Review by Frank Plowright
The English edition of David Rubín’s El Fuego (Fire) is released a couple of weeks after the globally reported news that it’s possible a large asteroid could collide with Earth in 2031, impacting on all life. It’s a case of reality overtaking his fiction, as an event of that type is at the heart of El Fuego.
In this case it’s estimated the asteroid will hit Earth in eight months, which is the prognosis of life given to architectural engineer Alexander Yorba, afflicted with brain cancer. In his era mankind has already colonised the moon, but social divisions are broader than ever, and Yorba’s career has been spent enabling the wealthy to distance themselves further. With death impending he re-evaluates what’s important to him, but the people he works for aren’t people to be walked away from. That their headquarters is named Putin Tower is an indication of their priorities.
There are clear villains here, but Rubín doesn’t take the easy option of recognisable caricatures, instead representing them anonymously by pixilated colour abstracts only seen via transmission screens. It’s one of several startling artistic innovations in what’s an artistic tour de force. Rubín visualises a bright and decorative future with all the wonder you’d want, but visibly decaying around the edges, building his visions on existing cities.
El Fuego is a morality tale for our times showing the super wealthy as entitled and abhorrent in discarding the human race to save themselves. Sadly, it’s what not enough of us suspect they would do were the circumstances real. However, what Rubín highlights is that perhaps they’re not the real problem. Perhaps that’s the lickspittles like Yorba who’re so desperate for the association with power that they discard any principles they might have once had.
Having set the scene, at the halfway point Rubín leaps forward several months and we follow Yorba with a double death sentence imminent. What would you do in those circumstances?
A first publication date of 2022 in Spain indicates a graphic novel conceived and largely created as covid swept the world, and although the circumstances differ, it seems Rubín’s response to the biggest global uncertainty for many decades. Yorba considers his life wasted, but with his purpose eradicated he’s a lost soul revisiting his past in order to re-evaluate it. There’s the fantasy of seeing the relentlessly misguided repenting their sins, but it leaves El Fuego a novel without a core. The trappings are magnificent, but ultimately what Rubín has to say is too obvious.
