighthouse keeper called Telmo.
What follows is a coming-of-age tale, a story about friendship and a narrative that finds hope in what seems a hopeless time. It’s also an old-fashioned adventure story inspired by Jules Verne and Robert Louis Stevenson that never shies away from the political realities of the era it is set in.
It’s also a fantasy of sorts. There was a real Francisco Valiente. He enlisted at the age of 16 as a rifleman, was sent off to fight but his brigade lost and he escaped to France where he ended up in a concentration camp. When the civil war ended he was sent to Morocco to do hard labour.
The cartoonist Paco Roca has taken the bare details of Valiente’s story and embroidered an adventure story that drew on his own love of Treasure Island and films such as Jason and the Argonauts. There’s also a bit of Borges thrown in for good measure.
The Lighthouse dates back to 2004 and is now getting a reissue in the wake of the acclaim for Roca’s graphic novel Wrinkles. It is a short but potent graphic novel. Easily accessible too.
Roca is an unflashy cartoonist who tells his story in a simple, cinematic style. “It is not necessary to overwhelm the reader all the time,” he once told The Comics Journal, “actually the reader is usually more concerned with the storyline than the artwork.”
And so here the story is told panel by panel in plain black and white imagery allied to a grey wash effect. The result is carefully crafted and stylish. His flashback sequences, meanwhile, utilise crosshatching to differentiate between past and present.
And around one single panel there’s also one of the most effective uses of white space I can remember. One of those moments when form and content are perfectly aligned.
The Lighthouse, by Paco Roca, priced £12.99, is published by NBM on February 16.
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