The genius and personality of Dalí: a biography in cartoons that delves into his talent, eccentricity, and controversy.

A renowned Hispanist and author of key biographies of García Lorca, Buñuel, and Dalí, Ian Gibson is a leading historian both for understanding the painter's life and the importance of his relationship with the poet and filmmaker. Now, Gibson has teamed up with cartoonist Quique Palomo to create a canonical biography of Dalí in comic book form: The Incombustible Life of Salvador Dalí (Planeta Cómic). The work is based on Gibson's monumental biography , The Unbridled Life of Salvador Dalí , and represents a new collaboration between the duo behind comics such as Four Poets at War , which focuses on Machado, García Lorca, Miguel Hernández, and Juan Ramón Jiménez.

Despite its relative brevity (152 pages), The Incombustible Life of Salvador Dalí has ​​the virtue of offering a clear, enjoyable and very well documented (as expected) review of the life of the Catalan artist, approaching the context that allowed the artist's birth, understanding his intentions and putting face to face his lights and shadows.

The comic is divided into four sections, each dedicated to four key points in Dalí's life: his Catalan origins, his formative years in Madrid, his meeting with Gala, and his return to Spain during Franco's dictatorship. Gibson and Palomo emphasize the importance that the Empordà landscape and character had on the young Dalí , as well as the death of his older brother (named, like him, Salvador) and his relationship with his parents and his sister, Ana María.

In Madrid, the authors address the episode at the Estudiantes residence, which coincides with the affirmation of Dalí's personality and the conflict with the academic authorities, and which also marks the beginning of his friendship with García Lorca . The authors emphasize Dalí's influence on Lorca's work (an influence that crystallizes in Poet in New York , they point out), and address both their joint projects and the discovery of a strong friendship that was not without sexual ambiguity.

Dalí's emergence as a great painter is vividly narrated: from his ability to see, study, and learn from the lessons of great painters, to the impact of his first exhibitions in Barcelona and Paris, the laudatory press reviews, and his controversial lectures. Little by little, the artist takes shape, and with him, the character.

And it is precisely at this point that the appearance of Gala marks a leap in Dalí's career. In a way, the authors seem to say, Gala accelerates everything: she multiplies his creativity and eccentricity, leading him to achieve not only artistic but also economic success. In that sense, his time in the United States represents another turning point, as Dalí understands the mechanisms at work in this modern and dynamic culture and becomes his own best ambassador.

Path In this comic we see how the artist is gradually developing and, along with him, the character.

A multitude of essential names in 20th-century culture pass through these pages: Picasso, Matisse, Miró, Hitchcock, and Disney, but at no point does the book overwhelm with information. This is undoubtedly one of this comic's strengths: its ability to measure out the information, as it is expertly filtered and only what is necessary has been selected so as not to drown out the story. There are even quotes from Dalí himself that confirm this documentary solidity and, well-introduced into the story, are integrated into it, providing Dalí's voice without hindering the reading.

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Although it covers the entire career of the surrealist painter, The Unquenchable Life of Salvador Dalí devotes more pages to his childhood and formative years than to his life after the end of World War II and his return to Franco's Spain. In this accelerated manner of recounting Dalí's final years, one seems to grasp the authors' way of explaining the artist's demise, of rushing, and rushing us, the readers, down a downward slope where the author has been devoured by his character.

Gibson and Palomo even change the narrative and the way the pages of this comic are presented in its final stretch, and that only keeps us even more glued to the story thanks to some of the bravest and most accomplished sequences in this graphic novel.

The note More Dalí in cartoons

This isn't the first time Dalí's life has been captured in a comic. Years ago, we recommended Edmond Baudoin's Dalí , a complementary work to the one we just reviewed and which can be read after The Incombustible Life of Salvador Dalí as a more sensorial introduction to the painter. The life of the Empordà genius has also been featured in Dalí , a previously unpublished diptych written here by Julie Birmant and Clément Oubrerie.