A fascinating tour of the ‘Comic Book’. Jorge Gard Collection / Exhibitions / Visit us / Start
Date Start: 09/25/2025 Final date: 11/22/2025
Place:
Exhibition Hall of the Library of Catalonia
Hours:
Tuesday to Friday, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m., and on Saturdays, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Commissariat:
Pepa Bagaria, with the collaboration of Esther Marín and Vanessa Torres, of the library of Catalonia.
In 2021 the Library of Catalonia received a significant donation from the writer and disseminator collector Jorge Gard, specialist Comic Book Edited in Mexico. It was about twenty-four thousand copies of more than a thousand titles Comic Book Edited in Mexico, he had gathered for forty years. This exhibition is a small sample of the collection and offers a tour of the best known heads, the most charismatic characters and some of the stories that are already part of the collective imagination.
It Comic Book It was born in the 1930’s in the United States. These are printed publications in a format of Grapat Quadernet, initially made from the comic strips already published in newspapers and other periodicals and, in a few years, incorporated original material.
Between the end of the 1940’s and early 1950’s, this new format reaches Mexican lands by the Novaro publishing house, which translates and adapts to Spanish the stories of the most emblematic characters of American comics and popularize them, first among the public of Latin America, and then of Spain, where he established headquarters in Madrid and Barcelona.
In addition to Novaro, many other Mexican publishers of the time wanted to join the comic book edition. Notable among them is La Prensa, Publisher Sol, Editorial Argumentos or Ediciones Latin American.
Superhero, justice, adventurers, cowboys, detectives, terror, science fiction, romantic or children’s stories came to the households in our country and glad the lives of their faithful readers. The comic became a recreation tool, but also educational and social criticism. A success that was a step forward in the evolution of the comic strip as a mass media, promoted the development of the publishing industry in this field and has deeply influenced contemporary popular culture.
