Review by Frank Plowright
To be able to spend your entire day in pajamas is an ambition harboured by more people than you’d think. Just look around the newsagent on a Sunday morning, or what the people driving their kids to school are wearing. In that sense Paco Roca’s got it made. He’s a prodigiously talented comic artist who appears on TV shows talking about his work, yet that work is carried out at home, and if he wants he can stay in his pajamas the entire day. And he wants. However, the longer Memoirs of a Man in Pajamas runs, the more introspective Roca becomes, revealing insecure elements of his personality that we won’t be as envious of.
The first batch of short, self-deprecating memoir strips maintain a level of distance, originally appearing in a Spanish newspaper supplement and collected when enough accumulated. Three collections appeared between 2010 and 2017, and they’re combined for this English translation.
Roca is a fantastic artist, precise, thoughtful and inclined to provide a full picture, no matter what it means cramming into one of twelve panels per page over what comprised the first Spanish language collection. That level of contemplation also applies to his life. Assuming the Roca on these pages isn’t a totally fictional creation to boost his reputation, he’s self-aware and unassuming, and because he spends so much of his time in pajamas when he encounters real life it’s often surprising. He also has an active imagination and an observational eye, two powerful tools for any creative calling, and the originality of his fanciful thoughts fly unrestricted in these strips.
He associates tupperware with motherly control, imagines incompatible celebrity marriages and examines the workmen contracted to dismantle Limbo after the Catholic church declares it obsolete. Whatever comes to mind can be encompassed by these strips, although a fair few concern his not quite understanding his male friends, each identified by a star sign rather than a name. He’ll be puzzled at the success at how one manipulative type is so successful with women, and appalled at conversations about children. There are some inevitable inclusions where topic inspiration is absent, such as being intimidated by the volume of e-mails, while every diarist eventually resorts to bemoaning the difficulty of producing a weekly strip. In Roca’s case, though, they’re created with such off the wall wit and charm they transcend the original lack of inspiration.
There’s so much to ponder as Roca becomes more introspective and reveals more and more insecurities. He’ll make you think about aspects of life you’d never usually consider ranging from the trivial (what do the characters do after a novel ends?) to the existential (humanitarian aid to Mauretania). So many moments are laugh out loud funny, and many others are well researched and compactly presented. His eighteen page investigation of debt should be on every school curriculum. He’s equally astute when it comes to the political demonising of the African poor, and why pharmaceutical companies remain immoral institutions.
As is the case with other densely packed observational autobiographical strips (see recommendations), Memoirs of a Man in Pajamas is best read a few strips at a time for the full delight. Gorging yourself in one prolonged rush will diminish both the enjoyment and appreciation.
