Six hands have been gathered, and not all, to carry out the comic book Mikel Laboa (Elkar): Harkaitz Cano, Unai Iturriaga and Joseba Larratxe. The result of the work of four or five years, presented in November of this year, will draw the attention of the reader from the beginning, since the first pages of history are told as a Western.

As for the images, three or four different Laboa appear in the book, adapted to the different times of the artist. Along with them, the singer of the Old Quarter had his travels: No Dok Amairu, Jose Luis Zumeta... If you are looking for a comic book useful for cultural transmission, this is a good option.

From an artist we already have to consider classic of our music, to a comic book classic: Maus, published by Art Spiegelman in 1991, and translated by Julen Gabiria, now has the opportunity to read in Basque, publishing the tireless editorials Astiberri. The comic tells two parallel stories: Spiegelman's relationship with his father and those who lived in a Nazi concentration camp.

II. Spiegelman chose an original way to tell the barbaries of the World War: to represent all characters as human animals. The Jews appear as mice in this play, the Germans as cats, the Poles are pigs, the French frogs, the British as fish, etc. With this resource, Spiegelman was able to reflect the de-individualization that was essential to be able to carry out the Holocaust, showing that the comic book is able to tell the most dramatic stories without giving up the graphic conventions that are its own, claiming autonomous genre.

During the lockdown, Usue Egia started drawing five hours a day as an exercise in self-knowledge, with no special intention of publishing that work. But these works were acquiring a more concrete form and have ended up being comic until the Water Hill in Denonarte, with the help of the Sister(s) leku scholarship from Durango.

Despite its origin in confinement and deconfinement, this is not a comic book about the pandemic: through this stop, the reader will find the experiences of a woman about 30 years old in a work that goes through many cultural references. Frustrations, humor and fantasy with songs like Chavela Vargas, Henry Purcell or Nacho Vegas.

As for the genre of self-fictional comics, we can also mention an Italian author who has worked this line in recent years: Zerocalcare (Michele Rech). His latest work, No sleep till Shengal (Black Pharmacy), has been published in Basque shortly after its publication in Italy, thanks to the translation of Koldo Izagirre. But this time, unlike other comics that we've been able to read in Euskera, like Hondamuina or the Armadillo divinity, the leading role will not be played by Cero, but by the Kurdish people.

This comic is a chronicle about the Ezidiarras who in 2014 managed to escape the genocide of ISIS, partly related to Kobane Calling of the same author. Besides leaving the hole of hell, the Italian comic book has given all prominence to a people capable of devising a new social organization in the middle of nowhere, completing a hard and epic story, but also with a margin of humor and reflection.

Following on from political issues, the Madrid illustrator EsCarolota, Holako are our Txalaparta books. In this book, translated by Itziar Diez de Ultzurrun Sagalá, from interviews with various friends, experiences about the rule and different views are collected, with great humor and feminist perspective.

The abundance of voices at the base of the book makes the theme reflected in many bodies and through different experiences: What happens when a rule doesn't come? Does everyone live the same way? The author has approached a topic still taboo for society with naturalness and irreverence.

Adur Larrea, for his part, found in an old verse the story that Lurbintto (Elkar) has finished being comic: XVIII. The Convention War of the century has just ended and some of the losers, upon returning to their peoples, find a bleak panorama: burned or occupied their homes, their lands in the hands of others... But they have guns. And they know how to use it.

The Vizcaíno Labortano cartoonist tells us in this latest work a little known aspect of our history. With a desire for revenge, former soldiers met who suffered this double failure, that of war and that of return home. In an area uncontrolled by the French Republic, actions are initiated almost every night.

The Bertsos have also been the starting point for Ainara Azpiazu Aduriz in the Utzi azalari comic (Dobera). But in this case, the 2017 Txalaparta Bertsolari has departed from those sung by Maialen Lujanbio in Irun prison. They were very well known immediately after chanting those verses, as Lujanbio put the audience in the skin of a nonbinary trans person with great strength.

From those rhymes this graphic novel, the protagonist of the verses becomes Elene in the comic book of Azpiazu and the night that passes with a boy named Iker is the starting point of the story. In addition, the Hernaniarra comic book has added to the verses of Lujanbio other ingredients in this work that allows us to reflect on bodies and lives in transition.

We started the article with a comic book that begins to tell Laboa's life as a Western. Why not stop a faque-western? Bruno Duhamel's comic book Fake Footprints (Harriet) stars Jake Johnson. For fifteen years he has played the role of Johnson Marshall in a Western American show, but he has ended up taking the job seriously: he took his gun to a tourist and is now unemployed.

This account of the journey that starts after losing everything is the penultimate result of the difficult French cartoonist. But his latest work, Never, divided into two albums, is also available to the reader in Durango. All of them have been published translated by Miel Angel Elustondo and by the invaluable commitment of the editorial Harriet, which has a specific weight in the elaboration of the Basque comic book, both in volume and in quality.

This year, in addition, the editorial has begun to publish the Japanese manga in Basque. You can't finish this review without recommending Tomomi Usui's Cube Arts: the adventures a high school student takes when she starts testing a virtual reality game, she's sure to hit young readers and not so young.