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This article seeks to analyze precariousness and precarity in recent Spanish comics by young women cartoonists. Mamen Moreu, Ana Belén Rivero, Ana Oncina, Teresa Ferreiro and Roberta Vázquez have been influenced by the global financial crisis of 2008, partaking of a certain "poetics of crisis" which has emerged in Spanish literary and comics production. Precarious employment, economic uncertainty and social vulnerability are shown in their comics. What is unique of these group of authors is that they use their precarious reality as the source material for their humorous, yet bitter, stories. They expose their economic constraints, precarious jobs, and unstable relationships by using self-irony, grotesque imagery, and graphic distortion. We argue that these cartoonists show themselves as vulnerable characters facing difficult circumstances while at the same time exorcising their vulnerability through humor; by doing so, precariousness attains an empowering aspect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study attempts to explore one of the less-studied works in Paul Bowles-Mohamed Mrabet's intellectual and translational collaborations, Chocolate Creams and Dollars, a semi-autobiographical novel illustrated by Philip Taaffe's photographs and found objects. The story presents Driss, a young Moroccan entangled within the shifts and twists of encounter with Westerners in a Northern Moroccan coastal city. By virtue of the three different interventions – Mrabet's story, Bowles's translation and Taaffe's art – the novel is contrapuntal, since each creator presents a different – and often conflicting – point of view. The three of them are observers who record Morocco's 'Interzone' from different angles and cultural agendas. This paper seeks to understand these networks of collaborative connections as they pertain to transcultural contacts, exploring the sexual, cross-cultural, textual and visual discourses running through the narrative fabrics. It analyses Bowles's slippages in authority and in authorship and Taaffe's objectifying and exotifying gaze, and how Driss, Mrabet's protagonist, turns his ethnographic gaze back upon the Westerners. It finally argues that Mrabet's novel, through the symbolic appropriation of experiences with Westerners, articulates intricate discourses on the construction of a cultural identity at the crossroads of neocolonial ventures and postcolonial anxieties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Beowulf by Santiago García and David Rubín stands out among the many graphic adaptations of the medieval heroic poem on account of its length, insight and art. Theirs is a cultural translation that adapts medieval to postmodern tropes. This article examines how their reading brings closer the character of the medieval hero with the contemporary superhero. It also explores how both creators subvert the tropes of the hero and the monster in terms of graphic treatment and storyline, whether approaching original themes under a new light--such as guilt--or hybridizing monstrous bodies and aligning them with humans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]