Miguel Gallardo realizes at the beginning of 2020 that he’s getting worn out with the succession of trips and workshops he’s been involved in since 2007, with the publication of his successful Maria and Me, a graphic novel that tells the story of his relationship with his daughter, who has autism.

The author feels it’s time to take a month’s sabbatical, at least. But bothered by a slight irritation, he enters the hospital, where they wind up removing a four-centimeter-long tumor from his head, leaving him with forty-five staples and a “punk-rock hairdo” a little bit like Makoki, one of the famous characters Gallardo co-created as an artist at the end of the 1970s. When he’s able to leave, he must continue undergoing cancer treatment in a world plunged into a pandemic that bears little to no resemblance to the one he knew when he walked through those doors to get checked out for a “slight pain” he’d gotten used to in his day-to-day life.

Something Strange Happened to Me on the Way Home, coedited by Z de SanZ, is a project that bears many of the marks of the unfortunately deceased Julián Sanz and reveals Miguel Gallardo’s need to draw and express everything, first to understand it himself and second to tell the world “what it means to travel to the moon without a helmet and come back without a map or a guidebook… But without melodramas, eh?” “This is,” Gallardo assures us, “a chronicle of inexplicable events in my life and the world that took place in the Year of Our Lord 2020.”