Barcelona, âme noire, written by Denis Lapière and Gani Jakupi, art by Ruben Pellejero, Eduard Torrents and Martín Pardo

Second frame of third chapter:

Look, this is a list of records which are banned here… You should be able to find them easily in France, especially the first three, Duke Ellington, Django Reinhardt and Benny Goodman.

Gani Jakupi kindly gave me a copy of this graphic novel as well as his Kosovo book when we met earlier this year. It is not available in English, unfortunately, though it has been translated from the original French into Dutch, Spanish and Catalan. It was co-written by Jakupi, who lives in Barcelona, and Denis Lapière, who is Belgian; the three artists are all Catalan, and Pellejero, who was born in 1950, has been exorcising the ghosts of the Franco regime for much of his career. Here’s a Youtube trailer for it:

Barcelona, âme noire (Barcelona, dark soul) tells the story of the rise and fall of Carlos, son of a grocer, whose mother dies in a bomb attack on their shop in (we guess) the immediate aftermath of the Civil War; he grows up to be a smuggler, crime boss, and lover of many women. The story apparently was originally intended to be a six-volume series and got cut back to 144 pages, and there is a bit of a sense of compression towards the end. But the art conveys a lot, and one gets a real sense of Barcelona as a seething centre of crime and subversion under the oppression of the Falange. The sexual politics is perhaps a bit traditional, but perhaps that also represents the times we are looking at. You can get it here in the original French.