The Ladies-in-Waiting's relation to baroque style and Las Meninas

This work seeks to reveal the ways in which the characteristics of Velázquez' painting Las Meninas' are recreated by means of comic book codes in Santiago García and Javier Olivares' graphic novel The Ladies-in-Waiting, along with the baroque resources on which this graphic novel feeds. In this regard, it attempts, first, to reveal the baroque impacts on the comic book's aesthetics, mainly through Wölfflin's classical-baroque dichotomy, then, to explain its eclectic narrative structure based on the artificialization, a largely common figure of speech in Baroque literature and the decorazione assoluta which defines the core of Baroque art according to Echeverría. In the end, it concludes that The Ladies-in-Waiting's creators Santiago García and Javier Olivares wrote/drew a kind of essay about Las Meninas relying on the idea that the way we receive it today is determined by its pre and post history (the works by which it was inspired and the ones it inspired). Concordantly, several elements from both histories take their place in The Ladies-in-Waiting in such a way that they support each other both thematic and visually. In addition, the work of art in question reemphasizes in comic book format the reflections of various critics about Las Meninas as taken from the book Otras Meninas [Other Meninas] edited by Fernando Marías. For instance, it transmits Las Meninas' often praised spontaneity to the reader through descriptive sequence while creating in his mind an image of Las Meninas —in concordance with the aforementioned thesis of the creators— making use of the closure, as an equivalent of the painting's baroque illusionism consisting of referring outside the painting area.