By Miguelanxo Prado, translated by Jacinthe Leclerc & Mary McKee (NBM)
ISBN: 978-1-68112-116-1
Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: For Magic All Year ‘Round… 10/10
With the season of moody weirdness well upon us now I’m absolutely delighted to focus on a work of truly groundbreaking import and astounding beguilement making a welcome return to bookshelves and whatever their digital equivalents are. I’m also pretty stoked to be adding a Magical Realist work of genuine global importance to our annual Halloween spooky soiree…
Miguelanxo Prado was born in A Coruña in 1958, and studied architecture before moving into the comics industry. The multi award-winning Galician graphic prodigy has worked for Les Humanoïdes Associés and other European publishers, and released numerous albums such as Chienne de Vie (1988), Manuel Montano (1989), Chroniques absurdes and Ardalén (2012).
He illustrates for others – such as Esquivel’s The Law of Love – and in his other lives writes novels, works as a commercial painter and makes animated movie such De Profundis. If you mainly read mainstream English-language comics you might have enjoyed Prado’s phenomenal painted storytelling on Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman: Endless Nights where he limned ‘Dream: The Heart of a Star’.
His most celebrated work is unarguably Trait de craie, which took Europe by storm in 1993, garnering a boatload of prestigious prizes and trophies from the numerous translated editions (including the one I can read) as Streak of Chalk, which became NBM’s initial ComicsLit Imprint release in 1994…
Now, to celebrate 40 years in the business, NBM have released a new-&-improved hardback edition packed with all-new extras that you’d be bonkers to miss.
A moody lyrical and deliciously brooding dark affair, the story deals with a remote island and its effect on the two regular inhabitants when strangers arrive…
Beautiful and desolate, the expansive rock appears on no maps and offers little more than an abandoned lighthouse, a general store and a huge jetty where occasional visitors (seldom more than two boats a year) scrawl graffiti messages and bon mots before sailing away again…
When solitary sailor Raul ties up at the height of summer, the wall of scrawls fascinates him. Soon he is sharing the sullen but expansive hospitality of the trading post/hotel run by dowdy Sara and her brutish son Dimas. Everyone seems to be mutually looking for company, gossip and something else. Something intangible…
There is another mariner visiting, but she is a returnee and a woman who fiercely treasures her privacy. Despite Raul’s awkward preoccupation with Ana, the blond enigma wants nothing to do with the newcomer. His conviction is that persistence will eventually win her over…
The sultry, sluggish tension grows more oppressive when a third vessel arrives, carrying two boisterous and unsavoury men. Sara is even more withdrawn: nothing good has ever happened when three boats moor at the same time…
Tragically, she is quickly proved right in the most appalling manner, but after the bloodletting stops, Raul incredulously discovers that something impossible is happening and that he is bewilderingly mired right in the middle of it all…
Enticing and intoxicating, this tale unfolds at the pace of a seeping wound and is as impossible to ignore. A graphic narrative masterpiece in every sense of the term, Streak of Chalk gets under your skin and stays with you long after the final page is turned.
However, before that happens this expanded Second Edition offers an enchanting Epilogue chapter plus an Afterword by Prado, a tribute sequence set on the island starring International Treasure Corto Maltese in ‘A Tribute to Hugo Pratt’ and a wealth of Additional Material, offering sketches, roughs designs, maps of the island, framing studies in ink and paint and covers for various foreign language editions.
One of comics’ most powerful achievements, this is a grown-up book no fan should ignore.
© 2003, 2017 Miguelanxo Prado, represented by Norma Editorial S.A. © 1994, 2017 NBM for the English translation.