Recommendation for Ernesto

As you plunge into the second half of your life, your curiosity fails you like your eyesight. It's increasingly difficult to find authors who can rewrite you, and when you do, they tend to be figures from the past. That's why I celebrate every time I discover a living genius.

You stumble when you're reading the first chapters of Blood Trails , the comic by Japanese author Shuzo Oshimi , and you remember that the collection consists of a total of 18 volumes . Of course, manga readers are much more accustomed to that. If you submit to the spell of an author, you can end up devoting the width of a bookshelf to Buddha , by Osamu Tezuka , or an entire piece of furniture to Lone Wolf and Cub , by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima , two classic works that occupy a disconcerting size in the eyes of anyone who is still unaware of one of the greatest achievements of Japanese comics: if a work has height, it will preserve it intact page after page, even if there are more than 1,000.

The fact is that no collection is quite like Blood in the Wind , whose premise and treatment are worthy of a Patricia Highsmith novel. It narrates the terrifying relationship between an abusive mother and her only son. As in the Texan writer's novels, the angle chosen, the microscopic vision of a handful of desires on the verge of becoming criminal, provokes such a degree of suffocation and vertigo that each volume could very well be the last. I swear by all that is sacred that I am not exaggerating. Each volume culminates in a final page that could serve as the perfect closing to a story that, nevertheless, continues to grow and grow until it reaches a horizon of which I do not want to reveal anything beyond what Ingrid Garcia-Jonsson wrote to me after reading it: "Now I can rest."

The good news is that Shuzo Oshimi is working tirelessly and is publishing quality works in Spain thanks to the efforts of publishers such as Milky Way and Norma . The really good news is that, although Oshimi imposes on himself the unusual rule of transforming his technique with each series, as if his artistic identity were dying of exhaustion with each outcome, the body of his work is as unequivocal as a blood test. The work that shot him to fame, The Flowers of Evil , has the silhouette of a student screwball comedy, but it shares the same mystery as Traces of Blood , that of our own identity beyond pain and desire, if anything remains.

That's all. So far, I've gotten four loved ones to devour Blood Trails , and I hope you'll be the fifth, Ernesto.