Kiosco by Juan Berrio

I didn't know this was wordless going into it. Wordless books pose a challenge to the critic, for all the usual dancing-about-architecture reasons, but this is sweet and lovely and expressive, so let's see what words I can dig up that Juan Berrio didn't need.

Kiosco is a horizontally-formatted graphic novel, generally one big wide panel to a page, originally published in Spain by DIBBUKS in 2014 and published in this edition for the US market by Europe Comics in 2017. It doesn't credit a translator; it didn't need one. Someone wrote the descriptive copy in English, but then I bet someone wrote descriptive copy for this in Spanish, French, and German earlier, and we don't credit those people, either. (No offense: I've written descriptive copy for books, back in my misspent youth. It's a skill, and a necessary function, and I didn't get credited, either.)

The main character is a young man. We see painting apparatus in his apartment, and him working at it, so we think he's an artist. But the way he makes his living, we think, is by running a little coffee-and-pastry stand in a local park, in whatever city this is he lives in. A kiosk, we might say in English. I gather "Kiosco" is the Spanish equivalent.

This is the story of one day. He gets up, gets ready, pokes at a painting briefly, and then sets off on his bicycle to work with a tray of croissants. He opens the shop, the sun rises, and he's ready to greet the day.

But though the park is full of people passing through, no one is spending money at the kiosk. Berrio shows time passing, with some wonderfully expressive pages in soft earth tones - I'm not sure if it's watercolor or colored pencils. He goes back and forth between the hubbub of the passing crowd - different every time, a fascinating array of different faces and body language and gesture, all going somewhere else to do something else - and our main character, standing and fidgeting and cleaning the stand and tables yet again to keep himself busy.

There are a few scenes of someone almost shopping at the stand, but no one actually does. It even rains, to make this a comprehensively bad day.

Eventually, though, he does have a customer. I won't spoil it. It's lovely and bright and happy, and that ends his day in the kiosk and, soon afterward, the book.

I don't know if Berrio typically works wordlessly; I found this book randomly and the only other Berrio book I see available in North America is similarly wordless, for kids. (But he has a long list of previous works on his Spanish site, and wordless comics famously travel the most easily.) This is a sweet little book in a lovely cartoony style, and I'd love to see more of Berrio's work make it over to my side of the Atlantic.