María Medem’s new graphic novel Land of Mirrors (Drawn & Quarterly, 2025) is about a girl alone with her memories. Antonia lives in a reconstructed version of her past, a barren landscape filled only with the sights she’s already seen and the feelings she’s felt before. Each morning, she rings the bells at the top of a tower overlooking her deserted world. But who is she ringing them for? We soon find out she’s not entirely by herself, as dogs roam freely, birds fly overhead, and in the distance, there’s a flower. It’s this flower, and the hope that she can save it, that sets Antonia on a winding path toward the land of mirrors.
Land of Mirrors looks back—at ourselves and at our past. Medem’s illustrations have a fragmentary and surreal quality, as if reflected on a broken surface. Describing this book is like putting a dream into words: While you’re in the story, you accept its peculiar logic without reservation, but try to convey it and facts and faces start to slip through your fingers. You’re left holding on to mainly what you felt—vivid emotions and sensations that, in this case, you will not want to let go of.
Medem is a comic artist and illustrator based in Seville, Spain. She’s known for her vibrant palette, inventive compositions, and vast, lonesome landscapes. Even if you’re unfamiliar with Medem’s previous comic work, you’ve likely seen her editorial illustrations in magazines like the New York Times, the New Yorker, Wired, or Gossamer. I corresponded with Medem about when nostalgia becomes a trap, the ways flamenco influenced this book, and doing the opposite of what she was taught in art school. This conversation has been edited for concision and clarity.
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The Rumpus: In a conversation with It’s Nice That, you said that part of the inspiration for this book came from the desire to understand how nostalgia works. Can you tell me more about nostalgia as a starting point?
María Medem: I’m not a very nostalgic person, at least [not] as it concerns my own life. I’ve never felt that the past was better or had this feeling of wishing to go back in time. I only have nostalgia in terms of climate, when I see the landscapes and species that are disappearing. In the end, I just keep having hope in the future, which is a bit the opposite of nostalgia. But I do have a friend who is extremely nostalgic, and around the time I started working on Land of Mirrors, he was very obsessed with his childhood and adolescence. He was recalling them as the peak of his life, and he was having a really bad time. We had long conversations around that. When nostalgia is so strong, it becomes an immobilizing feeling. You miss something that isn’t real anymore, that’s totally impossible to live again, and when you are trapped in that, everything that happens in the present is weaker than that idealized memory. The conclusion that I came to more or less was that it’s important to learn from the past but not have it as a goal. All of that led me to approach Land of Mirrors in this way.
Rumpus: Land of Mirrors felt somewhere between a memory and a dream. That feeling comes partly from the simplicity of the line art and the flatness of the shapes—the lack of details gives these illustrations a half-remembered quality. You also use that sparse linework to play with the rules of perspective and reality. What drew you to this style?
Medem: I’m very interested in provoking that sort of feeling in my work—a bit of disorientation. Not much, just a bit. I studied fine arts in Sevilla, which is a very traditional university, so when I started making comics and illustrations, I just did the opposite of what they had taught me: no shading, avoiding colors such as sienna, sap green, etcetera, and using bright colors instead. It wasn’t a conscious path, though. Now I can see what led me to drawing this way, but at that time, I just felt that comics were a territory where I could play and draw how I wanted, with nobody judging me.
Rumpus: One of my favorite lines in this book is when Antonia is trying to remember a moment from her past and says, “Did the fire burn warmer? I think it did, it warmed more . . . and burned less.” For me, this captured how a memory can feel incomplete. What did this line mean to you?
Medem: You can’t really retain the sensation of how strong a physical pain you experienced in the past was. You can’t feel it in your skin again—at least, I can’t. But the beauty remains. There are pains that aren’t physical that remain, too. I am very interested in how memory is incomplete, that you can’t trust it to be the truth, especially with the passing of time. I am fascinated with the fact that different people can remember the same event in different ways.
Rumpus: I read that you use a mix of analog and digital methods, but your final illustrations feel very handmade. What was your process for creating this book? Can you walk me through making a page from concept to completion?
Medem: Before I start drawing, I write the story almost as if it were meant to be just text, but with notations of certain visual things. There are a lot of people who don’t write before starting to draw. I don’t think there’s really a best method, but that’s how I’m most comfortable. Then I start working on the comic pages, translating the story to images but trying to use as little text as possible and leaving room to alter or lengthen scenes when necessary. I need to have this text to be sure the story has a rhythm, that the comic doesn’t get lost in itself—it’s like I’m a tightrope walker, and my text is the cord. I draw one page per day, sometimes two, just the pencils first. I inked some of the pages by hand, but in the end, I inked most of them digitally after scanning them. Then I color digitally. After all of that, I place the text—which, at that point, I mostly rewrite—and compose the word balloons on the page, which is something that always takes me more time than I expect.
Rumpus: Your panel layouts are so inventive and often don’t follow a canonical comic grid structure. It felt like each page in this book could be a stand-alone artwork. What are you considering as you’re deciding the layout? How are you thinking about the panel arrangement in relation to time, since time and space are linked in comics?
Medem: When I first started making comics, I decided to make one-page comics, at least one per week. It was a kind of challenge I set myself. I was very interested in making the page stand on its own as a thing with coherence that felt harmonious, as if it weren’t a comic page, but an illustration. At the same time, I wanted to make sure that the story I was telling worked well.
From there, I started working on longer stories. I usually make thumbnails of the page-spreads to be sure that each page also works with the one across from it, but I don’t overthink it. It’s a bit intuitive. I don’t have multiple options and choose one. Usually, it’s a fluid process: I know what’s going to appear on the page, what I want to tell, and then I see how I can compose it.
Regarding the experience of time, that is something that I love about comics. I can be very detailed in some scenes and make time pass slowly. In cinema, a ten-minute scene is a ten-minute scene. On the comics page, a reader isn’t bound by the reality of time. I can suggest a slower rhythm and show the slowing passing of days. I have a love for showing movement and things as they are. I feel very uncomfortable when things are abrupt, especially if the story doesn’t call for it. Also, one thing I’m very interested in, besides the story, is the atmosphere— everything that happens around the story. I’ve got to be precise with time and with how things work in the place that I’m drawing.
Rumpus: Who have been your influences, in or outside of comics?
Medem: My biggest influences in comics—the people who made me want to make comics—are contemporary comic artists. Although I read comics, I never felt that I was capable of making my own until I saw the people who were starting to make comics right around the time I wanted to, for example, Ana Galvañ, Andrés Magán, Cynthia Alfonso, Oscar Raña, and Olivier Schrauwen. Outside of comics, photographers like Cristina García Rodero, Ramón Masats, and Atín Aya have been a big influence. When I was a kid, we had photography books at home, and I spent a lot of time staring at the pictures and imagining stories behind them. I’ve also been influenced by tons of movies. One of my favorite movies is Where Is the Friend’s House? [directed] by Abbas Kiarostami. I also very much like Agnès Varda, Ozu, David Lynch; the movies of Kitano, like Sonatine; the first movies by Almodóvar; and of course, contemporary directors like Alice Rohrwacher. In books, it’s similar. I read a lot of books, even more than comics, so it’s difficult for me to choose a favorite. A Spanish book I really like is Los Galgos, Los Galgos by Sara Gallardo.
Rumpus: You write in your acknowledgments that some of the text in this book is taken directly from flamenco lyrics. Did flamenco influence this work in other ways?
Medem: Yes. I think the whole story is influenced by how I understand flamenco, which is a mix of beauty, pain, and playfulness. I had these three elements in mind when I was writing the story. Also, flamenco tends a lot toward nostalgia. It’s very referential to the past. The canon is trying to make things like the old people did. But even when flamenco was first appearing, people already said that flamenco was lost and that it wasn’t how it was in the past.
I like flamenco for a lot of reasons. One is their lyrics, and also because when I hear a good recital, I can be very moved with just the voice and guitar. That simplicity can be so powerful, and those things that I feel, I tried to translate in the only way I can, which is with comics.
Rumpus: Much of your early comics were silent, and there remains a wonderfully spare quality to your work. What led you to include words? How do you decide when a page does or doesn’t need text?
Medem: I try to put words only when necessary. If the words are redundant with the drawing, the drawing prevails. At the beginning, I wasn’t very confident with my writing, that’s why I didn’t write as much, and little by little I started including words. Silent comics are a totally different approach to storytelling that’s very enriching, and actually, I’m working now on a couple of silent stories! It’s so challenging because you have to find new ways of telling things that would be so easy to convey with just a word, but avoiding words gives the work a layer of ambiguity and subtlety that I’m very interested in. Also silent comics help me think of other ways of narrating, which keeps my drawing evolving. There are a lot of silent comics that I love, such as The Frank Book by Jim Woodring and Mowgli’s Mirror by Olivier Schrauwen.
Rumpus: Can you tell me about the silent stories you’re working on currently? Do you see yourself returning to silent comics for a while?
Medem: I’m working on a small book that I’ll publish this year with Fidèle Editions, a small press and risograph studio from Paris. In 2019, I published a collection of silent short stories with them titled Echos. It went through three editions, and last year we decided it was time for it to be out-of-print and to make a new publication instead. It was kind of organic to think of this new publication as a silent one, too. For me, making silent comics like Echos or this book I’m working on feels like writing poetry or composing music without lyrics: I’m developing narratives and trying to evoke certain feelings and emotions but without the specificity that words bring. That specificity can be a shortcut, but it sometimes means that you lose an essential mystery to the creation. Because of that, I’ll probably always return to silent comics.
Rumpus: In this book as well as your past work, there’s often a solitary quality to the images—one or two characters set against a vast landscape. What draws you to that imagery?
Medem: I’m not totally sure what’s behind that, but the stories that I want to develop all seem to have these characteristics. The vast landscapes, I think, came from my childhood, from long summer road trips with my parents where the only thing I could see for hours were vast plains, sometimes while listening to Tangerine Dream on cassette.
Rumpus: At different times in this comic, Antonia is reminded of an old story that goes, “If your shadow gets cast on something, then part of you belongs to it after.” For a while, Antonia worries her shadow will leave her scattered and empty. I felt like Antonia was pulled between wanting to be porous and open to the world and also not wanting to lose herself in it. Can you talk about that tension? The shadow story also made me think about how this book is a part of you that now belongs to the reader.
Medem: Yes, that tension is something that I’ve felt at different intensities, but very strongly when I was growing up. And I think this book is that too. Something that happened to me with this book that didn’t happen to me with my previous books was that I felt very embarrassed when the book was about to go out, and when the first people were reading it, I felt extremely shy about it. I couldn’t even read anything that anyone said about it. It’s something to do with it having more text than my prior work. Even though Land of Mirrors is not autobiographical, this book has a lot of me in it. I can see a lot of thoughts and feelings that have accompanied me through the three years I spent working on it. And the book changed me: it is clear that I am now a different person from the one who started the book.
Rumpus: This book begins with an anxiety around endings: Antonia is trying to preserve both a flower and her own past. How do you approach endings in your work, and what was your experience of finding the right ending for this book? Were there any endings you considered but didn’t use?
Medem: Usually, the endings are one of the first things I decide when working on a story, but in this case, it wasn’t like that. I had the general idea of the ending—how it ended conceptually, what I wanted to express—so I knew more or less where the story was heading, but I wasn’t sure how to put it into words and images. I had several options, but none of them were good enough. I knew I didn’t want the ending to be a cliché or too commonplace. I didn’t want it to be too complicated. I wanted it to make sense with everything you’d read before. I wanted it to be smooth, something that you arrive at in a casual way. I didn’t want it to be totally specific or too abrupt. I spent a long time thinking about the endings that I’ve liked when it comes to books, movies, et cetera. I wasn’t thinking of the endings themselves, but how those endings impacted me afterwards.
I think because of this balance that I was searching for, none of the ideas felt like they were working. What I did was just think about the ending during the day, not with a lot of effort, but it was always at the back of my mind. And when I was about to fall asleep, I thought about it but without pressure, as if I was imagining a story just for myself. If I push myself too much with this kind of thing, I get blocked, so I just let my mind drift over it while I’m doing other stuff. I’ve noticed that a lot of my best ideas come to me when I’m on my bike, perhaps because it’s a moment where my mind is blank and there’s room for thoughts to come casually. One day, I was riding my bike, going to some place in a hurry, and the ending came to me. To me, it felt like that was the direction. It felt right. But I knew that I was going to find the ending I was searching for; it’s like looking for a missing puzzle piece, but knowing the piece is there.
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Author portrait courtesy of María Medem
