The Sinister Among the Sacred Robert Benziker - The New Mexican
Mexican comic-book cover art displayed at The Museum of Spanish Colonial Art. (Susánica Tam/The New Mexican)
“¡Mirada! ¡En el museo colonial!” “¡Es un pájaro!” “¡Es un plano!” “¡No, es … El Hombre Invisible!” It’s true, señores and señoras: the relicarios and retablos at Santa Fe's Museum of Spanish Colonial Art find themselves in strange company. Ghouls, ghosts, zombies, mobsters, femmes fatales, aliens, cowboys, soldiers, and superheroes adorn many colorful paintings in the exhibition Mexican Comic Book Covers. These terrific specimens of pulp art, dating from 1960 through 1980, feature wonderful, chilling, macabre images — each providing enough visual clues and dramatic elements to allow viewers to envision the rest of the tale. But the story behind the art is not so easy to piece together. The exhibit is guest-curated by collectors Jan Nelson and Russ Todd, who acquired this work during several trips to the flea markets of Mexico City. The artists in the show are known only by their last names: Dorantes, Fzavala, Marin, Luna, Araujo, Pérez, and Ortiz. They aren’t always technically proficient, but what they occasionally lack in draftsmanship they make up for with eye-catching color and a sophisticated sense of composition and narrative. One Dorantes work features what appears to be a diptych of imagery. In the bottom half, a woman is held at gunpoint next to a fresh corpse. In the top half, a man with a gun approaches a boxing ring where two pugilists practice. The color scheme is split between purple and yellow — clashing colors that might suggest the past and present. Out of all the figures, only the woman is facing us; the remaining characters are out-of-frame or with their backs to us. The variety of colors and shadows and the positions of the characters make for high drama — not unlike American film noir posters of the 1940s. It was an easy decision for Nelson and Todd to purchase every cover they found. But when Todd went back to locate the artists and more work, he came upon insurmountable hurdles. Nelson related the experience: “Russ went back to Mexico and met a friend, Imelda, who is a tourist guide. They went to the seller, who had no information. They went to some government offices to try and find some kind of printers union that might have had these artists registered in some shape or form, and the end result was nothing.” Los Hombres Invisibles, indeed. What is amazing about this lack of information is that it comes despite the immense popularity of comic books in Mexico. By the mid-’70s, when many of the covers in the exhibit were published, more than 50 million comic books were produced monthly in Mexico, when the population was about 65 million, according to Not Just for Children (Greenwood Press, 1992), a book about Mexican comics in the 1960s and 1970s by Harold E. Hinds Jr. and Charles M. Tatum. Many experts say Mexico is second only to Japan in comic-book consumption, thanks in part to the wide female and adult readership in both countries. The authors cite research that gives several reasons for this, ranging from Mexico’s low literacy rate (which has improved from 74 percent to 93 percent since the 1970s) to comics being a cheap form of entertainment. But those theories don’t account for a similar interest in the medium in Japan (a relatively affluent and literate society) or that Mexican comics are often highly literary. Comics in Mexico began as they did everywhere else — as humorous and occasionally political strips in daily newspapers. In 1921, after nearly two decades of running exclusively syndicated American cartoons, the newspaper El Heraldo commissioned work by local talent Salvador Pruñeda, according to Hinds and Tatum. The result was Don Catariño, a strip about a charro (cowboy) that is considered to be the first comic by and about a Mexican. Other newspapers began to commission work from local artists. Some held competitions that uncovered a wealth of previously unknown talent. With the boom in popularity of newspaper strips, the jump to comic books by magazine publishers was only natural. In 1934, Paquín became the first weekly comic book in Mexico. Two years later, Hinds and Tatum write, Chamaco became the first daily comic book not just in Mexico but in the world. Again, however, these wildly popular books were anthologies composed chiefly of American strips translated into Spanish. At the same time, a crop of Mexican artists and books had taken seed and begun to grow — first in the anthologies, then blossoming into their own books in the 1940s. The period between 1930 and the mid-1950s is known as the época de oro (Golden Age) for Mexican comics. Much like the American Golden Age (which spanned from 1938 to the early 1950s and saw the creation of the superhero genre with characters like Superman, Batman, and Captain America), the época de oro gave rise to a plethora of new books and characters. American books reflected a national identity of strong characters fighting bullies (Nazis). Mexican books of this period found their identity in an ironic stance or humorous look at Mexico’s problems: poverty, lack of technology, misguided nationalism, and of course, living in the shadow of the country’s neighbor to the north. The popularity of comics in the época de oro allowed cartoonists to leave newspapers and start their own publishing companies. This was the era that produced the work displayed at the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art; the comics had begun to come in a variety of formats, including pocket-size books and novel-length books. The books also borrowed heavily from film (a format called fotonovela, which combines photographs with comics, emerged in this time period). Genres included political, superhero, romance, horror, sports, Westerns, and more, Hinds and Tatum write. Stories involved an avenging horse (El Caballo del Diablo), a socially conscious racecar driver (Torbellino), and multiple books about masked wrestlers roaming the countryside and fighting against injustice. As with a majority of the era’s American comic-book creators, Mexican creators also were treated as laborers, not artists, and experienced their share of injustice. They retained no ownership of their creations and were only given a minimal percentage of the profits — if they were lucky; some of the larger companies offered only a small flat fee, according to Hinds and Tatum. The comic-book authors were hired on a freelance basis, and they handed fully realized scripts to in-house artists to flesh out the story for the publishing house. Writers and artists were — for the most part — not allowed to unionize. Few details exist about the lives of the cover painters. They worked on a freelance basis, but it’s impossible to tell if they had a copy of the script or if they worked on several paintings that they shopped around or remained exclusive to one book. “These people may still be alive,” Nelson said. “These books range up to 1980, but that type of comic book and comic-book cover no longer exists, as far as we can tell. And we do all of the flea markets and bookstores.” If covers such as these no longer exist, it’s a shame. They pique curiosity about the book, often raising questions: Why did that elegantly dressed ghost kill the woman? How will those people get away from the killer bees? What did that murder have to do with the boxing match? And while you ponder these questions, here’s another: What does any of this have to do with Spanish Colonial Art? Nelson laughed when asked about it. “This isn’t exactly Spanish Colonial Art,” he said. “It’s a little bizarre. I suppose you could make a case that this is art as an evolutionary thing, or what art evolved into; but that’s probably stretching it.” Walking around the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art, it doesn’t seem much of a stretch. From the stories suggested in the relicarios to the macabre, almost cartoonish crucifixions that hang mere feet from the comic-book covers, to the anonymous brilliance of many of the artists, the covers don’t seem to be very strange company, after all. Mexican Comic Book Covers Reception 5-7 p.m. June 2 (MOSCA members no charge, general public $3); exhibit runs through July 25 Museum of Spanish Colonial Art, 750 Camino Lejo, Santa Fe
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Robert Benziker - The New Mexican
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