Sole Otero – författare

Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1768. It is a dark and foreboding night when the boat arrives from Europe, bringing three shadowy figures to shore. Before long, the Maria sisters will take the New World by storm. In the coming years, they wend their way from town to town, assisting women in need and wreaking vengeance against the men who've wronged them. At once fiercely righteous and gleefully malevolent, the sisterhood of witches exert their powers across centuries, from the 1700s to the present, leaving a wreckage of shattered and impotent men in their wake. Told as a fractured narrative, through the eyes of the people whose lives the sisters have cast asunder, Witchcraft is a mesmerising mystery to piece together. This masterpiece of a graphic novel combines strange magic, absurdist humour, and a fiery undercurrent of female rage, to tell a heady tale of colonialism, feminism, and indigenous folklore. Hand drawn in a playful, kinetic cartoon style, with a vibrant colour palette, this experimental, eerie, and hilarious work assures Sole Otero as one of the most dynamic comics artists in South America - and everywhere.

Buenos Aires, 2001. When Vilma passes away, few friends and relatives care to attend her funeral. This conspicuous absence sparks the curiosity of her 19-year-old granddaughter, Rocio, who moves into the house her grandmother has left her. In this home haunted by memories, she delves into Vilma's life and uncovers a family history shrouded in tragedy. Moving seamlessly between Italy at the beginning of the 20th century and Argentina at the beginning of the 21st century, Mothballs draws a poetic comparison between the lives of grandmother and granddaughter. Both women are strong-willed and ambitious, eager to forge their own way, but face pressure from family and society to conform to the paths set for them. At a crossroads in her own life, knowing well the isolation her grandmother felt, Rocio seeks to break free from the chain of history. Mothballs chronicles fraught family dynamics with rare nuance and sensitivity, sprinkling in moments of tenderness, vulnerability, and whimsy amidst the pain, a showcase of tour de force cartooning that marks Sole Otero as a major talent in the global comics scene.