Cuerpos de papel censurados en los cómics contractuales españoles de los años setenta

Abstract

In the seventies the Spanish society was changing very fast as consequence of the politic changes that were taken place in that decade: after the Franco's dictatorship the difficult years of the Spanish transition started. In this complex context the Spanish underground comic was born. An antiestablishment comix that frequently used sex, drugs, violence and rock music to attack the bases of conservative and retrograde society. Their vignettes represented the most conflictive and revulsive aspects of the time, such as the social exclusion, homosexuality, politic corruption, police's violence,... Their pages were full of acid critics, cruel and despiadated, against the establishment. They show an attitude that wasn't accepted by the authorities, which supposed the punishment of the censorship, which practiced a severe control and didn't permit any fickleness in the use of the mass media. Then a new fight for the freedom of expression and for the right to be different began. These drawers had to battle against the enemy using metaphoric expressions, especially with images of the human body. They searched for indirect and hidden expressions, made semantic games referred to the sense and form, so that everything seemed simpler than what it really was and broke the rules, direct the censor wrongly and reveal the repreased and prohibited aspect of the censorship rules.