How do you measure the zeigeist of an era, of a country, of a region when now, more than ever, there seems to exist a global feeling and a worldwide knowledge of comics books, both in its standard-written-in-stone history and its fluent, new and ever-changing past? Discovering Doug Wright or the 1973-1974 period of Peanuts is stuff that’s no longer limited to America. Or even to English-reading countries. All these re-publishing, these discoveries, reformulate and bring back names that perhaps only rang some melancholic bell and that now, after being re-published, have become major natural forces and unavoidable references in comics, more grade A population in the glorious Coconino country. For example, Wright was barely known in American culture, like “Oh, yeah, I remember I once saw these cool vertical canadian cartoons” and the re-publishing of his work turned the lights on. But you already had electricity in the air, in the gutters. Now try to image a place in which those works, and the reading them, or even having the faintest idea of the pre-Seth history of Canadian comics -except for the not yet well-known work of John Stanley during his Little Lulu years and the Nancy Comics- is similar to wanting to go to Oz but having the forecast announce clear skies… forever. No hurricane for you, friend of Nancy.

Redefining as they are (and by “they”, I mean any work that redefines your own history of comics when you discover it: be it You are Here by Baker, be it A Drifting Life by Tatsumi, be it Tony Millonaire’s Billy Hazelnuts books, Morrison’s X-men, be it All Over Coffee by Paul Madonna. Your call.) perhaps someone used to seeing more than thirty books put together in any comic-related store may fail to see the large and motivating importance of the tsunami of knowledge these reprints -or even prints- mean. Not only in Argentina, but to infinity and way closer than beyond. Yes, as you may have noticed, I called them “discoveries”. Allow me that sincere approach. Remember, here in Argentina, those artists and his works are like a new atomic bomb. Well, a mini atomic bomb (Hey, kids, comics! What did you expect of a country in which comics turn yellow in a newspaper stand –if they’re lucky enough to be in one-) Or as pop-Yoda Marcelo Panozzo defined it, the “benevolent atomic bomb”: one that, with its waves and radiation, redefines and mutates our comics perception. One whose blast allows us to see another room in the always-in-motion castle of comics. A blast that can be reduced to the mere fact of Internet-knowing that those books exist: American comic books aren’t easy to get here. And it’s even tougher to buy them. But if the chance of reading about a new artist or the mere knowledge of his work can help redefine the ways of a cartoonist that draws in the lighthouse at the end of the world (which, obviously, is situated in Argentina), what happens when your so-called history of comics must discover a century of commercial and independent comics from a whole other country (E.G.: Argentina)? How does the home of the greatest cartoonists ever –well, that’s just one guy’s opinion- react to seeing new old masters, new old Argentinean masters? How do we compare and interact with the idea of getting to know the history of comics and the present of what now, or till now, is pretty much a true neverland?

Well, with all due respect to Dylan in the movies: do look back. Argentina’s comic history is so vast –as every history of a mass media culture- that the mere idea of listing the “top Argentinean cartoonist” or any Top 5 of comic books is impossible to achieve. Funny? Yeah. Amazing? Sure. Complicated? You have no idea. Believe us, it’s an impossible task. First of all, the truly terrible reason: in lack of preservation politics, some of the first Argentine comics are gone forever. Second, comics are starting –once more- to be published in a regular way, the re-publishing of old material is still an exception in a market that’s an exception in itself. So, what can you do to embrace comics in Argentina while not living in Argentina? How do you step inside the raging fury of the rise and fall of an industry and its zombified present (zombified in the revolutionary way in which Romero approaches his creatures)? How can we even begin to comprehend that the zeigeist we talked about has always been a link between all comic(s) history(s)? That frame by frame idiosyncrasy obviously rules when, underneath, on a super-base, the coincidences keep appearing. What about showing popular works from Argentina that still have not been re-published in order to discover these links, these strange DNA coincidences? Our find-a-Holy-Grial-each-week section is gonna try to do that: to show a comic that is screaming to be discovered to anyone who wants to hear it, re-published, put on a safe and define what humanity was when that thing called comics were printed. Our first call is Las aventuras de Pi-Pió.

García Ferré is truly a major name in Argentinean comics. He is the creator of several characters which are iconic in Argentinian children`s comics, such as the superhero-distilled Hijitus. Although his characters became a legend thanks to TV, the magazine he edited was the stepping stone of several generations. Since the 60s, Anteojito (such is the name of the magazine and one of his characters) has been one of the main influences to a lot of the greatest artists and comics in Argentina. Though Spanish-Argentinean García Ferré’s abilities have always been a topic of discussion, his first and best work is, without a doubt (though also without many fans), a radical masterpiece. A unique absurdist piece born in 1952, Las aventuras de Pi-Pío, which lacks the over the top sensibility and moral of García Ferré’s later work, finds its poetics in its own savage way of being modern without knowing it. Its lyricism seems to flow in its format (one-page), to overcome Ferré’s limitations, but Ferré plays: with language, with the funny animals nonsensical grand scheme (Pi-Pío is a sheriff and a bird that never got completely out of its shell), with the page. Everything seems rough, adorably rough, as if it were written by a kid on sugar (or cocaine) who uses the dictionary as an M-16: Pi-Pío gets captured by the “Meckanichs”, who later in the same page will transform him into a half-bird, half-plane creature (the nightmare of the Metropolis citizen). As soon as he’s captured, one of the guys (the one with a hammer in is hand) goes “Done! Now let’s overturn his free will”, and the other one, answers, “The methamorphosis is anatomically possible”, while measuring Pi-Pió with a extremely huge pipe wrench. Las aventuras de Pi-Pío is an incredible discovery. And not only to you: to everyone who reads it. Its crude way of destroying the common uses of cartooning was never quite celebrated but it should: Las aventuras de Pi-Pió didn`t use the tipical round-leaded way of children cartooning, its shapes seems more rude, like they were masterfully drawn while falling of a cliff.

The argentinian version Superman, Superhombre.

In order to even start figuring out which, how and by whom comics are created and consumed in Argentina -an important and representative market that can show many (not all) of the Dos & Donts of the comic book scene in Latin America- you must first, at least if you lived all your life in America, do what every megalomaniacal-republican-baldy serial villain has ever wished for in his franchised life: kill Superman! That’s it! Wipe that Kryptonian out-of-this-world flavored do-gooder from your comic hard drive! Sure, Grant Morrison’s favorite pop-toy has done nothing wrong and, before you say you want a revolution, don’t turn this into a Che Guevara guerrilla scheme against the “Truth, Justice and the American Way” bumper sticker. You need to erase Siegel and Shuster’s man in tights and all of his superfriends for one simple reason: Argentina is not a genre-driven market. And even though it was for certain lapses, when genre walked the Argentinean editorial ground, it was never carried in the arms of vigilantes that evolved from status quo defenders to Happy Meal myths for grownups.

You must imagine a world, a third-world world, where Superman, although being a six-figure franchise and still the most recognizable trademark in human history (obviously! It’s Argentina not Krypton!), has never ruled the market. A country where a vast -and to a certain point parallel to America- development of comic book history has never been tainted by both of the avatars of the genre: the made for stealing the kids’ pocket change stigma and the direct market sales policy (or was it police?). But what might sound as a fascinating parallel world to those non-lovers of superheroes, who have lived their life pushing the Delete button on the World Greatest Comics magazines, might probably be surprised of how relevant and true (believer) is this affirmation made by Brian Doherty in the essay “Is the superhero Invulnerable?” (part of the Best American Comics Criticism anthology edited by Ben Schwartz and published by Fantagraphics): “Far from choking off the vitality of the comic book, superheroes might be precisely that which has kept the form alive, albeit on a smaller scale than decades ago. Look at the fate of another form of pop entertaiment that, along with comics, had a huge following in the 1940s: radio drama. There was no unique thing that it provided better than any other art form, and it died.”

Sonoman, the Oswal`s Argentinian superhero.

Not that ultrapop superheroes would have saved the day if given a try in what today is the harsh state -but still in a merging point- of Argentinean comics. In fact, having lived and read comics in another country since forever, you soon realize that no matter if you’re the last fanboy on earth or the Fantagraphics poster boy, superheroes are and can only be an American splendor. But Argentina, where international and local superheroes are an exception (Sonoman, drawn by the increible Oswal, being our top gun in that area), can show that the lack of superheroes not necessarily creates a better ground to an alternative comic scene. And I’m using the word alternative not in a “non-mainstream” way but in its global meaning: an alternative. Syndicated comics (such thing doesn’t exist here: every newspaper has its own comics), romance, adventure, humor, autobiographical, pirate, horror, funny animals, erotic, whatever works.

So here we are, in our Kirby nightmare: no country for men in tights. When Spiderman didn’t even know that Da’ Ditko would one day fight against Ma’Lee, when Zap! electrified the world in weird places, Argentina was struggling with a new dawn of comics that waved goodbye to our so-called Classic Age. An age marked mostly by the adventure magazine called Hora Cero (in fact, Argentina’s Comic Book Day is celebrated on the September 4, to commemorate the publication of Hora Cero). But before dropping names –there is plenty of time for that- let’s get back to our Earth-2 fantasy. Remember? No superheroes. “Sure, I can live with them paramilitary demigods, I’m no Simpsons Comic Book Guy.” So, all perched up, you enter a regular Barnes and Noble-like store in Argentina. Tons of books. A common landscape of trade paperbacks. With intrigue, you’re staring at a shelf in which the wagnerian guys that use their underwear over their clothes are a minority. What marvelous twilight-dimension choices may I find in this far, far away editorial plane of existence?

There are two possibilities. The first one and the most common: “So, you mean there’s no comic-book section. Wha.. What comic do I want? I just want to look around…What do you mean you have a few in the Humor section?” That means that –luckily- from Seth (imported from Spain, never published in Argentina) to, obviously, our classic and bestselling Mafalda (our most popular strip, done by Quino. Matthias Wivel wrote an article about it), these books are in the most remote corner of the store and next to paperbacks like “The 100 Best Jokes About Spanish People” or “One Thousand Puzzles”. The second option is that they have a Comic Book section, but they’re badly -if not miserably- managed. It’s difficult to find a bookstore or even a comic store that has every book published in Argentina (for example, in the first  semester of 2010, the amount of published books and magazines is of about 45 titles ). And that situation, where asking for Maüs is like asking for Henry Darger’s originals at a Deli or a Manara tale in a McDonald’s, is quite a problem. A super-problem indeed, one that comprises a lot of the Nemeses that what used to be an industry has suffered. Or created itself. For example: the decreasing lack of interest from major publishing houses in comics (Random House Mondadori publishes about four cartoonist’s works per year), the very high cost of printing and the strange and palpable –yet not invincible- apathy of the non-readers and part of the press (this last item becoming less and less an issue in time). Those items are important, but you might also want to add the following: First of all, the privative cost of imported comics -DC, Marvel, Fantagraphics, Top Self, French comics published in Spain. In order to know how much they cost, you need to multiply the cover price by five. This makes it impossible to have access to the already few imported comics. Also, we have the absence of serious comic-book journalism, the legion of mistreated comic-book artists and the increasingly threatening danger of losing a hundred years of Argentinean comic-book history because of the practically nonexistent reissues and digitalization of classic material.

What’s wrong with this picture? It kinda of gives a dark zeigeist vibe, don’t it? What, me worry? Actually, we’re living some kind of Second Coming in Argentina: there are, literally, hundreds of amazing cartoonists (good cartoonists, people who know the medium, who are no longer attached to the genres, that are trying new things –genre included… weird, huh?-) and all that sad vignette present is changing (lurking away would be a bit too much, but it’s a nice time to read comics in Argentina). We are sure that with Argentinean comics you can never be too sure. And that, true believers is, as always, more of a superpower than a kryptonite.