"Paracuellos is a work of great courage, created at a time when telling the truth about Spain’s political past could get one killed. Its publication precipitated constant death threats from right-wing groups. Carlos Giménez’s autobiographical account of the plight of children in post-World War II Fascist Spain has won virtually every comics award in Europe, including Best Album at the 1981 Angoulême Festival, and Angoulême’s Heritage Award in 2010. In 2003 Giménez was recognized with the Gold Medal in Fine Arts by Spain’s Ministry of Culture.
In the late 1930s when Spanish fascists led by Franco, and aided by Hitler and Mussolini, overthrew the elected government, almost 200,000 men and women fell in battle, were executed, or died in prison. Their orphaned children - and others ripped from the homes of the defeated - were shuttled from State- and Church-run “Home” to “Home” and fed a steady diet of torture and disinformation by a totalitarian state bent on making them “productive” citizens.
Carlos Giménez was one of those children. In 1975, after Franco’s death, Carlos began to tell his story. Breaking the code of silence proved to be a milestone, both for the comics medium and for a country coming to terms with its past.
Placing the comics in historical perspective are illustrated essays by Carmen Moreno-Nuño, Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Kentucky, and Antonio Martin, the foremost historian of Spanish comics."