In 2018, the illustrator Ana Penyas became the first woman to win Spain’s national comic award for her debut graphic novel, Estamos Todas Bien (We’re All Just Fine) and now, at last, here it is in English, translated by Andrea Rosenberg. A word of warning, however. This is a book that demands – and repays – close attention. I had to read it twice before I fully noticed all that was going on some of its pages and only after studying Esther Claudio’s excellent notes on the text did some other things become clear to me. If the story it tells is universal – Penyas is interested in all the ways in which the domestic labour of women has been, and still is, undervalued – its gorgeous richness is born of specificity. It really does help to know, say, that Jabón Lagarto was a particularly harsh soap, once popular in Spain for washing clothes by hand.
We’re All Just Fine traces the histories of Penyas’s grandmothers, moving between the present day, in which she patiently interviews them over bowls of home-cooked food, and the Francoist Spain in which they grew up, surrounded by the ever-present military police whose job it was to enforce strict social control. In some ways, the two matriarchs could not be more different. While Maruja has depressive tendencies – the result, perhaps, of an arranged marriage that left her lonely and isolated – Herminia, whose background is more unconventional, still has a subversive streak. But both remember the bad old days, when women were required to be nothing more than beautiful drudges, however fierce their spirit. As she talks to them, Penyas is painfully aware of her own privilege. It’s not only that she has the freedom to pursue her career; she still benefits from their maternal training, just as her parents did before her (when she visits, her grandmothers will not let her even so much as wash up).
