Science isn't separate from desire, from partnership, from the body.
Tres vidas que cambiaron el curso del pensamiento humano llegan ahora a las librerías españolas en forma de novela gráfica, un formato que no simplifica sino que encarna: Marie Curie descubriendo elementos en los márgenes de un mundo que le negaba el centro, Sigmund Freud enfrentando el colapso de Europa y de su propio cuerpo, y Joaquín Sabina como testigo cantado de su tiempo. Estos libros proponen que algunas existencias solo se comprenden del todo cuando se dibujan, cuando el trazo y el color asumen lo que la prosa sola no puede sostener.
- Tres editoriales apuestan por el cómic biográfico como vehículo de pensamiento serio, desafiando la idea de que la viñeta es un género menor.
- Alice Milani convierte la vida de Curie en un argumento visual sobre el derecho de las mujeres a ocupar el laboratorio, sin renunciar a la intimidad de quien amó y trabajó con igual intensidad.
- Leclair y Roy eligen los años más oscuros de Freud —el cáncer, las operaciones, el exilio, el nazismo— y los ilustran en blanco, negro y rojo sangre, una paleta que obliga al lector a no apartar la mirada.
- El formato gráfico no divulga estas vidas: las hace presentes, devuelve peso físico a cuerpos que la historia tiende a convertir en símbolos abstractos.
Tres vidas de consecuencia han llegado a las librerías españolas en forma de novela gráfica, cada una confiada a artistas que entienden que ciertos relatos exigen ser dibujados tanto como escritos.
La dedicada a Marie Curie arranca con dos páginas manuscritas por la propia científica, un gesto que ancla al lector en su letra antes de que comience la narración. Alice Milani, artista italiana nacida en Pisa en 1986, construye una biografía a todo color que sigue a la investigadora polaca desde su llegada a París para estudiar en la Sorbona hasta el descubrimiento del radio y el polonio. El trazo es claro y accesible, del tipo que invita en lugar de intimidar. Milani retrata a una mujer que convirtió su trabajo científico en algo más amplio: una declaración de amor a su vocación y un argumento inapelable sobre el lugar de las mujeres en el laboratorio. La vida de Curie se negó siempre a separar lo personal de lo profesional, y esta obra lo honra.
Una oscuridad distinta anima el segundo volumen. La psicoanalista canadiense Suzanne Leclair y el ilustrador William Roy eligieron los últimos años de Sigmund Freud, los que lo quebraron. El libro comienza en 1923, cuando los médicos le detectaron un cáncer de boca consecuencia de su adicción al tabaco. Desde ese diagnóstico hasta su muerte el 23 de septiembre de 1939, Freud soportó una cascada de intervenciones quirúrgicas. Las ilustraciones, en blanco y negro con acentos en rojo sangre, conforman un lenguaje visual de fuerza inusual que se niega a apartar la mirada del sufrimiento. A su alrededor, Europa ardía bajo la violencia totalitaria: el ascenso del fascismo, el exilio forzado, la destrucción sistemática del mundo que había construido.
Estas obras no son entretenimientos ligeros. Son intentos serios de rendir cuenta de vidas intelectualmente decisivas a través de la gramática del arte secuencial. La elección del formato gráfico es en sí misma una declaración: que lo visual y lo textual juntos pueden transmitir dimensiones de una existencia que la prosa sola podría no alcanzar. El lector no encuentra solo información, sino presencia: el peso de un instante, la textura de una habitación, la realidad física de un cuerpo en el dolor o en el triunfo.
Three lives of consequence have arrived in the comic section of Spanish bookstores, each rendered in ink and panel by artists who understand that some stories demand to be drawn as much as written.
Marie Curie opens with two handwritten pages from the scientist herself—a gesture that grounds the reader immediately in her own hand. Italian artist and writer Alice Milani, born in Pisa in 1986, has constructed a full-color graphic biography that follows the Polish-born researcher from her arrival in Paris to study at the Sorbona through to her discovery of radium and polonium. The work is rendered in clear, accessible line work, the kind that invites rather than intimidates. Milani traces a woman who transformed her scientific labor into something larger: a declaration of love for her work and an unyielding argument for women's place in the laboratory. Rosa Montero, in her essay on Curie, captured something essential about her—that she loved Pierre with the intensity of someone who had found not just a partner but a collaborator, someone who understood the work as she did. This graphic account honors that fusion of the personal and the professional, the way Curie's life refused to separate the two.
A different kind of darkness animates the second volume. Suzanne Leclair, a psychoanalyst from Shawinigan, Canada, and illustrator William Roy have chosen to depict Sigmund Freud's final years—the years that broke him. The book begins in 1923, when doctors discovered cancer in his mouth, a direct consequence of his lifelong tobacco addiction. From that diagnosis until his death on September 23, 1939, Freud endured a cascade of surgical interventions, each one a gamble with his own mortality. The illustrations are rendered in black and white with blood-red accents, a visual language of unusual force that refuses to look away from suffering. Around him, Europe was being consumed by totalitarian violence. Freud counseled his daughter Anna on how to treat the disorders of the soul—so often, he believed, rooted in the failures of love. But his own final years were shadowed by something larger than any individual neurosis: the rise of fascism, the necessity of exile, the knowledge that the world he had built was being systematically destroyed.
These are not light entertainments. They are serious attempts to render lives of intellectual consequence through the grammar of sequential art. The choice to present these figures in graphic form is itself a statement: that the visual and the textual together can convey dimensions of a life that prose alone might miss. The reader encounters not just information but presence—the weight of a moment, the texture of a room, the physical reality of a body in pain or in triumph. In an era when historical figures can feel abstract, these works insist on their humanity without diminishing their significance.
Citas Notables
Curie made her work a declaration of love and an unyielding argument for women's place in science— Implicit in the biographical framing
La Conversación del Hearth Otra perspectiva de la historia
Why choose the graphic novel form for these particular lives? What does drawing Marie Curie or Freud accomplish that a traditional biography cannot?
There's something about the visual that makes the personal immediate. You see Curie's hands at work, the space she occupied. With Freud, the red ink bleeding through the black panels—that's not something words alone could convey with the same force.
The source mentions that Curie's work was "a declaration of love." That's an interesting frame. Is the graphic novel trying to recover something romantic about scientific work that we've lost?
Not romantic exactly. More honest. Science isn't separate from desire, from partnership, from the body. Milani's version seems to refuse that false division. Curie loved the work and loved Pierre, and those things were inseparable.
And Freud's story is almost the opposite—a man whose theories were about the interior life, now depicted in his final years as Europe collapses around him. Does the graphic form emphasize that contradiction?
It has to. You can't tell Freud's last years without showing the historical moment pressing in. The red ink isn't just about cancer; it's about what was happening outside his window. The form allows both to exist at once.
So these aren't just biographies. They're arguments about how we remember these people.
Exactly. The choice of what to draw, what to leave out, how to render time—all of that is interpretation. These artists are saying something about who Curie and Freud were by the way they've chosen to show them.