Spanish peninsular literature and popular culture has increasingly focused on the 2008 global economic crisis as a primary focal point over the past decade, and the neoliberal economic and political policies that enabled it. This recession left a lasting mark, relegating citizens to precarity and alienation because of job insecurity and financial instability. Literary and cultural production have risen to critique neoliberalism and the 2008 economic crisis in Spain, and prior scholarship has engaged with this body of work extensively. Olga Bezhanova’s work Literature of Crisis: Spain’s Engagement with Liquid Capital, for example, analyzes the ways in which the eponymous body of literature critiques Spanish neoliberalism in the novel, essay, and poetry formats. More work is needed, however, in understanding the role that comics play in this social criticism, due to their unique ability to utilize cartooning to make difficult concepts more approachable to their reader. While work has been done in this field, a comprehensive and in-depth study of comics of the crisis is needed to advance the field further. This dissertation intervenes at this critical juncture. Engaging with scholars of neoliberalism and the economic crisis, most notably Wendy Brown and Guy Standing, as well as Scott McCloud’s and Nick Sousanis’ approaches to understanding comics, this dissertation analyzes the unique ways in which comics engage with the crisis. These comics are not only informed by the crisis and cycles of protest in Spain, but can also serve as a tool for the reader to map their own positionality within neoliberalism in Spain and, perhaps, visualize solutions to their alienation. Through comics, we can gain a more robust understanding of this crucial moment in contemporary Spanish history.
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