Manuel Marsol

Invitado de Honor

(Madrid, 1984) has turned in just a few years into an international benchmark in illustrated albums, translated into more than 10 languages, with prestigious acknowledgements such as the International Illustration Prize Bologna Children's Book Fair (Italy), the Amadora BD (Portugal) and the Pépite Livre Illustré (France).

In Spain, most of his work has been published by Fulgencio Pimentel, with titles such as El tiempo del Gigante (2016) and Yôkai (2017), co-written with Carmen Chica; Duel al Sol (2018) and Mvsevm (2019), the latter in collaboration with Javier Sáez Castán. His illustrated album, Astro (2023, Fulgencio Pimentel), has been praised by critics and included among the year's best by newspapers like La Vanguardia and ABC.

He has also illustrated novels like La Metamorfosis by Kafka (2015, Astro), La Venus de las pieles by Sacher-Masoch (2016, Sexto Piso), El gato de Brasil by Conan Doyle (2016, Ekaré) and Robinson Crusoe by Defoe (2022, Alma); the essay by Leslie Stephen Elogio del caminar (2024, Nórdica), and he has done covers for Anagrama, Babelia (El País), Libros del K.O. and Barrett, articles for the magazine Líbero, and album covers for the groups Jonston and The Boys with the Perpetual Nervousness.

He has also given talks, workshops and exhibitions in places such as Caixa Forum (Madrid), Taipei Book Fair (Taiwan), Fotokino (France), BD à Bastia (France), FIL (Guadalajara, Mexico), Fundação José Saramago (Lisbon), Red Itiner (Madrid), the Illustration Biennial (Croatia) and the Almería Western Film Festival. His work appears in Picturebook Makers (2022, dPICTUS), together with 11 other renowned international authors of illustrated albums.

www.manuelmarsol.com

Instagram: @manuelmarsol

X: @manuel_marsol

Jesús Cisneros

Invitado de Honor

(Zaragoza, 1969) studied History of Art and Illustration. He has exhibited his works in individual and collective exhibitions in Mexico City, Barcelona, Istanbul, Strasbourg, Marseille, Porto, Seoul and Zaragoza. He has also contributed as an illustrator in more than 30 books published by national and international publishers.

He has received the Lazarillo Illustration Award, a special mention at the Bienal Illustrarte, the Premio I Colori del Sacro award, and has been selected three times at the showcase of illustrators at the Bologna Book Fair.

For several years, he has alternated his creative activity with teaching, a field that has nourished his work and allowed him to contribute to teaching illustration as an artistic profession. He currently lives in Zaragoza.

Arnal Ballester

Invitado de Honor

I was born in Barcelona in 1955, and illustrating books has been one of my main occupations. I have illustrated works such as La Boca risueña (written by Montse Gineste); No Tinc Paraules; Chamario (written by Eduardo Polo, preface by Eugenio Montejo); Don Queharé (written by Ruth Vilar); Una pierna (written by Carlos Grassa Toro); El Gran Zoo (written by Nicolás Guillén); El día antes de la revolución (written by Ursula K. Le Guin); Calle de sentido único (written by Walter Benjamin) and De una batalla perdida (written by Svetlana Alexiévich).

In all it's been 80 titles, some of which have received awards at international book competitions, such as the Bologna Fair. As a whole, they were recognized with the National Illustration Award, with which the Spanish Government's Ministry of Culture distinguished the career of a country's illustrator for the first time.

But much more important than all this is that I feel I haven't wasted my time, something that also happened with my animation pieces for festivals, foundations and television channels, which is another of my passions, and very specially with the thirty years I have spent teaching visual narration at Escola Massana d’Art i Disseny in Barcelona.

In short, it is a privilege.

Ana Penyas

Invitado de Honor

(Valencia, 1987) is an illustrator and author of comics. In 2016, she won the VII Catálogo Iberoamericano Ilustra with the series Buscando un sitio. In 2017, she received the Premio Internacional de Novela Gráfica Fnac-Salamandra Graphic, thanks to which she published her first graphic novel We're all just fine (2017, Salamandra Graphic), where she talks about her grandmothers and the generation of women who grew up in the Franco era, and for which she received the Premio de Autora Revelación Nacional at the Salón del Cómic in Barcelona and the Premio Nacional de Cómic 2018.

She has published several illustrated albums, highlighting her work around historical memory: En transición (2017, Barlin libros) and Mexique, el nombre del barco (2017, El zorro rojo). She has worked as an illustrator on various feminist projects such as Pikara Magazine, the Jo tambè vaig ser piquetera calendar, and the illustrated notebook Biosindicalismo desde los territorios domésticos (2021, La Laboratorio and Fundación Rosa Luxemburg).

In 2021, she published Todo bajo el sol (2018, Salamandra Graphic), a reflection on the transformation of the Spanish Mediterranean coast as a result of tourism, which won the Éco-Fauve RAJA Award for Sous le soleil at the Festival de la Bande Dessinée d’Angoulême  (2023, 50th edition) and the ACDCómic Award for the best national work 2021.

In 2022, she developed, with anthropologist Alba Herrero Garcés, En una casa.Genealogía del trabajo del hogar y los cuidados, at the Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, IVAM (11/2022-04/2023). The exhibition aimed to create a dialogue between ethnography and artistic creation, expanding collective, subaltern memory based on the experiences of workers and employers.

She is currently working on a new comic book, again with Salamandra Graphic, to be published in the fall of 2025.

Other activities involving the participant:

Free time with a tourist personality
#LeemosCómics con Ana Penyas y María Luque

Magius

Invitado de Honor

(Murcia, 1981) is a comic book author. He adopted his pseudonym in 2001, as a tribute to the 10th-century miniaturist monk of the same name, a significant medieval reference in his work. He began in the world of fanzines in 1998 with a student horror-comedy fanzine. On September 10, 2001, he published the fanzine Black Metal Comix, and in 2012, he compiled the best stories into a 200-page volume. Black Metal Comix tells the wild real-life stories of black metal bands, always with a tone of dark humor. Starting in 2012, he created fanzines such as Murcia, Clásicos caninos, and Hammon. To publish these fanzines, he alternated between the pseudonyms "Magius" and "Yo, Perro," using the latter for stories featuring zoomorphic characters.

In the spring of 2015, Entrecómics Cómics published his album Murcia, which expanded on the story that had appeared in a couple of fanzines of the same title in 2013. Murcia is a comic where the city itself takes center stage, highlighting the quirky aspects of its customs and traditions. In April 2018, Autsaider Cómics published his graphic novel El Método Gemini, a story about Italian-American mobsters in 1970s New York, in true Scorsese style.

On July 16, 2020, the graphic novel Primavera para Madrid was published, a fictional but almost journalistic chronicle inspired by various political corruption cases. For this work, he received the Premio Nacional de Cómic in October 2021 from the Ministry of Culture of Spain.

Luci Gutiérrez

Invitado de Honor

(Barcelona, 1977), after finishing her studies in illustration at the Escuela Massana in Barcelona in 2001, has worked in fields as diverse as advertising, press and books.

In 2007, she lived for a time in New York. She didn't quite master English, but she drew and wrote enough to write English Is Not Easy, a book for learning it and of which many editions have been made all over the world.

In 2019, she published Manual de autodefensa, her second book as sole author, which makes it clear that life, like English, is not easy.

She has also illustrated Las mujeres y los hombres, which won a prize at the Bologna Fair in 2016, and other titles by the Italian publishing firm Orecchio Acerbo, such as L'albergo delle fiabe, Miss Galassia and La valigia delle carabattole.

Her stay in America also resulted in regular collaborations with The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The New Yorker, where she illustrates the "Shouts & Murmurs" section weekly.

More recently, her work has been recognized with the Society of Illustrators Award in New York; the Gràffica Award, presented by design and visual communication professionals in Spain, and in 2023, she received the National Illustration Award from the Ministry of Culture.

Other activities involving the participant:

Crossroads. Humor, illustration and literature

Kike Infame

He is a graphic designer, illustrator, and comic book artist. He is currently the president of Euskal Irudigileak (the Professional Association of Illustrators of Euskadi) and Fadip (the Federation of Professional Illustration Associations).

As an author, he is known for his work as a comic book artist, publishing titles with Astiberri (“El hombre que vino del cielo”) and Dolmen (“Corina y el pistolero,” “Quatroccento”), as well as self-publishing the series Morirse en Bilbao.

He collaborates in various media as a disseminator, particularly known for his work as an interviewer and event organizer. Along with Mikel Begoña, he co-authored the book Komikia about Basque comics (1975-2017). Later, with Álex Oviedo, he co-wrote Irudigileak and Hormetan, books focused on illustration and posters in Bizkaia. He has also published interview-based books: Con los codos pegados al torso with Mauro Entrialgo and Back to Black with Víctor Santos.

Other activities involving the participant:

Opening Ceremony

Abril Castillo

Abril Castillo Cabrera (Morelia, 1984) writes, draws, and creates books. She cooks weekend meals at Tantrum. She holds a degree in Hispanic Letters and this year completed her master's degree in Visual Arts at UNAM, focusing on metadrawing and creative processes. In 2022, she attended the Master's in Literary Creation at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. She directs the independent publishing project Alacraña.

She has published the drawing books Bogotá 2017 (Alacraña, 2023), Say It with Stones (Pitzilein Books, 2021), Chet (La Duplicadora, 2018), and Sobremesa (Oink Ediciones, 2016); the fanzines I Read, I Saw, I Remembered (Alacraña, 2021) and Mussol (Alacraña, 2024); and the novel Tarantela (Antílope-UANL, 2019; Animal Extinto, 2023). Currently, she is in her second year of Gastronomy at the Claustro de Sor Juana.

Jimena Estíbaliz

Jimena Estíbaliz (Mexico City, 1990) develops projects in illustration, art, and art direction. Throughout her career, she has collaborated with institutions such as the Ministry of Culture, the SEP, Penguin Random House, and UNAM, as well as with well-known brands like Nike, Adidas, C&A, Ben and Frank, and Clase Azul.

Her work is characterized by its versatility in both technique and visual style, yet it always maintains a common thread of conceptualization and the use of metaphors.

In 2018, she won first place in the “Let’s Invite to Read” competition at FILIJ. Her works have been exhibited in venues such as Vértigo Gallery, Gran Salón México, the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, the Ibero-American Illustrators Catalog, Pali Gallery, and Art House.

Augusto Metztli

Augusto Metztli (“moon” in Nahuatl) was born in Mexico City in 1980 and has lived in Galicia for the past 16 years, making him a migrant. He studied architecture at the University of Guadalajara.

He is dedicated to painting, illustration, cultural management, and teaching drawing and painting. As a complete author, he has published “14 maneras de llegar a la Luna” an illustrated album for children, and the illustrated poetry book “Huacal,” which discusses architecture and urbanism from the perspectives of decoloniality, feminism, and animalism.

His work has been exhibited in Mexico, Cuba, Malaysia, the USA, Argentina, Spain, Portugal, London, and Italy. He was selected in 2005 and 2006 for the Atanasio Monroy painting competition in Mexico, as well as in the painting competitions of the María José Jove Foundation in A Coruña, at the Ignacio de la Cuevas in Ourense, Spain, and in the Catalog of Mexican Illustrators from CONACULTA in 2008. He was also invited to participate in the European Identities digital exhibition of the European Commission in 2011 and in an artist residency in Piloño in 2010, in Galicia.

Maru Aguzzi

Maru Aguzzi studied Graphic Design in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and specialized in publishing, a job that she has been doing for more than 20 years. She has lived in Mexico since 2003 and works as a Cultural Promoter. Is the Founder and Director of Gran Salon Mexico, a contemporary illustration fair that takes place annually in Mexico City since 2014 and, in parallel throughout the year, she runs Gran Salon Agency, where she focuses on growing and connecting illustrators with different types of projects. https://gran.salon