I recently read Croco by Azul Lopez. It was both visually striking and original. Lopez clearly has her own vision, and it speaks to me enough that I’m seeking out all of her work that I can find.
That brings me to Look Up (published 2023 in Spanish, 2025 in English). It is as original and vivid as Croco, but is even more ambitious. Croco was set in a landscape full of plants (think jungle) and, most of the time, in the hole Croco was stuck in. By contrast, Look Up is set in sweeping landscapes, and wide and open skies.
This book follows a man who looks at the world differently. Where most people look down, this man looks up, to the sky. He looks up literally, and he looks up metaphorically and symbolically, looking beyond the prosaic to wonder. However, in the face of the “indifference” other people showed him, he withered, and looked down. His actions became standardized. He became part of this huge, laboring group building complex structures. The work continued for a long but indefinite time, making something so complex that the man got lost.
As he searched for “a path back, he came across a huge hole. Its size and darkness woke him up again. He screamed…and the hole, then the world, exploded in a multicolored mass of birds. The sound of their wings drew workers’ attention from their labors, and “their flight made everyone look up again.”
Aaaaand…that summary gives no sense at all of how wondrous the images in this book are. The things the people build are huge and geometric and hypnotic. The birds are lovely and organic and everyone.
And every page of this book cries out to be lingered over.
(After the story ends, there’s a note about the Cave of Swallows/Sotano de Golondrinas in Mexico [and the many birds that fly out each day] that inspired the book.)