The Comic Society of the UV organises on Monday a colloquium on the occasion of a graphic novel that illustrates in first person the child’s eyes on war

In the spring of 1992, the protagonists of Days Without School , a six-year-old boy, who will be taken in by Elena Uriel and Sento, and a four-year-old girl, dream that, at the end of the summer, they will start going to school with their friends, but suddenly a war breaks out around them that, for three years, will drag them to hell.

All wars always seem to be the same war, the one in which the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, always driven by dark interests, indiscriminately sow death, hunger and pain, destroying everything in their path. Their victims are always the same victims: innocent people abandoned to their fate and trapped in the midst of barbarism and horror. Among these victims, children are especially vulnerable.

Thirty years after the Balkan war, these children begin to tell us their stories, and they do not remember great battles or historic moments, as the books tell us, but rather they recall their days and nights, during three long years, with cold winters and hot summers, with hunger, illness and death riding freely on the roads. They remember fear and they also remember games and laughter, they remember their present, because all children always live, with innocence, in the present that, at each moment, is theirs to live.

The authors elude recreate in terrible scenes, but without renouncing to the connection with the feelings of Denis, that boy who arrived 25 years ago to Sagunt as a foster boy and became a member of the home.

About Sento Llobell
Vicent Llobell Bisbal, “Sento” (Valencia, 1953) After graduate in the Degree of Fine Arts in Valencia, works as a Anatomy professor in the same faculty between 1979 and 1981, year in which he abandons teaching to become a comic book artist.

Labelled, inside the movement “clear line”, one of the members of the called “New Valencian School” in the 80s. Publishes titles likeRomance, El Laboratorio del Dr. Arnau, Ruinas, Cazando millonariosandEl cartero audazwith his own scripts.Velvet Nigths (with the writer Ramón de España) and the series Tirant lo Blanc with a script by the novelist Jaume Fuster.

He has an extensiveportfolioin advertising illustration. Over time, the presence of three dimensions has become more and more frequent in his work. He has designed avant-garde fallas such as the one in the Plaza del Ayuntamiento in Valencia in 1986 and 1987, or in the Plaza de Na Jordana in 2005 and 2011, as well as the gigantic walkable figure of Gulliver that is found in the Turia riverbed in the same city. The publication inEl Juevesof caricatures, in the form of cut-outs, marks another aesthetic option in his curiosity about three dimensions.

Since 1981 he has published 12 comic albums, illustrated 6 books and designed 25 posters. His illustrations and comics have been published in media such as bésame Mucho, El Víbora, Cairo, Madriz, TBO, Pequeño País, El Temps, El Independiente, EFE EMEandEl Jueves. After almost 20 years dedicated to other areas of the visual arts, he returns to comics with the trilogy Doctor Uriel –Un médico novato, Atrapado en BelchiteyVencedor y Vencido– now compiled in this integral book.

He currently resides in Sagunto (Valencia), continues drawing comics and has returned to teaching by giving postgraduate courses at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Valencia and monographic courses at the Higher School of Art and Technology in the same city.

About Elena Muriel
After finishing Bachillerato in A Coruña, she passed the entrance examination and she is admitted in the Beaux-Arts de Paris, where she stayed one academic course. She returns to Spain and took a Degree of Fine Arts in Valencia. The French Government gave her a scholarship to perfect her studies of engraving and lithography in the National Superior School of Fine Arts. She is a Lecturer in Philosophy and Humanities at the Universitat de València. She is given thee landscape scholarship at El Paular (Segovia)

In 1981 she obtained the Chair of Drawing and teaches in various high schools until she arrived to the Clot del Moro, in Sagunt, where she takes up residence, settles her study and combines teaching with the painting, drawing and engraving. She has done individual and collective exhibitions in Orense, Barcelona, Sagunt, Valencia, Madrid, Segovia, Elche…, and is part of the group of artists La Tira de Dones. She is in charge of the documentation and colour of the last two comics of Sento,Dr. UrielandHistorietas del Museo del Prado. She illustrates in 2021 the memoirs written by her father:No se fusila en domingo, of the editorial Fuera de Ruta.