Venezuela has undergone stark transformations in recent decades. Once hailed as one of Latin America’s most stable democracies, the country has more recently been afflicted by widespread economic and humanitarian suffering, causing a mass exodus of its population that has reverberated throughout the region. Despite its substantive importance, comparatively few deep academic studies of contemporary Venezuelan politics exist that can shed light on the causes of this crisis.

While writing this review, I visited a big bookstore in Los Angeles, where I live in, and I observed that the comic and graphic novel section was put aside in a little corner, somehow hidden from the main and “serious” areas. During the hour or so I spent there, all the people who visited the section were kids and teenagers and I couldn’t help feeling as if I didn’t belong there. The logic which excludes adults as part of the natural public for comics reflects a long-time stigmatization that points them out as banal or childish.

Every time I travel back to Buenos Aires, my hometown, I immediately text my dad, “Can you get tickets to go to La Bombonera?” La Bombonera is Boca Juniors’ stadium, and Boca is our football team—just as it was my grandfather’s and as it is my nephew’s. When I was younger, before moving to the United States to pursue my Ph.D., I used to go on Sundays with friends to la popular—the standing terraces, akin to those in old British stadiums. Now, when I return, we need to get seats, as my father no longer wants to stand for three hours, and my nephew is still too young for the chaos of la popular.