The Sleep Of The Crisis Creates Monsters. Apparitions And Fantastic Visions In Antonio Hitos's "Inercia" and Miguel Brieva´s "Lo que (me) está pasando"

This article offers an analysis of two key graphics novels that were published in the last decade and deal with the economic crisis in Spain: Antonio Hito’s Inercia (2014) and Miguel Brieva’s Lo que (me) está pasando (2015). Unlike the common realist and costumbrista approach that most comics about the crisis adopt, these two works make use of the fantastic to express the economic, social and political alienation suffered by young people. Their protagonists experience «appearances» under the form of animals, objects and fantastic creatures, producing a hallucinated and fantastic effect that questions reality and implies a strong denounce of the economic and politic system leading to the crisis. This article focuses on analysing how these graphic novels reveal their protagonists’ alienation by means of the language of comics and the fantastic.