On 14 September 1940, 532 days after the end of the Spanish Civil War, José Celda was shot by Franco's regime along with 11 other men on the back wall of the Paterna cemetery in Valencia and buried with them in a mass grave. More than seven decades later, and after a long journey through the dark side of a country with a complex about its past, José's daughter Pepica, an octogenarian who was eight years old when her father was killed, finally managed to locate and recover his remains to restore his dignity.
In Pepica Celda's personal battle against oblivion, the role of Leoncio Badía, a young republican who had been condemned some time before to work as a gravedigger in the cemetery of his village, was decisive. Leoncio, a man obsessed with the meaning of life and the order of the universe, had been secretly collaborating for years with the widows of the victims of the war to identify their corpses, bury them in the most dignified way possible, locate their graves and hide messages among their remains, convinced that one day someone would be able to get them out of there.
Paco Roca travels back in time with El abismo del olvido to recover, together with Rodrigo Terrasa (who plays an important role in the documentation and contribution of ideas), the true story of Leoncio and José, an example of the tens of thousands of Spaniards who were savagely repressed after the end of the conflict in Spain. But it also accompanies Pepica Celda in her heartbreaking labyrinth that tries to unravel the miseries of a country obsessed with despising its memory.
Paco Roca (Valencia, 1969) studied at the Escuela de Arte Superior de Diseño in Valencia. Although his work focuses on comics, he combines his time with illustration and talks and workshops. In the field of comics, his work has been translated in a dozen countries. His bibliography published by Astiberri includes: El juego lúgubre; El Faro; Arrugas; Las calles de arena; El invierno del dibujante; Memorias de un dibujante en pijama. El integral; Los surcos del azar; La casa; La encrucijada; El tesoro del Cisne Negro; El dibujado, initially created for the walls of the IVAM; Regreso al Edén and El abismo del olvido, his latest graphic novel. His comics have won awards in Spain and abroad, including the 2008 National Comic Prize, the Goya for best adapted screenplay for Arrugas in 2011, the Excellence Award in Japan, the Inkpot Award at the San Diego Comic-Con in 2019 and the Eisner 2020 for best foreign work. Paco Roca has received the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts 2021 from the Spanish Ministry of Culture and in May 2023 he was awarded the Ciutat de València Cultural Merit Award.
Rodrigo Terrasa (Valencia, 1978) has been a journalist for the newspaper El Mundo for 22 years. His love for basketball made his first job as a journalist in the sports newspaper Superdeporte, from which he made the leap in 2001 to the València branch of El Mundo. He has written sports reports, interviews, political information and reports. In 2007 he started working in the digital edition of the newspaper and in 2015 he moved to the central newsroom in Madrid. He is currently a reporter for Papel, the daily magazine of El Mundo. In 2021 he published his first book, La ciudad de la euforia (Libros del KO), a journalistic chronicle about the years of corruption in the Valencian Community.
