Love, friendship and summer camps in Ana Oncina’s new manga – Danger Room –

One of the novelties of the last piece of December 2021, Among other excellent titles, Ana Oncina’s latest work: only friends† after passing manga planet, The author started with Neko girl. croquet and dumpling or damn 30 It bets on the first 218-page manga volume edited by Planeta Cómic.

Taking the reunion of two friends Erika and Emi, who met at a summer camp more than ten years ago, as a starting point, Oncina is directing the film. The keys to a candid story told without sacrificing value from the diverse perspectives of young women† With carefully structured and chromatically presented flashbacks, Erika and Emi embark on a journey that encompasses the past shared by the present and gradually presents themselves as two different personalities.

Like a piece of mosaic, the protagonists get lost in the distant past to recall the summer anecdotes of a camp that marked their journey into existence. Volleyball games, sleepless nights with others enjoying the star shower in sleeping bags in the tent, t-shirt-paint t-shirt workshop, drunkenness, sunrises, games and the first times are now reconstructed through the filter of memory and the different effects on them. biographies. DHence a dual set of perspectives, because to the time that runs as a common thread from the present to the past is added the perspective from which everyone experiences a particular event. and then he built it through the filter of discourse he showed the other as if it were the only possible truth.

The initial journey of the heroines, who for various reasons leave their homes and the known environment, articulates here from the camp as a neuralgic focus that transcends spatial location to trigger the intensity of experiences, as well as the boundary separating them. from the reality from which each of them begins. After the parenthesis about their supposed daily life of the week at camp, Erika and Emi must return to their own assets and organization, yes, with the baggage of learning experience. As the axis, rhythm and measure of time, the camp stopped at the wine and rose hours when the poet sang, when the seemingly endless summer days as well as the vital periods of adolescence accelerated and savored to the last second. gets bored.

The author’s special stamp on topics such as the first kiss, first love, the first hangover, as well as the transition from adolescence to adulthood and the tears that come with the discovery of sophistry distills the sensitivity in each vignette. , but implicitly in the blink of an eye, at a glance, in a relationship that is thought to be forever and as long as it lasts.

From personal experience, Oncina transforms the camp into a transcendent turning point in the identity configuration of its heroes. because one point about the relationship between the two that they return to over and over again during their conversations to explain themselves and us is to gradually reveal to us subtle clues that we sense intuitively but don’t have as readers. It combines gracefully to outline two complex and distinct psychological characterizations of Erika and Emi, through silences and unspoken words, without delay, informative text-image repetition, or excessive value judgment in the design of a plain or archetypal character.

Oncina’s maturity is appreciated only in the total mastery of the screenplay and the narrative rhythm that allows the reader to slowly but surely enjoy a plot based on the personal experiences of two teenagers with whom they can identify the portrait of their adolescence. also in the graphic section of a manga with oriental reading sense in which Japanese vignette onomatopoeia is integrated. With black and white as the slogan, However, the deliberate changing of the background of the vignettes stands out as an indication of time jumps, as the white background is preferred for the present, while the black background houses events from the past.

With a charming yet realistic plot, Just Friends builds from the seeming insignificance of a conversation between two friends, a delicate symphony of moments orchestrated by nostalgia evoking Erika and Emi’s first voyages, a story of discovery and maturation that also tastes bittersweet. It slips into the student of the reader who wishes to rest for a few moments in his reclaimed teenage paradise.