The Lighthouse by Paco Roca

This is a 2004 graphic novel - should I say bande dessinée? Roca is Spanish, but my sense is the term is used generally across Europe - that the creator's afterword notes was tweaked a bit for subsequent publications, finalized (or abandoned, if we're being Da Vinci-esque about it) in 2009. This English translation - which Roca might have kibitzed on, as his afterword talks a lot about kibitzing on the French and Spanish and other editions in the first years - was done by Jeff Whitman for a 2017 American publication.

So it's older that it might look, but maybe not entirely so. The original work is about two decades ago now, but I'm not sure Roca didn't touch it, one last time, before this edition.

The Lighthouse is one of Paco Roca's earliest works, I think, but that picture is muddy. He's been translated out of sequence here in North America, with The House from 2005 only arriving in 2019 and Wrinkles from 2007 lapping it handily in 2008. But he was already, according to that afterword, deeply into the working life of a cartoonist, coming off a complex book called Hijos de la Alhambra and working intermittently on the series Los Viajes de Alexandre Ícaro (neither of which, from what I can tell, has been translated into English) before diving into El Faro (the original Spanish title for The Lighthouse).

It's a relatively simple story, as that afterword says: mostly in one place, two major characters, some action but a lot of talking. It wasn't something that would require a lot of research and page design, and not in color. That's one of the things that appealed to Roca, he says: it was a palate cleanser (and maybe, if I'm being puckish, also a palette cleanser, given it's not in color).

I'll also point out that the US-edition cover is a collage of panels from the book, maybe because the US audience needed the obvious weenie: a book called The Lighthouse must have a lighthouse prominently on the cover. Roca includes a much better-looking painterly cover in that afterword, but it includes the carved breasts of a mermaid figurehead, which may have killed it for an American audience. (I hate to say it, but my country is crazy in some ways that are very obvious and very well known globally.)

Francisco is a young soldier, fighting for the Republican side towards the end of the Spanish Civil War. He's fleeing a disastrous battle, hoping to get across the French border to survive, assuming he'll end up in a camp there but knowing the Fascists will kill him if he stays. He doesn't make it to the border, but he does meet and is taken in by Telmo, the aged keeper of a remote lighthouse.

The book is about the two of them: what Telmo tells Francisco during his recuperation, the boat they built, the way Telmo rekindles a love for life in the younger man. Telmo has plans and dreams and schemes, which he draws Francisco into wholesale, while the reader probably notices they may not be entirely based on reality.

The war must return in the end, of course. And the young man must move forward, while the old man, having given his lessons, is left behind. We know how this story has to go. It all does happen, and it happens well. Roca makes Telmo's lessons valuable, even if they are based on less than solid footings.

This is probably a minor book in Roca's career; I've only seen his The House before so I'm mostly guessing. But it's the BD equivalent of a bottle episode: solid, interesting, accomplished, working within a limited space and accomplishing what it can there.