Chiselled creatures of mystery

Illustrator Agustín Comotto uses expressionist woodcutting in his poster for the fourth edition of the 42 Festival, bringing together golden dragons, sidereal seas, astronauts and ancient gods

An image storyteller, illustrator and cartoonist, Agustín Comotto is best known in the Catalan fantasy genre scene as the man behind the covers for the Catalan editions of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series, published by Raig Verd, but he’s also the illustrator of editions of Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher, as well as Pere Calders’ Coses aparentment intranscendents [Seemingly Trivial Things], published by Nórdica. This Barcelona artist of Argentine origin is passionate about children’s and young adult literature, winning awards such as A la Orilla del Viento, and is renowned for the way he integrates visual narrative art into his creations. His poster for the fourth edition of the 42 Festival is no exception.

Four elements of the poster, shared with the rest of the festival’s imagery, come together to craft an unsettling mystery:

- Firstly, in the centre of the image, surrounding the number 42 that gives the festival its name, Comotto has created a spectacular feathered DRAGON in the tradition of the Maya culture. The creature spits water and not fire, as a giver of life and carrier of the full cycle of the planet depicted. The dragon, one of the themes of the festival’s fourth edition, also has a golden body that follows the divine Fibonacci sequence, which can be found throughout the cosmos and natural world in everything from the shape of DNA to the spiral patterns of galaxies.

- Meanwhile, building on the approach that led him to incorporate medieval woodcutting in modern science fiction narrative and Le Guin’s fantasy, the artist’s sea plays with the mystery of fossilised waters and includes nods to the current drought and Barcelona’s position on the sea, topics that will also be part of conversations at the festival.

- Applying a burin and the expressionist engraving style of the Weimar Republic, Comotto opts for a palette of saturated, high-contrast colours, and with the support of designer Tono Cristòfol, incorporates a rounded typeface reminiscent of classic science fiction, underscored in this case by an astronaut exploring what could be the ruins of an extinct, once fertile planet.

- On the opposite side, the eerie remains of a lost civilisation, symbolised by a fossilised giant’s head half buried in the sand, invite viewers to wonder what happened millennia ago in this fascinating, fallen realm and whether the dragon’s powers might bring it back to life at any moment. This invitation to ritual darkness, closely linked to other themes of this year’s festival, such as mythology and folk horror, rounds out a creation with unique individual elements that do not overwhelm viewers but rather force them to contemplate the narrative as a whole.

This is the essence of 42, a festival that pays tribute to Douglas Adams’ idea that we need fewer answers and better questions, the questions that arise from books and images. The great narrative artist Agustín Comotto will guide us in finding them.