Narrating the Archipelago: The Aesthetics and Politics of Balearic and Canary Island Graphic Art

This thesis conducts the first critical analysis of the aesthetics and politics of thus far understudied comics, cartoons, vignettes, illustrations, and longform visual narratives drawn, printed, and displayed across the Balearic and Canary Islands during the mid-twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries. It examines the work of artists and curators across four different pivotal moments: the mid-Francoist regime (1950–1975), the transitional period (1971–1983), the tourism boom (2006–2025), and the graphic revival (2011–2025). Whilst approaching these materials together as a corpus of graphic art, the thesis compares and contrasts how they cultivate distinct poetic graphic aesthetics which invoke the archipelagic politics of mobility.