Last Friday,
Fallos de raccord
went on sale, which is, if we remember correctly and excluding that installment of
Work in progress
published by the fictitious and arty publishing house
Ediciones Reversas
, the first solo work by
Marcos Prior
(until now he had dedicated himself more to screenwriting than anything else, if we stick to the tasks of comics). However, it could be said that the book will not be officially presented until this weekend at the
Expocómic
in Madrid; Marcos will be there from half past two on Saturday signing copies, exactly at the
Diábolo Ediciones
stand.
Literary criticism is not our thing, but since we have already acquired the habit or vice of sticking our noses into other people’s business, we could not resist commenting on the work. The bad thing is that phrases like this come to mind: “Fallos de raccord is to Spanish comics what
Infinite Jest
is to North American literature” and things like that, typical of the most vulgar marketing. The worst thing, however, is not that, but the fact of thinking that deep down there is some truth in this senseless comparison. Perhaps the most accurate thing to say is that, like the novel by David Foster Wallace, Fallos de raccord is a complex work (although saying this is a commonplace), which pushes and twists the limits of the medium to tell us something without telling us a stori(et)a.
Is there anything that more flagrantly violates linear and “teleological” narrativity than a continuity error? (which is, by the way, part of the jargon of another medium). But this is not just a metaphor that would reinforce a formal decision: If with something Fallos de raccord deals with, it is with the contingency and causal necessity of the events that occur in people’s lives; something that puts us on notice, at the beginning of the comic, the conference given by the character Nicholas Nicholson, a guru of business management “addicted to marketing literature where anthropomorphic animals appear as in Where is My Cheese?”. That conference, in which the character mentions the story of
A Descent into the Maelstrom
, by Edgar Allan Poe, reverberates later in the various references to the arrival of Hurricane Katrina to the city of New Orleans and in many other elements of the “narration”, generating an authentic “rhizome”, in which the meaning appears by accumulation, not because we are explained “one thing after another”; in that spiral also resonates, for example, the “anomaly”, “skill”, “gift”, “talent”, “dark secret”, “monstrosity” or “semipower” of Nicholas, who suffers, in his daily life, the effect of continuity errors (yes, Nicholas has that power and is, in his own way, a superhero, so that Fallos de raccord is also, fatefully, a superhero comic).
And so we could continue to tie elements from here and there, arranged throughout the pages of the book. In short, the comic is great and the people at Diábolo have put a lot of effort into the edition, which is why we congratulate them because theirs is, as they say, a risky bet. We fervently hope that their courage will be rewarded handsomely.