Someone Devoured the Middle Class When the middle class stars in a horror film, Europe trembles. When Europe directs a horror film, the middle class trembles. Do we know how to recognize our oldest fears? Where are the monsters that want to suck our blood? And worst of all... what the hell does it mean to be Europeans? Aleix Saló broadens his horizons and leads us on a safari across the European Union, a wild and untamed territory where not even God knows which way the wind will blow.

Spanish comics represent an exciting and diverse field, yet one that is often overlooked outside of Spain. Spanish Comics offers an overview on contemporary scholarship on Spanish comics, focusing on a wide range of comics dating from the Francoist dictatorship, 1939-1975; the Political Transition, 1970-1985; and Democratic Spain since the early 1980s including the emergence of the graphic novel in 2000. Touching on themes of memory, gender, regional identities, and history, the chapters in this collection demonstrate the historical and cultural significance of Spanish comics.

Politically Animated studies the convergence of animation and actuality within films, television series, and digital shorts from across the Spanish-speaking world. It interrogates the many ways in which animation as a stylistic tool and storytelling device participates in political projects underpinning an array of non-fiction works. The case studies in the book cover a diverse geographical scope, including Spain, Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico. They critically analyse different works such as feature-length animated documentary films, a work of animated journalism, a short animated essay, and micro-short episodes from a televised animated documentary series. Jennifer Nagtegaal employs the term "politically animated" in reference to the ideological implications of choosing specific techniques and styles of animation within certain socio-historical and cultural contexts. Nagtegaal illuminates the creative union of animated documentary and the comics medium currently being exploited by Spanish and Latin American cartoonists and filmmakers alike. By paying particular attention to cultural production beyond the big screen, Politically Animated continues to stretch the bounds of animated documentary scholarship.

Spanish comics have attracted considerable critical attention internationally: dissertations have been written, monographs have been published, and an array of cultural institutions in Spain (the media, publishing houses, bookstores, museums, and archives) have increasingly promoted the pleasures, pertinence, and power of graphic narrative to an ever-expanding readership – all in an area of cultural production that was held, until recently, to be the stuff of child’s play, the unenlightened, or the unsophisticated. This volume takes up the charge of examining how contemporary comics in Spain have confronted questions of cultural legitimacy through serious and timely engagement with diverse themes, forms, and approaches – a collective undertaking that, while keenly in step with transnational theoretical trends, foregrounds local, regional, and national dimensions particular to the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Spanish milieu. From memory and history to the economic and the political, and from the body and personal space to mental geography, the essays collected in Consequential Art account for several key ways in which a range of comics practitioners have deployed the image-text connection and alternative methods of seeing to interrogate some of the most significant cultural issues in Spain.

This text examines the actions that governments have taken to cope with the economic and political consequences associated with the globalization of international finance. Topics covered include the Third World debt crisis and the collapse of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, BCCI.

A timely and provocative account of why the euro has failed and why, as a result, the Union will unravel Examining key economic indicators and assessing the situation across Europe, two British journalists assess why the euro has failed—and what will happen when the European Union completely unravels. “This book is a must-read for anyone who cares about the future of Europe and progressive politics. Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson correctly predicted the euro would prove a calamity. They are right today that the euro crisis is far from over. Their demand for a radical change of approach must be taken seriously—by policy makers and politicians alike.”—Ed Balls, UK Shadow Chancellor from 2011 to 2015 “[The book] offers useful insight into why so many people thought the euro was a good idea in the first place.”—Harvard Business Review

Faithful to you in my fashion: The cheating heart of EMU