Curated by comic book designer and publisher MacDiego, the exhibition can be visited from October 2, 2026, to January 10, 2027, and brings together 125 images and pieces, most of them originals, tracing the artist's development from the age of 9 to his first professional publications.
Before titles such as "Wrinkles" (Spain's National Comic Award in 2008), "The House", "The Furrows of Chance", "Return to Eden" and "The Winter of the Cartoonist", there were notebooks, doodles, school assignments, fanzines and numerous training exercises. The exhibition focuses precisely on this lesser-known period to show how Paco Roca experimented with different techniques, learned from his influences and gradually developed the graphic and narrative language that would later define his work.
125 PIECES TRACING A CAREER
The 125 pieces on display include childhood drawings, notebooks and training exercises, sketches and studies, original inked pages, early fanzines, posters for nightclubs, advertising work, first professional publications and covers from his earliest comics.
The exhibition also includes a Goya award, editions of "Wrinkles" in around 30 languages, script excerpts and other materials that help reconstruct Paco Roca's creative and professional process. Rather than focusing solely on the final result, the exhibition highlights the tests, attempts, influences, doubts and solutions that shaped the artist's development.
"Paco Roca's Stone Age... and a Few Other Things" thus invites visitors to view the author's career from a different perspective: not through his awards or the recognition he would later achieve, but through his beginnings and the process by which a passion for drawing eventually became a profession.
A CONVERSATION WITH PACO ROCA
As a complement to the exhibition and as part of the activities organized by the Zaragoza Comic Salon, a public conversation with Paco Roca, curator MacDiego and Juan Royo Abenia will be held at the Centro de Historias on October 20 at 6:30 p.m.
