Goya: The Terrible Sublime: A Graphic Novel

Celebrated artist Francisco de Goya confronts demons real and imagined in this vivid portrayal of the end of his life.

Francisco de Goya is considered one of the most important Spanish painters of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, last of the Greats and first of the modernists. But his sumptuous images stemmed from a mind in torment, especially later in his life.

Goya: The Terrible Sublime is a graphic novel inspired by Goya’s life, in particular focusing on his final years, as he struggles with assorted physical ailments that threaten to take his mind, as well. Recovering from a serious illness in Cadiz, Spain, which has left him deaf, Goya suffers from terrible headaches, high fevers, and hallucinations. Still, the monsters in his delusions are not real–but his friend Asensio Julià is, and he belongs to another world.

From the mind of the terror master El Torres and the art of Fran Galán comes a terrifying story that brings readers into the artist’s world of madness and dark paintings, a historical miasma populated by recognizable figures and swathed in an aesthetic of beautiful grotesques living in the shadows. And even as the artist faces dreadful images of witchcraft and pure evil, he knows that he must not fall into what lurks beyond the dream of reason.