ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns the extent to which the safe space opened up by this subsidized publication for the work of several talented women comic book artists allows the critic to explore the aesthetic and professional achievement of Spanish female comic book artists. An analysis of the work of Ana Juan, Ana Miralles, and Asun Balzola for Madriz reveals that the public funding of the magazine enabled women comic book authors to expand the traditional form of the comic book to include feminist narratives and radically new aesthetic proposals. Madriz constitutes a brilliant example of the aesthetic renovation and the political progressiveness that could emerge out of the unlikely conjunction of modernist and postmodernist cultural and political projects in Spain of the 1980s. The chapter argues that the women artists confronted a problem: dealing with the sexism that generally permeates the medium.
