By Miguelanxo Prado, translated by Jacinthe Leclerc & Mary McKee (NBM)
ISBN: 978-1-68112-116-1 (HB/Digital edition) 978-1-56163-108-7 (TPB)
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 El pacto del Letargo (2020).
He illustrates the work of others – such as Esquivel’s The Law of Love – and in his other lives writes novels, works as a commercial painter and makes animated movies like 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, and as hardback second edition in 2017.
A moodily lyrical, deliciously brooding affair, the story deals with a remote island and its effect on the two regular inhabitants once strangers arrive…
Beautiful and desolate, the expansive rock appears on no maps and offers barely 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 or 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’s 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 seeking 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 so-manlike 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 Sara is even more withdrawn: nothing good has ever happened when three boats moor at the same time…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’s 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, the tale unfolds at the pace of a seeping wound and is just 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 the 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, comprising 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.