Bienal de Pontevedra

This mural created by Antonio Muntadas for the Pontevedra Biennial uses the Spanish comic Hazañas Bélicas (War deeds, 1948) by Boixcar as a basis for reflecting on violence. This series of comics, very popular at that time, deals with conflicts such as the Second World War, the Chinese Civil War, the Indochina War and the Korean War, always featuring the Communist enemy, in tune with the polarity of the Cold War. In the 1950s, comic books, then known as 'tebeos' in Spanish, were one of the most popular forms of entertainment, together with cinema and even more in vogue than the still emerging television, and so the war stories found in them played a key role in youth culture. Hazañas Bélicas tells the adventures of an anonymous soldier who struggled to achieve peace through war, but, at the same time, introduces a paradox: even though he tries to denounce the conflict, he presents it as an unavoidable solution. Muntadas appropriates this comic to question how media build the image of violence and to reflect on the standardisation of war conflicts in popular culture.