Cristina Daura’s baffling comic stars a little boy she describes as a “tyrant bastard”

La Ciudad en Viñetas is a recently finished comic from Barcelona-based illustrator Cristina Daura. Like most of her work, it’s skilful and well-finished, but the four-page comic is also thoroughly perplexing, not least because my Spanish is very poor. Cristina continues to favour a bold palette, symmetrical layouts and geometric frames, and illustrates the story of a little boy – she describes him as a “tyrant bastard"– chasing a man he catches spying on him from the garden. On one page she somehow manages to incorporate Vladimir Tatlin’s tower, a major work of unrealised Russian design from the early 20th Century, which also happened to inspire Anish Kapoor’s Olympic tower here in London. In light of her previous comics, which have centred on subjects like taking LSD inside Tate Modern, La Ciudad en Viñetas’ strangeness is perhaps par for the course, and definitely part of its charm.