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On June 20, we received the terrible news of the premature death of Oscar Gual (Gandía, Valencia, 1973) after suffering a long illness. Óscar was one of the regular collaborators of this publication, we contacted him five years ago just when 13 million ships began a kind of second stage after a long lethargy. We had read Óscar in Entrecomics, (a headline publication for any comic lover, and a reason for healthy envy for those of us who set up this website). I remember sending him the email to join 13 million ships with a point of skepticism: it sure happens, I thought. And it is that Óscar apart from collaborating in Entrecomics already had a solid background as a historian of comics: He had collaborated with Romà Gubern in the Magazine of the Faculty of Geography and History of the UNED, where he published an excellent essay entitled: The comic as a source the historical false testimony of Tintin in the Belgian Congo that you can read here In 2013 his Doctoral thesis Postwar Cartoons was published. Comics as a source for the study of history (PUV – Publicacions Universitat València), where the contrast between the comic strips by Roberto Alcázar and Pedrín and the Guerrero del Antifazle allowed ‘to build a social and cultural portrait of Spain during the First Francoism’. Óscar was also a regular contributor to the specialized magazine and dedicated to research in the field of comics CUCO. COMIC NOTEBOOKS. As his acceptance of a collaboration in 13 million ships was quite a surprise and above all a luxury: we knew that his contributions would add many integers to the quality of the web content, and we were not wrong. Óscar improved with the review of the first Ortega y Pacheco compilation and he jumped from one genre to another without any problem: his erudition on the subject allowed him to approach everything from the superhero genre to the manga, going through the Franco-Belgian BD, without lose sight of emerging authors both from here and from other latitudes. All with extraordinary solvency, preventing easy pedantry or gratuitous name fall, always with a very solid plot base and through access prose, simple and far from any pomposity or useless grammatical artifice. Nothing is left over, nor is anything missing in his texts.
Óscar was an excellent writer and a great disseminator: his texts function as small guides to understand the reviewed work and above all to arouse concern and jump towards other readings: doors that open other doors. We lose a great promoter of the medium: many comics will no longer have the opportunity to be the subject of his ‘wise’ reading, but above all we lose a great guy and a better person. Rest in peace, amic Oscar!
