BETWEEN LOVE AND MADNESS: MEXICAN COMIC ART
Art exhibit examines allure of Mexican microcuentos.
The train wreck of a story is such a pulpy rush it could only happen in a cheap comic book or a B-movie. It’s a nightmare of gaslighting, or psychological torment.
Clementia del Valle, a pretty brunette, thinks she’s going crazy. Her seemingly doting husband, the handsome, mustachioed Dr. Lorenzo del Valle, is giving her drugs that make her hallucinate. He takes her to a mental hospital, where he’s friends with another doctor, Eduardo, then dashes to the arms of his girlfriend, Cristal, a blonde who can’t wait to claim him as her own.
Clementia improves, comes home, relapses (duh) and kills herself. Lorenzo rushes to Cristal, but — surprise — Cristal has turned predatory. She bites him. Grabs him by the neck. Kills him!
The blaze-eyed Cristal gets carried off to an asylum. Eduardo, contemplating Lorenzo’s corpse in the morgue, is left with just his thought bubble:
“My poor friend! His wife was crazy … And his lover was crazy. The injustices of life!”
So ends “Between Love and Madness,” the microcuento — or “mini-comic” — that lends its name to a surprising exhibit at Lawndale Art Center by Rice University professor Christopher Sperandio and students in his Practical Curation class.
Sperandio, an internationally known artist who co-produces books and other collaborative projects under the imprint Kartoon Kings (with Britain’s Simon Grennan), stumbled upon his first microcuento a few years ago at a book store in Mexico City. Smitten, he found a dealer who wanted to unload a cache of original drawings. Sperandio bought about 1,300 of the drawings for $1 apiece.
He often buys drawings to use as teaching tools in the Comic Art Teaching and Study Workshop at Rice.
Fittingly enough, the whole story of microcuentos is mysterious.
Sperandio’s investigations turned up no history of the pocket-size books or the artists who created them. “They were maybe embarrassed to be creating comics,” he said. “Many worked under pseudonyms.”
The books, which are about 4-by-6inches, are smaller than the original drawings. Typically 92 pages, they were produced fast, and cheaply, in color-coded inks that varied by genre, including suspense stories, science-fiction yarns, romances and histories.
Some of the books in Sperandio’s collection were published by the long-defunct Editorial Continente, which produced a new microcuento every eight days during the 1970s.
By 1975, publishers were selling 55 million microcuentos a month in Mexico — equal to about 80 percent of the country’s entire population then — for a peso apiece. Those who couldn’t spare a peso could also rent the little books.
“They were more popular than television and movies in the 1960s and ’70s,” Sperandio said. “The stories were complex but the words were manageable for somebody who didn’t have a lot of education.”
He doesn’t know why microcuentos fell out of favor; perhaps because TV became more accessible. Even contemporary comic-book artists Sperandio met in Mexico City had never seen microcuentos before he unearthed them.
But he does know one thing: “These are beautiful little drawings,” he said.
He loves the delicate lines on an odd image in which a flashy car crosses the mouth area of a skull. “Is the car grill the mouth?” he wondered.
“Some of the drawings are so bad they’re good, and some are just good-good,” he said. “Of course, the artists had to work quickly, and they were getting paid a low rate. They didn’t have time to wring their hands over an image.”
One of his favorite panels shows a corpse with an exploded throat on an autopsy table. “The eyes are so dead. And the throat — that’s not drawn from imagination,” he said.
Thematic groupings of the small drawings are arranged across the gallery walls — sex and death, cowboys, out-of-control animals. Sperandio’s curatorial students collaborated to mount every aspect of the show, down to designing the vitrines, reproducing several images as murals on Lawndale’s big walls, translating the title book and writing the exhibition text.
Sperandio, who is 53, fell under the spell of comics — starting with the beautiful Supergirl — as a kid growing up in Kingwood, W.V., a small coal-mining town about 90 miles south of Pittsburgh, Pa.
“Really, there were three TV stations,” he explained. “We had a movie theater that showed two films every week. And comic
books. That was culture to me. There were no museums. And I was very interested in culture.”
In that era, comics were still a “red-headed stepchild,” he said. “We’re taught that comics are wrong, dirty, will rot your brain.”
That has never stalled the market in the U.S., however. Comic book and graphic novel sales in the U.S. and Canada grew by $55 million in 2016, to more than $1.1 billion, according to the comics research website comichron.com.
Sperandio’s own projects certainly don’t lack ambition. He’s deep into a multiyear, three-volume graphic-novel project that will contain more than 280 drawings, with imagery adapted from vintage public domain comics.
Academic cred for comic studies is clearly rising, especially across the arts and literature. (Sperandio’s full-time teaching gig could be Exhibit A.) He thinks the topic has become appealing partly because it can be interdisciplinary — equally adaptable to commu
nications, visual arts and English programs. At Rice, comic-book artists are even working with engineering students. Sperandio has collaborated with Jane Grande-Allen, the bioengineering department chair, to help improve the graphic qualities of posters that science and engineering students produce to present their work. “It’s really great to have a scientist say art is valuable, and we can learn things from it,” he said. Their first workshop was last week, with Mexican graphic novelist Augusto Mora — who has a companion show at Lawndale based on his politically driven work.
Mora’s “Where Are They Taking Us To?” tells the story of the Night of Iguala in 2014, when 43 students on their way to a demonstration were stopped by authorities and never seen again.
So the show at Lawndale doesn’t just add some museum cred to comic art, it also encourages viewers to consider how the past informs the present, and how the medium of comics has resonated outside the U.S.
And there’s still something a bit subversively fun about looking at the microcuento drawings as art. They’re kind of a guilty indulgence. Sperandio thinks that also can be a turnoff for viewers who are more accustomed to contemporary, abstract works.
“Comics are not as open to interpretation as other artworks are because they have words and pictures that tell you unequivocally what’s going on,” he said.
It’s not by accident that out of all the images his students could have reproduced on the gallery walls, they chose to depict a crow that pecks out humans’ eyes. “It’s a very bad crow,” he said. And a good metaphor for an eye-opening experience.
“The definitive history of these things hasn’t been written yet,” Sperandio said. “And it’s not being written by me! But I’m hoping the exhibition will spark some interest. I think this would be a great Ph.D. topic.”