‘No one calls anymore’ is the new comic by the screenwriter Elizabeth Casillas and the illustrator Blanca Vázquez, published this week by Astiberri. The work focuses on the loneliness of the elderly living in the towns of the emptied Spain, where Sunday family visits break a routine marked by silence, waiting, and the passage of time for a few hours.
The protagonist is Mariona, an 87-year-old woman who lives with her husband, Vicente, in a small town. As her friends disappear and his memory becomes increasingly fragile, death begins to occupy a growing space in her thoughts.
Casillas, born in Bilbao in 1986, explains in an interview with EFE that the first thing she wrote was precisely the title, ‘No one calls anymore’, and that the entire story arose afterwards from that feeling.
Between one Sunday and another
The germ of the graphic novel comes from several personal experiences of the author: the deterioration of her grandparents, her visits to the family town of Arroyuelo, in Burgos, with barely 24 inhabitants, and her work in an association for people with hearing disabilities.
It was there that she became aware of how much hearing loss can increase isolation and disconnection from the environment, especially in elderly people.
Although Casillas assures that the comic is “less personal than it may seem,” she acknowledges that her visits to Arroyuelo made her closely observe a reality that repeats itself in numerous rural municipalities: elderly people who remain practically alone for much of the week and whose social life concentrates on visits from children and grandchildren.
“I wanted to show what happens between one Sunday and another in the towns. And it is that in those days in between there is a life that does not stop, but that lowers the volume a lot,” she explains.
A story about emptiness, not a political manifesto
The work inevitably addresses problems related to depopulation, lack of services, and the progressive abandonment of certain municipalities, but its author insists that she does not intend to build a political discourse about the emptied Spain.
The objective is more intimate.
‘No one calls anymore’ seeks to portray the existential void of those who feel the end of their life approaching, the progressive loss of family and friends, and the need to leave some kind of legacy.
The graphic novel thus moves within realism and turns small everyday actions into the center of the narrative.
Sundays bring family members, conversations fill the house, and the routine seems to be interrupted. Then the silent days return.
Silent pages to tell loneliness
One of the most characteristic elements of the comic is precisely the absence of words.
Casillas explains that the book has “little dialogue and a lot of script”, with numerous silent pages that serve to convey to the reader the silences, the weariness, and the monotony of the days.
The house and the garden then take on a special prominence. The latter becomes one of the most important spaces for Mariona, to the point of imagining there the place where her ashes could rest.
The illustrator Blanca Vázquez, born in Guadalupe (Cáceres) in 1997, found in those silences one of the main visual resources of the work.
A watercolor created entirely digitally
Vázquez has developed the illustrations entirely in digital format, although simulating the texture of watercolor.
The color also helps to differentiate the different emotional states of the story.
The home is dominated by ochres, browns, and reds, while the garden appears full of light and intense greens. In contrast, the memories, dreams, and flashback scenes take on blue tones.
The illustrator explains that the silent pages appear especially after family gatherings, when the panels are full of speech bubbles, conversations, and movement.
Then comes the contrast.
Mariona and Vicente are alone again. “Not bored, but with so much routine of seeing each other, that they have nothing much to say to each other and that is palpable,” notes Vázquez.
The routine of a couple growing old together
The relationship between both characters also allows for portraying another form of loneliness: the one that can exist even when accompanied.
Mariona and Vicente share a home, meals, and routines, but their days repeat and conversations become increasingly scarce.
To this is added Vicente's progressive cognitive deterioration, which introduces a new dimension to the narrative: the fear of losing someone even before they physically disappear.
Death is present throughout the graphic novel, but not as an isolated dramatic event, but as part of the aging process.
Two ways to understand family visits
‘No one calls anymore’ also avoids pointing fingers.
The work shows both the point of view of the elders and that of their children and grandchildren. For the younger generations, visiting grandparents once a week may seem like a reasonable frequency within a life marked by work, commuting, and family obligations.
For those who remain in the village, however, those seven days can feel very long.
This difference in perception is one of the emotional cores of the comic: what for some is just a week, for others can become a succession of practically identical days.
“A universal comic”
Vázquez defines the work as a story about the everyday and family, but also about “the twilight of life, like a sunset”.
The illustrator believes that the narrative can connect with very different readers because it addresses an experience that transcends the rural world: the aging of parents and grandparents, the distance between generations, and the guilt or doubts about how much time is really dedicated to the elderly.
That is why she considers it to be “a universal comic with which we all identify”.
‘No one calls anymore’ is part of the collection Sillón Orejero de Astiberri, dedicated to graphic novels of a particularly reflective nature.
Casillas and Vázquez thus transform the seemingly small routine of an elderly couple into a broader portrait of rural loneliness, aging, and waiting, with an implicit question that runs through the entire work: what happens in the lives of those who remain when the visits end and another week begins.