Let's Talk Illustrators #316: Manuel Marsol

Every so often a book comes along that speaks to a very specific part of me. Astro by Manuel Marsol, translated by Lizzie Davis, is one such book. I'd like to let Manuel do the talking, though, so check out our conversation to learn more about this unique exploration of grief and loneliness.

About the book:

When Astro arrives on a faraway planet, everyone wants to meet him. Who's this strange person, and why is he here? But one kind creature in particular is especially drawn to him.

Together, they form an unlikely bond and navigate the world's curious terrains--mountains, caves, oceans. When the creature is taken from him, Astro must confront the difficult questions that underlie our existence: Why are we here? What is our life for?

Let's talk Manuel Marsol!

LTPB: Where did the idea for Astro come from? Why did you choose to tell this story?

MM: In the summer of 2013 I made my first drawing. I had not yet published anything, but I already knew that at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair there was a prestigious exhibition of illustrators and I thought of doing something that would surprise myself, mixing techniques, collage, etc., as I knew that experimentation was valued there, with works that perhaps had little market but were artistically valued. In that time I had just left my job in advertising (creative, art director) and was painting with a friend of my late father, (the abstract painter López-Soldado, and he taught me his techniques of mixing oil with acrylic, which generated accidental stains, and which he used in his abstract paintings and with which I had grown up. As I felt many deficiencies in the more figurative drawing, which later became a virtue, I thought that those spots were also strange, physical lunar landscapes -they reminded me of the volcanic island of Lanzarote, which I visited with my family as a child-, but also mental -my memory, when as a child I would run my hand through Lopez-Soldado’s paintings or walk through his house-studio and hide, surrounded by those shapes, which I felt so much my own for having lived with them since I was born-.

That is why I drew an astronaut exploring, and unintentionally, without having anything in mind, I drew him more as a child than as a scientist. His way of being there was not that of an adult on a mission, but that of a child entering a wonderful garden full of insects and hiding places. I made 5 illustrations with that same graphic and thematic universe and luckily they were selected at the Bologna’s Fair, which was a great surprise for me, in my first attempt. I continued drawing and then appeared the encounter with the being from another world and existentialist and metaphysical themes, such as mourning for the early death of my father, when I was eleven years old. I was always interested in science fiction that mixed space adventure with big transcendental questions, like Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or Kubrick's more adult 2001: A Space Odyssey or Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris, and that eventually came naturally.

LTPB: The topic of this book is particularly tough, dealing with issues of loss and depression -- how did you approach the book so that it would be accessible to young children?

MM: I think all children, like all humans, feel loneliness strongly. The baby feels that if his mother leaves the room, she is gone forever. That's why he laughs in relief when he sees that she is back. Even if they love you at home and show it to you, as fortunately was my case, you can't avoid the feeling of helplessness for the most trivial and whimsical reasons. However, there are children and adults who deliberately seek and need a certain solitude. To shut out the noise of the world, to be with themselves, to live for a while in inner silence, on your own planet. That is why as a child I used to look for a corner of the house where I could hide to listen to my own heart, to imagine ghosts, and that is why, as an adult, I look for another secluded corner to sit and read, for example, after a noisy family meal.

On the other hand, the taste for the mysteries of the world is ancestral and is shared by all children. Then we grow up and take it all for granted. We see the moon, the starry sky, a dark and humid forest or the immensity of the sea and we are not surprised. Well, fortunately I still have that wonder and I try to recreate it in my books. As the poet Lord Byron said, for the child and for the poet a mountain is also a feeling, an emotion. William Blake or Sendak also insisted on that connection between the child's gaze and the artist's, a special state for creativity. At the presentation of the book in Madrid I wanted to be accompanied by a writer I admire, Manuel Astur, and he said that the character of Astro can also be seen as if he were a poet, someone who is still able to see the world for the first time.

For me it is a success that the book can amaze people of all ages. I have received comments from parents excited to read it alone and with their children. From children trapped in the nooks and crannies and secrets of the planet, disturbed by the protagonist's conflict or by a mystery that escapes them. The aesthetic and literary delight is independent of age. It is unfair to deprive children of certain stories or other aesthetic forms less assimilated by the dominant culture. I know that bookstores need to place the book in a section, and perhaps that is the only problem, a problem unrelated to the content of the book. Because I don't consider that I have made a work for a certain age. Because I used to go with my parents to El Prado Museum (Madrid) when I was a child and I was amazed when I saw The Passage of the Styx Lagoon by Patinir, and… who can say that this is a painting for children?.

When I conceive my albums, what I try to do is to avoid a treatment that, because of issues such as violence, sex or bad taste, can not also be enjoyed by the little ones. Apart from that, which is the problem, that they are a little afraid? Very well, let them embrace their parents, let them generate doubts and amazement and fascination and desire for more; that they don't understand everything? Fine too, they'll ask their parents more questions. And Astro is a great question in itself, like when you look up at the night sky and wonder how we could possibly be here.

LTPB: What challenges did you encounter, and what did you find most rewarding during the process?

MM: I encountered all possible difficulties and challenges. I insist that this is a book I started when I had not published anything, so it was my first book. What happened is that I couldn't find a way to close it, to preserve the mystery without making it completely cryptic. It was also a very risky book in commercial terms, long-expensive, demanding, unclassifiable (for children, for adults?) and unconventional. And that made several publishers in Europe who wanted to publish it, in the end they backed out. I abandoned the project and put in a drawer several times, until my Spanish publisher, Fulgencio Pimentel, convinced me to rescue it. I would never have been able to make my career (slower, yes, but more personal, coherent and "authorial") as I am doing thanks to Fulgencio Pimentel. In part, because I would not have been edited for certain things. Actually, it was quite improbable that a book like Astro would be published... that's why I say that if this publisher didn't exist, Astro wouldn't exist either. Fortunately, Transit Books has that mix of sensitivity and courage, and I value their confidence very much.

Regarding the narration, one of the keys was to find the voice. It was essential that the astronaut should always be somehow inaccessible, mysterious. That's why there was a graphic distance, we see him almost always as a little ant. But I discovered that when I accumulated several drawings, they always showed the main character from afar. That's why I didn't want him to speak, I didn't want to kill his strangeness. At first I invented a classic narrator to that world, but I didn't like it either. And that's when I gave voice to his friend, the alien. That changed everything. The alien was the little astronaut. And when I moved on and decided that Astro had to deal with the death of a loved one, that it was essential to the intensity of his questions, I thought it was interesting to keep the same voice. A voice that spoke to us from the other side, from another time. Normally grief is told from the point of view of the one who remains. And here we see a friend who is gone forever and observes with curiosity and affection the one who stays. And it can be interpreted to mean that the love or memories remain as well as the questions. Who could deny it. The voice of the alien does not know from where or from when he speaks to us, but the fact is that he speaks to us, and he remembers his friend Astro.

Despite the sadness, the idea was to come out of the book with some hope and gratitude. It talks about mourning, but above all it talks about acceptance and the indelible memory that someone leaves us and that will be with us until the end. Also of the legacy, like the one my father left me through his love of art, cinema, soccer and his loved ones. My father discovered a world he loved and I have received that love to transform it into art.

LTPB: What did you use to create the illustrations in this book? Is this your preferred medium? How does your process change from book to book?

MM: As I was saying, there is a mixture of pictorial techniques that my father's great friend, López-Soldado, taught me, and which have to do with the accidental and the stain. The mixture of oil and acrylic, for example, which are two media that do not mix well, provokes random shapes and organic textures. I associate Astro very much with that trip I mentioned before to the volcanic island of Lanzarote (Canary Islands, Spain) that we took when we were children. The sinuous shapes of the rocks, the colors, the immense spaces and the sensation of being on another planet. And this "material" use of paint gave me what I was looking for. I also used collage, either from cardboard or from an old sewing magazine I found in a dumpster on the street. The wefts of the sweaters, even the patterns and templates, were naturally incorporated into the drawings. Those dots and crosses later played an essential role in the book. They were talking about particles, about the minimal expression of things, about atoms, stardust… and how everything has to do with the big, the small and time.

Even so, I also tried with an aesthetic close to pixel art, in my own way, to associate those spaces to the world of video games of my childhood, where you went through a world with a little character followed from a side scroll camera.

I think my favorite medium is painting. My parents were Art History teachers and my references, especially in my beginnings, came more from the world of painting than from the world of illustration. But I'm from a generation that lived naturally with traditional and digital media, and my beginnings as an art director in advertising helped me to understand that sometimes there are projects that require different techniques and moods. Some are more pictorial and atmospheric and others more graphic, direct, as digital drawing gives you. However, I think that lately I'm more interested than ever in focusing on analog work, especially with the over saturation of digital drawing that one sees in social networks. Not to mention the sad irruption of an uncontrolled and unlawful generative AI. That drawing exists and can be touched for me has a value, and much of my paid work has to do with exhibitions of originals in different parts of the world.

LTPB: What are you working on now?

MM: I have been working for some years on a book that on the one hand has many things in common with Astro and on the other hand is totally different. Astro was not born as a story to talk about the mourning with my father, it just appeared along the way. However, I had always wanted to make a book about my father that started from a photo of him that obsessed me since I discovered it as an adult. The photo is taken from behind a soccer goal in Madrid, on a sandy field in the 1970s (I know because the date is in the margin), and my father has just taken a penalty kick. The goalie is leaning to one side, and the ball is frozen in the air on the opposite side. When I saw it, I thought it had everything that interests me about images and works of art. That mystery, that unsolvable question: did the ball go in or did it go out, impossible to know. And it was also a metaphor of all the questions I won’t be able to ask to my father. But that shoot gives rise to a kind of metaphysical investigation. Not that of the detective who starts investigating and asking questions here and there, but rather that of the artist who reflects on the photo, on his memory, memories and art, with his own tools, which are just writing, drawing and personal gaze. And that connects, by chance, with another much more famous penalty that I was able to see with my father, the one that Roberto Baggio took and missed at the Rose Bowl Stadium in Pasadena, which meant Italy's defeat against Brazil in the final of the World Cup USA'94.

It will be a decidedly adult book in the way of writing and approaching the issues (a sort of illustrated essay mixed with some visions and poetry) and of a much longer length than the Picture books I have done so far, exceeding two hundred pages.

LTPB: If you got the chance to write your own picture book autobiography, who (dead or alive!) would you want to illustrate it, and why?

MM: I have no doubt about it. I would choose Javier Sáez Castán, who for me is one of the greatest picture book authors in History. His best known title, published in many countries, is the Professor Revillod's Universal Animalarium, which has been a source of inspiration (and plagiarism, let’s say it) for countless subsequent books. But his work goes far beyond that, mixing the classicism of the great authors with the modernity of someone who knows the unique artistic possibilities of the picture book as a mechanism, as a clock, as a small magical world in book form. And he is as good a writer as he is an illustrator, which is rare. I always say that if he had been born in the United States, England or France, countries with a long tradition in this field and with a larger public, there would be no need to introduce him because he would have an international reputation on a par with his work. In Spain he has won the National Illustration Award and has been a reference for many of us, also in Latin America. But for different reasons he has not obtained the worldwide recognition that I believe he deserves. I admired his work before I met him and I was lucky that later he also liked mine, which led us to collaborate and develop a strong friendship. For a possible autobiography, I think few people know me as well as he does, and besides, I have shared my whole process of the book of my father's penalty photo, and he has guided and helped me a lot. When I finish it, I will lack space on the credits sheet to thank him for his infinite help.

A BIG thank you to Manuel for sharing the process for this incredibly personal and thoughtful book with us here! Astro publishes from Transit Children's Editions on April 8, 2025!

Special thanks to Manuel and Transit for use of these images!

This post contains affiliate links. For more information, visit my policies & disclosures page