Renowned Graphic Novelist Ana Peñas Visits ISU’s MA in Spanish Spring Series

Ana Penyas, award-winning Spanish graphic novelist and the first woman to receive the National Comic Award (2018), joined students and faculty at Idaho State University this week for a virtual conversation as part of the MA in Spanish program’s Spring Speakers Series. Her visit, organized by Dr. José Eduardo Villalobos Graillet, brought a powerful and visually striking voice in contemporary comics to the university’s graduate course on Critical Theory and Spanish Graphic Narratives.

Penyas is widely known for her politically engaged storytelling and innovative visual style that blends illustration, photography, collage, and archival material. Her second graphic novel, Todo bajo el sol (All Under the Sun) (2021), served as the centerpiece of the conversation. The work critically examines the transformation of Spain’s southern coast through tourism-driven urban development, capturing the social and environmental costs of economic progress through the eyes of working-class families.

Speaking from her perspective as a Spanish citizen, Penyas reflected on the sweeping changes that have shaped her country since the onset of desarrollismo and the international opening of Spain in the late Franco era. She discussed how mass tourism has affected not only the environment and urban space, but also cultural memory, daily customs, and the way people relate to their neighborhoods and history. With Todo bajo el sol, she seeks to portray how this model of development has altered the identity of entire communities.

The event included a lively Q&A session in which master’s students posed thoughtful, research-based questions exploring themes such as displacement, gentrification, memory, tourism, and visual style. They inquired about Penyas’s use of repetition, symbolism, and photorealistic faces—techniques that blur the line between fiction and documentary, and emphasize the tension between personal memory and collective history.