Inés Estrada Part 1, September, 2022

The 339th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium. For more info: https://nycomicssymposium.wordpress.com/

View Part 2, where Inès answers audience questions about her essay, here:

https://youtu.be/rCM94UPSRKM

Inés Estrada on “Cartoon Spirituality”

“Cartoon Spirituality” is an essay zine originally self-published by Inés Estrada in spring 2022 about cartoons, magic, consciousness, faith and fandom, and the ideas in it will be presented and expanded in this talk. An exploration on the power of imagination, the relation in between cartoon characters and religious icons, how drawing has evolved together with human culture and belief since the beginning of time, and how this has brought us to our current era in which spiritual and psychic warfare is being inflicted on us, as the real and the unreal become increasingly inseparable from each other.

Inés Estrada is a cartoonist from Mexico City, where she currently resides. She has been self-publishing her comics since 2006 and has also been published in Sweden, Spain and the US. Her last book, Alienation, a sci-fi/horror graphic novel about a future in which reality and the virtual are indistinguishable, came out in 2019 from Fantagraphics and is currently sold out.